Tulip Terrace Memories

Narrator:

When Bowles was a child he enjoyed rolling down the grassy slope here. – But only when his ever-protective governess was not looking! The patch below the terrace on the south bank of the New River was always one of his favourite areas. He remembered it as “the sunny plot”. When he took the garden over there were some crocuses growing here. Crocuses were to become his “first garden love”. Among gardeners he was known as the Crocus King, and with good reason. Maurice Mantle, a gardener at Myddelton in the 1930s, remembered six or seven hundred different bulbs growing in the kitchen garden’s cold frames. Many of these had been sent to Bowles by horticultural gardens, and some of them were extremely rare. Bowles was proud of the fact that his was possibly the most comprehensive crocus collection in the world.

At the western end of the kitchen garden wall, next to the steps, you can see where, in 1887 Bowles, his brother, Henry Ferryman Bowles, and a Cambridge friend, TAH, carved their initials into the bricks.