Garden TOUR
It’s been 50 years in the making, but Mary and Stuart Hendry will never be finished with their garden
It’s hard to imagine that Mary and Stuart Hendry’s sprawling four-seasons garden – a romantic idyll of rambling roses, herb beds, vegetable patches and “oodles” of snowdrops –was once no more than a huge concrete road and a barn. But it’s true.
Their 17th century home of more than 50 years is a former pub and cottage knocked together into one large family property. “We spent the first year sorting the house out and by the time that was done, we had a little toddler, who we put in a play pen, in the mud, while we tackled the garden!” Mary says.
It has been a labour of love, although it must be said that in the early years, the emphasis was on “labour”. “We got the diggers in and they took out nine 10-tonne lorry loads of rubble, concrete, you name it.”
From the house, the first major feature you see is what they jokingly refer to as the “Italian Garden”. It’s an area of 2.5msq with a Japanese holly (Ilex crenata) in each corner and a beautiful stone bird bath in the middle that they picked up for a bargain £10.
Mary says: “It makes us very happy to look at it and watch the birds having a bath with the flower beds in the background.”
Just beyond, densely planted yellow and green bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea) screens the greenhouse from view. The lavender-blue of Algerian iris (Iris unguicularis), punctuates the yellow stone walls of the barn. They flower reliably in December, January and February, having spent the summer baking in the sun – which they adore.
Follow the path round and there’s a dramatic corkscrew hazel, Harry Lauder’s walking stick; Mary loves to take branches from it at Christmas for bauble hanging.
She credits Stuart with creating their wooden rose arbour which catches the eye,
even in winter, with the twisted stem of a red rose ‘Chevy Chase’, pale pink ‘Gardenia’ rambling rose, and ‘City of York’, which starts off yellow and fades to a perfect white. Honeysuckle ‘Scentsation’ (Lonicera periclymenum), which has delicate yellow flowers in spring and summer, and star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasm
