What a truly wonderful face-to-face Garden Club Meeting, back in The Village Hall last night, which was the first since lockdown. There were around 47 attendees which included some of our new members, returning lapsed members and the usual band of die-hards.

We also welcomed back Geoff Hawkins, who gave us a talk back in 2018 and he certainly came up with the goods again this time with his talk on Herbaceous Borders.

Geoff first asked 'what is an herbaceous plant? 

Definitely not a herb, they are vascular plants that have no persistent woody stems above ground, including many perennials and nearly all annuals and bi-annuals.

 

How did Herbaceous Borders come about? 

The Romans gave us symmetrical plants and courtyards and Monasteries decorated theirs with decorative flowers and religious planting*

The Tudors introduced raised beds and Henry V111 preferred sparse planting, within Knot Gardens.   The Parterre was first developed in France by Garden Designer Claude Mollet around 1595 when he introduced compartment-patterned parterres to Royal Gardens at Saint Germain-en-Laye and Fontainebleu. This style soon became popular in France and across Europe.

 

Geoff showed us a slide of what we would consider a typical Devon Garden, idyllic thatched and whitewashed cottage with roses around the door, whereas in reality, the garden would have been for the raising of pigs and poultry and growing fruit and vegetables for the table.

 

It was during the 19^th Century when the Victorians introduced bedding schemes that gardens came 'alive'.  Arley Hall and Gardens in Cheshire were created by Rowland and Mary Egerton-Warburton in 1846 and whilst successive generations have added to them, the traditional character remains to this day, including the double Herbaceous Border which was one of the first to be created.

 

William Robinson - 1838-1935 was an Irish practical gardener whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to popularising of the English Cottage Garden.  Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants.

 

Gertrude Jekyll - 1843-1932 was a horticulturist, gardener, designer, craftswomen, photographer, writer and artist, who created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States and used full colour schemes. 

 

Vita Sackville-West - 1892-1962 - designed gardens depicting different 'rooms', leading from one to another.

 

Percy Thrower - 1913-1988 was a British gardener, horticulturist, broadcaster and writer and a bust of him can be seen in The Dingle Gardens of the Quarry in Shrewsbury. 

 

Beth Chatton - 1923-2018 was an award-winning plants-women author and lecturer and in 1960 she began work on transforming an overgrown wasteland of brambles and turned it into what is known as Beth Chatto's Plants and Gardens.