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Rosemary Verey's Garden

© Kirk Johnson

My favorite garden writer, Rosemary Verey, died a year ago on May 31, 2001. I discovered her writing almost by accident, when Hamilton Books offered Rosemary's Classic Garden Design at a bargain price. In this book, which was published in 1984, Rosemary wrote about the gardens of the past and the influence which they had on her own garden at Barnsley House, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire.

Rosemary Verey's Making of a Garden, published in 1995, is all about her garden at Barnesley House. In it she wrote that she "never made a master plan of the garden. It has evolved slowly, probably because initially I knew very little about design". I have never visited the garden at Barnsley House, so it wasn't until I saw the plans in this book that I really understood how the various parts of the garden were linked together. Before I had seen attractive photographs of the various features, such as the temple with its pool, the laburnum walk, the knot garden, the potager, the yew walk, and Simon Verity's frog fountain. Many of these features were shown in Classic Garden Design and they were all beautiful, but I suspected that Rosemary's garden would look like a museum made of of fragments from earlier gardens. Rosemary seemed to have far too many unrelated ideas in her garden.

Jane Brown may have been thinking about the garden at Barnsley House when she wrote in Sissinghurst: Portrait of a Garden that "Along with the plethora of imitations of the English classical revival style come a whole host of familiar furnishings, which it is well to note that Sissinghurst does not have: it has no long grass-walk flanked by double borders, no pergola, no pools and fountains, no trellis walks or arbours and no topiary twists or triangles. There are no white painted seats, no Versailles tubs, there is no iris rill or laburnum tunnel, no balustraded terrace or columned temple, and there are very definitely no Japanese touches or trompe l'oeil effects. There are plenty of such things in other gardens. Here most of them would have been dismissed with a snort, and the Sackville insult - bedint - meaning common".

The garden at Barnsley House doesn't contain all of the features that Jane Brown mentioned, but it contains enough of them for the criticism to be valid. The English classical revival style has probably come to a dead end with the death of Rosemary Verey and I hope that the garden at Barnsley House will be preserved as one of the best, and hopefully one of the last examples of that style.

The copyright of the article Rosemary Verey's Garden in Garden Design is owned by Kirk Johnson. Permission to republish Rosemary Verey's Garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.