ENTERTAINMENT THROUGH THE GARDEN GATE


Camilla, Rachel, Jekka & Rosy


THROUGH THE GARDEN GATE THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES


106


Television Horticulturist, Camilla Bassett-Smith, shines a light on some prominent plantswomen, who have played their part in promoting gardening across the ages..


Thirty years ago the Spice Girls burst onto the scene singing of girl power, but the female of the species has been bringing a sprinkling of magic to the world of plants for much longer.


Gertrude Jekyll is the name on everyone’s lips when it comes to old-school garden design, with over 400 gardens around the world benefitting from her creation or advice between the end of the 1800s and early years of the 20th century. She believed in beauty and is famed for huge billowing herbaceous borders. Local examples of her work can be found at Berkeley Castle and Coombe End Manor in Elkstone. She famously quoted that “Green is also a colour” – how true and how many different shades there are, allowing us gardeners the pick of a panoramic palette.


However, it is Ellen Willmott, gardening at the same time as Miss Jekyll, who comes across as perhaps the more fascinating of the two, famously cheekily scattering seed of the spiky Eryngium giganteum around gardens she visited – hence the common naming of this plant as Eryngium ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ She had character in botanical buckets and nurtured over 100,000 different plants, financed plant hunting trips abroad and was an avid plant photographer and writer. She was a frequent visitor to Spetchley Park in nearby Worcestershire as her sister Rose married into the Berkeley family who owned the estate. Ellen like myself, was a lover of daffodils and thus I have a real affinity with this green fingered lady. Invest in a copy of ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghosts’ by Sandra Lawrence to find out more.


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Educated here in Gloucestershire at my alma mater, Cheltenham Ladies College, and a contemporary of both Gertrude and Ellen, was Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, who lived and breathed horticulture, writing thirty books in the first half of the 1900s. She had a particular interest in herbs, designing herb gardens for the Chelsea Flower Show and for Lulling- stone Castle in Kent, one of her first books being titled ‘A Garden of Herbs’. Her publication ‘Rose Recipes from Olden Times’ is also a delightful read.


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