The Test OF TIME
Gardening is in Claire Austin’s blood, but at her parents’ former home of White Hopton Farm in Powys, the garden is a laboratory where she experiments with plants to weave ever-changing combinations WORDS
CONSTANCE CRAIG SMITH PHOTOGRAPHS JOE WAINWRIGHT
History has moulded and shaped the incredible, richly planted gardens of The Bishop’s Palace in Wells. This is a garden steeped in folklore with a history of wars, revolutions, murder and even dragons enveloped within its majestic stone walls in the shadow of the most extraordinary Gothic cathedral in the UK.
Cross the drawbridge over the moat and pass through the Gate House into the garden. A sense of historical wonder surrounds you. It’s like walking into a di erent dimension; literally stepping back in time. The palace itself dates back to 1206, the chapel having been constructed with the Great Hall in the 1270s, and the North Wing and fortifications, including the moat, completed around 1340.
Over the course of 800 years, resident bishops have shaped and changed the garden. A formal croquet lawn hugs the back of the palace, the residence of the current Bishop of Bath and Wells, The Rt Rev Michael Beasley. Towering above it is a huge black walnut ( Juglans nigra), just one of the sentinel-like trees within the garden. Many were planted in 1824 by Bishop Law (1824-1845) in the picturesque style that he strived to establish during his time as bishop here. He remodelled the walls from the ruined Great Hall as a backdrop to the garden. “He didn’t have to build pretend ruins and follies – he had them already!” explains James Cross, who has been head gardener here for nearly 20 years.
Above A path curves gracefully between a herbaceous border and the Well Pool, with Gothic Wells Cathedral peeping over the trees.
“We’ve planted a lot of replacement trees over the years,” says James. “Now, when we plant new trees, we need to future proof them so that they are ready for climate change: hotter drier summers and much wetter winters.” Other magnificent specimen trees include a huge Chinese tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), foxglove trees (Paulownia tomentosa), Indian bean tree (Catalpa bignonioides) and two ancient mulberries (Morus nigra).
When James took over the garden in 2004, it was a veritable blank canvas. “It was mostly lawn really,” he recalls. “There was the odd narrow bed against some of the walls, with a limited range of plants. There wasn’t much archive material, so we had to reimagine it for the 21st century. We developed and planted it in a way we thought visitors would like to see; a way we hoped would keep them coming back.” The borders now brim with lush perennials, while a collection of noteworthy flowering shrubs including glorious yellow Sophora ‘Sun King’, fascinating spring-blooming edgeworthia, a huge Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ and the red barked strawberry tree (Arbutus x andrachnoides), provide structure and interest throughout the season.
Climb the bastion towers and stroll the ramparts for views of the moat, the deer park, the Mendips, the Somerset levels and Glastonbury Tor, as well as the garden below. Photographs taken from here have shaped the current design. “There’s a Victorian photograph taken at the top of the ramparts that
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Above The parterre has retained features such as this 19th-century urn, but euonymus has replaced stricken box hedging.
Right The palace’s moat, with its resident swan.
Bottom right The East Garden with masses of Phlomis russeliana
Below left Penstemon ‘Hidcote Pink’.
Purple spikes of Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’, with plumes of flu y Stipa tenuissima and Origanum ‘Rosenkuppel’ by the pond.
The meadow area was sown with the ‘Tuscan Hills’ mix from Pictorial Meadows, yellow Anthemis tinctoria currently at the fore.
Instead, Dr Sherwood has led an extraordinary, labyrinthine life –“complicated but pretty sensible”. It has seen her help develop a world-class drug, save the Orient Express and create one of the most important collections of botanical art the world has seen.
Born in 1933, Sherwood grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire, the daughter of artistic parents. “My mother went to Leeds Art School just before Henry Moore. She was really quite good, but she never thought she was. I don’t think women were brought up to think that kind of thing in those days. Her mother – my grandma – was a remarkable character, the first woman cyclist in
Yorkshire, a real dynamo,” she recalls. Given a large magnifying glass, the young Shirley developed a passion for looking at life in depth. “I wanted to be a naturalist with a botanical slant,” she says. “I was obsessed with plants.” She was further encouraged at school “but they didn’t want me to do botany at university because there was no future in it. And at that time, I think it might have been true.”
Ignoring her school’s warnings, Sherwood read botany at Oxford. “I was the only woman botanist in the whole university in my first year.” She married medic and pharmacologist Michael Cross in 1958, but tragedy struck when he died in a plane crash just six years later.
“I had two children, aged two and three to support. It was quite simple, really. There were no jobs in botany so I went into the pharmaceutical industry. A lot of botany is biochemistry; working out how plants photosynthesise was the hot subject at the time. Pharmaceutical research is the same; it’s just discipline. I worked with experimental compounds labelled with radioactivity. It was interesting and exciting. The team at Smith Kline & French (now GSK) was very small in the beginning, about ten of us. I was the only woman.” The results, published in 1971, were startling. Team leader Jim Black would eventually receive a Nobel Prize for the group’s work on Cimetidine, a histamine that inhibits stomach acid and, sold under the brand name Tagamet, is used for the treatment of ulcers and heartburn.
In 1977 Shirley married again, to someone she had known for years. The founder of Sea Containers shipping company, James Sherwood was interested in tracking down once-grand hotels that had fallen on hard times and bringing them back to life, and the Sherwoods set about buying
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TRAILBLAZING WOMEN
IMAGES SHIRLEY SHERWOOD COLLECTION; RBG KEW/INES STUART-DAVIDSON
Top left Redcurrants by Brigid Edwards, a meticulously observed study of the fruit. Top right The gallery also holds preparatory sketches such as these by Coral G Guest of pollia berries. Above Denise Ramsay’s painting of a silken poppy, A Brilliant Life – Perfection
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“They didn’t want me to do botany at university because there was no future in it. At that time, I think it might have been true”
Clockwise from top left Sacred Lotus by Phansakdi Chakkaphak; Mieko Ishikawa’s Flowering Cherries and Jean Emmons’ Dark Dahlia ‘Rip City’
The garden of plantswoman Claire Austin and her husband Ric Kenwood enjoys beautiful views over Shropshire’s Kerry Vale.
