10:30am Saturday 9th January 2010
When, just over 60 years ago, Giggleswick author Bill Mitchell joined The Dalesman in Clapham, he lodged for a time with the family of Jack Winton, who was gardener at Ingleborough Hall – the mansion of the Farrer family which had become a residential centre for urban youngsters. Helping Jack to bring a semblance of tidiness to a world-famous rock garden, in a tucked-away corner of the grounds, introduced him to the works of Reginald Farrer (1880-1920), gardener and author extraordinary, as Bill describes here.
A shiver of excitement ran through the village when George Redman, head gardener to Reginald Farrer, was notified by Farrer that the body of a princess had been despatched by rail from London to Clapham. Redman must arrange for a tomb to be built on the hillside.
George took this literally, though he was unsure about the measurements of the princess. Was she tall and thin or squat and podgy? Keen to arrange for the body to be received with due style and reverence, he hired a cab and took along with him the local vicar, complete with cassock and surplice.
The railway station bearing the name of Clapham has a draughty situation, being one and a half miles from the village and with a backdrop of moorland. As the train arrived, George and the vicar stood to attention. They were approached by the guard. He handed them a coffin. It was about two feet long. The Princess was a cat! A day or two later, it was entombed.
This story was related to me by Fred Loads, broadcaster on gardening topics. He visited what had been Farrer’s nursery in 1950 and chatted with George Redman and Joe Watson, one of his pupils.
Fred, an avid Farrer fan, was “owned” by a descendant of one of Farrer’s beloved Siamese cats. Farrer had prefixed the name of each cat by “Princess”.
Fred, who lived in Lunesdale, was friendly with the Farrer family and enjoyed his visits to Clapham. He made an astonishing discovery in a local barn. Here were Reginald Farrer’s field notes, some watercolours and his own copies of all his books. Fred was intrigued and amused to see on the fly-leaf of his Garden of Asia the words “dedicated to Princess Alice of Siam”.
Here, too, was the imprint of a cat’s foot. Against it, Farrer had written “her mark”.
Farrer was a short man, brisk of speech, averse to wasting time. On a visit to the garden of Richard Milne-Redhead at Holden, near Bolton-by-Bowland, he was so moved by a specific plant species in flower that he prostrated himself before it.
He had been a weakly lad, ultra-sensitive to his disabilities, notably a hare-lip (covered by a bushy moustache) and cleft palate. These induced him to become a loner on an extensive family estate. He was able to trudge proprietorially across farmland and to the heights of Ingleborough.
Young Farrer exulted over the birdseye primrose (Primula farinosa), a true bog-plant which, he felt, did best without bog treatment. It was at its best on dry, exposed banks. His conclusion? It depended on our climate rather than its situation.
We remember Farrer primarily not because of his eccentricities, but as a man whose plant-hunting took him to alpine areas of Europe and Asia. He introduced into our land over a hundred new species, including the stunning Gentiana farreri.
Through his book, My Rock Garden, published in 1907, he popularised the type of rock-gardening that gave plants settings that were appropriate to their habitat. It was on a summer evening in 1949 that I accompanied Jack into a wild, tree-shaded, gloomy part of the grounds of Ingleborough Hall and began a short career in weeding the neglected rock garden.
Jack had allocated to me a tract of garden almost covered with mare’s tail. The growth of trees round about meant it was a gloomy environment. Farrer, in his delectable prose, had declared that the two absolute essentials for a rock garden were an open situation and perfect drainage: “A dank hollow is doom; drip is damnation.”
In this dank hollow were slabs of limestone, removed by horse and sled from Ingleborough, now positioned to resemble a natural outcrop. He had not wanted an “expensive Drunkard’s Dream of stony spikes and pinnacles”.
At the lowest part of the garden was a lily pond with an island. The erosion of soil and plants had left, exposed, areas of – concrete!
A sojourn in Farrer’s rock garden led to me writing a biography of the man and his local connections. At the age of 33, Farrer completed the writing of his most influential work, The English Rock Garden. He flitted from Clapham to London (his birthplace), thence to the alpine parts of Europe and Asia.
At Clapham, he was invariably found working in his rock garden. Clarence Elliot, a close friend, recalled pulling a vigorous plant of land-cress from Farrer’s great moraine and, looking for somewhere to throw it, heard Farrer say: “Take it back to Stevenage and clothe your barren territories.”
Charles Graham, who built himself a house and rock garden on The Mains at Giggleswick, deserves a place in the story of Reginald Farrer. He had spent some of his early years in the Army, including a period with surveyors in the Himalayas, not far from an area frequented by Farrer, whose reputation he knew well.
Charles retired from work in 1964. After he had built his house and developed his garden, he rescued and restored the rhododendrons Farrer had planted on the steep slopes of the gorge down which a lively beck flows to enter Ingleborough Lake at Clapham.
Charles swung on a rock to reach otherwise inaccessible ledges and, one day, hobbling out of the grounds using a fork as a splint for a damaged leg, he transferred some of the plants to his own garden, nurtured them and returned them to the wild.
I listened for hours to his gardening talk. He built me a rock garden – small, square, occupying a corner and now, to my shame, a botanical depressed area.
Farrer died in the wilds of upper Burma while on a plant-hunting expedition. He breathed his last on October 17, 1920. He was temporarily alone, wracked by chest pains and lying in a tent with rain pattering on the canvas. The Ghurkas whom he had bonded into a plant-collecting team bore his body to the Burmese hillfort at Konglu. The area of his grave was fenced off and a simple cross set in place. The grave was, indeed, as solitary as the man had been.
To Farrer and George Redman must go the credit for the discovery of the use of refrigeration to assist the germination of difficult seeds. Various experiments were carried out. Redman thought: “They didn’t have gardeners out in Tibet, so I’ll try a snow arrangement.”
The gardeners were instructed to gather snow off the frames. It was piled over seeds in a heap about ten feet high and allowed to thaw naturally. When subsequently placed in heat and potted, the plants came up like mustard and cress.
For me, a mystery remains. Where on earth, on Ingleborough Estate at Clapham, did George Redman entomb the body of that Siamese princess? She who was received in a tiny coffin when Redmond and the vicar met the train at Clapham station?
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