The Persephone Garden
The Walled garden consists of two areas. The North part, below the greenhouses, is given to growing vegetables and cut flowers. Below that there are three square decorative gardens, or 'rooms' inside yew hedges. We have recently redesigned the garden nearest the sea, raking up the triangular parterres and miniature junipers and replacing it with something completely different: the Persephone garden.
In 2022, The garden Designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan came to stay and I asked him his advice on how to remake this garden, which had been unchanged since the nineteen-seventies. Within hours he had formed a complete scheme, sketched on a piece of paper.
We would make a pavement around the fountain and beyond that, long grass, wildflowers and bulbs. We would use local stone and salvage, and interplant the pavement with bulbs.
By a miracle, we found everything we needed on site, in the builders yard, where piles of old paving, fragments of stone gateposts, chimney-pots, stone drains, roof slates, old bricks, collapsed bridge-piers and other pieces of salvage had been laying unused for half a century or more.
Todd came to stay for a week in March 2023, and Todd and I and the Mulgrave building team laid the paving ourselves, freehand. Large blocks of stone were brought in by machine, and once these had been placed, Todd started to make patterns on the ground using combinations of all the salvage we had found. The idea was to make a pavement like you might find in a ruin in Sicily, but made entirely with materials from a North Yorkshire farming estate. We sunk bits of pipe and filled them with earth, laid broken drain-surrounds to make a frame for bulbs. The only thing we needed to bring in from outside were the pebbles for the paths, much of which I laid myself (you can see my first efforts, they're the bit where there is more concrete than pebble). We carried on, while March threw its worst at us in the way of rain, hail and even snow, the cold making the concrete seize before we could push in the stones. We moved four mature Magnolia stellara which had been on either side of the entrances, to encircle the fountain: a mammoth task, as in order to survive they had to be lifted with root balls almost as big as their crowns. They didn't flower the first year, but they survived; and as I write this they are again covered in fat furry buds that will open in spring.
The garden was to be a spring garden. Every little bit of earth is stuffed with spring bulbs: Narcissus like Tête-à-tête and Thalia, narcissus bulbocodium; grape hyacinths, Iphcions, miniature iris, snowdrops, fritillaria, species tulips such as t. clusiana, t. turkestanica, t. linifolia, t. acuminata, and so on. We also put in a few irises for later on in the year: flag irises - mainly 'Benton' cultivars, bred by the painter Cedric Morris - and the slim black irises chrysographes and 'Just around Midnight', which have liked it so much that we're soon going to have to thin them out. The beds under the magnolias have got campanulas, violas, crigerons, asphodels and Saxifraga x arendsii 'Triumph' which puts out rich pink flowers in April. However, as the year went on and the grass grew tall, we found thar the garden had a much longer season than we expected, and every month threw up new wildflowers among the long grass. It's a joy from March till August.
It was Todd's idea to call it the Persephone garden, after the story the ancient Greeks and Romans told themselves, to explain the mystery of winter. Here it is, in case you don't know it.
Named after an ancient tale
Told by the Greeks and Romans
Demeter, goddess of she earth and harvest, was out one day picking flowers with her daughter, Persephone. The God of the underworld, Hades, fell in love with Persephone's grace and beauty, and, manifesting in the meadow where the women were walking, dragged her down to his awful kingdom underground. Enraged with grief, Demeter cursed the carth, sat on her hands, and refused to bless the fields and the trees. She vowed that, as long as Persephone was under the ground, nothing on earth would grow. Soon, all she plants on she earsh began to wither and die.
The people starved.
Zeus, the king of the gods, saw shat this wouldn's do, and dispatched his messenger, Hermes, to Hades, to ger Persephone back. Is was an urgent mission, because, by the inexorable law of the kingdom of the dead, anyone who sakes food in the underworld can never return to the air. Luckily, Persephone was aware of this; and when Hades gave her a pomegranate to eas, she resolved only to drink its juice. But, pomegranates being what they are, she accidentally swallowed five seeds.
Eventually Hermes made a deal with Hades: every year, Persephone must spend a month in Hades for each seed she ase: five months. The rest of the time, she would be returned to her mother in the sunny mediterranean hills. And that is why she wheat dies back and the flowers shrivel away, and why the grass and the flowers return in the spring.
The name stuck, and so we decided to emphasise it, with a bronze cast of own daughter, Sibyllas, arm and hand - as if to represent Persephone re-emerging from the underworld. It's in the middle of the fountain.
The garden is designed for conversation. Please sit on the big stones - which are the broken piers of old bridges - and on the rim of the fountain, and on the zig-zag bench, and chat.
