Val Bourne examines the beauty and fragrance of the best varieties

It’s high summer and I find myself making batches of strawberry jam while topping and tailing pounds of gooseberries, AND trying to watch the World Cup.

Many women may be in mourning this June, longing for a good television drama uninterrupted by writhing players and gesticulating whistle-blowing referees, but I am in my element. Some evenings I can fit in the cricket highlights and then two football matches and it’s all thanks to my brothers and male cousins.

As the only girl of my generation I was an honorary chap who wore dungarees and went to the downstairs barber for a longer version of the short back and sides, underneath Burtons the Tailors. In the days when the ‘full Monty’ meant putting clothes on and not taking them off.

The Best Beloved has an escape route luckily, when all that opinion gets too much for him, called the allotment. He regularly sallies forth with wheelbarrow and once there he loses himself for hours and has to be rescued, or is that recaptured? When I stroll up the village street, it’s Fragrance Alley at the moment. The philadelphus proffer lemon curd and orange zest, the hybrid tea roses fizz like a soda syphon as you sniff them and there are beauty bushes, principally Kolkwitzia amabilis ‘Pink Cloud’(living up to their name so well) and deutzias, faintly perfumed.

And yet we seem to have fallen out of love with the summer-flowering shrubs and shrubs in general, perhaps seduced by prairie planting perhaps.

What good things they are — as long as you select the best. Philadelphus flowers with the roses and the smallest, ‘Manteau d’Ermine’ (1899) only reaches above a metre (3 ft) on good soil. In my old, very dry garden at Hook Norton it was a stunted thing. I prefer the medium- sized philadelpus with white flowers softened by maroon or damson smudges at the heart of the flower. ‘Belle Etoile’ (1930) is superb and the fragrance is clean and sharp too. Both were bred by the Lemoine family who had a famous nursery in Nancy in France.

The same family also left a legacy of fine deutzias and both would have been forced and cut for the flower markets of Paris because in those days nurseries made most of their money selling cut flower. The family spanned three generations between 1869 and 1960, with Victor, Emile and Henri, and specialised in doubles because these last longer in vase and garden. Perhaps their greatest legacy was the common lilac: they introduced 200 into cultivation.

The British version of the Lemoine family is the Hillier family, celebrating 150 years this year. Edwin Hillier (1838-1926) started with a small nursery and shop in Winchester and was soon joined by his sons, Edwin Lawrence (1865-1944) and Arthur Richard (1877-1963). Edwin’s son Harold George (1905-1985) joined the business and bought some rich farmland at Ampfield,near Romsey, which allowed the nursery to extend their range. Part of that land is now the Harold Hillier Arboretum, well worth a visit. His son John Hillier now runs the nursery business.

It seems fitting that there should be a new paperback version of The Hillier Manual of Trees and Shrubs, published this year (see above right). This bible, the eighth edition since 1971, contains 13,000 plants including 1500 new additions. It’s published with the Royal Horticultural Society and has involved their botanists.