My next major garden project turned out to be in Colorado, where Tim had his first headship at the Fountain Valley School.  We lived in a magnificent Hacienda, designed by Addison Mizner, the Palm Beach architect, and my courtyard garden was surrounded on three sides by cloistered walks and a tower.  Although later I realised I should have been ecological, growing cactuses and native desert plants, at the time I revelled in everything that loved sunshine – iris, dahlias, lavenders and annuals.  Some plants, like phlox, had trouble with powdery mildew because of the dry air, but many old English favorites did well. I grew honeysuckle over an arched gate, climbing roses and clematis on the cloister pillars, and espaliered apples on the cloister walls. Teaching theatre and running the Arts Department, I also had many roles as a headmaster’s wife, but with three small children to keep an eye on, my favorite activity was creating a small fertile world in that courtyard.  Luckily, it was also a place used for school receptions, so my efforts were appreciated by the grounds crew – they didn’t have to worry about looking after it – but they did mow the lawn!
​
Early in our marriage, Tim and I had bought a small cottage on the south west coast of Wales.  This had been a 40-acre smallholding, a self-sustaining farm with about 15 dairy cows and a vegetable garden.  We only owned two acres, and much of the land was on the steep edges of a valley running down to the sea a mile away.  But from the start that original vegetable plot was useful.  My parents loved to come down from London in the spring and plant things for us to harvest when we arrived from the USA in the summers – and in no time it contained rhubarb, raspberries, gooseberries, currants, loganberries and blackberries… (though as the lane down to the cottage was covered in wild blackberries, these last were rather redundant.)  There were often potatoes waiting for us (wonderful for children to discover!) though the local rabbits probably ate more of the above-ground vegetables than we did.  We did manage to have a few flowers, but with nobody living there much of the time the survivors were shrubs like spireas and hydrangeas, or roses, clambering in the hedges.  For bright blossom, our mainstay was a hanging basket by the front door, bought as soon as we arrived.  To be surrounded by a real garden, Little Mountain would have to wait until we retired.

Well, as this is being written for the Grantham Garden Club, maybe it makes sense to focus on my connection with gardens?    I’ve lived in quite a few places, so to describe the history of my gardening is rather a long story.   Apologies to those of you who have seen images of the Welsh garden before.

To begin at the beginning…. I grew up in suburban north London, where houses had medium sized gardens and it always seemed to me that everyone liked to work with plants.  I was one of five children so our own garden was fairly functional, though there were always flowers and apple trees and berries. 

But across the road my father had developed an “allotment” on a bomb site.  I was born in 1943 and in the late ‘40s and ‘50s London there were many patches of ground where bombs had obliterated houses and left behind bare earth.  Our allotment grew every imaginable vegetable and was surrounded by steep banks where blackberries, raspberries and loganberries were trained.  My father loved to work there early in the mornings before going up to Whitehall where he had his real job.  We often played and climbed trees there and were always co-opted into picking fruit when it was in season.

My grandmother lived nearby and had a large garden of perhaps half an acre.  This contained everything from lawns and perennial borders to an extensive rockery, vegetables, a bluebell orchard and a hill covered in daffodils in the spring.  All this was surrounded by shrubs and trees that contained magical paths and hiding places.  Perhaps this background can give you an impression of why I grew up assuming that wherever I lived I would have some kind of a garden?

After school and university (my undergraduate degree was in English Literature and my MA in Social Anthropology) I acted for a while and also taught.  There were months in film studios in Rome and acting stints in London theatres.  This was not exactly a life with much time for gardening.  But in my mid-twenties I came to the USA and taught at the Woodstock Country School (now defunct) in S. Woodstock, Vermont.  A year in the USA turned into two years and I was teaching at the Dalton School in NYC when I met my husband, Tim…. who owned an old cape in southern NH.  That house, with a view of Mount Monadnock in the distance, was my first real garden. 

​A weekend gardener, I learned about the short New England season, with plants like blood root and wildflowers like trailing arbutus in the lawn and discovered that here one has to honor the climate and accept that some plants will simply not thrive.  My forsythia only flowered on the lower branches that had been buried in snow, and an attempt at wisteria flourished – but never blossomed.  Roses somehow never seemed to do well.  But I grew asparagus from seed brought over from a family garden and grew the fattest stalks you could imagine!  Gardening was always an exciting adventure.

This was taken from the 3rd floor of my grandmother's house.  It is sadly browned out but gives some idea of the space and the vegetable area behind the flower borders.  

A brilliant use of gnomes was devised by the Orange Alternative, an anti-government movement in Poland in the 1980’s. Armed with spray paint, the group peacefully protested the government’s censorship of free speech and public gatherings during the period of martial law by defacing communist propaganda with paintings of mischievous little gnomes. “It was a terrible, dangerous time. You couldn’t go out on the streets at night and there were tanks and soldiers in the main square,” reported a Polish journalist. “The dwarfs gave us something to laugh at, and that was the whole idea: to show how absurd the situation was and encourage people not to be afraid.”   The Orange Alternative organized a gathering in 1988, also known as the Revolution of Dwarfs which attracted more than 10,000 people who marched through the city center in Wrocław wearing orange dwarf hats.  A number of marchers were arrested and the press had a field day capitalizing on the humor of policemen arresting dwarfs which brought national attention to their cause.  Who’s to say if these gnomes had anything to do with the final demise of the communist government but it sounds to me as if they certainly had a hand in it, albeit a little one.

Fast forward to the new millennia.  The city of Wroclaw had a gnome statue erected to honor the legacy of the Orange Alternative.  The statue proved so popular that in 2005 the city commissioned a local artist to create more gnomes.  Enterprising local businesses quickly got in on it and contracted other artists to produce even more.  Very quickly gnome statues proliferated around the city and now number more than 400.  They have proven to be quite a tourist draw which has boosted the town’s economy.

My final tale about these creatures concerns the quaint fad of taking gnome statues on trips and posing them in front of iconic scenes like the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal. The concept of the traveling gnome started fifty years ago when an Australian photographed his own garden gnomes, Harry and Charlie, while he was traveling around Antarctica.  It reminds me of the Flat Stanley I took with me on vacation for my great-nephew.  Ideas often spark other ideas. The vacation gnome devolved into the not so quaint practice of swiping a gnome statue, taking it on a trip, and returning it with a photo album of his vacation. The earliest prank involving a traveling gnome also comes from the Australia.  The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1986 that a suburban gnome-owner was distressed when she discovered her gnome had been stolen.  A note was found in its place: 'Dear Mum, couldn't stand the solitude any longer. Gone off to see the world. Don't be worried, I'll be back soon. Love Bilbo xxx.”

A special thanks to gnome-owners Janie Clark and Linda Douville :-)

This blog is a little unusual so let me tell you of its evolution.  While waiting for 'Meet the Member' stories from the GGC crowd, I went through my garden photos looking for inspiration and was thrilled with where it led me.   I had taken lot of pictures of whimsical garden statues including this jolly guy who guards Janie Clark's garden 24/7.  I started to do a little research about garden gnomes and dwarfs which resulted in so much strange and interesting information that I have written my first two-part blog.
 
The allure of having quiet helpers in the garden dates back to the second century AD when the Roman emperor Hadrian had hermits living throughout his villa’s garden. This idea caught on again in 18th-century England when wealthy landowners would hire a person to be an “ornamental hermit” in their garden.  They were required to live in rustic outbuildings (or hermitages), wear disheveled clothes and grow beards. Having a hermit living in your garden became fashionable in Georgian England. Some historians believe that this garden hermit fad paved the road for garden gnome popularity in Britain.

Once the hermitages and their hermits fell out of favor, ceramic garden gnomes were offered as a less expensive and more humane garden décor.  As early as the 1600s, garden statuary in Europe had evolved to include a key figure known as gobbi which isItalian for “dwarf.” In 19th-century Germany, these diminutive men with pointed hats, round bellies, and white beards became known as Gartenzwerge (garden gnomes).
​
In 1847 English baronet Sir Charles Edmund Isham bought twenty-one terra cotta garden gnomes from a German manufacturer to decorate his rockery.  After Sir Charles passed away, his ungrateful daughters had all of them removed.  One gnome was in a secluded spot and managed to elude his captors. He wasn’t found until 1940 when he became famous as the oldest garden gnome in the world.  He was nicknamed Lampy after the luxurious Lamport Hall where he now lives indoors given his age and value.  He is insured for £1 million.
Next Friday's blog also includes a story about living dwarfs--stay tuned....