Getting Dressed: Penelope Hobhouse Brigid Keenan
‘I had to get out of my corduroy trousers and gumboots’
It is only by a quirk of fate that I can write about Penelope Hobhouse as our grande dame of gardening, for when she left Cambridge in 1951, the career adviser suggested she became a policewoman. ‘I would have been a good policewoman but I thought of going into dark alleys on the beat and was afraid,’ she says.
Born into the Anglo-irish ChichesterClark family and raised in their stately home in Derry (‘Mainly by the Presbyterian staff who taught us that if you enjoy yourself you will pay for it later’), she did what girls from aristocratic families did then: married into another one. In her case, this was the Hobhouse family of Hadspen House in Somerset. The first decade of her marriage was taken up with looking after three children in a house in Scotland, but when her husband inherited the family home she suddenly found herself mistress of eight acres of garden. ‘Like so many places, it had been completely neglected during the war, and I had no idea what to do. But then came my Damascene moment: I happened to visit Tintinhull Garden, not far away, and I was bewitched. It changed my life. I threw myself into restoring the garden at Hadspen, learning as I went along.
‘After some time I wrote a book, The Country Garden, and I longed to do more but my husband didn’t particularly like this; he wanted me to concentrate on our social life. Every time I started to write he would invite 25 people to lunch.’ An escape – and new learning – was provided by a house in Italy, bought for her by her mother. ‘We rented it out and I would stay on alone after the holidays to get it ready for tenants and then I would drive around looking at Italian gardens. In those days you could ring up the grandest people to ask if you could see their gardens and they nearly always said yes.’
Then, at the age of 49, fate intervened again: Hobhouse met a medical professor, John Malins, with a similar passion for gardens, fell in love and left her marriage of 27 years. This was the start of a new and happy life for her, not to mention a brilliant career: extraordinarily, she was asked to take over the garden at Tintinhull, her first inspiration, and many more books followed, including Colour In Your
Garden. This became a bestseller in the US and led to lecture tours and TV programmes, including a series on the great gardens of the world, presented by Audrey Hepburn. In making the programme, they travelled the world together, becoming close friends. (When Hepburn came to stay in England, Hobhouse had to borrow a hairdryer from the local hairdresser for her.) ‘She was absolute heaven: nice, thoughtful; everyone fell in love with her.’ Soon Hobhouse was in demand as a garden designer, most famously creating a cottage garden for Apple billionaire Steve Jobs in Palo Alto. She turned him down at first: ‘Who is this Steven Jobs?’ she asked her son Niall. A garden for the Queen Mother followed: ‘I was told that she only liked blue and pink flowers, so I put them in the borders but then I got fed up and planted some tubs with yellow daisies. When she came to open, it she admired the borders but walked straight past the daisies.
‘Sometimes the people who ask me to design their gardens have a vision of their own, which I don’t particularly like. I learned a phrase which I would use if I hated their ideas: “You don’t think that is a bit suburban do you?” They’d usually change their minds.’
After a year in which she had to fly to the States nine times, Hobhouse cut back the American side of her career. Soon, however, her research into Islamic gardens led to her
becoming a lecturer and guide for trips to Iran, Afghanistan, India and Kashmir – a job she did for ten years and loved.
Her new celebrity career affected the way she dressed: ‘When Colour took off in the States and I was asked to do lectures, I had to get out of my corduroy trousers and gumboots and dress up in proper clothes. I think I had bad taste – I was brought up in the war when you couldn’t get anything nice to wear. But gardening draws on so many senses: you are thinking of colour all the time, in sunshine and in shade. Then, seeing the glorious textiles in places like Samarkand and India helped me dress better.’
To receive her MBE she wore a red embroidered coat she bought in Turkey, with trousers – she always wears trousers, with low-heeled shoes or trainers. One of her favourite outfits is the black jersey suit in our photograph, by Eileen Fisher, bought in New York long ago. She was delighted when her ‘mouse-coloured’ hair turned white at an early age because she no longer had to bother with highlights. She has an ancient exercise machine she uses if it is raining, but mostly she is working outdoors for six hours a day; no wonder she is so slim and straight-backed. Her garden now, in what used to be a farmyard near Bruton, Somerset, is, she says, designed to get old in (she is 87): ‘Some favourite shrubs surrounded by self-seeding perennials – like a meadow. I will be able to sit in my wheelchair and look at it and not worry too much.’