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| Influential designer: Rosemary Verey at Barnsley House Photo: NADREW LAWSON |
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| Barnsley House |
It is now almost a
decade since the death of Rosemary Verey, gardener-owner of Barnsley House,
Gloucestershire.
By Tim Richardson/ 01 Dec 2010/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/8160347/Remembering-Rosemary-Verey.html
Verey was one of the most influential designers and authors
of the Eighties and Nineties, admired for elegant plantings that raised her
work into the realm of classic garden design.
An evening in her honour held earlier this month at the
Garden Museum in London was intended to be a timely reappraisal of her work,
although it was to prove most remarkable for the revelations provided by Sir
Roy Strong. But first, why the need for a reappraisal at all?
It has been fashionable in recent years to deride or ignore
the Verey style. For some, she was the ultimate establishment designer, a
shires lady in pearls and quilted jacket who worked for the Prince of Wales at
Highgrove while also enjoying a career "selling" her Englishness to
the United States through books, lecture tours and garden commissions.
Her star began to wane in the early Nineties as garden style
moved on from the "good-taste" pastel tones inherited (or so it was
believed) from the Arts and Crafts movement of Gertrude Jekyll, and towards the
exotic palette of Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter and Nori and Sandra Pope of
Hadspen.
This was a long way from the Verey look, which depended on
the soft tones of flowers such as alliums, geraniums, campanulas, clematis and
aquilegia.
Also ranged in implicit opposition were Modernist designers
(led by Dan Pearson and Christopher Bradley-Hole) and, a few years on, the many
influenced by the New Perennials planting approach of Dutchman Piet Oudolf.
These were matters of taste in planting, but one element of
Verey's style that genuinely dated quickly was the high degree of
"historical" effects in her gardens, in the form of potagers, knot
gardens in yew and box and small classical buildings (such as the 18th-century
temple her husband, David, installed at Barnsley House in the Seventies).
Indeed, Verey's book Classic Garden Design (1984) was
subtitled: How to Adapt and Recreate Garden Features of the Past. But by the
Nineties knot gardens, sundials and statuary seemed so "last decade"
in style - as dated as Brideshead Revisited.
But if there had been any danger of the evening at the
Garden Museum becoming over-reverential, that was soon averted by Sir Roy
Strong.
He began by stressing the influence his friend had had on
his own garden-making and also mentioned her bluestocking credentials: despite
her ultra-conventional appearance, Verey had studied maths and economics at
London University, when she had also enjoyed japes such as waterskiing down the
Thames.
Sir Roy wondered, nevertheless, how it was, aged 62, that
she was able to burst upon the scene, a fully fledged doyenne of country house
garden design. Was it really down to a passion for antiquarian gardening books?
Sir Roy went on to produce a startling revelation: that
Verey had had a serious love affair with an interior designer who, he
suggested, may have had a strong influence on her emerging design style and the
layout of the garden at Barnsley in the Seventies.
The identity of this designer was David Vicary, an architect
whose best-known foray into garden design was the fountain garden at Wilton
House.
Details of the affair are recorded in a shoebox of love
letters that document their trysts (now in the possession of garden designers
Julian and Isabel Bannerman, who were friends of Vicary's and inherited his
effects).
Vicary lived at Kilvert's Parsonage, near Chippenham in
Wiltshire. He was part of the wider David Hicks circle of country-house
designers, although he ended up losing his mind: Sir Roy painted a vivid
portrait of Vicary's tragic final days, sleeping in his car under newspapers.
Verey was "hot stuff in Gloucestershire",
according to Sir Roy, "highly sexed, like many who follow the hunt"
and "the only woman I have ever known who kissed me full on the lips the
very first time we met". She was so well known for her risqué behaviour
that she was "barred from several houses" in the county.
Not that Sir Roy was in any way censorious, noting that
Verey herself had said that her marriage to David Verey was an affectionate one
that suited both parties. What raised the Vicary revelations above the level of
tittle-tattle was Sir Roy's contention that it was Vicary who opened Verey's
eyes to the possibilities of design.
By "outing" Verey in this way, I do think Sir Roy
was making a serious point, a decade after the subject's death.
Such relationships are important in designers' lives, and
it's a measure of Verey's legacy that it should be deemed interesting at all.
What scandalised some - more than the revelation of the affair(s) - was the
implication that Verey, as a woman, would have needed this male designer to
give her all her ideas, or at least start her off on the right track.
But again, I don't think Sir Roy was being misogynistic; it
was just his take on this particular relationship.
As the audience emerged into a London blighted by a Tube
strike, the general chaos seemed an appropriate epilogue to an event that had
seen the genteel world of Cotswolds garden design turned upside down and shaken
about.
• Tim Richardson is a garden writer and critic
She was born Rosemary Isabel Baird Sandilands and educated
at Eversley School, Folkestone, and University College, London. In 1939 she
married David Verey, whose family owned Barnsley House.
Verey's most famous garden design was that of her own house,
Barnsley House, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. In 1970 she opened the
garden for one day to the public for the National Gardens Scheme but eventually
it was open 6 days per week to accommodate the 30,000 annual visitors. In 1984
when her husband David died, Rosemary Verey began designing gardens for
American and British clients. Most notable are HRH the Prince of Wales, and Sir
Elton John, Princess Michael of Kent, the Marquess of Bute and the New York
Botanical Garden.
Rosemary Verey was well known for taking imposing elements
from large public gardens and bringing them into scale for the home gardeners
use. Her laburnum walk, which has been photographed many, many times, is an
example of this technique. The National Trust's Bodnant Garden in North Wales
has a very large laburnum walk that inspired Verey to plant a similar, smaller
scale laburnum walk at Barnsley House. Verey is also noted for making vegetable
(ornamental potager) gardens fashionable once again. The potager at Barnsley
House was inspired by that at the Château de Villandry on the Loire in France.
She was awarded the OBE in 1996 and in 1999 from the Royal
Horticultural Society the highest accolade that Society can award, the Victoria
Medal of Honour (VMH).
A bolder, more dramatic Barnsley
Mary Keen on the
future of the late Rosemary Verey's Gloucestershire garden, celebrated
worldwide for its 'English' style
By Mary Keen / 16 Jun 2001/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/4793708/A-bolder-more-dramatic-Barnsley.html
ROSEMARY Verey's death signals the end of an era. I doubt we
will see her like again. She belonged to a generation of Englishwomen who
possessed an uncompromising sense of duty and strength of character. The
daughter of a naval officer, she always knew the value of self-discipline and
her world-famous garden at Barnsley House in Gloucestershire was run with
meticulous attention to detail.
Every day she rose early to walk round the beds and borders
before her gardeners arrived at 8am. A diary of the work done was kept by her
staff, so that when her son, Charles, took over the running of the place three
years ago, he found records of daily maintenance going back for 10 years. The
garden, he says, is a mine of her knowledge and skill, but he knows that she
would have wanted it to evolve, because she understood that all gardens age and
change. Last winter, after a ceanothus died, she said to him: "Now you can
choose the right plant for that place."
With her husband, the architectural historian David Verey,
she spent years choosing the right varieties to plant around Barnsley, their
beautiful, 17th-century stone house. They shared an interest in buildings and
history, and when she began to design and plant the garden, her influences were
the early horticultural manuals that she had begun to collect.
The box hedges and knot gardens, punctuated by small-scale
topiary that she devised specifically for Barnsley, were copied all over the
world. Clipped balls and domes may seem obvious to us now, but they were not a
common feature in the early 1980s. The tight, trimmed layouts that she wrote
about in Classic Gardens made formality fashionable, but it was the potager
that Verey designed for Barnsley in the mid 1980s that was perhaps her greatest
triumph. Inspired by the celebrated gardens of Chateau Villandry in the Loire
Valley, the potager was witty and original, its small, box-edged beds filled
with vegetables that none of us had ever seen before.
Long before the River Cafe opened, I remember noticing
Cavolo Nero there. When I admired it, in a spontaneously generous act that was
typical of her Verey fetched an envelope and addressed it to me on the spot,
promising she would send the seed when it was ripe.
The other remarkable feature at Barnsley, which has perhaps
been more photographed than any other garden, is the formal laburnum walk,
underplanted with the shadowy mauve globes of Allium aflatunense. After her
funeral it was looking its best. Walking under laburnums in dappled shade is a
very different experience from confronting their flowers in broad daylight. It
was the gentleness of it all that made it so striking. Any brighter, and it
would have become vulgar.
As the look of the garden changes, the colours within it
will get stronger. Charles Verey likes red, and modern trends are brighter. His
mother loved colour, but it was the colour of gentle English skies. Misty
mauves, purples and blues, clear pinks and plenty of greens all melted into one
another in her flower-beds. Although she never used primary colours together
and strong contrasts and brassy orange were rare in her gardens, in its day,
her palette was as original as her formal layouts.
Like Vita Sackville-West, Verey believed in planting
abundantly, within a formal framework, but where Sissinghurst was strong on
roses, Barnsley was the place for herbaceous plants and bulbs. In spring, the
bulbs were dazzling, because she felt that early in the year bright colours
worked better. She was clever with yellow, which is often difficult to use. I
learned from her that it can light up gardens where stone is the dominant
material. Good Planting, published in 1990, explains how she achieved her
effects; by planting in layers so carefully planned that one picture faded into
another throughout the year.
Her forte was high-maintenance gardening, the kind that has
to be watched and managed every day. Timing is critical: the lifting of bulbs,
dropping-in of annuals, cutting-back of faded perennials and constant judging
of the picture. The meticulous attention to detail may be replaced by Charles
Verey's broader vision. He likes the idea of developing the drama of the
terraced lawn at the front of the house, but he is wary of adding to the
workload and wants to continue exploring organic methods of pest control.
The fame of Barnsley brought her commissions all over the
world for clients who loved her English style. She made a drought-tolerant knot
garden in Florida and a herb and bee garden in Montreal. She was in Kentucky
advising a new client five weeks before she died. In England, she devised
rainbow borders for Elton John and laid out knot gardens, herb gardens,
Elizabethan gardens and potagers in counties from Scotland to Kent. Her most
prized commission was for the Prince of Wales at Highgrove; it was the pinnacle
of a glittering career.
In all her famous comings and goings, Rosemary Verey never
lost touch with her values, her village and the Church. In the end, it was not
as a gardener that we praised her - that went without saying - but as a devout
Christian who belonged to an age that is over.
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