On the surface, the bulk of labor in restoring Nancy Lancaster’s little-known garden in Northamptonshire is done.
Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
“When can you give me a planting plan?” asks Annabelle, who has taken on a repair lease to restore the seven-bedroom house known as the Wilderness.
Annabelle had given up asking me for a planting plan, and was aiming this question at the respected gardener Phylip Statner, my friend who’d come over to have a look.
The view from the upstairs hallway over the south-facing parterre, designed by Nancy Lancaster in the 1920s while she was deciding how to decorate Kelmarsh Hall, which lies on the other side of the fields.
They had taken on Kelmarsh for a peppercorn rent and they decorated the spare house to a degree that was remarkable in its detail.
The symmetrical layout is enclosed on three sides by walls of brick, and the ironstone facade of the house.
The east-facing border, overhung by an apple tree from the orchard over the wall. Annabelle and her husband, David, have a freedom with the planting which could be a joy, without the usual worries over layout.
Bigger clumps of topiarized boxwood have survived the blight that affected the smaller variety around the edges (Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’, the most popular choice for parterres, is also the most susceptible).
Admittedly, this historic garden belongs to a trust, but their main interest is in seeing its collapse halted.
Annabelle has energy to spare, even after seeing to the needs of her own four children and running a curtain business. The lines need to be engraved into the parterre, instead of being vaguely indicated by box.
Edging for the 21st century: what would Nancy do? The spade doesn’t go in too well and a similar prod in the long borders reveals what I’d feared: spaghetti coils of bindweed lurk beneath the surface and the parterre is stuffed with long tap roots of noxious weeds as well as tree stumps.
The soil is essentially good, after decades of meticulous maintenance, before a slip at the end.
It would also give time to properly clear the site.” Annabelle isn’t going to like this part: “You might even be able to plant out the new plants next autumn.” Another year of no pink and purple?
The brick and earth stairs (all the better to infill with creeping thyme) lead from parterre to “wilderness.” Two holding walls are built with brick. Some of the stone is now falling away; I’m not sure that the brick needs to be disguised.
The informal lawn that meets the steps wraps around the side of the house. The River Ise runs through the middle of the garden, dividing grass from woodland.
Remnants of Nancy’s pears planted around the door and windows of Wilderness House. There is early spring blossom and later, the opportunity of leaning out of the window to pick fruit.
Pears also have that other Nancy Lancaster ingredient in abundance: romance.