The best-laid plots

Every article I write, and I write four to five days per week, I tap out on a Gordon Russell dining table that once belonged to my in-laws.

Sir Gordon Russell (1892-1980) was a modern furniture maker influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and there’s a museum dedicated to him in Broadway in Worcestershire (gordonrussell museum.org/01386 854695).

Russell was also an extremely keen gardener and The Barn Museum in Chipping Camden has a picture of him digging. It’s said he preferred gardening at his home, Kingcombe House in Chipping Campden, to designing furniture. Good man is all I can add to that!

When his Cotswold stone house came up for sale in 1996, the particulars listed a cherry orchard, a pink garden, a Victorian garden and a series of troughs cascading into a moat.

Kingcombe’s garden was a little like Russell’s furniture, with clean modern lines, and it was co-designed with luminaries Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe and Russell Page. The brief was to use modern materials and one unkind critic said that the Water Garden, a series of white recesses round a rectangular pool, should be featured in Concrete Quarterly. I don’t know if it’s still there today.

The Cotswolds was a centre, and the last great Arts and Crafts house ever built in England was Rodmarton Manor, midway between Cirencester and Tetbury. The garden, an integral part of the design, was laid out at the same time as the house and most of the furniture was made for the house. The garden is open to the public on Easter Monday and then on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Bank Holidays from the beginning of May until the end of September, 2–5pm. Groups can also book a tour of the house, which is said to have the best collection of Arts and Craft furniture known. Tours need to be arranged beforehand though (rodmarton-manor.co.uk /01285 841442).

Close to the imposing house, topiary divides the garden into rooms originally meant for embroidery, poetry and painting. Further away there are romantic touches that include a balcony worthy of Romeo and Juliet. There are secret gateways that reveal parts of the garden hidden behind high walls. There’s also a Barnsley summerhouse at the far end of four herbaceous borders and a garden containing stone troughs raised up on staddle stones. Rodmarton also has a large collection of snowdrops and opens in February on some occasions — but do check the website because times have to fit round the British weather.

The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement is still with us today and most would list Hidcote Manor and Great Dixter in their top ten gardens. Usually the garden frames the buildings and often there’s a sunken garden that allows the house to stand proud of the garden. There are often straight allées that lead the eye out to the landscape, or the garden fades into the countryside. Wide paved paths often run past equally wide borders, exuberantly planted with herbaceous plants.

Great Dixter was developed by Nathaniel Lloyd, himself an Arts and Crafts designer of posters for well-known confectionery companies. He employed Sir Edward Lutyens to remodel the house and garden, and Nathaniel’s wife Daisy added the flesh to the bones. Christopher Lloyd (1921-2006) freely admitted he couldn’t design a garden himself, but he planted up the borders with great style and verve. He always looked for form and shape when planting and happily placed the strong sword-shaped leaves of orange crocosmia alongside willowy upright purple verbenas. I just wish I had Dixter’s climate at Spring Cottage!

My favourite ‘Christo’ quote is about hand weeding “Many gardeners will agree that hand-weeding is not the terrible drudgery that it is often made out to be. Some people find in it a kind of soothing monotony.

“It leaves their minds free to develop the plot for their next novel, or to perfect the brilliant repartee with which they should have encountered a relative’s latest example of unreasonableness.”

Many of us will recognise the ebbing away of worries as we pick and pluck the weeds.