People still ask me, ten years after we left our old Essex house, Saling Hall and the garden we made there over forty two years, ‘Don’t you miss it?’
The answer is no, or not really. But why not? In the first place because we are happy in London, with all its amenities (especially its parks), but principally because memory works so well. I can still take mental walks, not just at Saling, but in all the gardens and places I’ve known well and been attached to. In fact it’s what I do when my head hits the pillow. I can visit our woods in Wales, or our daughter’s garden in Hampshire, Wisley, or the garden of a chateau in the Médoc where I had a hand in the design, or stroll as I often do in Kensington Gardens, where trying to match the dogs with their owners is a game I sometimes play.
The other reason our Essex garden remains fresh, and even exciting, in my mind is because our successors there are doing such a good job with it. Not perhaps exactly what I was planning to do, but intelligent, interesting and above all pretty. The walled garden has not looked so good or been so well maintained since our early years there and its complete replanting in the early 1970s, or at least since Christopher Bailes joined us as a very young gardener – en route for his illustrious career at Merrist Wood, the RHS gardens, and eventually Kew.
It was a risk, I admit, hiring a young man whose experience didn’t go much further than leaf-sweeping, but when he sat on a bench with me at Saling, in the walled garden, and said ‘I would just love to garden here’, something told me he’d work hard and do well. After a few weeks, when he asked to borrow my gardening books, I knew for certain. But not that one day he’d be in charge of the orchids at Kew. Now I read his books on orchids, and hollies, and feel quite proprietorial. The RHS has given him its Victoria Medal of Honour. You can’t get more senior than that.
