Not a gentleman’s garden or a gardener’s garden, it was always an artist’s garden,’ recalled the writer Angelica Garnett when she reflected on the garden that her parents created at Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. An early product of Bloomsbury Group horticulture, it was, according to Garnett’s half-brother Quentin Bell, a ‘dense mass of flowers, overwhelming in their variety of colour’. It was, he said, ‘a painters’ garden’.
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Charleston lies at the foot of the chalky, windswept hills of the South Downs, which provide a fitting canvas for the walled garden’s post-Impressionist colour.
In brief: A farm cottage garden in Charleston, East Sussex
- What Historic garden created and painted by the Bloomsbury Group.
- Where East Sussex.
- Size Half-acre walled garden set within a garden of approximately four acres.
- Soil Chalk to chalky loam, improved over the years.
- Climate Temperate with predominantly hot, dry summers and intermittently hard winters. Very windy.
- Hardiness zone USDA 8b.
In 1916, writer Virginia Woolf encouraged her sister, artist Vanessa Bell, to rent the farmhouse, a major draw being its ‘charming garden, with a pond, fruit trees and vegetables, all now rather run wild’.
For Bell, there was another more pressing reason for making the move, as her fellow painter Duncan Grant, with whom she had fallen in love, and his lover David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, would be able to avoid conscription into the army if they worked on the farm. By the autumn of that year, the deal was sealed and the Bloomsbury era at Charleston began.
It’s about the artistic spirit of the space and looking and paying homage to key principles
Within the now iconic hollyhock-strewn half-acre walled garden, the priority at first was to grow food for the new occupants of the cold and dilapidated farmhouse. Almost immediately, however, some design help was sought.
Having recently designed his own garden with the help of Gertrude Jekyll, fellow Bloomsbury Group member Roger Fry was called on to lay out the walled garden in a similar fashion: linear gravel paths and borders leading from the house, flanking a large lawn, with a box hedge to separate the vegetable garden at the north end.
In the following years, Bell and Grant steered the garden’s direction as they had in the house, where off-white corridors lead to colourful and detailed rooms.
According to Quentin Bell, the garden, like the house, was ‘not intended to be tasteful or restrained. It is as though the exuberant decoration of the interior has spilled through the doors’. The couple crafted mosaic floors and hand-painted tiles to surround the lawn’s rectilinear pond. Sculpture adorned walls, lurked in the Orchard to the northeast and later even appeared to levitate on the far bank of Charleston’s pond.
It’s about being aware of tradition, while allowing for the fact that gardens are in flux. Nothing was ever static
More fruit trees were planted, and plants were selected to be good enough to paint in a border or a vase, as Bell’s still-life paintings attest. It was ‘a medley of apples, hollyhocks, plums, zinnias, dahlias’, she wrote. Parrot tulips in spring, followed by astrantias, fuchsias and Eryngium giganteum, for example, which are captured in two of her paintings.
Following the death of Duncan Grant in 1978 (17 years after Vanessa Bell), the garden’s future was secured by the foundation the Charleston Trust. But what would happen to this artists’ garden minus the artists?
“For me it’s about being aware of tradition, while allowing for the fact that gardens are in flux,” says head gardener Harry Hoblyn. “Nothing was ever static.” Harry is one of a long line of head gardeners. He took over in spring 2020, just as the pandemic was sinking its teeth in, and his year-long traineeship in the garden was coming to an end. When head gardener Fiona Dennis decided to move on as the country locked down, Harry chose to stay.
Since the 1980 restoration of Charleston’s garden by landscape architect Sir Peter Shepheard, each of its head gardeners has had a subtly different, but equally valid, approach to gardening in the spirit of the Bloomsbury era. Some have been wilder in their approach, some have gardened for peak interest
at particular times of year, and some have gardened to a specific decade.
Vanessa Bell was very fond of roses and strove to have a rose garden of her own – ‘enough roses to pick a bowl full and leave plenty on the trees’
All have done extensive research on the planting and thoughtfully preserved the ‘bones’ of the garden, including climbing roses ‘Paul’s Lemon Pillar’ and ‘Mermaid’ on the front façade, and the magnificent apple ‘Beauty of Bath’, which fills the view from the garden room window.
Even Roger Fry’s Santolina chamaecyparissus, which edges the lawn, has been kept going, despite finding the soggy, chalky loam, shaded by fruit trees, difficult. Harry sees it as one of the “most important heritage features”.
“It’s about the artistic spirit of the space and looking and paying homage to key principles,” says Harry. When making decisions over what to plant, he thinks differently when approaching the ‘woody’ and ‘non-woody’ layers. Vanessa Bell was very fond of roses and strove to have a rose garden of her own – ‘enough roses to pick a bowl full and leave plenty on the trees’. Harry favours heritage roses from Bell’s time at Charleston, but makes an exception for the 2017 David Austin introduction R. Vanessa Bell (= ‘Auseasel’).
The herbaceous layer on the other hand is regarded by Harry as more open for artistic interpretation, based on what Bell and Grant might have liked to have grown.
Both the sub-shrub Pseudodictamnus mediterraneus and Melianthus major are two silver-leaved, architectural introductions, which along with the famous cardoons (Cynara cardunculus), provide those silver sprays so characteristic of what Virginia Woolf described as Charleston’s ‘variegated quilt of asters and artichokes’. Preserving the romanticism without contradicting the principles is one of Harry’s great skills.
“It should always feel like a cottage garden,” he says. “It would be really tempting to put a few ornamental grasses along the dry Studio Border to add some rhythm to it, but it just doesn’t feel in-keeping.”
Self-seeders are ‘shepherded’. Anthriscus sylvestris, Silene dioica and Valeriana officinalis fill in the gaps, giving the garden incredible dynamism. “For me,” says Harry, “gardening increasingly feels more about just steering the balance, making little edits where I can within the context of this historical garden, and actually letting the garden guide its own course.” Harry doesn’t irrigate, but admits that “if I have to throw a bucket of water on a wilting phlox, I will”.
It would be really tempting to put a few ornamental grasses to add some rhythm, but it just doesn’t feel in-keeping.
For Harry, the future of the garden is about maintaining this legacy in a changing climate, but with increased public engagement. In-keeping with Charleston’s spirit as a place for the Bloomsbury Group to gather, it’s the setting for two well-established festivals – the Charleston Festival in May and July’s Festival of the Garden – now joined by September’s three-day Queer Bloomsbury, all of which keep Harry and assistant gardener Tom Dawson busy.
So, what does it mean to be a gardener in what is, and will always be, an ‘artist’s garden’? Inspired by Derek Jarman’s use of gardening as an art form, Harry sees the two going hand in hand. “As gardeners, we are creatives in what we’re doing, as custodians of the land.”
Useful information
- Address Charleston, Firle, East Sussex BN8 6LL.
- Tel 01323 811626.
- Web charleston.org.uk
- Open Wednesday – Sunday (and Bank Holiday Mondays), 10am-5pm.
- Garden admission free.