nappies and ironing clothes. Unless you are exceptional, you realize you are becoming dull.”5 With a nanny and other help in the house, it is unlikely that Rosemary spent much of her time washing nappies or ironing clothes, but she firmly believed, and often said, “It’s a sin to be dull!”
With Rosemary still engaged with horses and hunting, David moved to re-establish a decent garden around their house. Without consulting Rosemary, or possibly because she expressed no interest in his undertaking, David pressed ahead. He started by focusing on the area immediately around the house and called Percy Cane, a fashionable garden designer of the day, to come to Barnsley.
Percy Cane was known for an Arts and Crafts approach to garden design, which was of keen interest to David. The Cotswolds had been at the heart of the movement that began in the late 1800s and continued into the early part of the twentieth century. Reacting to the industrialization taking place in England, and influenced by writers like John Ruskin, the movement counted William Morris among its leading proponents, advocating a return to traditional architecture and crafts produced by hand rather than by machines. His home, Kelmscott Manor, was in Lechlade, not far from Barnsley, and several prominent like-minded architects followed him to the area.6
Given his own interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, it was natural for David to engage a garden designer who championed it. When Percy Cane arrived at Barnsley without any warning, “Rosemary saw red! She’d been resisting. You can see her – eyes lighting up with fury. Getting in someone else when she was going to do it and she did.”7
Rosemary admitted Cane’s arrival “was most provocative to me. I realized that it was my garden,”8 so Percy Cane was quickly ushered back to London. No one was going to tell her what to do about her own garden. With her back up, she was determined to take charge. Looking back, Rosemary gave Percy Cane credit for teaching her one important lesson, namely “that you should always make the longest possible distance into your most important vista and give it an interesting focal point.” And it taught her another useful lesson. Remembering her own reaction, Rosemary believed that any garden she later designed had to be the client’s garden, not hers.
Before Percy Cane was sent packing, he did suggest the basic outline for the borders just outside the south-facing door of the drawing room at Barnsley House. Here, years before, Linda Verey had planted parallel rows of tall Irish yews, marching like stiff green sentinels along the path that led away from that door out to a gate that opened through an existing stone wall to the farm lane beyond. In the 1770s, an early owner, the Reverend Charles Coxwell, had built a high stone wall on three sides of the grounds, starting at the southeastern end, turning to run along the south and then turning back again. A small Gothic Revival-style gardenhouse remained at this northern end of the wall, serving as a full stop feature and garden folly. Beyond the end of the garden wall, a yew hedge hid the swimming pool Rosemary and David had built at the furthest northwestern edge.
Although Rosemary had not eliminated the tall yews when she grassed over the gardens of her mother-in-law, there was only grass on either side of the yews when Percy Cane arrived. In place of open lawn, Percy Cane outlined four symmetrical triangular beds on either side of the yew-lined central path. Each triangle had a gentle curving hypotenuse to contrast to the sharp right angles of the other two sides. This design, quite simple but classical, was appropriate to the age and architecture of the house. The four beds, later called the Parterres, would become the heart of Rosemary’s garden at the rear of Barnsley House.
Originally, the farm lane just beyond the stone wall had served as the main village thoroughfare, but after the introduction of the automobile, a broader paved parallel road had been built further north. As a result, the drawing room door looking out over the Parterres and the yew walk toward the farm lane beyond would once have been the front entrance of the house. Instead, after the paved road arrived, the north facing façade became the front entrance, facing this main road that connected the important town of Cirencester to the south with the charming village of Bibury to the north and continued on through the heart of the Cotswolds. A handsome pair of iron gates connected the driveway to this busily trafficked road. Alongside the driveway’s edge, another stone wall ran uphill to the house, behind a row of handsome large trees; in early spring, the ground is awash with aconites blooming a sea of yellow. Linda Verey had planted formal herbaceous borders in the front of the house, where the sloping land had been terraced. In her eradication phase, Rosemary eliminated these borders and simplified the terraces, leaving an unfussy, quiet green area at the front entrance of the handsome three-story house.
Before Cane’s arrival, Rosemary already had begun experimenting with a few plantings of trees and shrubs at the southwestern edge of lawn, just beyond the Gothic Revival gardenhouse, with no formal wall or enclosure there other than the yew hedge hiding the pool. She described this area “as somewhere between a woodland and a wild flower meadow.”9 She called it the Wilderness. The very name suggests the influence of William Robinson, whose influential book, The Wild Garden, and later writings passionately called for a more natural approach to gardening in England. Robinson, who was influenced by John Ruskin as well as the American Frederick Law Olmsted, would have been embraced by anyone like David Verey interested in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Rejecting the Victorian gardening style of bedding-out tender plants in highly formal, geometric-shaped areas, William Robinson preached a more naturalistic and picturesque approach. Rosemary wrote about this shift in gardening style away from the formal bedding-out of tender plants, noting “William Robinson crusaded to change the fashion to a more permanent mixed and herbaceous border.”10 Robinson was an important influence on Major Lawrence Johnston, an American who created his magnificent gardens at Hidcote Manor in Gloucestershire, not far from Barnsley. Hidcote was certainly known to Rosemary. Further away in Kent, Vita Sackville-West’s gardens at Sissinghurst Castle and her widely read garden writings were also influenced by Robinson’s views.
Given her own early university studies in social history, Rosemary was well aware that styles evolve, and from her library, that garden styles were no exception. “Like cooking, gardening is tremendously influenced by social history. At the turn of the century, cheap labor and cheap coal meant people could have fleets of gardeners and enormous hothouses. Because lots of exotics were coming into this country from around the world, extra flowerbeds were created to fit everything in. In those times, the ladies of the house often knew little of their garden. Now that situation has changed and in many cases for the better.”11
Like any beginning amateur, Rosemary’s first efforts in her wilderness were not too successful. As a novice, she began to regularly attend the Royal Horticultural Society flower shows at Vincent Square in London and visited many gardens, taking constant notes. Absorbed by trees and shrubs, she wisely consulted a tree expert, Tim Sherrard, at a local nursery. In contrast to her later, more effective, formal areas of her garden, The Wilderness was rarely noticed or photographed, probably because it wasn’t much more than a collection of fine but somewhat randomly placed trees without any structure, vista or focal point.
In due course, Rosemary herself admitted that the Wilderness was not something she took great pride in, much as she continued to admire many of the plants there. “Now inevitably, I would like to treat a few (trees) as chessmen and move them round the board.… I would do at least three of each crab and cherry instead of a single to make a bolder accent. These mistakes are the price paid for an amateur instead of a professional layout.”12 However, this particular amateur was a keen observer and critic of her own efforts, learning from these early experiences.
By Christmas of 1961, Rosemary was far enough along in gardening that her daughter Davina gave her a book to serve as a garden journal. Rosemary knew enough about the growing conditions in her garden to remember “My daughter gave me a notebook importantly titled ‘Gardening Book’ on the opening page; below I added the words: ‘Be not tempted by plants that hate lime.’ ”13 The following year, her son Charles gave her a membership in the Royal
