Rosemary Verey. Barbara Paul Robinson
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to contrast to the sharp right angles of the other two sides. This design, quite simple but classical, was appropriate to the age and architecture of the house. The four beds, later called the Parterres, would become the heart of Rosemary’s garden at the rear of Barnsley House.
Originally, the farm lane just beyond the stone wall had served as the main village thoroughfare, but after the introduction of the automobile, a broader paved parallel road had been built further north. As a result, the drawing room door looking out over the Parterres and the yew walk toward the farm lane beyond would once have been the front entrance of the house. Instead, after the paved road arrived, the north facing façade became the front entrance, facing this main road that connected the important town of Cirencester to the south with the charming village of Bibury to the north and continued on through the heart of the Cotswolds. A handsome pair of iron gates connected the driveway to this busily trafficked road. Alongside the driveway’s edge, another stone wall ran uphill to the house, behind a row of handsome large trees; in early spring, the ground is awash with aconites blooming a sea of yellow. Linda Verey had planted formal herbaceous borders in the front of the house, where the sloping land had been terraced. In her eradication phase, Rosemary eliminated these borders and simplified the terraces, leaving an unfussy, quiet green area at the front entrance of the handsome three-story house.
Before Cane’s arrival, Rosemary already had begun experimenting with a few plantings of trees and shrubs at the southwestern edge of lawn, just beyond the Gothic Revival gardenhouse, with no formal wall or enclosure there other than the yew hedge hiding the pool. She described this area “as somewhere between a woodland and a wild flower meadow.”9 She called it the Wilderness. The very name suggests the influence of William Robinson, whose influential book, The Wild Garden, and later writings passionately called for a more natural approach to gardening in England. Robinson, who was influenced by John Ruskin as well as the American Frederick Law Olmsted, would have been embraced by anyone like David Verey interested in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Rejecting the Victorian gardening style of bedding-out tender plants in highly formal, geometric-shaped areas, William Robinson preached a more naturalistic and picturesque approach. Rosemary wrote about this shift in gardening style away from the formal bedding-out of tender plants, noting “William Robinson crusaded to change the fashion to a more permanent mixed and herbaceous border.”10 Robinson was an important influence on Major Lawrence Johnston, an American who created his magnificent gardens at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, not far from Barnsley. Hidcote was certainly known to Rosemary. Further away in Kent, Vita Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst Castle and her widely read garden writings were also influenced by Robinson’s views.
Given her own early university studies in social history, Rosemary was well aware that styles evolve, and from her library, that garden styles were no exception. “Like cooking, gardening is tremendously influenced by social history. At the turn of the century, cheap labor and cheap coal meant people could have fleets of gardeners and enormous hothouses. Because lots of exotics were coming into this country from around the world, extra flowerbeds were created to fit everything in. In those times, the ladies of the house often knew little of their garden. Now that situation has changed and in many cases for the better.”11
Like any beginning amateur, Rosemary’s first efforts in her wilderness were not too successful. As a novice, she began to regularly attend the Royal Horticultural Society flower shows at Vincent Square in London and visited many gardens, taking constant notes. Absorbed by trees and shrubs, she wisely consulted a tree expert, Tim Sherrard, at a local nursery. In contrast to her later, more effective, formal areas of her garden, The Wilderness was rarely noticed or photographed, probably because it wasn’t much more than a collection of fine but somewhat randomly placed trees without any structure, vista or focal point.
In due course, Rosemary herself admitted that the Wilderness was not something she took great pride in, much as she continued to admire many of the plants there. “Now inevitably, I would like to treat a few (trees) as chessmen and move them round the board.… I would do at least three of each crab and cherry instead of a single to make a bolder accent. These mistakes are the price paid for an amateur instead of a professional layout.”12 However, this particular amateur was a keen observer and critic of her own efforts, learning from these early experiences.
By Christmas of 1961, Rosemary was far enough along in gardening that her daughter Davina gave her a book to serve as a garden journal. Rosemary knew enough about the growing conditions in her garden to remember “My daughter gave me a notebook importantly titled ‘Gardening Book’ on the opening page; below I added the words: ‘Be not tempted by plants that hate lime.’ ”13 The following year, her son Charles gave her a membership in the Royal Horticultural Society. Although she continued to enjoy her horses and tennis, she faced a steep learning curve in the garden. As she learned about plants, she was fortunate to have David bring his architectural talents to bear on providing the bones of the place.
In 1962 David placed a jewel in the garden. He acquired a small, classically styled Temple, suffering from years of disrepair and neglect at nearby Fairford Park. He had it moved stone by stone to Barnsley where he sited it just behind an existing reflecting pool located in a walled corner off to the east side of the Parterres. This corner of the garden had served as his parents’ private retreat during the years they lived in The Close. After their death, David had installed this small pond to replace what had been his parents’ lawn. By chance, the measurements of the elegant Temple perfectly aligned with the width of the pool and anchored one end of the garden with a beautifully proportioned set piece of formal architecture. In hindsight Rosemary observed, “Men gardeners will do things like moving temples. I wouldn’t have done that and I don’t think [David] would have been all that good at designing borders.”14
David also rescued a set of iron railing with double gates which he placed in front of the Temple with its pool to create a sense of enclosure; he chose to paint it a surprising but pleasant deep blue, the perfect foil for the profusion of plants that Rosemary would add to scramble through it.
David then planted an avenue of lime trees (Tilia platyphyllos ‘Rubra’) in line with the Temple leading away toward the garden wall at the far western end. Because there are no straight lines in old houses, David soon realized that his parallel rows of nine lime trees seemed to veer off sideways because the old stone wall running alongside was not truly parallel to the house causing his trees to run off at a slight angle. Correction came in the form of optical illusion or an architectural trick. Nicholas Ridley, their local Member of Parliament and a grandson of the late, revered architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, gave “an instant pronouncement. Plant another line of limes!”15 And plant them to compensate for the problem by slowly increasing the space between each tree in the double row. To the untutored eye, these two rows of limes, one a single row and the other a double, now appear to be perfectly straight.
To complete this avenue effect, Rosemary asked her brother Francis and his wife Gill for a gift of laburnums and wisterias. Or to be more precise, Rosemary ordered the plants and informed the Sandilands that these plants would be their anniversary gift. “I have bought as a silver wedding present from you, Francis, ten Laburnum and ten Wisterias for an extension to David’s lime avenue. When the bill comes I will send it to you! I think it might be quite something one day!”16 It was just like Rosemary not only to expect a gift but to dictate the choice and then buy it herself. She knew exactly what she wanted and made sure she got it. Indeed her words proved to be prophetic. The laburnum allée would not only “be quite something one day,” it would become one of the most photographed and iconic of garden images.
Where did this idea of a laburnum allée come from? Certainly the magnificent one at Bodnant, now a National Trust property in Wales, was well known at the time. Given its grand scale and fame, it is hard to think that its existence wasn’t at least known to Rosemary. But she claimed not to have been influenced by the Bodnant laburnums, nor to have seen them before she created her own, or “ours might have been wider.”17 She credits instead Russell Page’s Education of a Gardener, published in 1962, for causing her to think about focal points and a long axis, something that was sorely missing in her Wilderness.
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