The heartbreak of leaving behind a garden you love
Radio 4 star WINIFRED ROBINSON spent 13 years creating the garden of her dreams. Now she’s had to move — and oh, the agony!
AGARDEN is meant to make the spirits soar, but not this one. The plot I looked out on, as last summer drew to a close, made my heart sink to the bottom of my boots: it was small, north-facing and horribly overgrown.
The worst of it was that this was my new garden and I knew that it fell to me to sort it out.
We’d moved more than 100 miles north almost a year earlier when my job, presenting Radio 4’s consumer programme, You And Yours, relocated from London to Salford, taking us with it — me, my husband Roger, our son Tony, who is 15, and our big, soft, golden labrador William.
We’d left a village near Banbury, Oxfordshire, where our home had been a stone thatched cottage with a third of an acre of land wrapped around it. We’d arrived when Tony was just a toddler, and put down roots — literally.
A home needs a garden. My mother taught me that. When I was born, she was raising four children all under five in a back-to-back terrace near the Liverpool waterfront; my father worked on the docks. Those early days rise in my memory in monochrome — apart from the flowers that pushed up from the window boxes she planted.
We moved from there to a council house with a garden. We didn’t have a lot of money, but she planted roses even the most eminent gardener would have admired. She understood the importance of a view onto something that delights the eye — even if it’s as humble as a pot of marigolds on a balcony.
It is because of my mother’s inspiration that everywhere I have lived I have focused so much attention on the outdoor space. In particular, I loved that cottage garden and from the very start spent every spare minute working on it.
It seemed to offer endless opportunities to try new ideas. It was south-facing and sunny but with areas of deep shade from mature trees and shrubs.
When we arrived, although looking a little neglected and bare, the garden showed traces of an earlier, skilful planting scheme — borders of acid green and white, a glade of white magnolia, evergreen laurel and firs.
OvER the years, I added dozens of old- f ashioned cottage garden plants. There was a soft-pink rose called Maiden’s Blush under-planted with deep blue perennial geraniums, pale yellow honeysuckle clambering over dry-stone walls, and great drifts of lavender lining the paths. On sunny mornings, their massed flower heads seemed to hover over the grey-green foliage like a mist.
I was so proud when it was judged good enough to open to the public as part of the National Garden Scheme, raising money for the cancer charity Macmillan. That is the ultimate accolade for any amateur gardener.
So, when we knew we had to move to Salford, parting from that garden was the biggest wrench.
The cottage sold quickly to a lovely couple with a little girl of two — the same age Tony had been when we arrived. It sounds mad, I know, but I lay awake at night wondering if the new people would know how to look after the plants. On the day we moved out, as the vans were loaded up, I fed those roses for the very last time.
Why on earth did we swap that garden for one that looked like Sleeping Beauty’s, all choked in brambles and weeds? At first we’d decided to rent a tiny modern house — our furniture and belongings in store — fully expecting to find something quickly.
But we should have known it wouldn’t be easy. After all, it’s in the news often enough that this isn’t a normal property market. People aren’t selling unless they have to, and there is very little to buy. We kept viewing and rejecting houses until, after several months, the penny dropped that we would have to buy something, or risk getting stuck in the rented sector.
And so we bought our big victorian semi in Cheshire. An elderly lady had been living there alone. Neighbours told us her husband, a keen gardener, had died almost a decade before. When the house came on the market in the spring of 2014, she had already moved into a sheltered flat.
We completed on the sale last August and the garden should have been the least of my worries. The house needed complete renovation — a new roof, new plumbing and wiring. Worse still, it was sinking, the walls riven with cracks, caused by collapsed drains at the front and a leaking water main at the back.
In the gardens I’ve created, I’ve always loved the slow, patient process of planting afresh, nurturing, watching and waiting for things to grow. It’s so at odds with the frantic pace of modern life that it never fails to lift my spirits.
Not this time. Looking at that garden, I felt completely overwhelmed and tempted to do what I always advise others against: give up and pay a landscaping firm to come in and rip it all out.
That intention was still forming in my mind when we decided to do a first, initial hacking back.
As we started the process of clearing and taming, I realised how much I’d missed this quiet, purposeful, toiling in the sun. The dog stayed close to my heels, as he always does, bringing me a ball to throw.
Roger and Tony set about cutting back the privet hedges at the front of the house. In the back, my boots got caught in grass that was so long, it had formed seed-heads and flopped right over.
I tore great skeins of ivy off rotten fencing panels, gingerly picked away brambles
that had poked their spiny fingers right through the greenhouse glass, and peeled back the shoots of a massive wisteria, its contorted trunk surely as old as the house, which dates from 1899. It had romped across a pathway and completely engulfed the roof of an original, huge red brick garden shed.
Between the three of us, that first day, we cut back enough to fill 20 garden sacks. It was then that I discovered what lay beneath; what I realise now I have found in every garden I have loved — the remnants of an earlier planting scheme created by the previous gardener of the house.
As I pulled up the weeds, the sunshine spilled across some of my favourite plants — a deep blue hydrangea, a blush pink New Dawn rambling rose.
And then I literally stumbled across a perfect, hand-thrown Whichford terracotta planter. I’ d brought Whichford pots with us from our old garden. They’re made by a family firm in Warwickshire, not far from where we used to live.
This pot was their basket design and perfectly matched the ones I have. It felt like a gift from a benevolent spirit, as though the previous gardener had laid his ghostly hand on my shoulder and wished me well.
I’d felt really down about this new garden, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the work ahead, but in that moment I realised I would come to love it, just as he had. When I ventured for the first time into the garden shed, I saw on a shelf among the cobwebs his stout leather boots carefully placed, side by side.
His tools — shears, spade, fork and rake — were neatly arrayed on hooks along the walls. It looked ordered and peaceful as it must have done the day he closed the door for the very last time.
THAT evening, I brought my Whichford planter back to our rented house along with a spindly azalea I’d also uncovered in the garden, engulfed by weeds, still in its plastic pot.
The roots were so constricted they were bursting through the base. I imagined the old gardener receiving it as a gift from a visitor and taking it outside when it had finished flowering, intending to pot it on but never getting the chance.
I could almost hear it sigh with relief as I let it spread its roots into rich, fresh soil. That azalea was so grateful that a few weeks later it flowered out of season in a riot of big, blousy blooms.
When winter came and the builders got to work, I curled up with gardening books and magazines, so excited to be planning another plot. After months of delicious indecision, I stole the design from one of our greatest living gardeners, Sir Roy Strong.
The gardens he created in Herefordshire extend over four acres, but they’re arranged in a series of small, stunning, outdoor rooms. I’m planning to make one with a broad grassed walkway and deep flower borders either side. So far we’ve spread tons of new topsoil and put down the lawn. It doesn’t look great yet, but it’s a start.
I ’ ve realised that’s what all gardeners do when they don’t know where to begin, they build on the work of other generous gardeners who’ve gone before.
As I’ve worked in the garden, neighbours have stopped to chat. In spring, the keen horticulturalists made me gifts of perennials they were dividing as they tidied their borders. Among them is a verbena bonariensis. I’ve never grown it before; it produces a haze of purple flowers at shoulder height in the autumn.
It’s little actions like these that are reassuring me that as the roots go down in the garden, slowly, we too will grow into our new life.
Deep down, the sadness of leaving our old house — the feeling that I would never have as lovely a garden again — was bound up with the sadness of leaving a network of friends who had seen me through more than a decade of sorrows and joys.
My neighbours in our old village had scooped Tony up and looked after him when I was helping care for my dying mother. They’d walked our dog when I was at work and Roger was recovering from back surgery.
The house, too, had been so full of memories. Tony had grown there from a cuddly toddler into a lanky lad. He’d wobbled down that pathway on his first bike and stepped from that doorway in his new uniform on his first day at primary and secondary school.
We humans find change hard to bear and yet change is as inevitable as the cycle of the seasons that makes the plants grow.
It was so sad to see those stout gardening boots covered in cobwebs, sadder still to remove them and replace them with my own. But new beginnings are how we make the best of a home, a plot, a life.
The new garden will incorporate some of the best of the old. I’m planting up the terracotta strawberry pot to stand at the centre of what will be a more modest herb patch.
There’ll still be the joy of nipping out after dinner on a warm summer’s evening to pick and serve the berries we have grown ourselves. There’s nothing quite like that.
Now that the house renovations are complete, friends from our old village are booked in for weekend visits in the months ahead, all very curious to see the new garden and promising to help.
It may not be bigger or sunnier than the last but it will be just as lovely — I’ve promised myself that.