If anyone deserves the title of the plantsman’s plantsman it is Maurice Foster. We visited him at White House Farm in the green depths of Kent last month, after an interval of ten years. He hasn’t changed: still the rather impish, beaming figure with an unparalleled flow of botanical fact and anecdote to keep you happy all day. Maurice can recall every moment in the finding, naming, provenance and propagation of every plant in his collection of – I can’t remember how many thousands of taxa. His passion goes far beyond trees; he will be as eloquent on a rose, a grass or a lichen – well, maybe not quite as eloquent on a lichen..
The garden of White House Farm encompasses some four acres, a stretch of woodland a further three, and the arboretum beyond it seven. On Monday mornings, Maurice told us, two helpers get a briefing for the week; the heavy work to be done. The rest he does himself; a dizzying prospect as you look around you.
In ten years the arboretum has grown from a field of sticks to a leafy heaven of prodigious variety. Certain recurring genera amount to comprehensive collections; hornbeams in a variety no one would have thought possible; tilia, quercus, magnolia the same, berberis and philadelphus…. But a list of genera can sound like a dull plantation, and this is a magic wood of surprises and questions – to which Maurice has the answers.
Ten years is nothing in the life of a garden, or a gardener. At Saling Hall I was still planting more trees after forty years – closer and closer together. When I started I put them far too far apart, before I discovered that the thing trees (not perhaps all trees) like best is each other’s company. Every perambulation raised the question of priorities: does the beauty of that tree take precedence over the rarity of its neighbour? One or the other has to go. There were occasional duels, but I tended to let the happier tree win. The context, though, was different. I was trying to paint a landscape; in a landscape it is the spaces, more than the details, that count.
In the end an arboretum is a wood of different trees. In a good arboretum they are congruous; themes emerge, comparisons are close enough to be useful. White House Farm has all the beauties of a wood, but one where your eyes are constantly drawn to details of design you never expected to see.
