For anyone brought up on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, the idea of a garden hidden behind walls is utterly compelling. So when the writer Olivia Laing made her first visit to this house four years ago, she was full of eager anticipation, knowing that both the garden and its garden-designer owner had once been very well known in the horticultural world. Behind the rose-covered façade of the charming house in a Suffolk village, she discovered an intriguing walled garden, slightly over-grown and with an air of neglect that made it even more thrilling. ‘We saw it in the January and, the minute that I stepped into it, I was aware of the seriousness of the planting,’ recalls Olivia. ‘The daphne was covered in flowers and there was a tree peony that was coming into bud. I could tell that this was the real deal. But it was half lost and I didn’t want to over-tidy it. I wanted to keep the slight air of secrecy – that feeling of being on the edge of wildness. That’s the sort of garden I think is really exciting.’
The garden had been designed in the 1960s by Mark Rumary, chief garden designer at Notcutts nurseries, and a former assistant to landscape designer Lanning Roper. He had lived at the house from 1961 until his death in 2010. A third of an acre in size, the plot felt much bigger than this, with a succession of walled or hedged garden rooms to explore. It was also stuffed full of interesting plants that constantly threatened to overwhelm Mark’s carefully considered architectural design. Olivia was smitten.
As she explains in her new book The Garden Against Time, ‘He fascinated me, in part because of the warmth with which he was spoken about by everyone I met and, in part, because of the strange intimacy that went along with repairing his design. To mend the garden meant working initially to understand the pattern he’d intended and then to recover it, stitch by stitch, as an embroiderer might.’
By the time Olivia moved in six months later with her husband Ian, she felt intimately acquainted with her garden predecessor, having tracked down several articles on the garden, including a lavish Country Life spread from 1974 and a chapter in Rosemary Verey’s book The Englishman’s Garden. Olivia made a list of more than 200 plants she had read about or seen in online photographs, wondering excitedly whether she would find them in the garden when she was able to get her hands into the soil at last.
As a teenager, she had been fascinated by Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, in which he explored a ‘pharmacopoeia of magical and medicinal plants’. Olivia later trained as a herbalist, studying botany for five years, so an interest in plants – particularly historic ones – runs deep in her veins. ‘Each plant was so interwoven into human history that to study it was to tumble down a conduit through time,’ she writes in her book. Having moved from one rented home to another, she was ecstatic that she would finally have a permanent garden where she could grow the plants she loved. Only it was not just her garden. ‘I had this feeling all the time that I was in Mark’s space,’ she explains. ‘It really felt like a collaboration.’
Olivia spent the best part of that first year clearing overgrown vegetation and weeds – a gruelling job but also one of the most exciting, as it revealed many things that she knew Mark had planted. There were buried peonies and unusual ferns, an unruly hoheria, a beautiful yellow Rosa banksiae and a fig that had come from a cutting from Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst. ‘There were legacies left by Mark everywhere,’ she says. ‘The previous owners had left it like a museum, so by the time we arrived here, it was really quite untamed.’
Bit by bit, the original character was revealed: the retro-style lawn and borders that you can imagine captured in an oversaturated 1970s photograph; the charming old brick walls and beech hedges that help to delineate the smaller garden rooms; the raised quatrefoil lily pond inspired by gardens in Andalucia; the slender cypress trees that Mark had grown from seed.
Now, four years on, all of this has been thoughtfully restored. The ghost of Mark Rumary is still very much a presence, but the garden has moved on. Rather than preserving it in aspic, Olivia is making it her own, adding her own plants and redesigning areas that had become irrevocably choked up. ‘At the beginning, I was completely obsessed with how Mark had the garden, but this is gradually changing. I think it has a lighter touch now. I encourage self-seeders, so it changes every year and it’s so exciting to see what comes through.’ In the spring, tulips, honesty and forget-me-nots stud the borders, while species peonies and martagon lilies have been added to an old collection of ferns in the new library garden. Olivia does almost all the gardening herself, weaving it into her writing schedule: ‘There’s such a lovely parallel between gardening and writing. With both, you are creating structure and then editing.’
The first two years of Olivia’s gardening epiphany are recounted in The Garden Against Time, which is a richly layered exploration of the garden as a place of refuge. Spinning out from the diary-like descriptions, she takes us on a fabulous journey through time on her own quest for Eden, which, she concludes, ‘is a dream that is carried in the heart’. It is clear, though, that this house in Suffolk has brought her a step closer to finding this elusive paradise, through the connections she has made to the past as she tends her beloved plants, and by the simple, fervent act of gardening, which makes her feel whole.
Olivia Laing’s book ‘The Garden Against Time’ (Picador, £20) is published on May 2; olivialaing.com
