All my Gardens: part 2 Garsington Manor and beyond.

My first garden, as a grown up, was the grandest garden I shall ever know.

In response to an advert in the Oxford Times we found ourselves renting the converted top floor of a monastery  bake house in the grounds of Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire.

It was incredibly cold and impossibly right and romantic. The story was that it had been converted for DH Lawerence to live in as an “agricultural labourer” on the land of Lady Otoline Morrell and thus avoid conscription. However, his unflattering description of her in as Hermoine Roddice in “Women in Love”had resulted in a falling out and  he never took possession of flat.  Ottoline Morrell continued as a famous hostess of the  intelligencia during  WW1 and her guests included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sasson, Virginia Wolfe, Henry James, Bertrand Russel, WB Yeats, TS Elliot and of course the troublesome Lawerence.

The beautiful gardens  she had laid out around the Tudor Cotswold manor house were open for us to enjoy and we timidly explored the lower reaches away from the big house and could hardly believe our luck.

At the furthest end was a lovely natural pool full of fish always ravenous for bread crumbs where I watched an equally hungry cat lean further and further over to catch them, until it fell head first in the water. It’s expression of outraged indignation as it hauled his sodden body out on the other side of the pond, was a delight I have never forgotten.

Beyond the fish pond was the Italian lake, which was large enough to swim in and to boat around a central island.  The water was cold and green, but we braved it sometimes, floating briefly on our backs to admire the statues set into the deep green hedge. I would have looked more closely at the plinths upon which the statues stood if I had known the story that accompanied them. It was apparently common knowledge that Ottoline Morrell had an affair with the stone mason who made them and that their trists in the shed were the inspiration for the gardener and the lady in “Lady Chatterly’s Lover ” by DH Lawerence.

Beyond the lake the gardens sloped up to a formal parterre of 24 squares of geometric control,  punctuated by tall yew trees and above that there were fabulous herbaceous borders of riotous colour and exuberance.

If you are trying to visualise this, it is maybe easier than you think, as some TV programmes and films with shots of perfect English gardens lapping honey coloured manor houses; were actually filmed at  Garsington. So if it sounds oddly familiar, that is because it is. If you are an opera fan you may of course have strolled in the grounds during the interval as the opera festival held in the grounds annually, came to rival Glynbourn.

The opera came after our stay and in fact the monastery bake house flat was later used as offices for its administration (they also complained it was cold!).

During our brief stay  their was a lovely performance of “Twelfth Night” on a perfect summer evening in the garden. We were helping taking tickets and as I stood by the gate, the youngest daughter of the owner came running up in great distress, as she had noticed that the toadlets in the pond had chosen this very evening to emerge from the water and thousands of the tiny creatures were hopping unnoticed between the polished brogues and stiletto heels of the oblivious audience. In my best school teacher voice I ordered the visitors to, “Look down at your feet!  Notice the tiny toadlets and move slowly away from the pond!” Meekly they obeyed and clutching their glasses of wine, they obediently tip toed back to the paths and the great toad massacre was averted.

We were allowed to garden a dark patch of grass behind the bake house, but I didn’t dare actually dig anything up or try to plant anything in this lightless spot.

My only intervention was to ask for the grass not to be cut. This was allowed and as we had guessed a  couple of wild common spotted orchids  that had been waiting for years for the chance, flowered and  then set seed on this bit of old meadow land. Their delicate wildness could be considered my second little contribution to this memorable, magnificent garden!

Photo thanks to      https://mefoley.wordpress.com/tag/bloomsbury/