Some gardens should be visited with friends: they are sociable places that invite picnics. Others, such as Herterton House on the fringes of the Northumberland Moors, should be sought out when you need peace, a place to sit and gather together your thoughts. Within the dry-stone walls that give shelter from the searing easterlies is a garden so tranquil that it has the feeling of a monastic cloister. I have been visiting Herterton for 15 years, and my trips have slowly revised what I now consider to be the point of a garden.
Herterton House was a ruined farm that had lain derelict for 17 years when artists Frank and Marjorie Lawley took it over in 1976 on a long lease from the National Trust. What’s now an acre of garden, subdivided into four distinct areas each with its own unique planting, was then a field of unforgiving Northumberland pasture. They set to work on the land inspired by their extensive reading of 17th-century herbals and gardening texts, especially that of the Yorkshire parson William Lawson who, in The Country Housewife’s Garden, advocated beauty, simplicity and harmony. Lawson would have recognised many of Herterton’s plants – gillyflowers, forget-me-nots, foxgloves – and its humanist philosophy.
The Front Garden is all clipped box and yew with low hedges, a place to see people strolling past in the lanes and to invite conversation. The Fancy Garden, with its clipped box parterre and stone gazebo, is for walking and thinking. In the Physic Garden, centred by its tighty clipped willowleaf pear and bordered by mounds of London Pride, it’s enough to sit and breathe in the scent of rose, thyme and artemisia. The Flower Garden, at its most flamboyant in July, echoes the colours of the lengthening day. Near the house is dawn – pink, white and yellow; in the middle are the vibrant colours of midday; and towards the rear of the garden, the purples and dark reds of sunset.
It has taken the Lawleys 32 years to create this masterpiece, and they have felt the heft of it. In the first days they built walls, dug out all the stones by hand and imported topsoil from the moors. They funded the garden by selling plants such as hardy geraniums, Jacob’s ladder, pulmonaria and astrantia – cottage-garden favourites that because of Northumberland’s cool summers continue to look fresh throughout the growing season.
In the early days of their research they’d visit the “high priestess” of cottage gardening, Marjorie Fish, at East Lambrook Manor. She had been married to the editor of the Daily Mail, Walter Fish, and wrote a classic book, We Made a Garden. As a dedicated plantswoman, she always carried a spade and a sack in the car in case she found good leaf mould, and Frank recalls how she collected old cottage garden plants that had been discarded during the Second World War in the Dig for Victory campaign. “She’d be driven around by her chauffeur, who doubled as the local butcher, and tour local country cottage gardens bellowing, ‘Stop!’, when an interesting primrose, euphorbia or hellebore caught her eye. She’d then negotiate with the owner and instruct her chauffeur to dig up a piece of the plant – usually with the starting handle of the elderly car.”
The Lawleys, realising that many cottage-garden favourites were in danger of dying out, adopted Fish’s plant-hunting technique – though without the help of a chauffeur – and have amassed an enviable collection of unusual varieties of plants. They favour simple flowers such as violets, campanulas, sea holly, astrantia and poppies and grow rare, double-formed varieties or those with an interesting leaf form. A treat before leaving Herterton is to visit the stock garden. Each day, those plants that have just reached their peak are dug up, wrapped in damp newspaper – Frank favours the broadsheets for their durability – and sold. Only the heartless could resist.
Seeing Herterton today, many visitors remark how fortunate Frank and Marjorie are to have had the opportunity to create this garden. The Lawleys are philosophical. “It was a calling,” they say. Like most artists, they are driven by their creative impulses, and roughened hands, worsening arthritis and a shortage of money throughout their lives testify to what a labour of love it has been. The sad thing is that, because they are tenants, they cannot be sure that after their deaths the garden will continue, with the National Trust unable to give an undertaking that it will be maintained as it is now. I urge all those who love gardens to visit Herterton soon.
Herterton is about 20 miles north of Morpeth in Northumberland, near the village of Cambo (01670 774278). It is open until September 30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 1.30pm until 5.30pm. It is also open under the National Gardens Scheme on July 17 and August 7 from 1.30pm until 5.30pm
