I awoke to ‘Narnia’ on the day of my visit to Penny and Graham at the imposing Victorian school which has been Penny’s home since 1989. I had hopes of taking some wonderful winter wonderland photographs to illustrate this article, with foliage draped in icing sugar, sparkling in the sunlight, but sadly by the time I arrived to meet this delightful couple, the fairytale snow scene had deteriorated into something shabby, opaque and very wet. Perhaps before I complete this Tale from the Potting Shed, winter will come again.
When Penny arrived in Cleobury Mortimer, she was working full time at a West Midlands school as a Music Teacher. She had friends who lived in Stourbridge and Kidderminster, and her Head Teacher lived on Clee Hill, so she was aware of our hamlet. So why Cleobury Mortimer? As usual, it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the deeper truth is that she had found and fallen in love with THE OLD INFANT SCHOOL.
Penny had hoped to find a property which offered an opportunity for private music tuition, and this house provides it IN SPADES. The whole top floor is a magnificent space of fine, narrow strip wood floor and two bays of mahogany, raised cruck truss arch bays supporting the classic Victorian school roof, with ecclesiastical windows to the floor, looking out onto rear and front elevations. The innate grandeur of the room must have brought out the best in pupils practising there.
Before I begin on the main point of this article – the garden – I think it is worth giving you some more information on the history and development of the Old Infant School. The school was built in 1892, one of three buildings on the one plot, with the playground in front and to the side. In the 1970s the whole was divided into three lots and offered for sale; a new house was built on one plot and the detached Old Infant School was purchased by a Mr Wells who very imaginatively converted the single storey school into the two storey house we see now, installing a new, wide twisting staircase behind a very imposing original oak entrance door which probably struck fear into the hearts of the infants joining the school for the first time.
Penny retired in 2018, just in time for COVID, the event which put so many peoples’ lives on hold, but it is an ill wind which blows nobody any good, and retirement and enforced semi-isolation provided the impetus for the garden to present itself centre-stage, and produced the germ of an idea to create a Victorian garden to match the Victorian heritage of the building.
Whilst COVID was an opportunity to sit in the garden, it also brought into sharp focus the state of the garden and Penny freely admits nothing much had been done at this time. Following the Wells’ completion of the house, the garden had been planted for low maintenance – bushes, shrubs, conifers, and a nut tree, all of which grow very well and happily if left alone, but not always in the right shape and place. She had kept it tidy, with neighbours providing plants when available, but Penny thinks this was an attempt to persuade her to do something with the ‘mess’ (Penny’s term!).
But where to start? A project of this size – one which required removing walls, cutting down trees, digging up major roots – needs a set of decisions, the first being which one WAS the first. Personally, I have found that sometimes that first decision is the most difficult to identify, and when identified, is too big to contemplate. So, do we carry on? Of course, we do and so did Penny and Graham, now on the scene.
It was late 1980 when Penny made one of her first forays into the undergrowth and came across a pond, there either by intent or opportunity is not known; what was known was that it was home to a colony of newts, species unidentified. Newts had no part in Penny’s plans for a Victorian makeover and a new home was found for them by contacting the previous owner, who took them away.
Another pre-Graham event was the planting in 1992 of two wisterias in commemoration of the centenary of the buildings. Readers who know this house will be aware of the wonderful show they give across the front aspect. They were in desperate need of attention when Graham joined Penny in 2000 and he set about installing straining wires and training the growth horizontally and upwards. Now, when the wisterias are in bloom, they are a magnificent show. How does Graham deal with the tall growth? With great difficulty I reckon.
I need at this point to give you details of the layout of the garden. This is a large rectangular plot all at the front of the house, level, which is surprising as the roadside boundary, farthest from the house is a stone retaining wall rising some 8 feet to be level with the garden itself. The land here formed the old playground, so had to be level. The garden is open to sun and the elements on three sides, east, west and south.
And so, to the Master Plan. Was the plan so ‘masterly’ at this stage, probably not! Both Penny and Graham claim not to be gardeners, but you should see what these non-gardeners have accomplished! I think it makes sense to describe the various stages and accomplishments in date order. Graham was on the scene and available and very willing to add his brawn to Penny’s dreams when it now came to wall-building, hard landscaping and major earthmoving.
2015 – The conifers lining the drive incline were cut down. The inner wall lining the outer stone boundary was removed to clear the embedded tree roots between the two structures. All the evergreens, bushes and shrubs were dug out. Trellis was removed, the weed-infested grass of the lawn was removed and the hard baked clay substructure dug out. All the grass forming the deep borders was removed. A central path was constructed from the house to the end of the garden dividing the lawned area in the middle.
Suddenly there appeared a much bigger garden than first imagined. At the roadside end the gravelled area was levelled and a pergola and terrace created for warm summer evening sitting, greeting neighbours and passers-by. A flower bed was created here, and in keeping with the house’s Victorian heritage, old edging was purchased to surround the beds, and to add stature to the path to the house, several tall Victorian chimney pots were also acquired
Graham owns up to the fact that he does not do a lot! But believes his responsibility lies with maintaining the lawn, which has now been dug up and re-laid once and scarified by hand twice – no machines for them! And looking after the wisterias. And all the heavy work. You get the picture!
Penny and Graham then saw a period of calm over a few years when new flower beds were created, and planted, and changed, with the addition of a vegetable patch, a few climbers up the pergola. But having agreed to open for the Cleobury Mortimer Open Gardens in aid of church funds, the commitment to this charitable enterprise causes you to look again at your previously perfect garden and begin to see all the parts where attention is needed to be ready for the big day. Having opened my garden for this event in the recent past, I have experience of just how much pressure is placed on you, but only by yourself.
If part of Penny’s plan was to create a space in keeping with the Victorian heritage of The Old Infant School, then I think she has succeeded. She now has an open, sunny vista; a calm, tidy, quiet space. For the future Penny mentioned a box hedge in keeping with the Victorian heritage, maybe forming a ‘parterre’. (That last idea is all mine). My final entry involves Penny’s decision to become a plot holder by taking a tenancy agreement on an allotment, managed by Cleobury Gardeners. It is therefore evident that all the ideas, planning and hard work in the garden so far has in fact sown bigger seeds – if you will forgive the pun.
Going back to my initial paragraph, there has not been any more snow, so no ‘Narnia’, but spring seems to have come early with hellebores, primulas, roses blooming, the quince in flower, and green shoots on so many plants. More ammunition for the Potting Shed.
LASHMAN/CG/12/24
