IVOR BARTON

Colchicum autumnale in Ivor Barton’s alpine meadow in September 1973

The life of the gardener, traveller and diarist who planted ‘The Cleavage’

The Alpine Garden Society’s past presidents form a select but surprisingly diverse group. They include a brace of RHS treasurers, an overseas general manager of a multinational company whose son is one of England’s best-known modern-day painters, Lord Mountbatten’s physician, the wife of a former Governor-General of Canada, a railway executive and a retired wing commander.

Our current president, David Haselgrove, was in his working life the managing partner of a law firm and is one of several solicitors who have held the office. One other was Ivor Barton, a resourceful and obdurate Yorkshireman who served from 1974-76, by which time he was semi-retired.

Narcissus bulbocodium en masse in the alpine meadow at RHS Wisley

Ivor Barton, who died in 1986, was the AGS president for three years from 1974. Robert Rolfe has been given access to his gardening diaries and slide library, which record the successes and idiosyncracies of an outstanding plantsman

For many years he gardened at High Hanger in Wimborne, East Dorset, leaving there to live briefly in Coombe Bissett, south of Salisbury, in the late 1960s. Then, in 1970, he moved to Musbury near Axminster in South Devon, spending the remaining 16 years of his life developing a notable garden at Hartgrove House with his second wife Helen. Here he had space for an alpine meadow, in which Colchicum autumnale formed a large patch. His meadow was inspired by the one at Wisley, where the famous displays of Narcissus bulbocodium were of vintage quality. He also built a Mediterranean House ‘to keep the growing medium dry and hot throughout the summer, when the... [bulbs] would naturally be dormant’, of which more later.

He first went abroad in search of alpine plants in 1939, the year before he joined the AGS, and 35 years later became its president. There’s a black and white photograph of him in AGS Bulletin

volume 42 (1974), page 5 (reproduced here), sporting one of his trademark buttonhole flourishes – Cyclamen hederifolium on this occasion, although numerous other flowers occupied this left lapel throughout the year.

As his diaries testify, he took considerable pride in these. Other choices included the pinkish selection of lily-of-the-valley, Convallaria majalis var. rosea (worn at a Ladies Dining Club ball in May 1968), Viola hederacea (‘quite successful’), a dark purplish Helleborus x hybridus (‘burned stem and split it – kept firm’), Persicaria campanulata (which he knew as Polygonum campanulatum and picked from his woodland garden; it ‘caused much comment’), Sternbergia sicula (which he grew very well with cold-frame protection in pots, alongside Cyclamen cilicium), Convolvulus cneorum (‘not much good’; the flowers failed to remain open and soon shrivelled) and, as Christmas approached, Narcissus romieuxii. They were emblematic of the astonishingly wide range of plants he grew conspicuously well. Alpines, dwarf bulbs, hardy orchids and daphnes were firm favourites, but he also cherished numerous trees and shrubs, lilies, sweet peas (which he would pick to brighten his office) and candelabra primulas, among many others.

He photographed whatever took his interest. While some of his slides have faded badly, others are still vibrant after 40 or so years and illustrate this article. Certainly he photographed rare plants, but he was just as likely to direct his lens towards a patchwork of Thymus serpyllum colour forms or a mass of Tropaeolum tricolor, forgiving its freespreading proclivity under glass.

Barton had a wide interest in natural history, with an expert knowledge of butterflies and moths. There’s an image taken in southern Greece of a scarce swallowtail resting on his wife’s sleeve, and another of an even more exotic tropical species, blackish overall but with neon-yellow patterning, that he photographed in Uganda. Gardening and plant-hunting were his main interests, though he also enjoyed fishing. An entry in his diary from July 1966 reads: ‘Hotter than ever – glorious day fishing in Poole harbour – no gardening!’

This quote has relevance in that the Royal Horticultural Society has long produced a Gardeners’ Five Year Diary (or record book). I have Barton’s copy from 1964-68, containing the detailed entries he made almost every day throughout that period. These are almost illegible, for they are written in a very small, spiky, cursive hand, with up to three lines crammed into each space that the ruled pages show was intended to bear just one. Yet what can be deciphered is a record of a man whose life revolved around his garden, as exemplified by the day in June 1968 when he attended a silver wedding anniversary from 11.30-15.30, returned home, changed his clothes straightaway, weeded a large border and some frames, watered the occupants of these, put in an hour’s work with the hoe, harvested a crop of runner beans for supper and ate this close to midnight.

An earlier Amateur Gardening diary from 1962, also in my possession, has far fewer entries and is chiefly notable

Thymus serpyllum forms photographed by Ivor Barton, pictured below in 1974

for Arthur Hellyer’s rather sententious introduction: ‘No year passes in the garden without its highlights and its tragedies, its new lessons learned and its old beliefs confirmed. The most valuable feature of a garden diary is to provide a permanent record of such facts and events for future guidance.’

There are, though, scraps of information to be gleaned, as in a record for January 28 that lists what is even now, never mind at the time, an impressive array of crocuses already in flower – C. sieberi subsp. sublimis f. tricolor, C. veluchensis, C. cyprium, C. carpetanus as well as C. chrysanthus in five or six forms. It also records Barton’s attempted cross between Iris histrioides

‘Major’ and I. danfordiae, two years after E.B. Anderson’s I. ‘Katharine Hodgkin’ first flowered.

Barton grew the rarer crocuses – C. biflorus subsp. nubigena from Lesbos and a notable form of C. laevigatus from Imittós (Mount Hyméttus) he had introduced personally – in cold frames. Here he also maintained C. hartmannianus, raising batches of seedlings, and this narrowly endemic Cypriot remains one of the rarest species in cultivation.

The easier ones established well outdoors, among them good clumps of C. etruscus, C. speciosus (‘magnificent’ according to an October 1967 record, in a large bed often referred to by the acronym DLH in his diary but never spelt out in full) and C. banaticus, shaded by a large Rhododendron ‘Loderi King George’. The latest of them all, C. cambessedesii and C. laevigatus ‘Fontenayi’, were targeted by mice in some years and failed to open in bad weather: ‘A perfect beast of a day,’ he noted on one such occasion.

Here was a man who, on Christmas Day, preferred gardening vouchers to any other present and would always make time to leave the house to admire Viburnum farreri in full flower (1964). By New Year’s Day, having noted that Ranunculus calandrinioides was looking good in a cold frame, with Galanthus fosteri (a Lebanese stock) in bud nearby, he busied himself sowing seed, pruning ash trees at the top of the garden and steadfastly transferring lily bulbs from pots to the open ground. Prone to bouts of insomnia, his timing of such activities was not always conventional. One 1964 log states: ‘Before breakfast finished potting up, including 20 pots of Crocus and as many of Iris.’ Such crack-of-dawn bouts of gardening were fairly typical.

Unsurprisingly for someone who set himself such a pace, Barton was something of a taskmaster when it came to his paid helpers. His detailed instructions included when best to apply manganese sulphate to the borders, which peonies and lilies to spray with a fungicide in order to stave off Botrytis, and how often to edge the lawns. Standard pesticides included Derris and DDT (dubbed ‘Don’t Do That’ in these pages long ago, as its toxicity became increasingly clear), while tubers of everything from dahlias to terrestrial orchids would be dusted with Captan to combat rotting.

What he described as ‘monumental rows’ resulted when the work didn’t reach the required standard, for all that his relationship with gardeners identified as ‘B’ and ‘M’ was clearly harmonious overall. Trips to the Iberian peninsula, Greece, Turkey, Kashmir, East Africa and the Seychelles meant that he had to leave the garden in their hands. Right up to the last minute, lists of tasks to be completed in his absence would be compiled. ‘Make frame behind greenhouse. Put up wires for beans,’ one page-long schedule finishes, with the very next sentence reading: ‘Off in an hour to Lesbos, flying to Athens, then sharing a cabin on the sea crossing.’

As a seasoned lecturer and lecturegoer he was also decisive: ‘Slides superb; delivery not so good,’ is the wry note after a less than accomplished performance. But when praise was due, he gave it in full measure: ‘24 November

Crocus etrucus was among many of the genus grown by Ivor

1964. Off to the RHS – Chris B[rickell]’s lecture excellent, including a dozen or so of my slides. Quite gratifying. Evening Horticultural Club dinner, followed by Admiral Furse on his trip to Afghanistan. A wonderful day.’

In the next few years he came to know Paul Furse well, visiting him in Kent the following year (‘An amazing collection of plants, superbly grown’) and hosting him in turn when Furse lectured to several Dorset gardening clubs.

Nor was he always impressed by judging decisions – a commonplace condition among exhibitors. A September 1964 jotting reads: ‘Zephyranthes andersonii [= Habranthus tubispathus] superb (30 flowers); should have won its class and perhaps an award at the RHS – damn!’ Yet on the whole he enjoyed such occasions very much indeed, as the following two entries underline:

‘9 October 1965. Left office about 11.40 for London – wonderful day. Excellent [RHS] show; autumn colour and nerines from Borde Hill (£1 apiece). Slides shown at the Lily Group meeting by V[alerie] Finnis using a Rolleiflex camera really beautiful. Very good talk. Take saxifrage cuttings now.’

‘29 March 1966. Up at 4.25; away for just after 5.00. A scattering of snow by the roadside beyond Basingstoke. Vincent Square by 7.25, waited until 8.00 to unload the boot and stage [This was the first day of what was then called the AGS Main Spring Show]. A first for Fritillaria obliqua [he grew this southern Greek, blackish-belled rarity extremely well; coincidentally Jack Elliott brought along a large non-competitive exhibit of fritillarias, many from recent expeditions to Turkey and Iran] and also Narcissus rupicola – nearly left behind as it was only just opening. [Harold] Esslemont got everything for his Paraquilegia grandiflora [the inveterate Scottish exhibitor had travelled down on the night train to London from Aberdeen with this and five other plants, winning the Farrer Medal]. Ended with an excellent party (champagne).’

Barton won a Farrer Medal in September 1969 with what was, at that time, a little-grown plant – the predominantly southern Greek Daphne jasminea. This had received the RHS Award of Merit at Chelsea Flower Show in May of the previous year (Barton was equally delighted by a close encounter with Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent), when the plant under scrutiny was rather modestly adorned, for this species has a marked tendency to bloom in several flushes over the summer. By way of confirmation, in his diary it is recorded from early August 1968 as being ‘a mass of flower’.

He was one of a number who reintroduced material from above Delphi – others given in Brickell and Mathew’s Daphnes (1976) included Hugo Money-Coutts, Ken Aslet, Eliot Hodgkin (responsible for the first of the re-introductions, in 1954) and the authors themselves. Barton’s stock dated from 1964 and he advocated the deployment of soft tufa round the neck of the plants, with a sprinkling of old mortar rubble and bonemeal added to the compost.

Often he selected D. retusa stocks for grafting, though he also trialled D. mezereum (in both pink and white selections, the latter all too little grown) with some success, using a mist propagation unit. Several times this faltered, a problem he succinctly diagnosed as ‘bunged up’. The Farrer Medal came towards the very end of his show-bench career. After taking on the large garden at Hartgrove House the following year, there was no time to spare for such a pursuit.

Instead he turned his energies to taming this Devon garden 600 feet above sea level, writing: ‘It is not the soft climate one might expect. The natural soil is very light, stony and slightly acid, and strong winds and about 40 inches of rain a year, with exceedingly brilliant sun – when it shines – make growing under glass a bit of a problem.’

Magnolias of all kinds did very well – he certainly had the space for them – as did rhododendrons. A grassy walk downhill between two borders of these he christened ‘The Cleavage’. A sunny raised bed he referred to as ‘The Battlement’ following a remark to this effect by a visitor soon after its construction, before the planting had softened the outlines. A very dwarf form of Osteospermum ecklonis was

Daphne mezereum forma alba in March 1984. Ivor propagated daphnes using a mist unit

a particular success. Such nicknames appealed to him, for he had also created a successful scree bed which he called ‘Brighton Beach’, referencing that pebbly part of the English coast.

Visiting other gardens and notable nurseries was second nature to him. Leonardslee Gardens in West Sussex, with a Pulham rock garden dating from the Victorian era, are mentioned again and again. Jermyns House in Hampshire, set in the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens and with a now celebrated avenue of mainly Magnolia soulangeana that had only recently been planted when Barton first went there, was another favourite, as

A dwarf Osteospermum ecklonis adorns ‘The Battlement’ at Hartgrove in 1973

much for the noteworthy winter garden and its peat garden. Trips were made to places such as Broadleigh Gardens, where he took photographs of the stock beds, to Westonbirt Arboretum and to noted gardens such as E.B. Anderson’s at Lower Slaughter. A much-prized purple Helleborus x hybridus came from a visit in October 1965, as did Corydalis cashmeriana, which visitors recall selfsowing not just in the garden but down the lane. ‘Went to EBA’s for lunch; came away with many most interesting things,’ Barton wrote upon his return.

He also journeyed further afield to Scotland, where the famous Himalayan woodland garden at Crarae in Argyll (the trip was timed to coincide with the flowering of Embothrium coccineum Lanceolatum Group) and Jack Drake’s Inshriach Alpine Plant Nursery near Aviemore figured on the itinerary. In July 1969 he photographed Lilium macklinae in massed flower at the latter establishment.

He greatly admired lilies of all sorts, the more refined hybrids included, and grew them in pots or in his woodland gardens, where the exotic and heavy scent of Japanese L. auratum would signal its presence on a humid August day, with the elegant, trickier to please L. canadense at its best a month earlier. Other slides show a substantial colony of Lilium martagon var. album in a woodland border, the seedlings planted

Ivor’s picture of stock beds in their spring glory at Broadleigh Gardens

out in their third year, and dozens of pots filled with L. longiflorum in full flower, these grown in a screened-off area that provided both dappled shade and shelter from blustery south-westerly winds.

This enclave was also home to candelabra primulas en masse, both seed-raised plants and divisions, kept there until their first flowering had finished, whereafter they would be planted out in the autumn. There were riotous hybrid swarms in all shades of pink, purple and red, with occasional whites. A deep, rich yellow stock of Primula prolifera (which Barton knew as P. helodoxa, the specific epithet translating as ‘frequenting marshes’) was also maintained, the strongest spikes up to a metre or more tall and carrying optimally six umbels of fragrant flowers. These, the most colourful of all primulas for mass planting, require an unstinting supply of moisture to keep them happy.

Tolerant of slightly drier conditions, but at its best in a rich, leafy loam that doesn’t parch, even in high summer, P. denticulata was another success. At High Hanger in Dorset, Barton devoted an entire border to this alone. His was a mid-pink form, analogous with what Inshriach once sold as ‘Rose and Red Strain’ (the usage of ‘strain’ has since been proscribed: it had it uses, nonetheless) rather than the same nursery’s more intensely coloured ‘Inshriach Carmine’.

His appreciation of the genus was sometimes more highbrow. From Jack Drake came Primula wattii. His was the only nursery where this member of Section Soldanelloides from the eastern Himalaya was listed repeatedly. Dorset isn’t somewhere you would expect such a notoriously choosy species to live for long, but Barton flowered it quite well. That it has seldom been photographed makes it the more regrettable that his slides have, like their subject matter, faded away.

Back in southern England, he often went to RHS Garden Wisley. One slide, taken in April 1969, is of the Petiolarid Primula whitei bedded out on the peat banks, echoing exemplary plantings in several Scottish gardens where these highly desirable species have been grown to the highest standards since their earliest introductions. The first hot summer soon put paid to Wisley’s experiment.

Long before then, Barton had become friendly with Ken Aslet, superintendent of the rock garden at Wisley throughout the 1960s. And so one reads: ‘To Wisley with a load of plants for Ken; spent a very pleasant afternoon in the gardens (K. in committee early on), then a delightful time with Ken, Letitia [‘Letty’, his wife] and John Tomlinson [another important figure from the Society’s past who, like Barton, had a keen interest in rare bulbs, taking him to Turkey and Iran with Brian Mathew in 1965].’

Barton’s affection for primulas stayed throughout his life. One of his last slides, taken in the cold greenhouse at Hartgrove in 1986, is of P. auricula cultivars and P. x pubescens occupying a broad swathe of the plunge.

As has been mentioned, he visited gardens up and down the country. He also received a large number of distinguished horticulturists at High Hanger and subsequently at Hartgrove

A fine clump of Lilium martagon var. album and, right, L. canadense at Hartgrove

House. One of gardening’s happiest traditions is the exchange of plants on such occasions and he was both a benefactor and a beneficiary of this custom. When Valerie Finnis called for an afternoon in September 1967, she brought with her enough plants to keep him busy potting them up over the following four days.

A month later Sid Lilley, at the time one of the most successful cultivators of cassiopes and other dwarf Ericaceae, spent a morning at High Hanger. Along with a boxful of these, he imparted his reputedly foolproof ericaceous mixture, which comprised one part loam, one part coarse sand, one part sifted leafmould and half a ration of sphagnum peat, with added flowers of sulphur. Barton used this ever-afterwards, and little wonder when one reads that luxuriant mats of Epigaea gaultherioides over 40cm in diameter resulted, or that Arisaema wallichii and A. sikokianum (in 1968, a decade or more before their popularity ‘took off’ in the British Isles) were settling down well.

Already he was growing Meconopsis to a high standard, grouping what he referred to as M. baileyi, not M. betonicifolia

(correctly, as has subsequently been confirmed) in quantity along with Euphorbia griffithii and a fringe of dwarf gaultherias. A surprise log from 1968 records: ‘Planted Meconopsis delavayi after lunch according to the Lilley recipe’ – where he obtained this rarity isn’t mentioned.

Other difficult alpines with which he had success included Ranunculus glacialis (from the same year, when it flowered well in a frame) and Eritrichium nanum. In May 1964 it bloomed so well in one of his troughs that friends such as the Blanchards were invited over to witness the event, and the precise number of flowers, 41, was counted. He also grew Thlaspi rotundifolium in ‘Brighton Beach’, though in its usual pink form, not the unusual white variant he photographed on a trip to the Alps in 1963.

Open days were held but not always well timed, as a terse scribble in the diary on May 10, 1968, suggests: ‘Forecast for tomorrow – thunder, hail, rain, wind, colder. What a day to choose for the opening of the garden!’ Among the plants he had wanted visitors to see at their best in the wood were a deep purple form of Glaucidium palmatum (it must have been a cold spring, for it would ordinarily have finished blooming), Viola sororia ‘Albiflora’ and Trientalis europaea. The latter, of British provenance, he dug up and took to the Chelsea Flower Show a couple of weeks later, where a Preliminary Commendation was awarded despite his misgivings that it might be ‘too pink and too tiny’ for the committee’s tastes. Most of the wild populations are in Scotland, although it occurs spasmodically as far down as Lancashire and Yorkshire, and was once known from isolated sites in Norfolk and Hampshire.

Perhaps his greatest successes involving difficult plants came with hardy and near-hardy terrestrial orchids at a time when methods of propagating the majority were in their infancy. Indeed, the name Dactylorhiza romana subsp. bartonii was conjured up in 1967 for a Portuguese race characterised by an orange zone at the base of the lip, tenuous at best and now deemed a synonym of D. insularis. As others have found, this genus is apt to seed around in gardens, so that a Spanish plant akin to D. elata produced ‘seedlings about an

Thlaspi rotundifolium in the Alps in 1963

Viola sororia ‘Albiflora’ in Ivor’s woodland

inch high... [that] were sturdy flowering plants two years later’.

His article in The World of Rock Plants International Conference Report (1971) is well worth reading, for it dispels a good deal of the mystique that surrounded their cultivation at the time, insisting that they are ‘certainly no more difficult than many other plants that are grown with reasonable success’. As in his Dorset and Devon gardens, Barton divided them into two categories. The first set (including Ophrys, Orchis and Serapias) were ‘from calcareous ground... where the ground is warm and dry, at least when they are dormant’. The second, the woodlanders, required ‘cool, shady situations’.

Even species from the Mediterranean were grown outside, most successfully on an orchid bank where Cyclamen persicum also established at the margins and Anemone pavonina seeded liberally. He also advocated growing orchids ‘in banks, screes, sinks, or wherever good drainage can be secured’, the more southerly ones protected from northerly and easterly winds, with light overhead protection in frosty spells. Even those grown in pots were often left outdoors until just before Christmas, the moisture and buoyant atmosphere helping to ward off the blackening of the foliage so often experienced.

But try as he might, some of the plants he came to love from his travels to the

A Spanish hillside populated with viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare

Mediterranean wouldn’t grow outdoors for long. For these he had built what he considered the lazy gardener’s greenhouse, the ‘Med house’, based upon models dating from the early 1960s that another past president, Henry Hammer, and another learned plantsman friend, Richard Gorer, had developed. Its occupants were many and varied, for he was not snobbish in his tastes – a favourite slide, taken in central Spain, depicts a hillside coloured purple with viper’s bugloss, Echium vulgare – though such liberal tastes meant that some plants swamped their slow-growing neighbours.

The Med house was on a concrete base, with insulating Thermalite blocks forming raised beds either side of a central pathway. It had no heating. The several frames that were added later, however, were covered with cocoa matting in really cold weather, while Cyclamen rohlfsianum was protected by an inverted wooden box ‘with some newspaper or a piece of expanded polystyrene’ stuffed within.

Drainage came courtesy of builders’ rubble and flint stones gathered in the garden, with inverted turves above this layer, a good layer of light loam laced with garden lime and bonemeal, then a surfacing of pea gravel. No watering was carried out from spring

Muscari macrocarpum relishing the conditions in Ivor’s ‘Med house’

until a thorough soaking was given in late August, following a scattering of bonemeal, sulphate of potash and hoof and horn. This was clearly to the liking of some recipients, for Cyclamen graecum grew to 30cm across (nowadays we are accustomed to such specimens; then they were exceptional). Muscari macrocarpum also romped away, and Iris attica in several colour forms did very well for a few years, before signalling the need to divide its clumps and provide fresh soil by dwindling when such requirements weren’t met.

Barton was at heart an experimental gardener, who recorded in meticulous detail (if not in meticulously neat writing!) his gardening efforts on a daily basis. At a time when travelling abroad often took far longer than it does today, he set off with scarcely a second thought – his Kashmir trip in June and July 1967 involved changing at Brussels, Rome, Tehran and Delhi (‘a furnace!’), flying over Samarkand and Moscow on the return journey. And he was enthusiastic about new introductions, whether his own or those of others:

‘29 November 1966. Consignment of fascinating plants arrived from [Sydney] Albury [these would have been from the landmark Albury, Cheese & Watson Turkish expedition] – arranged distribution on Saturday.’

Cercidiphyllum japonicum in its autumn splendour at Hartgrove House

His methods could be unorthodox (attempting to lift a mature Daphne arbuscula, as he did at Wimborne, is often doomed to fail) and present-day readers may well feel uneasy about the sources of his terrestrial orchid collection. That said, in general he instructed that ‘owing to the rarity of some and their slowness to propagate, orchids should not be collected or their flowers picked, regardless of place and species’.

He didn’t segregate his plants but mixed them together at every opportunity. Cyclamen cilicium thrived under a very healthy Cercidiphyllum japonicum (clearly quite a sight when the tree was in full autumn colour) and a very catholic range of plants was brought together in the woodland garden that he developed after visiting noteworthy examples throughout the British Isles.

He distributed his best plants widely and disapproved of anyone reluctant to act similarly – ‘decidedly stingy’ he wrote of a correspondent who saw fit to spare only one small bulbil of a purpleleaved Lilium martagon.

Ivor Barton lived a life largely dedicated to gardening, as his diaries – by turns amusing, wry, candid and observant – confirm on every page.