The breaking of the British drought has led to a heavenly autumn flowering in our gardens. I have been viewing it through the lens of history, first through a visit to the garden of a house with ancient connections, then through the late Queen’s funeral. Like the monarchy, this house and its garden have had a history of reinventing themselves.
I will take the funeral first. The flowers on the Queen’s coffin for Westminster Abbey were superbly matched, chosen and arranged. Traditional florists’ flowers were minimised in favour of flowers from the various royal gardens: they were truly classy and none of them wilted, even under the glare of millions of watchers worldwide.
Seasonal heads of pink-red sedum kept company with dark red scabious and roses that I strove to identify on my TV screen: some of them, I think, were the new pink Platinum Jubilee, bred by Harkness Roses and launched this year. What a joy to see dahlias in the centre, not narrowly British flowers but ones that gardeners have continued to value during the Queen’s long reign.
While on view in Westminster Hall, the coffin was decorated with white flowers, but even there, seasonal dahlias were to the fore. I haven’t been able to verify with the Palace, but here are my identifications of the varieties on view.
The white dahlias were Caro and the excellent Karma Maarten Zwaan, two top choices for next year, the latter being a great grower and free flowerer as I can testify from my plants of it this autumn. On the coffin in the Abbey the double dark reds were either Arabian Night, a top choice in recent decades, or the more recently bred Karma Choc. Both are excellent. They will carry memories of the event into subsequent Septembers. I will be sure to have them in the garden.
I had prefaced the great occasion with a visit to Great Chalfield Manor in Wiltshire. This remarkable house traces back to years when two competing royal houses’ wars were splitting the country in the Wars of the Roses. It is now owned by the National Trust but remains lived in by its donor family, the Floyds. They run the garden, while the Trust maintains the house. The day before the funeral, I was taken round the garden by its presiding genius, Patsy Floyd, who has styled and planted its 8 acres during the past 30 years.
Chalfield Manor has several links to the monarchy and nobility. They begin with a sequel to the English King Henry V’s victory over the French at Agincourt. They continue into the civil war of the 1640s when the manor was seized and damaged by anti-royal Roundheads. In the 1760s it became linked with a lady whom King George II tried to fondle. In the early 1900s it benefited from a reinvention of tradition, something which the monarchy also began to exploit.
First, Agincourt. On the battlefield, Lord Hungerford is said to have captured a supreme prize, the Duc d’Orléans. Unencumbered by trade agreements, he took him back to England as a prisoner where the Duc was kept in custody for the next 25 years. Helped by his proceeds from the battle, Hungerford continued to amass ever more properties in England. As he was an adept talent spotter, he took young Thomas Tropenell on to his staff to handle matters of the law.
Tropenell then spread his own wings and acquired properties throughout Wiltshire. He would surely appreciate our House & Home section, as he piled up more than 40 of them, including the site of Great Chalfield, where he started to build the first big manor in the 1460s. Artfully, he remained on good terms with both sides in the royal Wars of the Roses meanwhile. He was described by a contemporary as a “perilous covetous man”. You probably know others.
After suffering in the civil war, Chalfield passed to the Duke of Kingston and his mistress Elizabeth Chudleigh, whom he married in 1769. By then, she had been propositioned by the King, George II, who had tried to put his hand on one of her breasts. Deftly, she anticipated it and transferred it to what she called a softer place: the King’s forehead. Only after Kingston married her did it emerge that she was married already. She was then tried for bigamy in Westminster Hall.
Chalfield’s history already reads like a subplot of The Crown, but by 1900 it had fallen into grave disrepair. Luckily, plans of its original architecture had been drawn up in the 1840s by a pupil of the neo-Gothic architect Pugin. In the early 1900s a new family of owners then acted on them.
They are an example of invigorating social mobility. Robert Fuller, heir to the house and garden, trained as an engineer and then became the head of the family business Avon Rubber. Profiting from the invention of rubber-tyred bicycles, and then cars, he rebuilt Chalfield Manor to the 1840s plan with the help of a skilled neo-Gothic architect, Harold Brakspear. He also hired the garden artist Alfred Parsons to design and plant the gardens in a nostalgic English style.
“Neo” movements are not given much credit by modern critics. While Chalfield was being given a second life, kilts and Scottish baronial architecture, two neo-fashions, had reanimated British monarchical style. In her updating of Parsons’ plan for the garden, Patsy Floyd showed me her own reinterpretations at Chalfield, enjoyed by National Trust visitors. They include well-pruned lavender hedges, myrtles, rosemary, dahlias and pink roses, flowers that all earned a place in the recent royal wreaths.
When the lavender bushes become leggy after several years, they are pruned hard to the ground in late May, but thrive on the treatment. The dahlias are cactus-flowered and orange, cleverly mixed with the orange lantern-shaped seed heads of physalis. The pink roses include a neglected favourite, twice-flowering Nathalie Nypels, a bush variety that is well worth growing.
In a new long border, white-flowered gauras have been prettily mixed with New England Michaelmas daisies, supported on thick lengths of hazelwood. In an adjoining bed, magenta-pink Salvia involucrata is combined only with dark violet-blue Salvia Amistad, each enhancing the other’s colour. These salvias are often hardy in winter but Patsy Floyd takes hers into a reserve polytunnel and cuts them down to the ground in November, keeping them dense and not too tall for the following summer.
She began her career as a photographer, especially one of horses, including such famous race-winners as Secretariat and Mill Reef. She traces her sense of colour to her work with a camera, including work for racing, the sport of kings and of our late Queen.
Within a day, I was reflecting how much of the planting in an English garden like Chalfield interrelates with the flowers chosen for the Queen’s last wreath. In an American state funeral, I would expect wreaths of formal flowers such as lilies, and in a French one, a white or peachy garland of florists’ roses entwined in a chic style. In Britain, the final wreath was one of flowers that Britain’s gardeners, like their Queen’s, actually grow. It could not have been better.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
