11. Pergola Garden, Rose Garden and exotic plants

Narrator: 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.

Rose Garden

Narrator:

An old brick pillar is topped by a stone ball. It is an eye-catching feature on this curiously shaped wall - known as the Irishman’s Shirt. Bryan Hewitt will explain how it acquired its unusual name, after Bowles brought the Tudor pillar back here from nearby Gough Park.

Bryan Hewitt:

it was about eight or nine feet tall and was diamond shaped as seen from above and had some wonderful brickwork with very fine lines of cement which Mr Bowles greatly admired and Bowles said “yes, I’d like that and we can put it up in the garden!”.

So it was sawn in half somehow and it was bought here by a horse and cart …

And it was erected where you see it here to this day and Bowles capped it with a stone ball and he noticed when it was completed that the ball looks as if it wants to roll to the left as seen from one side and looked at from the right it looks as if it wants to roll to the other side. He went up it with a ladder and checked it with a spirit level and to his surprise it is absolutely square on that plinth, and it is simply an optical illusion caused by the diamond shape of the pillar. And Bowles…added a wall and a summerhouse, all built from reclaimed materials – bricks, columns, the tiles on the floor – and then beyond, heading east, the other wall and then it turned right with the wall and headed south a couple of feet and finished it with that wonderful serpentine brickwork that you see. And he called the whole thing the Irishman’s Shirt, because he’d heard a tale of a cheeky Irish tinker who’d knocked on a kindly old lady’s door and asked her if she’d be so kind as to sew a shirt onto his button…

Narrator:

Bowles grew many tender plants in the bed on the southern, sheltered, side of the wall - in the hope that they would survive the winter. To this day the gardeners at Myddelton use this area to experiment with growing unusual and exotic pants.

Exotic plants

Narrator:

The gardeners at Myddelton continue to follow in Bowles’s footsteps. The beds on the south side of the Irishman’s Shirt are used to experiment with the types of plants that can be grown here.

Let’s hear from Bryan Hewitt:

Bryan Hewitt:

Well, Bowles was very keen to see what he could get away with growing; what would come through the winter in the garden… A lot of tender stuff would be put in there and I think he was a bit like his friend Professor Balfour of the Edinburgh Botanical Garden, who … said that “I never believe that a plant is not hardy until I’ve killed it”. So I suspect he got through a lot of plants through testing them. …

We’ve got some bananas in there at the moment. … And we’ve got another plant called Albizia julibrissins  which is in the leguminous family which has lovely pincushion-like flowers. He also grew a banksias rose, which is slightly tender, on the Irishman’s Shirt. He wrote in his book My Garden in Summer … in 1914 that he had hoped that one day it would eventually encircle the ball on the top of the column in the corner ...

…I think Mr Bowles liked people to think they’d come to another country when they came to this garden, with the wonderful exotic things; in his day… it was a very, very famous garden. And some of these plants, which are common now, had not been seen before.

I would like to recreate, somehow, the magic that he had here by growing challenging plants and constantly pushing the boundaries.