Rosemary Verey in the Laburnum Walk at Barnsley House, by Andrew Lawson.
The Sandilands family: Prescott and Gladys Sandilands with their four children, Pat, Francis, Christina, and Rosemary (in riding clothes). Courtesy of the Verey family.
The wedding of David Verey and Rosemary Sandilands at St. James, London, October 21, 1939. Courtesy of the Verey family.
Portrait by N. Lytton of Rosemary with her two sons, Charles and Christopher, 1944. Courtesy of the Verey family.
The Verey family: David and Rosemary Verey with their four children, Charles, Christopher, Veronica, and Davina. Courtesy of the Verey family.
David and Rosemary at Barnsley House in the 1950s, before there were any gardens. Courtesy of the Verey family.
Rosemary, a passionate hunter, jumping on Mata Hari. Courtesy of the Verey family.
David and Rosemary at Barnsley House in front of the covered verandah where the Knot Garden would be. Courtesy of the Verey family.
CHAPTER THREE
Creating the Garden 1960s
In a garden you get what you work for, don’t you?
IT WAS DAVID who pushed Rosemary into creating a garden at Barnsley. He first piqued her interest in the subject by buying and presenting her with old gardening books he acquired on his travels for the Ministry of Housing. He loved books himself, particularly the books he collected for his own scholarly work on the architectural history of Gloucestershire. He introduced Rosemary to the classical Greek and Roman writers, the likes of Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny, whose writings about plants influenced medieval science and medicine, along with the early herbalists who became her favorites, such as William Turner, John Gerard, and John Parkinson.
“With his understanding of Rosemary and her mathematical, geometric mind, [David] was able to nudge her. He was really a great bibliophile. He had a lot of books on Gloucestershire. He started to buy her ancient books on gardening. I think he could see that with these fifteenth- and sixteenth-century treatises … she could have a lot of fun and really make a niche for herself, which indeed she did.”1 After dinner, Rosemary would curl up in her chair for hours before the fire, sitting companionably with David while immersed in some large tome about gardens. These old herbals were hard to read but offered a window into the past, appealing to Rosemary’s interest in history and her fascination with classical patterns and designs.
The older Vereys had died not many years after giving Barnsley to David, first David’s mother in 1956 and then his father in 1958.2 David decided it was time to replace the garden that Rosemary had grassed over soon after they moved into Barnsley House. Perhaps he wished to pay tribute to his mother’s memory or perhaps, because the girls had gone away to board at St. Mary’s Calne School, he realized there was no longer any need for grassy playing fields. Whatever the reason, David chose not to wait for Rosemary to move ahead with this idea.3
But he did ask her what she proposed to do in order to occupy the time formerly spent on teaching the girls. Rosemary, still sufficiently engaged with riding and having groomed her own horses and kept the tack clean for years, asked for a full-time groom. David complied and turned his parents’ residence in The Close into groom’s quarters. Later, however, Rosemary would say that she began to tire of riding. “It became a way of life rather than an occasional pursuit. I realized then that I did not want to devote the rest of my life from September until March to hunting.”4
The timing was perfect. Rosemary was at loose ends without her daughters at home to teach, and her energies needed some outlet. She recognized that “one of the worst things about getting married and having children is that all you know about is washing nappies and ironing clothes. Unless you are exceptional, you realize you are becoming dull.”5 With a nanny and other help in the house, it is unlikely that Rosemary spent much of her time washing nappies or ironing clothes, but she firmly believed, and often said, “It’s a sin to be dull!”
With Rosemary still engaged with horses and hunting, David moved to re-establish a decent garden around their house. Without consulting Rosemary, or possibly because she expressed no interest in his undertaking, David pressed ahead. He started by focusing on the area immediately around the house and called Percy Cane, a fashionable garden designer of the day, to come to Barnsley.
Percy Cane was known for an Arts and Crafts approach to garden design, which was of keen interest to David. The Cotswolds had been at the heart of the movement that began in the late 1800s and continued into the early part of the twentieth century. Reacting to the industrialization taking place in England, and influenced by writers like John Ruskin, the movement counted William Morris among its leading proponents, advocating a return to traditional architecture and crafts produced by hand rather than by machines. His home, Kelmscott Manor, was in Lechlade, not far from Barnsley, and several prominent like-minded architects followed him to the area.6
Given his own interest in the Arts and Crafts movement, it was natural for David to engage a garden designer who championed it. When Percy Cane arrived at Barnsley without any warning, “Rosemary saw red! She’d been resisting. You can see her – eyes lighting up with fury. Getting in someone else when she was going to do it and she did.”7
Rosemary admitted Cane’s arrival “was most provocative to me. I realized that it was my garden,”8 so Percy Cane was quickly ushered back to London. No one was going to tell her what to do about her own garden. With her back up, she was determined to take charge. Looking back, Rosemary gave Percy Cane credit for teaching her one important lesson, namely “that you should always make the longest possible distance into your most important vista and give it an interesting focal point.” And it taught her another useful lesson. Remembering her own reaction, Rosemary believed that any garden she later designed had to be the client’s garden, not hers.
Before Percy Cane was sent packing, he did suggest the basic outline for the borders just outside the south-facing door of the drawing room at Barnsley House. Here, years before, Linda Verey had planted parallel rows of tall Irish yews, marching like stiff green sentinels along the path that led away from that door out to a gate that opened through an existing stone wall to the farm lane beyond. In the 1770s, an early owner, the Reverend Charles Coxwell, had built a high stone wall on three sides of the grounds, starting at the southeastern end, turning to run along the south and then turning back again. A small Gothic Revival-style gardenhouse remained at this northern end of the wall, serving as a full stop feature and garden folly. Beyond the end of the garden wall, a yew hedge hid the swimming pool Rosemary and David had built at the furthest northwestern edge.
Although Rosemary had not eliminated the tall yews when she grassed over the gardens of her mother-in-law, there was only grass on either side of the yews when Percy Cane arrived. In place of open lawn, Percy Cane outlined four symmetrical triangular beds on either