By Emma House, Garden Museum Curator
Last year we had the pleasure of borrowing a rose by Erté and one by Oliver Messel from Glyndebourne as part of our Wild and Cultivated: Fashioning the Rose exhibition. I was therefore delighted that a few days before this year’s summer season of opera opened at Glyndebourne I was able to join Head Gardener, Kevin Martin and Garden Advisor, John Hoyland for a tour of the gardens. Glyndebourne’s first opera festival was staged by John Christie and his wife Audrey Mildmay in 1934 and over the last 89 years the gardens have become an essential part of Glyndebourne.
Of course, the summer picnic is an integral part of experiencing opera at Glyndebourne and the gardens provide a wonderful back to that experience but as John and Kevin explained the gardens provide a much more fundamental function to the running of Glyndebourne and are more embedded in the work, they do than one might first realise.
Glyndebourne is of course a family garden and as such there is a cricket lawn where the family play and relax but there are more formal spaces that lend themselves to the function of providing for visitors. The gardens were developed initially by Audrey Mildmay and then more extensively by her daughter Lady Mary Christie who worked very closely with her friend Christopher Lloyd to create a series of interlinked spaces. As the opera has grown and the new auditorium was built and new buildings have been added the gardens have changed and evolved.
We started our tour in the Figaro Garden which is a quiet and contemplative space with a reflective pool presided over by Henry Moore’s sculpture Draped Reclining Woman. Here visitors who have experienced the high energy of an opera or the mournful sorrow of a tragic ending can spill out of the auditorium and decompress before returning to earth. It’s important that the gardens provide a cohesive encounter for opera goers and enhance their experience.
From here we journeyed down the steps into the Bourne Garden, with the cast rehearing ready for next week’s performance in the background. With singing bursting out of the auditorium, I felt a connection to the work that happens at Glyndebourne and could begin to understand how the gardens are integral to the creativity of the people who work there. This garden is planted with exotic and tropical plants and offers a hint of the spectacle that visitors will experience in the opera house. The trees in this area are carefully pollarded to offer a canopy and layers of texture which immerse the visitor in the lushness of the planting.
The gardens however aren’t just for visitors and the summer season. Glyndebourne employs more than 180 people and they work their year-round, designing costumes and sets and rehearsing. The gardens are used in the early mornings by the cast warming up their voices or the orchestra practising in small groups. Throughout the day the team from directors, set designers, costume designers and wig makers use the gardens. The garden team regularly run wellness walks to encourage the large team to utilise the space and connect with the landscape.
The garden is very much designed and maintained with Glyndebourne’s team in mind. The croquet lawn is used for picnickers but it also provides a breakout space for the orchestra. Who during the interval use it to play croquet and mentally prepare for the next half of the performance. For those working at Glyndebourne it is very different to many other cultural institutions as it is linked to the land in a very special way and the gardens help to strengthen this bond and aid the creative process.
The gardens are also practical in other ways. There is a dye garden where dahlias, madder, irises and many other plants are grown for dying costumes. The team at Glyndebourne are looking at ways to make every part of the opera festival and its operation more sustainable and the dye garden is central to this. We were introduced to dyer Jenny Mercer and Andrea Benson the gardener who looks after the dye garden. Fabrics for costumes are sourced in the UK wherever possible and as close to Glyndebourne as is feasible.
Natural materials and traditional production methods are always preferred when sourcing materials. When a costume is dyed it must be light fast and washable, so each dye is carefully produced and tested before finally being used on each costume. Any costumes that are white aren’t suitable for the stage as under the bright lights they become too bright and would ruin the overall effect on stage. Therefore, many costumes are ‘knocked back’ to make them off white so that they are suitable to be used with stage lighting. The natural dyes produced from the garden are essential in making these costumes fit for purpose.
The garden team try to make the gardens sustainable in other ways too. All of the metalwork, from lighting to plant supports and rose arbours are produced locally by a blacksmith from Glynde village. This reduces the miles that materials travel and their carbon footprint but also helps to keep traditional manufacturing skills alive within the local community. The garden team grow most of their plants from seeds and cuttings, again reducing the amount of miles plants travel. But it is also important for them to teach propagation skills to new members of the team and pass on that knowledge. In areas where visitors don’t picnic grasses are kept long, and meadow flowers are encouraged to offer greater biodiversity.
It is incredibly interesting to think of the gardens at Glyndebourne as working spaces and the variety of ways in which the garden team have developed them to this effect.