Hanham Court

Hanham Court in Country Living May 2010

2010-04-22T14:05:21+00:00

Spring flowers

2010-04-22T11:17:12+00:00

Hanham Court is open!

April has brought new growth to the Gardens; Magnolias and Fritillaries are in bloom and with Tulips on the way it is a great time to visit the gardens.

Auriculas have taken center stage in the plant theater and are showing off their best.

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FOUNTAIN

2009-11-05T14:49:09+00:00

In The Press

2009-05-28T17:22:58+00:00

The Daily Telegraph July 4th 2009 – Peonies at Hanham Court

Hamish Bowles article for VOGUE Blog

http://www.style.com/vogue/voguedaily/2009/07/hanham-court/

Sarah Raven’s article for Telegraph Gardening

The Daily Telegraph June 25th 2009 – Delphiniums at Hanham Court

Sarah Raven’s article for Telegraph Gardening

House & Garden July 2009 – An I&J Bannerman design at Euridge Manor

Visit the Bannerman Design website

The Sunday Times May 31st 2009

Anna Pavord in The Independent May 9th 2009

Country Life May 27th 2009

Gardens Illustrated June 2009

The Sunday Times May 31st 2009

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1st May - The Time of Lilac

2009-05-08T02:53:43+00:00

“When on a summer evening the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the ‘Meseglise way’ that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac-trees.” Only Proust can describe the impossibly simple and yet complex Lilac. Again he writes “…we would leave the town by the road which ran along the white fence of M. Swann’s park. Before reaching it we would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed even in the shade with the sunlight in which they had been bathed…” Long before Proust part of the myth of Lilac was its uncommon power to unlock memories. The smell defies description, and does not bear drawn out inhalation as it becomes cloying in the nose. The beauty of the flowers is easier to transpose to the page than the bottle. Edward Thomas’s ‘swollen turbans of jeweled pashas’, Proust’s ‘rosy minarets’ whose hue has the ‘pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature’- the images conjured are as often exotic in quality as homely. William Beckford planned his burial mount with a walled ditch about it, a pink Aberdeen granite Egyptian inspired tomb and a ‘grove of lilacs’ (sadly gone). Thus he combined all the Lilac’s charms with its mournful Lenten purple attributes. Corruption is never far from the lilac even at its height. Many discerning gardeners will not plant the white-flowered one, despising the way the dead brown buds muddy the snowy panicles. ‘ Lilac-time is nearly over; some of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shriveled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry and scentless’ remembers Proust. The scent is schizophrenic. To those that don’t love it passionately it is too much, assaults the senses and the sense. “Too sweet, troubling and molesting the head in a very strange way” wrote Gerard in the 17th century. It is not a scent in which to wallow, it does become rank in the nose. But in wafts it surpasses anything in the tropics, white lilac containing the extraordinary ‘well-being’ inducing compound now as ‘indol’. Vita Sackville West alludes to the same watery quality as Proust when she finds solace ‘in the distilled scent of every dew–drenched lilac you ever smelt’, a quality like that of drinking the absolute finest White Burgundy. Lilac somehow encompasses the louche and the homely. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the family Lemoine of Nancy, France, was gripped in a fever of breeding, creating from the humble but delicious common lilac and its cousins, shocking plumes of immense weight loaded with scent, their names redolent of a lost world, Necker, Lamartine, Vauban. They also extended the range of hue to depths of rich crushed mulberry and heights of iridescent stormy slatey-violet blues. 19th century Europe’s drawing rooms were entranced by the shrub and the ‘starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads’. Russians still stop trains to jump out and pick lilac from the trackside.

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28th April

2009-05-08T01:50:06+00:00

So much going on it is almost impossible to catch breath in the garden let alone write about it. Finding a moment to take a look at the Bees brought me to thinking about Tree Flowers. Last week and this is the brief best moment, the time of Candles. It comes seconds after the time of Dandelions -the few days following Easter when these leonine stars beam out everywhere only to turn, in moments, to downy nebula. The effect of the passing traffic of spring becomes now not the Doppler effect of such and such coming out and passing through the consciousness as a continuous roar, clamouring for the attention of birds and bees. When the Horse Chestnut in the middle of Wick village lights up like Prince Albert’s proverbial Christmas tree the moment has come, the time of Candles and Tassells and what I call Beech Raff as every leaf and flower on every tree throws of its winter garments. At this party there are quite a few side shows, easily missed amongst the flashy teeth and tits of flowering cherries and crabs and magnolias. One of the oddest tree flowers is the Yew. Once you have noticed a big ancient yew tree apparently smoking in a march wind as the pollen is buffeted from its million subtle mud coloured anthers you will never miss its flowering again. Not so much a flowering as a great puffing pollen bearing organ. I have always wondered if the mustard coloured ‘smoke’ of this pollen is healing or noxious, and do the bees collect it? Bees plunder trees more than anything else for pollen, and nectar and sticky propolis. The next platter of pollen I notice is the Sycamore. I can only guess that there are male and female because some dress up in a salad of livid inflorescence so completely covered it looks like light bearing leaves. Again year in year out the Sycamore on the bend in Chippenham by the telephone box into which Eddie Cochran drove his motor one night in the 50’s(?) is always a signal, a lighthouse in case you had any doubts that you were entering the rocky shores of spring. Simultaneous but a lighter bite are the flowers of the Elm family. These are more like bunched bracts or a vegetarian’s dream green crisplets. As the light filtres through them they appear to be floating on a pond. How heartbreaking to think of them towering over the Vale of the White Horse in my early childhood, two hundred foot of light bearing green pylon, bending as they talked to one another over the heads of Ash and Beech and Oak below. Early in the year they were beacons, later they cast the deepest longest shadows on those incomparable ‘Battle of Britain’ days in high summer. Depending on the year it seems difficult for me to pin down when the Oak flowers. Oaks appear flower when they feel like it and they cause the Ash to sulk. Right now the Ashes are deeply hung over in their winter beds, and the Oaks are partying. The decking out of the Oak is suitably baroque, ponderous, majestic and magnificent. The dangles of inflorescence are a marvellous tawny, masculine decorator-chic colour, an understated shabby gold. They are the finest passmenterie, hand made, weighty with quality, the trees become a Daniel Marot bed of State in the flag waving pollen fest that last barely two weeks.

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26th April

2009-04-27T13:24:01+00:00

The crystalline purity of the Old Pheasants eye narcissus is matchless. Of all spring bulbs this ranks very high. Not only do they have an ethereal beauty in a class of its own, they have a particularly distilled daffodil scent. This arrives on the hastening wave of spring; with the first sunning of bare earth; the first rain after the sucked dry end of winter; a new veering in the wind; the rising young grass in which they throng; larch and poplar leafing. Laundry white, on sight they would make any heart light. Laundry clean on smelling they deliver water, honey, apricots and a wisp of something more robust, musk perhaps. This strength gives them mystery as well as charm. They have been found in the funeral wreaths of the Egyptians. The power of the scent is reflected in the name, the ‘nar’ part has the same derivation as narcotic – a flower with a scent that causes numb lethargy. They rarely perfume the air outside, it being too cold, but when brought into the house, like their ‘Paperwhite’ cousins at Christmas, they puff a festive note about the house, rounded and confident. In the still uncertain, spring-blown garden they must be sought out and picked, stems oozing, then pressed, coolly watered, to the face to experience one of life’s deep pleasures. Vita Sackville West describes the moment when the straight n. poeticus begin to flower, around the equinox, when the “grass beneath the Worcester Pearmain blows with narcissus” “all in a hurry in the wind of March”. She remarks on their generosity producing ‘two score’ progeny where you planted one. They look incredible under white flowering cherry trees.

Narcissi are mentioned in Homer and Theophrastus in 300bc. Probably grown in England since Roman times, they have countless, delightful common names including ‘Sweet Nancies’ and ‘Non-so –Pretty’. They turn up in Chaucer and Spencer, Henry Lyte calls them ‘primrose pyerles’ and when Shakespeare writes of the narcissi that‘…May had painted with his soft showers’ one thinks of the orchards of middle England. There are wildings found in Japan, and in Chinese paintings a double, but best for wild colonies are Spain, Portugal and North Africa. In the high Pyrenees, even as late as July, there can be meadow full of very lovely, narrow twisted petalled Narcissus poeticus var. ‘Recurvus’. The leaves however are poisonous to cattle. Narcissus poeticus var. ‘Recurvus’ – an early 19thcentury strain, the ‘Old Pheasant’s Eye’ is late and lovely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dean Herbert ‘Crossed a Trumpet with a Poet’ in order to prove that wild narcissi might actually be hybrids. Thereafter breeding of yellow daffodils got out of hand. Bowles laments that breeding is ‘degrading daffodils’ as early as the 1890’s. But of n. poeticus he says that they were traditionally called incomparable, ‘Nonpareille’ and ‘Nonsuch’, and they remain so. Their porcelain perfection is captured by Margery Fish thus; “their petals have… the same glittering quality found in nerines and begonias, as if each cell were encased with lenses to reflect light.”

this “Rockii” tree peony looks like it is going to be sensational in a weeks time…

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Easter Sunday

2009-04-22T07:42:47+00:00

What a day to be alive. Early morning was like the dawning of the world. Everything newly fashioned and fashioning it self before one. The lipstick red tulips are knockout with the euphorbia. Julian says my tulip choice could only have been made by girls on acid, but there isn’t much else to amuse out there. The honesty or ‘pope’s change’ as the french neatly call it, seems to be knitting itself into flower as I walk round. Horror of a badger has wormed his way in through barbed wire barricade’s and rootled out the bone meal we foolishly added to the heleniums when we planted the other week. Bonemeal is like truffles to brock and he, for it is a he, tossed the heleniums far an wide in a slurping frenzy. Luckily we found some juicy Moreheim Beauty at wonderful Downside Nurseries only last week – thankfully have had no time to plant so will block the invasion route and just to be safe plant them without bonemeal. And what of the last furious frazzled few days before opening and the opening itself? The labour camp swelled with sisters and cousins and kiwi kind help, and the diet reduced to soggie chips late at night followed by more pva and emulsion. Seem endlessly to shift things from A to B and back to A because you need it, and then it all had to be swept under the greenhouse staging or anywhere out of view on Friday morning. Friday was raining and cold but there were people at the door at 11am sharp. Mary Keen blessedly brought a troupe and a thermos as I had to say that soup was not even off, it was not possible. Shirley Ann brought gooey boxes of cakes and meringues and everybody unpacked the Bridgewater china in a flurry of paper and cardboard which then had to be shoved into a corner. The crown danced – was it on Thursday night for the first time?- but on Friday morning is fell off its perch every time we turned on the hot tap in the kitchen and the lights dimmed, something amiss with the electrics. Later somebody said that their tea was stone cold, but all in all the reception was good – especially to the garden where the Magnolias we waving their flashiest flags and the fritillaries were fritting. Saturday dawned in deep haze, promising pearl of a day, and so this morning. Unreal to have blinding new gravel down and the stumpery planted. Everything a bit raw round the edges but hey.

Magnolia “Elizabeth” in the dell

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MARCH

2009-04-18T09:18:30+00:00

March 14th – my birthday. The incredible Sandy Baxter and his team came all the way from Sussex this morning for a meeting at 8am to discuss a project we are hoping to do together and the pumps and Dancing Crown for here. They added a professional aplomb to our fumbling with hydraulics. Water is nothing but trouble -it runs away, gets in where you don’t want it, has a life of its own and will not be tamed easily. Mess with it at your peril. We spent hours looking at ‘curves’ – these are graphs which I think show litres per minute versus head of water or some such. They are very important when it comes to choosing pumps. There is so much to do in the next month, can it be done? We have just managed to finish the moss work for the interior of the Arundel Antler Temple – the kitchen and every inch of the house has been drapped in moss for weeks and with it come pine needles and living things and the smell of wet dogs – http://www.bannermandesign.com for pictures of the finished work. At least everbody seems pleased with the results, thank the lord. One of the night terrors off the list – but there are plenty more to take it’s place. My birthday is always the nadir of the year, things change with the equinox and St Patrick’s day but for now it is bitter and bone dry and the earth is holding back, leaving the hedgerows decked with carrier bags and crisp wrappers and only wisps of hawthorn leaves struggling to spring. But shining out are the Euphorbias in toxic gold. Used to hate them, thought them extra-terrestial and without merit. But somehow we planted some strays here and they love it and grow taller than I in this drained scree of a soil. Now we appreciate their generous early greening and even that feral smell. They are annoying for suddenly plunging into a sulk and dying, especially the most prominent one which I have left because its few plumes are vital. I know we don’t cut them back hard enough and Mary Keen tells me to root out the ones which have a black eye – they are all supposed to be E. characias wulfenii ‘Martinii’ I think and I am not sure that I have the temperament to worry about the black eyed misfits. To work to work, so much to do, we may want it to feel like the Garden of the Finzi Continis but we cannot be swamped with hairy bittercress. At least the Daphne odora will be a positive presence to accompany the weeding, smelling of sherbet lemons. The cousin, Daphne Jacqueline Postil, is close to flowering by the archway. Many kind hands and coronets, a covern a of lady gardeners, are coming next week to make a real difference to the mammoth task of getting the beds ready, but when will the diggers and dumpers be out?…..

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February

2009-02-28T13:19:27+00:00

Snow, which it has to be said was ravishing, has never really settled here before, not in fifteen years of bringing up three boys who longed to toboggan down through the orchard. When it finally came only one was here to enjoy it, and after a couple of days we began to get restless about the disruption. When it left the snow left, as it always does, a kind of waterloggedness unlike any other, mushy and dispiriting. But then there came the fine day you know will come, but you can’t quite trust it to happen, when the sun actually warms your back for a moment and you pause to enjoy it with a sigh. My bees were straight out there, impatient to work the snowdrops and aconites.
Canon Ellacombe, who was in the 19th century our local Christopher Lloyd – journalist, parson, bombast, and plantaholic – and lived in Bitton the next village between here and Bath, was said to have the “most richly stocked garden in England” when he published “In a Gloucestershire Garden” in 1895. He almost certainly encouraged the planting of millions of snowdrops and cyclamen in our dell. We have continued to plant and to propagate, lying on our bellies in February, spreading thousands of Gallanthus nivalis and a host of other rarified treats in the garden and woodland. We were encouraged at the beginning by being given bundles of prized bulbs by Christopher Gibbs – who enlightened us about the world of formidable “Galanthophiles” like the famous Primrose Warburg who is said to have wanted to create in her garden at South Hayes “maintained and controlled wilderness” – a very sympathetic idea. The ‘Galanthophiles’ single minded pursuit of snowdrop perfection is not quite the way we follow out passions, but Julian began to beg and buy from Helen Ballard, Mrs Parker Jarvis, Foxcote Nursery and all over cultivars such as” Merlin“;”Lady Elphinstone“; “Mighty Atom“;” Daglingworth“; and also many species such as G. plicatus byzantinus. This was Ellacombe’s favourite and one of the first snowdrops to show in January. The great globular “G. Sam Arnott“ is so powerfully honey-scented it must make the bees dance and sing. Having seen Mary Keen’s bank of this one variety at her garden at Duntisbourne Rouse, we came home wishing that we had planted more of this splendour – but we always, always wish we had planted more of everything – and wishing once again that we had studied and practised the art of “twin scaling”. This is a fascinating way of multiplying certain bulbs by surgically slicing them into as many as fifty bits, all must have a piece of basal plate, and putting them in a dark place in a sealed plastic bag with vermiculite. After 12 weeks every single one is likely to be a viable snowdrop bulb in need of potting up. However, they do seed themselves in the wood naturally – most often right in the middle of the existing clump – and they do produce offsets every year. All of which means you can dig them up, delve and divide and dig back in, seperately or in twos, millions of clustered spears of G. nivalis. This week they bristle down the dell and form a huge milky puddle under the Walnut tree; rich reward for last year’s labours.

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