Although I was trained and worked as an artist, I became seriously involved with gardening when I first had a garden of my own in London. Later I combined art and gardening in a book published under my professional name, Fenja Gunn, The Lost Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll (Letts 1991), which attempted to bring to life some of Jekyll’s forgotten garden designs in text and watercolour paintings. Gardening journalism followed and I contributed to Country Life, The Garden and other gardening publications. I always yearned for a garden in which I would have the scope to try out fresh ideas, plant outstanding plants - including my passion, old roses - and experiment with themes of colour.
We moved to Mariners at the end of 1996. The garden, when we first saw it, presented a daunting prospect from a design point of view. Our predecessors had made a well-regarded garden here out of this steeply sloping area and had opened it under the National Gardens Scheme. We felt that much more could be achieved even with such a challenging site. In the event, we have changed the garden to a very great extent and exploited the character of the banks and contours. (I wrote an article about this: Taking over an Old Garden in Hortus Issue 60, 2001 - PDF file). We were fortunate to have inherited some fine mature trees, shrubs and hedges. The hedges still define the boundaries of the garden, with a robust hornbeam hedge dividing the main garden from the sunken rose garden. Some of the original trees and shrubs remain.
A former vegetable garden at the highest level of the slopes is now a mixed orchard of apple, plum, greengage and cherry. An old tennis court was removed and replaced with some 170 old shrub roses and a wilderness of brambles above a small stream was cleared to reveal a bank, now covered with primroses in the spring. We have cut a pathway across the lower level of the bank so that the path runs just above the stream and have planted a variety of bulbs and woodland perennials with climbing roses scrambling up the trees.
In particular, we felt that more could be made of the slopes. A landscape option was to terrace these formally with levels defined by brick walls, but we felt that this would not suit the style of the garden in its country setting. So we have cut into the slopes, planting these bank borders with an exuberant variety of plants and exploiting associations of plant form, texture and colour. The shapes of borders are based on flowing curves that blend with the landscape. The heavy clay underlying all this part of the garden has provided a particular challenge to its development.
A later addition to the garden has been the wild flower meadow, extending to about an acre, which lies beyond the slopes at the top of the formal garden on a local ‘gravel-top’. The concept for this has been to reproduce an old-fashioned pasture meadow, with a wide range of plants and grasses consistent with this principle and with indigenous trees planted in the corners.
For both my husband, Anthony, and myself the garden has been and remains a passionate interest. One of the great pleasures of creating it has been the constant input of ideas from outside sources: nurseries with their exciting ranges of plants and bulbs; experts who have helped us, such as Charles Flower, who advised on the preparation and planting of our wild flower meadow, and Peter Beales who has supplied all our roses (about 300 now growing throughout the garden: see List of Roses - PDF file); and, especially, all the gardeners who have been associated with our garden. We have never had a full time professional gardener but over the years we have had the invaluable help first of Jane Rozdolska and Den Dolin, and currently of Ann Binding and Simon Catliff in our “gardening day” team (with Robert Whitehead helping regularly with trees and hedges). They all have made it possible to keep the garden in good order and have increased our own pleasure in working here.
The garden is open annually for the National Garden Scheme and occasionally for other good causes. We enjoy welcoming other gardeners and horticultural groups, large or small, to share our garden with us. For all of us who work in the garden, it was a particular source of pride and satisfaction to be awarded a star by the Good Gardens Guide in 2007 (also see the RHS Garden Finder www.rhs.org.uk ). In September 2008 an article on Mariners appeared in the gardening magazine The English Garden with images by the well-known garden photographer, Clive Nichols. Some of his images of the garden may be seen on his website's Garden section - www.clivenichols.com.
Fenja Anderson
