Rosemary Verey, legendary gardner, dies at 82
- Subject: Rosemary Verey, legendary gardner, dies at 82
- From: e*
- Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 13:14:50 -0700
This Hade been cut and pasted from the New York Times
Rosemary Verey, Legendary English Gardener Who Tutored America, Dies at 82
By ANNE RAVER
Rosemary Verey, the tough, artistic English gardener who brought the
art of
clipped boxwoods, laburnum walks and ornamental vegetable gardening to
America, died in Chelsea Memorial Hospital in London on May 31. She was 82.
"She was a marvelous lecturer and she knew so much," said Gregory Long, the
president of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. He first heard her
speak about her famous garden at Barnsley House, a 17th-century rectory in
the Cotswolds of England, about 20 years ago at the Horticultural Alliance
of the Hamptons.
The four-acre garden was her working laboratory, where she domesticated
elements from legendary gardens, like the yellow-flowering laburnum arch at
the National Trust's Bodnant Garden, in North Wales, or the ornamental
potager, or vegetable garden, at the Chateau de Villandry, in the Loire
Valley in France, and made them seem possible for the home gardener.
Mr. Long remembers staring longingly at the slides of the neo-Classical
temple that Mrs. Verey's husband, David Verey, an architectural historian,
had dismantled in an English park and rebuilt himself, stone by stone.
"It was a really good lesson in garden-building," Mr. Long said. "None of
this redwood pergola stuff from catalogues."
Years later, when he became the president of the New York Botanical Garden,
he would ask her to design an ornamental vegetable garden for the Bronx,
complete with cold frames for extending the seasons and herbs that are used
by gardeners from other cultures. She was working on the design with the
sculptor Simon Verity the week that she died of pneumonia, possibly
contracted while flying to Cincinnati and on to Kentucky to work on gardens
there.
She was mentor to many American garden leaders like Marco Polo Stufano, who
transformed Wave Hill, the public garden in the Riverdale section of the
Bronx; Robert Dash, the painter who created the Madoo Conservancy, on the
East End of Long Island, and Mr. Long.
Ms. Verey wrote more than a dozen garden books including "The Classic
Garden" and "The Garden in Winter," which were seminal works for Americans
interested in design and sophisticated use of plants, with color and texture
year-round.
In her later years, she designed gardens for British celebrities like Prince
Charles and Elton John. But her favorite people were gardeners. She often
gave them cuttings and seeds from plants she herself had clipped or gathered
from such legendary gardens as Gethsemane, outside the city of
Jerusalem, or
Monet's garden at Giverny.
For more than 20 years she redesigned the grounds around Barnsley House,
which is near Cirencester, in Gloucestershire, first with her laburnum arch,
which dangles chains of gold flowers over purple alliums in May. Her husband
laid the path beneath, a mosaic of colorful stone and pebbles collected from
the Pembrokeshire beaches.
"She had an impeccable eye for color, an ability to embroider gold against
purple," said Mr. Dash, whose gardens at Madoo, in Sagaponack, N.Y., are
widely considered an American work of art. "She took that grim forbidding
aristocratic face off English gardening, and with her charm and her
writings, gave it a friendly, domesticated face."
Mr. Dash and Ms. Verey would occasionally lecture together, playfully
arguing over whose garden was more original and just who stole from whom.
Did Ms. Verey really swipe her famous laburnum arch from Bodnant?
"Of course!" Mr. Dash said, laughing. "But my laburnum arch bears no
resemblance to hers. It's a question of following your own light."
She studied mathematics and economics at University College in London, but
left before earning her degree to marry Mr. Verey in 1939, and proceeded to
raise four children, like a proper English gentlewoman of her day. She was
an accomplished horsewoman, until she fell in a hunting accident.
"A horse rolled over on her," Mr. Dash said. "So her husband gave her a book
on mandrakes that piqued her interest." And a temple just to get her
started.
A scholar and perfectionist, she began to read widely, collecting rare first
editions usually seen only in the British Museum or the Royal Horticultural
Society's Lindley Library. Her redesign project began in 1950, and the
grounds opened to the public in 1970. By the time her husband died in 1984,
she had started a new career, and a garden that would eventually attract
30,000 visitors a year.
She lectured widely in the United States, where she made five or six
trips a
year to cities like New York, Seattle, Atlanta or Chicago, or to Indiana and
Kentucky. "Flower shows in winter and the garden clubs in spring and
summer," Mr. Long said. "We began to see a lot of laburnum arches in the
Hamptons."
She took many young gardeners under her wing, drilling them in the Latin
names of plants, and shooing them off for the day to plunge into the great
gardens of England.
"She would get very cross with us if we didn't speak to the head gardener,"
recalled Mr. Stufano, who with his companion, John Nally, spent many
days in
the gardens at Barnsley. "Her garden was a very personal garden. She was
always trying new things. It had the feeling of someone who loved plants and
she was out in it constantly. She was a wonderful cook and one of my fond
memories is being sent out to the garden for a few marrows, or zucchinis,
for dinner."
Long before Mr. Long became president of the New York Botanical Garden, he
made a gardener's pilgrimage to Barnsley, to learn some secrets for his
place upstate. He had been happily wandering about in the rain, poking about
as gardeners do, when he saw her looking out the window.
"She was so imposing in those days, I was a bit intimidated by her," he
said. "I almost wished that she not come out. She showed me Phlomis
fruticosa, which is a silver- leafed thing with yellow flowers in the fall.
I tried to grow it at home and couldn't."
Then she locked the gate and invited him in for drinks. Years later, at his
own garden upstate, she sat on his compost pile and showed him how to dry
the bulbs he had carelessly thrown away. They bloomed the next year.
Her influence was not restricted to naïve Americans. David Wheeler, the
editor of Hortus, a garden quarterly in England, who has built, with the
artist Simon Dorell, a garden on the edge of Wales, was also nurtured by Ms.
Verey, who opened up her library, garden and larder to him.
She was a great networker, or Miss Fix-It, as Mr. Wheeler put it. When he
admitted that he would like to meet Prince Charles, she simply rang him up.
"Be here at 5," she said." "We're expected at Highgrove at 6."
Her vegetable garden, a tapestry of ever-changing cabbages, lettuces,
strawberries, hop vines and espaliered fruit trees, "has become a cliché
copied around the world," Mr. Wheeler said. "But she made us look at growing
vegetables in these times of peace and well-being. We were no longer digging
for victory and growing rows of vegetables. We could do this decoratively."
She also reinvented the formal garden, he said, with little parterres of
clipped boxwood. "Those had been part of the English garden since
Elizabethan times," he said, "but it had all but washed away with modernism
and the 20th century."
In 1999, Ms. Verey received a special award from the Massachusetts
Horticultural Society for her work with English gardens, and the same year,
was given the Royal Horticultural Society's most distinguished award, the
Victoria Medal of Honor.
She leaves two sons and two daughters. Over the last two years, her son
Charles has overseen the gardens, which are still open to the public. "But
the eye is gone," Mr. Dash said. "The artist is gone."
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