So why the Dead Gardeners Society?

Betley Court from the main road (note the missing railings, taken for the War effort)

The Professor once pointed out to me that the problem with old houses is, that when neglected, they fall down. By contrast, untended gardens grow up and out, making the problem much, much bigger. It’s a problem we grapple with every day!

Betley Court Gardens are ten acres of English pleasure grounds, designed in a variety of styles, with different levels of maintenance afforded them over the years.  During the period the house was empty, the last Squire Charles Fletcher-Twemlow continued to pay for a gardener to mow the lawns in the formal gardens around the house, so that never got too out of hand!  However, the secluded Romantic woodland walk around the Dingle was largely left to its own devices and is now home to a forest of self-sown ‘volunteer’ sycamores. The dam, that creates a pond at the bottom of the Dingle walk needs repair. We’re not even sure if any work has been done on it since it was dredged to make a swimming therapy pool in the second Word War.

So, where to begin? And what to do? And if you’re going to restore a garden, what are you restoring it to?

We are very lucky. Over the generations, Craddocks, then the Fletcher-Twemlows sought out some high profile and fashionable landscape gardeners to help them create their vision of the perfect English garden. If you go to the archives at the County records Office, you can even look at some of the designs. It is quite thrilling to paw over the original drawings, under the watchful eyes of the archivist, to see where a compass point has pieced the paper to mark the centre of a tree, or the arc of a path.

Even more excitingly, there are features on these plans that you can see still in the landscape today. There is Williams Emes’s naturalistic ‘gardenless’ vista stretching down to Betley Mere. Overgrown yew topiary, a lowered formal lawn and a magnificent Cedar of Lebanon planted by the great ‘Tree Mover’ William Barron remain to the south elevation. And although the walled garden has long since been built over with a housing estate in the 1980s, the last Head Gardener, Mr Mulliner is remembered in the stories of village elders.

So, when we’re gardening, we are gardening along with those long passed gardeners. These Dead Gardeners left us an interesting legacy, the physical shape of the garden, even some horticultural treasures. In moving forward with the restoration of the grounds, we will have to bear this in mind, whilst altering the design to fit today’s budget, availability of labour and evolving function of the grounds. It’s going to need a bit of detective work, but it is going to be an exciting journey!