A descendant of the eminent horticultural Backhouse family, Caroline Thomson is preserving and celebrating her family legacy through the carefully researched and planted garden at Fife’s Backhouse Rossie
WORDS PHILIP CLAYTON PHOTOGRAPHS RAY COX
The name ‘Backhouse’ will be familiar to many gardeners. Snowdrop collectors will know Galanthus ‘Backhouse Spectacles’; those of a botanical bent perhaps grow tender shrub Correa backhouseana with its creamy bells; and lovers of daffodils will recall the work of William Backhouse (1807-1869) and later generations of the family, who hybridised daffodils to improve their strength and vigour, providing a genetic legacy for selections we enjoy today.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this love of plants has been inherited by Caroline Thomson, a descendant of the Backhouse gardening family, who, in 2005, with her husband Andrew and son Hamish, moved to the 120-acre Backhouse Rossie estate and began to make it their home. The estate needed plenty of work. The cottages, which have now been restored, are enjoyed by wedding guests, while the elegant house, with its views out to the Lomond Hills, is nearing completion as a private family home. But Caroline’s focus has been the garden.
She began her project with research at the RHS Lindley Library and RBG Kew Archives, adding plants still available and others that had long since fallen off catalogue lists to her collection of Backhouse-raised plants – particularly daffodils. As a result, April here is resplendent. Golden drifts of daffodils cross sunny lawns to the south of the house beneath fine trees and shrubs, including a marvellous Acer griseum or paper bark maple, which is a Scottish Champion Tree. Other plantings ensure Backhouse Rossie is far more than just a spring garden, with beauty throughout summer, complemented by the garden’s café, which offers visitors tastes and scents from the summer garden.
The 1.25 acre walled garden is believed in parts to pre-date the two 400-year-old gnarled yew trees still growing beside its north wall. Surviving features include a Robert Stewart & Sons lean-to greenhouse, now in working order and heated by a computerised biomass boiler, and coldframes made useful again. Tumble-down whinstone walls have been repaired to shelter espalier fruit trees.
“The new layout is a nod to the 1830 plan that shows improvements to the garden and grounds,” Caroline explains. A c
