9. Tulip Terrace and Bowles Memories
Narrator:
Bowles was very keen on tulips. Above all he preferred tulips that flowered in late April and May. In his book, My Garden in Spring, he wrote:
Voice of Bowles:
I have long ago lost every scrap of affection for the early-flowering garden varieties that are still the most conspicuous Tulips in most public parks and many gardens.
Narrator:
In Bowles’ day the beds in this tulip terrace were planted with single colours. Care was taken to make sure there was no clash of colours. As soon as flowering was over the developing seedpods were snapped off to encourage the bulbs to ripen quickly. This meant they could be lifted in time for the planting out of summer bedding.
Bowles liked to fill individual beds with plants of the same type. In some he grew succulent plants, in others he grew Salvia splendens – or scarlet sage – which gave a brilliant red focal point to the terrace. The salvias Bowles grew were taller than the ones that are widely grown today. Another of his favourite plants was heliotrope, or cherry pie, as we will hear from Bryan Hewitt:
Bryan Hewitt:
he had a large collection of species tulips which he would put in those beds and … then after the tulips were finished they would have summer bedding in, ..which Cherry pie… was one of the plants he used to famously grow in there - that’s very sweet-smelling..;
Narrator:
Scent was an important feature in the garden.
Bowles 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.