The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys Page B

Britain’s male gardeners had been killed in the Great War. And there was no real recovery from that slaughter. Estates such as Mosel were greatly diminished after that. Probably the kitchen garden was worked and a sort of general overall maintenance was in operation for the duration of the war itself. Then perhaps the estate changed hands and the new owner was primarily interested in the fields, in a high-yield agricultural production, did not want to keep a gardening staff employed. It is very easy to return nature to itself. The clean lines of a garden go first. Then the balance of what has been planted. What used to be a conversation between the different elements becomes a tuneless cacophony. No one thing distinguishable from another.
    I spend the afternoon walking purposefully over the estate, the gardening ledger tucked under an arm. I find the North Garden behind the barn. It once must have been a flower garden, perhaps even a market garden. I can find evidence of dahlias, but little else. The garden has, obviously for years now, been used to graze animals, and it is essentially ruined. The same is not true of the South Garden, which lies under bits of broken trees, well behind the dining hall and kitchen garden. The South Garden had been envisaged as a wild garden. It was planted with bulbs and flowering trees. A meadow garden. Daffodils still brighten the ground, flashes of yellow from the sea of long grass. Beyond the South Garden the farm fields fall away in green shelves. This garden was the exit from the estate, just as the North Garden was the entry to it. This place was the transition between the order of the estate and the order of the natural world. Step away from this garden and you walked down through fields of tall grass, and then into the pleated furrows.
    The North Garden would have been more formal. It would have been the first glimpse of a Mosel garden seen through the trees on the drive up to the house. There would have been flowers in rows, tall flowers to be moved by the wind and seen as a woozy sway of colour through the trees as the horse and carriage clattered past.
    It occurs to me, standing here now, that I didn’t see much in the way of gardens when I was up to visit Raley at the big house. The usual shrubs to define the walkway to the front door, but nothing elaborate in front of the house. It is true I didn’t have time to poke around in the back, but I am struck now by the lushness and variety of the gardens here, and the scarcity of ornamental vegetation at the house, where it would seem to be required more. But perhaps the buildings where we are housed predate the house? Certainly the quadrangle is an old design, dating from the Middle Ages. Perhaps this fleet of gardeners were being loyal to a much earlier time than their own when they designed and tended these gardens. And perhaps they didn’t design them at all, but merely maintained or rescued what had already been here.
    I stand in the middle of the ruined meadow garden. Soon the fruit trees here will be foaming with blossom. There are wild violets in the woods, and pools of blue-bells at my feet. It would have been just like leaving land, to leave this garden, to kick through the warm shallows here—flowers breaking like spray above my boots—and step out into the deep, flat ocean beyond. The smell of blossom in my hair like wind.
    Whoever made these gardens originally, and whoever kept them going, reinvented them, knew what they were doing. And more than that, I think, looking over the ripple of fields past this meadow—more than that, someone loved this place.
    The orchard is to the east, down the slope behind the stables, down the hill from the North Garden, in a small clearing, protected on one side by an old stone wall. Perhaps the wall once enclosed the whole area. There are a few limbs down, but generally the trees are in good shape. Mature trees. Apple and pear. Several have been trained to grow along the wall, their