Guest Blog: Elizabeth Wellesley Wesley – Creating Our Dream Garden

Last year, readers of The English Garden magazine voted for their favourite National Garden Scheme garden.  The Nation’s Favourite Garden competition featured seven regional categories, each one including a small selection of some of the country’s best loved National Garden Scheme gardens.  The Old Rectory in Nacton, Suffolk, was voted regional winner in the East Regional category.
At The Old Rectory, in Nacton, Suffolk, Elizabeth and James Wellesley Wesley have been perfecting their garden over the past three decades. The plot is just under two acres, and attention has been paid to planting for each season, while working with the prevailing light soil and Suffolk’s dry conditions. Bulbs fill the garden with flowers from early spring, followed by wisteria and roses in June, and salvias, dahlias and asters in the autumn.

We are delighted to share a guest blog this week which has been written by Elizabeth Wellesley Wesley.

The Old Rectory takes part in the National Garden Scheme and details can be found on the garden’s page.

 

To start at the very beginning…

To start at the very beginning…and give you an idea of what a garden is for me.

Ever since I was a child I have loved plants.  The smell of damp earth, birdsong, buds opening, butterflies flying drunkenly away from fallen apples, leaves turning, trees bare and architectural in winter’s low slanting sun.

A wander through any natural setting with a watchful eye at any time of year is a pleasure and an education.  The scent and sight of a bluebell wood takes me back to mucking about in streams surrounded by badgers’ sets and cherry blossom.

To me my garden is a personal paradise, pulling in many elements to make my own reminder of so many different happy days, and of so many lovely friends and family.  And to create an environment for making more wonderful memories.

 

Freedom to experiment

But loving nature and becoming a gardener are not always totally compatible.

For me the key to making a beautiful garden is finding the balance between order and chaos, between soft wild and woolly areas and the sharpness of a straight line, allowing ‘happy accidents’ – abundant on our light sandy soil where many things self seed with almost alarming ease – whilst still having rhythm and balance in areas you have planted with care.

We were fortunate to take on a garden that had not had any attention for over 40 years.  We had freedom to do our own thing without regret or constraint.

We bought our Old Rectory at auction from the church in 1990, ending up with an old wreck and a two-acre space full of rabbits, nettles, brambles, and underpinning the whole thing, a legacy of fallen trees from the 1987 storm.

 

A labour of love

We also had four young children.  Our priority was to make the garden accessible to our daughters: dens for campfires, a zip wire from a tree, a swing on a chestnut tree; vast laurel bushes served as wonderful climbing frames.

Gradually, James and I cleared away the dense scrub often helped by friends visiting for a weekend.  First we scythed a path through the acre of scrub, then erected a fence to keep children off the road and deer and rabbits out of the garden.  The delightful John Cole who ran a local small holding arrived with his tractor and ploughed and turned over the patch we had scythed.  We picked up stones and nettle roots, hand raking the whole area, we chainsawed through fallen oaks and beech as they emerged from the undergrowth.  Log piles multiplied, the children played, it was our way of unwinding at weekends after busy working weeks whilst still being with our young family.

So the ‘garden’ was, for the first few years, a wonderful playground.  Then my grandfather died and I went out into the garden and realised there was nowhere to hide and cry.  The laurels were the children’s demesne, the rest was an open rectangle with mature trees around the edges.  I needed to make more hideaways which remained sanctuaries even in winter.

The gardener’s bug

James and I planted around 300 small yew – small bare rooted plants about 40 – 60 cm high (we had time to watch them grow) in lines that seemed to make some sense on the ground but without a plan as such.

I remember a lot of string being involved, I think my attitude to garden design was ‘organic’.  I love wild cherry, so in went five, providing a random ‘copse’ to break up the area we had cleared.  We scattered foxglove seeds, ox eye daisy seed, planted primroses and violets from my mother’s garden, took cuttings from her box, hellebore from my grandfather’s garden, bluebells and snowdrops were a present from a neighbour up the road.

We created our first flower bed, an L shape because a rectangle seemed dull.   Jim Pope, a talented local plantsman and equally talented mole catcher who had just retired from a career at Levington compost, came by and with a wry smile declared:  “you’ve got the bug”.  A week later he arrived with gifts of plants from his glorious snowdrop and cyclamen filled haven of a garden.  Generous neighbours arrived with random plants…in they went, I love the generosity of people who garden.  Some plants survived, some didn’t.

Jim was right, I had the bug!  I was on a steep learning curve dealing with dry summers in Suffolk; the rainfall in Nacton was lower than the rainfall in Cairo in the first three summers we were here.

Haddonstone Gothic Urn and Base

And then, randomly, we purchased our first garden ornament: a Haddonstone Gothic Urn and Base.

We plonked it more or less in line with the door to the garden from the house, it became the centre point around which the top of the garden developed.

I painted it with yogurt to age it to match the patina of our Old Rectory’s Suffolk white brick facade.

Nearly everything else has moved, the urn has stayed exactly where we first put it.  That happens to be the truth!

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