By Caroline Cathcart, Horticultural Trainee
As part of the Horticultural Traineeship at the Garden Museum, Caroline has the opportunity to work with experienced gardeners across the UK. Her latest placement took her to Sarah Raven’s Perch Hill in East Sussex:
Emerging from the sylvan shadow of a narrow, winding road in the East Sussex countryside, I arrived at Sarah Raven’s Perch Hill Farm on a still morning at the beginning of October. With summer ended, and deepest autumn yet to come, I found the landscape stilled in the liminal space between the two seasons. A time of quiet decline and mellow light, berry-laden hawthorns, hips, and beeches turning golden—a season of its own, lingering between the fecundity of summer and autumn’s slow rot.
There are moments in this season-between-seasons when light pours in as though a dull veil between worlds had been lifted, soft gold light from the dwindling sun. Its alchemy is matched only by the dusk-light of a summer’s evening, another liminal moment when the world is momentarily transformed before our eyes. Otherworldly as it is, the beauty of autumn’s light lies in perfect opposition to the quiet violence that drives the vast observable shifts in the landscape. Decay. Dissolution. Death. Flowers rotting in perfect silence.
These transitory gaps in time demand of us a pause, a still moment to reflect on what has gone before and what lies in the unknown beyond. In an instant we see what is so often overlooked or missed altogether in the rushing and business that the bountiful months demand of us. Perhaps too, there is a rotting down in us, of old griefs, resentments, a withering away of the year’s accumulated sadnesses, carving out space for something new to grow, something beautiful, something good.
I found Perch Hill in what felt like a still moment. Unfolding beneath an autumn-blue sky, a world away from the chaos of London, it looked peaceful; as though the garden were taking a long, slow exhale after the summer. With the days darkening, productivity was on the wane, but even in its slow ebb towards winter, it was a thing of beauty. Brick paths wound through beds and borders full of flowers still in fine fettle, tagetes, aster, salvia, cosmos; and all throughout glimmered the frothy haze of Panicum ‘Sparkling Fountain’. Huge terracotta pots flanked the paths, their pea-stick trellises obscured by sprawling masses of Ipomoea batatas, its black leaves clambering skyward. Dotted amongst the dark foliage was the little orange thunbergia, ‘African Sunset’.
Most beautiful of all were the dahlias. As I drove up to the farm, the sight of them en masse spilling through the farmhouse fence made my heart do a little leap. The huge flowerheads jostled side by side in a painter’s palette of pinks, peaches, oranges and reds. One of the most precious plants in the autumn garden, dahlias blaze on into earliest winter and the first frosts, becoming more precious still, as the green abundance into which they first bloomed withers around them. Their beauty lingers on in the gloom as the last echo of summer.
At Perch Hill they leave their dahlias in the ground over winter, but the garden was having a rearrangement and so I spent my first day clearing dahlia beds—cutting back the flowers and foliage, lifting the tubers and packing them into crates to be stored away in the polytunnel. As I made my way through the beds, a severed dahlia head strewn amongst the detritus of the morning’s work stopped me in my tracks. It was ‘Engelhardt’s Matador’, a deep, rich pink, double dahlia with a luminous quality that almost made it glow. I’d never seen a flower so radiant, so beguiling. I squirrelled it away to take home with me.
That evening, the sun set over the Oast Garden at the back of the farmhouse. I sat and watched it disappear through the branches of a tree silhouetted against the orange sky. With the dying of the light, the rich jewel-like colours of the planting intensified. Deep scarlet, hot orange, pink, plum-purple and wine-dark red, all set against the backdrop of the almost-black foliage of Ricinis communis. While the ruby hips of Rosa moyesii, hung from the branch-tips like baubles.
I was awoken the next day by sunlight seeping through the windows that encircled my round room in the oast house. It was a rare joy to wake and step straight out into the garden. The delight of such a short commute to work was not lost on me. I ate my breakfast in the veg garden, looking out over the farmland rolling into the sky, while a cockerel sang out in the distance. Each morning, I would stand in the conservatory admiring the powder blue flowers of Plumbago auriculuata, a tender evergreen climber that had sprawled its way up the walls and across the roof. It was a new plant to me, and the head gardener, Josie Lewis, kindly let me take some cuttings to bring back to the museum.
Although the year was winding to a close, preparation for next spring had already begun at Perch Hill. Benches of tender perennial cuttings sat rooting in the polytunnel, while outside in the cold frames, freshly sown hardy annuals were germinating next to a sturdy stock of biennials ready to be planted out before the winter sets in. In the coming months, thousands of bulbs would be planted—tulips, narcissus, fritillaria, crocus and camassia, to name but a few. As the weather turned on my second day, we moved into the polytunnel to do some propagation. I sowed a few hardy annuals—Nigella hispanica and Papaver somniferum ‘Black Beauty’, and pre-sprouted butterfly ranunculus corms by placing them claws-down in a tray of moist compost and vermiculite.
I spent my last day in the Farmhouse Garden, clearing a trial bed of meadow flowers, emptying big pots to make way for bulbs and weeding out unwanted fennel and comfrey seedlings. I was delighted to see Dahlia merckii amongst the planting—the lovely little flower I had fallen in love with during my last placement at Gravetye Manor. Nicotiana langsdorffii was another treasure with its trumpet-shaped flowers nodding in pale green masses. But it was the climber, Clematis rhederiana that stole my heart. Sprawling over an arch in a mass of little bell-like flowers of the palest yellow, which, in the fading light appeared a ghostly green. Apparently it had been cut right to the ground three weeks prior to my visit and had grown back with great vigour to cover the entire arch in blossom.
As my return to the bedlam of city life beckoned, I looked around the garden one last time, taking in the quiet magic of the place. In the surrounding farmland, autumn was just beginning to show itself in the yellowing beech leaves. As I watched the light filter through them, I thought how lucky I had been to be here at this flickering moment between the seasons. A month from now deep autumn will set in, the light will change and everything will look different. In the stillness that this liminal space afforded me, a yearning had been softened—a yearning for green, for freedom, for solitude, for deep space and slow time, for wild beauty, for peace—these are the things that give Perch Hill its quiet magic, a magic dearly longed for, but rarely found.
Follow Caroline on Instagram: @tendrils_lilee
The Garden Museum Horticultural Traineeship is generously funded by The National Gardens Scheme.