The road home to London from Snowdonia and our Welsh woods is long and winding. There was a blizzard of sleet as we threaded our way along the lovely green valley of the River Elan. We arrived with deep pleasure at our overnight stop, precisely on the English border and my favourite garden for half a century. Yes, Hergest Croft.
I see I first wrote in this diary about Hergest Croft in the 1970s, when the third of the five generations of the Banks family was in charge. The fourth, my friend Lawrence, my contemporary at Rugby and Treasurer of the RHS, is succeeded by his widow Elizabeth and their son Edward. They are quite a family. Elizabeth was the first professional landscape architect (her briefs included the Royal Parks) to become RHS President.
From the elegant new bungalow in the garden she calls her ‘enderhome’ she supervises a garden that summarises all the amenities of traditional country house walled gardens, and leads on into one of the country’s most distinguished collections of trees and shrubs, flourishing, fascinating, and mostly rare.
A further walk through rolling parkland takes you to Park Wood, a place sacred to me as where I first conceived my passion for trees. It was Lawrence’s father Dick who inducted me; tall, benign and omniscient, he introduced me to birch and silver fir as one does a friend. Streams and pools reflect the soaring larch and oak, a hundred feet above, with the red flowers of rhododendron arboreum mingling in the intricate canopy. Bright green and yellow skunk cabbage circles the pools where a frog plops and a flower drops from high above.
