Rosemary Verey's English Country Gardens

by Rosemary Verey

An author of The Art of Planting presents tips on keeping a garden colorful throughout the year, using as examples some famous English gardens, including Powis Castle, Highgrove House, and her own garden at Barnsley House. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Gardening

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 10, 1996

About the author

Rosemary Verey, OBE, VMH was an internationally known English garden designer, lecturer and prolific garden writer who designed the famous garden at Barnsley House, near Cirencester.

She was born Rosemary Isabel Baird Sandilands and educated at Eversley School, Folkestone, and University College, London. In 1939 she married David Verey, whose family owned Barnsley House.

Verey's most famous garden design was that of her own house, Barnsley House near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. In 1970 she opened the garden for one day to the public for the National Gardens Scheme but eventually it was open 6 days per week to accommodate the 30,000 annual visitors. In 1984 when her husband David died, Rosemary began designing gardens for American and British clients. Most notable are HRH the Prince of Wales, Elton John, Princess Michael of Kent, the Marquess of Bute and the New York Botanical Garden.

Rosemary Verey was well known for taking imposing elements from large public gardens and bringing them into scale for the home gardeners use. Her laburnum walk, which has been photographed many times, is an example of this technique. The National Trust's Bodnant Garden in North Wales has a very large laburnum walk that inspired Verey to plant a similar, smaller scale laburnum walk at Barnsley House. Verey is also noted for making vegetable (ornamental potager) gardens fashionable once again. The potager at Barnsley House was inspired by that at Villandry, on the Loire in France.

She was awarded the OBE in 1996 and in 1999 from the Royal Horticultural Society the highest accolade that Society can award, the Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH).

Reviews

[Felicity Fields · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recently learned of Rosemary Verey and was excited to read her work. This book taught me 2 things: there's a lot of structure, planning, and work to acheive a noteworthy English country garden (which I like walking through), and I would never want to manage or create one. :)

I liked the history of how the gardens evolved under previous and current owners. I can't say the book made me want to visit these gardens, but it made for relaxing reading before bed.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lovely, coffee-table book. I took notes on flowers I may want to plant in my gardens in the future. I read a lot of the the text, but not ALL of it, as it was a library copy and there is a lot of material here. What I didn't enjoy about the book so much is that in that there are actually fewer pictures than I would like. In the text she talks about wandering through a particular garden and seeing thus and such and coming around then corner and then you see "this picture." Before she arrived at "this picture," though, she'd talk about seeing things that weren't actually pictured which is fine, I suppose, if you are a master gardener and can picture what she is talking about in your mind, but I am not and I couldn't. The other drawback the book had for me was my own misconception of what would be in this book (I ordered it sight-unseen as an inter-library loan)and what it actually contains. Because of the title, I'd imagined it would be about English cottage gardens, which it most certainly is not - and it doesn't really say that in the title anyway. But, be advised, that the gardens featured are large, estate gardens (Elton John's is one that is featured)that are tended by professional gardening staff. There is little for me, personally, to aspire to in these pages other than, as I mentioned, noting a few flowers I might like to add to my own garden and a few I might like to learn more about. But I'd imagined smaller, home gardens with ideas that I might be able to incorporate and these gardens, with their acres of landscaping - more like our own, Minnesota Arboretum than a common home-garden - are places I may visit one day but nothing I could replicate. If you like to visit formal gardens on your travels, this might very well whet your appetite for some of England's finest.

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is divided into the four seasons. Each season features predominately the same homes, thereby giving the reader a chance to see the same garden with different things in bloom. This is the beauty of this book. Rosemary Verey's inside stories of the places and compRision to other gardens is also a bonus. The color photos are excellent.