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In Your Garden Monthly gardening ideas & tasks by Andrew Staib of Glorious Gardens High Beeches - An unsung Sussex Jewel When I left Sarah and Jeremy Bray, owners of The High Beeches Woodland and Watergardens, I had the feeling I was waving goodbye to two “Ents”, trees from Lord of the Rings that can talk and move about. Such is their dedication to the spirit of the land they inherited from Sarah’s parents in the early 90’s. They showed me around the grounds and their enthusiasm was childlike and fresh. Given that Sarah has spent most of her life here, its impressive her intense enthusiasm for High Beeches hasn’t waned. “My parents, Anne and Edward Boscawen, met Colonel Giles Loder family in the 60’s, and in 1966, when he died, various parts of the estate were sold off, my parents buying High Beeches. It came without a house, but Owners Sarah and Jeremy Bray instead had a magnificent collection of trees that Colonel Loder had built up in the first half of the 20th Century. Among Col Loder’s cousins with whom he exchanged plants, were Lord Wakehurst of Wakehurst Place and Edmund Loder of Leonardslee. She pointed to a grassy bank “Look, Narcissus cyclamineus is out all ready! Oh I do hope late frosts won’t get the Magnolia flowers this year.” “When we came back here, and my parents moved to the Garden House, we immediately started sourcing and adding to the collection. And then a year after our official opening to the public, the 1987 storms hit us!”. They both shudder and recount stories of buying chain saws, gathering vast piles of fallen timber, remembering the loss of great trees. My mother’s force of will got us through that time. She was so dedicated to this place.” As we walk past a small valley, that smooths its way through a grove of trees, Jeremy talks about the unexpected benefits of lockdown. “I have commuted into London most of my working life, but lockdown enabled me to slow down and even start to learn the names of our collections here. We have ambitions to create a proper database of our whole collection.”
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