east Lambrook Manor: The ultimate cottage garden
I was already halfway to being in love with Margery Fish’s original cottage garden before I got there. My taste runs to the delightful and the curved, the romantic and the edge-of-wild. East Lambrook Manor is quietly famous in the right circles (which is, in my mind, the only way to be famous).
It is a Grade I listed garden because of its historical significance but, like all the best cottage gardens, it rejects the stuffy and the stiff. We pulled into the car park and paused next to old potting benches with pots of roses and hellebores for sale. People on bikes propped them against benches to better look at the sweep of blooms in the verge. Painted signposts directed us across the grass that connects the Manor and the barn, puddled with ponds of purple crocuses. Up a few steps into the shop, filled with the smell of brewing coffee and homemade cakes, and the bustle of kind volunteers. Within three minutes of being in the place, I had planned out my retirement. I would spend happy hours pouring coffee, offering leaflets, and selling seeds. There is a feeling that hangs over East Lambrook Manor, and it is a truly lovely one.
The local stone helps. Big orange blocks of the hamstone, dug out of nearby Ham Hill, for all the world like the Cotswolds with a layer of fake tan. I adore gardens, of course, but the right house can make me utterly weak at the knees. The Manor is one of those houses. In my mind, it is inhabited by people who keep spaniels, are generous with wine and love, are not ashamed of a lie in, believe in only having butler sinks, and talk without irony about the scullery.
I can see why you would think February is an odd time for heading off to visit a garden known for wild abundance but there is a very good reason. Snowdrops. I have been refreshing the website for a fortnight now. The cold weather kept them back for a fortnight and then the warmth brought them forward a week in a day. The NGS open day caught me by surprise, and I worried that all the best varieties in the nursery would have sold out. But in terms of the peak of flowering, we timed it to absolute perfection. Every single bloom was out and not a single one over.
If I get it this right every year, I will count myself the most fortunate of people.
And the garden made it very easy indeed to appreciate each one. Many of the snowdrops were planted into tall pots, just asking to be admired and poured over. Indeed, my heart was lost to the very first one I saw, Galanthus ‘Marjorie Brown’. Like a cartoon, the leaves are glaucous and bluish, the outer petals generous and rounded. I was not entirely faithful to my first love though, and my notebook filled up with names as we wound out way around the intimate paths. ‘Seagull’ and ‘Orion’ were similarly voluptuous, ‘Kingston Double’ intricately formed, and ‘Owen Godfrey’ eye-catchingly stellar.
G. ‘Owen Godfrey’ by Jason Ingram
Being so out of season for everything else meant that we could appreciate the structure too. Rather than the big herbaceous border style gardens that you stand back and look at as a one big picture, this cottage garden has little pathways, wending here and there, around irregular patches of lawn, between rose arches, and along old stone walls. Such intricacy and unevenness mean that you watch your feet and notice the little things. The snowdrops yes, but also the pinks, red, and lime-greens of buds pushing through the warming soil. The single snowdrop that has found its way into a crack between old stone steps. A bloom framed against a backdrop of damp, dark stone.
Having admired the topiary and the multi-stem silver birches, and marvelled at the crocuses that absolutely swarmed with bees, we ended at the nursery. A terraced raised bed was planted with all the best varieties, in absolute peak bloom, each one named with a perfect slate label. I was not leaving without a G. ‘Marjorie Brown’ and, even though they had to rummage around in the back of a polytunnel, I did not come away empty-handed. Being spoiled by sowing and propagating my own and the luxurious ease of having trade accounts with nurseries, I would rarely pay £10 for a single plant. Like so many before me who thought they could take or leave snowdrops and find, too late, that they cannot, I find myself paying that much many times over as I collect small pots of precious bulbs.
More about snowdrops:
If you would rather look at Jason Ingram’s pictures than mine, there are some beautiful images here.
You can read a lovely article about Margery Fish (and the pitfalls of combining marriage and gardening) here. If you are interested in finding out more about the world of snowdrops, read this at your own risk.
Having spent a bit of time poring over catalogues, I am off to collect a pot of G. ‘Colossus’ from my local specialist nursery, Broadleigh Bulbs, and I am going to be devoting a few hours to tracking down some G. ‘Sam Arnott’ from wherever I can find them. Other places to avoid if you don’t want to be drawn inexorably into an unsustainable galanthophilic habit:
Painswick Rococo (make time to have lunch in Painswick, it is utterly lovely)
Anglesey Abbey, confusingly not on Anglesey, but in Cambridgeshire