6. Pergola Garden

When Bowles first had a Pergola built here, its oak frame was made from trees that were grown on the estate. But the wood has long since rotted away. The pergola that stands here now was put up in the 1980s. Roses, honeysuckle, wisteria, and low growing herbaceous plants grow here[OU1] . A second smaller pergola is devoted to vines.

The formal Rose Garden was created in Edwardian times. At its heart stands Enfield’s old Market Cross. - Bowles persuaded his father to buy it from a builder’s yard in 1906, for just a few pounds. He wrote about it:

Voice of Bowles:

it came here for a quiet time among the roses and makes a splendid support and background for that lovely single-flowered climber Rosa ‘Anemone.

Narrator:

Bryan Hewitt remembers that when renovation work started here in the 1980s, this area was a tangled mess, with plants’ shoots, or suckers, cropping up all over the place:

Bryan Hewitt:

The rose garden was in a terrible state when I came here in 1982. There were suckers from a nearby poplar coming up through the… path; all around the beds and the rose garden and all the box hedging had been ripped out and there weren’t many roses left from Bowles’ time and those that were there were not properly identified and some had reverted to suckers, so they had to be ripped up and removed. And so we put in a new layer of soil, and replanted with some varieties that were around in Bowles’ time. To add interest to the garden we do know that Bowles planted phlocks and salvias and other perennial plants like peonies, because he didn’t want just roses in the garden he wanted to increase the seasons of interest when the roses weren’t flowering.