Rosemary Verey: The Life and Lessons of an Extraordinary Gardener
The author of this biography (which I read in December) was blessed to get to work in Rosemary’s garden and to know her as a friend. I love her descriptions of what it was like to work there. And here are my favourite bits from the book, starting with what it was like to work with her. (I think I could have handled it and found it an absolute dream.)
(Push, push, push! is often my motto on a stressful work day.)
I also loved the description of a head gardener that she inherited from her mother-in-law, the previous owner of the Verey estate. I am he! Especially when I consider one of our longtime jobs which may go to a new owner this year, who may desire help with the garden.
I own and cherish several of Rosemary’s big, handsome books, included The Scented Garden, The Art of Planting, and The Garden in Winter. In The Scented Garden, she wrote with an understanding of working people:
In her career as a garden designer, she advised metal edging on the lawn, “as she realized continued edging would eventually erode the shapes of the beds, although she didn’t follow this advice herself” (nor do I, as my grass paths get narrower and narrower). “Her own gardeners were constantly manually edging the Barnsley borders. Probably the expense of metal edging put her off, or maybe she preferred the softer look of lawn against earth.”
In the designing and planting of another garden, the client complained that a lavatera was too bright magenta, and “Shortly thereafter, while driving through the countryside, [Rosemary’s] keen eye spotted a lavatera, growing near the edge of the road, flowering a lovely pale silvery pink… Out like a flash, Rosemary had cuttings in hand…to propagate. …Lavatera ‘Barnsley’ was the famous result.”
When I first moved here, we saw L ‘Barnsey’ as a signature plant in Cannon Beach downtown gardens and planted it in all the gardens we did, as well. It was much admired but sometime in the mid 2000s, all of them up and down the coast got some sort of wasting disease and withered away, and I was never able to get my hands on a healthy specimen since then. Some examples of it from back when:
I think that the diseased specimens were all coming from the Oregon-based supplier and that the plant itself is still available if I could get it from another source.
I was moved by Rosemary’s insecurity about her lack of formal training. It meant a lot to me when I learned that she and some other great gardeners who I admire were self taught.
“Although Rosemary did little to reveal her sense of insecurity, she confided to her diary that she was quite nervous and felt better after a whiskey. …Although she exuded confidence, privately she confessed, ‘I am hopeless, unprofessional, ignorant, only opinionated. Can’t imagine what carries me through.’”
Speaking of whiskey, if I had a famous friend and was asked to write an honest posthumous biography of her, it would be a real dilemma for me whether to write honestly about my friend’s alcoholism and temper. What would you do? It was certainly interesting and written in a sympathetic way, unlike the horribly mean biographies of Beverly Nichols and May Sarton. Never did Rosemary sound to me like someone unlikeable, even when she sounded disagreeable in her later years.
I was intrigued with how at once point she fell out with her friend and client Prince Charles and felt tormented about it, and then they totally reconciled. He comes across as very likeable and dear in this biography, as I believe he is (despite the hatchet job in The Crown). She was friends with Ryan Gainey, too (a gardener beloved to me) and worked with him on a garden design on a garden in France. He also was revealed to be a difficult person in a documentary about his life. Yet I’d have given just about anything to have been his friend.
Rosemary’s popularity as an lecturer in the USA began in the 1980s when she was 62. It was essential to her because she had financial worries. I was sad to read that she had been under that kind of pressure. Her garden and home at Barnsley were not an inexpensive upkeep.
In 1990, I began to attend lectures at the annual NW Flower and Garden Show. Rosemary was to be one of the lecturers, and in the morning when I caught the bus to downtown Seattle for the show, it had snowed and the bus did not come anywhere near on time. When I got to the convention center, the lecture was about to start and all seats were taken. I had tears in my eyes as I begged to be let in. A kind doorman let me stand in the back, which would not have happened in later years with stricter fire codes. My heart would have broken to have missed her.
I saw her again at the show in another year, this time in a seat near the front after an hours-long wait in line. She came to the row I sat in to speak to someone near me. I breathed in thinking, I am breathing the same air as Rosemary Verey.
“American audience loved her…. She sparkled as the center of their attention, but she was also genuinely interested in people and their lives, not just their gardens. She was also extremely sympathetic about anyone seriously interested in starting a garden, even when they didn’t know how. Having experienced that herself, she was very encouraging and empathetic.”
”Her friendships in the United States [were] across a complete range of incomes and class and cultures and she loved it—absolutely adored it….And she felt loved.”
There is a mention of what an important show the NW Flower and Garden show became, and a mistake in saying that it was sometimes in Vancouver, BC. It was not. Maybe the author was thinking also of the Hardy Plant Society Study Weekends that do go from city to city. Even though I have stopped going to the show because the new show runners no longer got amazing international guests like Rosemary, I still remember breathing in so near to her own breath. I also saw lectures by Penelope Hobhouse there, and Piet Oudolf and Fergus Garrett and other garden idols of mine from across the pond. (Although Northwesterner Dan Hinkley was also a big draw for me.) And unless I am imagining it, I saw Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto there.
The very last time I was to see Rosemary speak at the NW show, I was so excited. I had taken the train up to Seattle for the show. When I arrived very early to stand in line, a reader board said that she had fallen and broken her hip just before flying over and her appearance was canceled. I think it was not long after than that she died, in 2001, at age 82.
Somewhere in the biography is the mention of a book that influenced her, so I will, of course, try to find it through interlibrary loan or, failing that, a quest for a used copy.
Isn’t that gorgeous? That particular copy is $85, but I may have found one for a mere $25, and it also available as a print on demand book. (Allan just snagged the $25 copy for me from Abe Books!)
But I have digressed before giving my recommendation that the Verey biography is a fascinating read. I wish I had been one of her garden crew.
I enjoyed this post on Rosemary Verey, and thanks for the tip on Abe Books, I had not heard of that company, and it seems that Amazon, who owns them now, keeps them for those rare and hard to find books. There is another out of print book I am looking for, one from the 70s, called “The Pond”, about all the goings on of various creatures down at a pond on one particular day in May. I do not remember the author.
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I am pretty sure that the mother of my long ago partner, Bryan, asked for that very book for Christmas! Darn it, I thought we were escaping Amazon by ordering from Abe!!
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Such a thoughtful, nuanced post. I had never heard of Rosemary Verey, and I will look her up. As for revealing warts without being mean spirited…a tricky balance. Do writers approach it from a place of being mean spirited and small or from a place of compassion yet shrewdness. I would always chose the latter. Also, who doesn’t have warts and flaws? That’s part of being human.
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Very insightful, and the author’s point of view was compassionate. I just thought Rosemary might have liked to keep her secrets and yet…it wasn’t a secret to those who knew her.
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I hear you!
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I too saw Rosemary speak at the San Francisco Garden Show, back in it’s glory days-probably one of the same years you saw her. I have never forgotten.
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That is very cool to hear. I bet we were in the same audience…must have been, as I never missed a speaker from the UK.
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Oops wait, my reading comprehension was poor because I got too excited. :-). I see you wrote the San Francisco Show, but probably the same year.
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I’d heard of Rosemary Verey, but didn’t know that much about her until this post. I, too, would have liked to meet Ryan Gainey.–He was fascinating. If I had the chance, I’d like to pick their brain if they would let me. Love the cover of “Corners of Grey Old Gardens”. As for telling the truth about cantankerous people…It depends.Yes, we all have flaws as Laurie said above, but I’ve gone both ways in this regard.
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If you have a vcr player and can get hold of a copy of Gainey’s video tape called Creating the Romantic Garden….well, it is just wonderful.
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A riveting post! I could picture myself there through your words. So glad Allan snapped up that book for you.
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Darn, the order got canceled from the other end for some reason.
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He’s pretty good at tracking down books, though.
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