Much More than a Perfect Gent

I cannot think of many garden writers from a century ago in whose company I would have felt entirely comfortable. William Robinson would have ignored me, Gertrude Jekyll seen through me, and Reginald Farrer unnerved me. But I should dearly have loved to meet Edward Augustus (‘Gussie’) Bowles, and have him conduct me around his garden one sunny day in spring. For by all accounts he was a sweet-tempered and charming, funny and self-deprecating, discerning and cultured man. He spent his entire life at Myddelton House in Bulls Cross, near Enfield, and, around the beginning of the First World War, wrote what amounted to a gardening autobiography, the trilogy My Garden in Spring, My Garden in Summer and My Garden in Autumn and Winter (1914–15). Of these, the first volume is the best.

Bowles’s ancestors, who were Huguenots, had lived at Myddelton House since 1724, and the family owned a majority share in the New River Company, whose eponymous stream flowed through the garden and on to water London. The spacious house (now owned by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority) is of white Suffolk brick, and was built by Bowles’s grandfather in 1818 (he pulled down an Elizabethan red-brick house to do it). Gussie lost most of the use of his right eye as a result of an infection when he was 8, a fact which prevented his being sent to Harrow, like his brothers. Instead, he was taught the classics by a local clergyman, and he developed a keen interest in natural history while ranging around the garden at home. He went up to Cambridge to read Theology and would have taken Holy Orders had the deaths of a brother and sister from tuberculosis not intervened. He abandoned ordination in order to look after his parents, and became a lay reader and churchwarden instead. Bowles’s parents were full of Christian charity, doing good works among the poor of Enfield, and their children inherited these philanthropic tendencies. Gussie founded a night school to educate poor boys and organized the local Boys’ Brigade. He did not need to seek employment, so settled instead for developing a prodigious interest in gardening at Myddelton House, making it his own after his father died in 1918 and he inherited a life interest in the house. Scarcely anything changed for the rest of his life: the house remained as it had been, with all the Victorian ornaments and furnishings that his mother had liked and without gas, electricity or heating. Gussie quickly became known as a noted gardener, plantsman and plant-hunter, and also a talented botanical artist, working mainly in watercolours. He was particularly fascinated by flowering bulbs, rock plants, cacti and botanical eccentricities, such as the corkscrew willow and the purple-leaved plantain. He placed these ‘curiosities’ in a bed together, which he called the Lunatic Asylum. He was, really, in a direct line of descent from those seventeenth-century London botanists John Gerard and John Parkinson. His reputation grew steadily and, in 1900, he was asked to sit on the Scientific Committee of the Royal Horticultural Society, something he continued to do until a month before his death in 1954, aged 89. In the trilogy, Bowles adopted the literary device of conducting the reader around the 6-acre garden at Myddelton House, border by border, cold frame by cold frame. Sound practical advice and closely observed botanical information were intertwined with gently amusing anecdotes and lyrical descriptions. His discursive style was criticized in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, after My Garden in Spring was published, but personally I find him hard to beat. How about this as a brilliant and useful explanation of how to pollinate crocuses?

When you see your Crocuses wide open in flower sally forth with a stick of sealing-wax or the amber mouthpiece of an old pipe in your hand . . . Rub whichever of the two unusual accompaniments of a garden stroll you have chosen, on your coat-sleeve if it be woollen, and hold the rubbed portion as soon as possible after ceasing rubbing near the anthers of an open Crocus, and you will find the electricity thereby generated will cause the pollen grains to fly up to the electrified object, and, what is more, to stick there, but so lightly that directly they are rubbed against the stigma of another Crocus they will leave the amber and be left where you, and Nature before you, intended them to be.

A hundred years after publication, Gussie’s books are still extremely readable although, to get all the jokes, it helps to have a working knowledge of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible. On the subject of the hardness of the New River water, for example, he wrote: ‘Derived mainly from chalk wells, it is so hard that one feels it would be scarcely a miracle to walk on it . . .’ Although an immediate success, My Garden in Spring caused the wrong kind of stir when it came out, and for this Bowles had his friend Reginald Farrer to blame. Perhaps foolishly, he had asked Farrer to write the Preface, and the well-known rock-gardener, gardening writer and plant-hunter, famous for his overheated prose and odd ways, decided to use it as a none-too-subtle dig at Sir Frank Crisp, the rich, eccentric City lawyer who owned Friar Park, near Henley (later bought by George Harrison). Sir Frank had built an enormous and lavish rock garden, which included a millstone grit replica of the Matterhorn, complete with alabaster top to resemble snow, and tin chamois peering from behind rocks. Farrer couldn’t resist comparing this extravagance with Bowles’s modest but high-quality rock garden, where plants flourished in semi-natural surroundings. Farrer didn’t name names, but he didn’t need to. The Preface caused a tremendous hoo-hah, with Bowles being squarely blamed. Crisp’s friend Miss Ellen Willmott, who gardened on an enormous scale at Warley Place, handed out to all and sundry at the Chelsea Flower Show a furious pamphlet, written by Crisp, that condemned Bowles. It was entitled ‘MR E. A. BOWLES AND HIS GARDEN, A New Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican’. In it, Bowles was attacked for puffing up his own achievements in the Preface; Crisp, in his irritation, had failed to note its authorship. It says a great deal for Bowles that, beyond a gently reproachful letter to Gardening Illustrated after that periodical reproduced the pamphlet, he kept silent, neither publicly shifting the blame on to Farrer nor allowing his friendship with Farrer to be diminished by the latter’s irresponsible behaviour. My Garden in Summer was published later in 1914, while My Garden in Autumn and Winter came out the following year. Although very good, in my opinion they are not quite as appealing as My Garden in Spring, perhaps because Bowles’s first love was always spring bulbs, especially tulips, irises, narcissi and crocuses. Farrer referred to him as ‘crocorum rex imperator’ and indeed he was sought out for his knowledge of them all his life. He also wrote A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum for Gardeners (1924) and A Handbook of Narcissus (1934) as well as many articles in the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society. No one appears to have had an unkind word to say about Bowles, and most people who met him found him excellent company. He was also extremely generous, both to his favoured charitable projects and with his plants. His great-great nephew, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles (the first husband of the Duchess of Cornwall), remembers being sent parcels of bulbs and plants by Bowles when he was away at school; and when I was serving my gardening apprenticeship in the 1970s, there were still people around who treasured plants in their gardens given to them by the man himself. The best-known photograph of Bowles, taken in 1910, shows a man in a starched collar and tie, tweed suit and polished lace-ups, sitting on a garden bench, with one hand leaning on a garden fork, a wicker basket of garden tools and seed packets beside him, and a (presumably) faithful shaggy-haired terrier, called Kip, at his feet. He stares straight and benignly at the camera, the corners of his mouth lifting slightly in a diffident smile. It looks like the picture of just another perfect gent, living a respectable, privileged upper-class life at the turn of the last century. But the trilogy of books he wrote reveals somebody much rarer and more precious than that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 33 © Ursula Buchan 2012