The Haphazard Gardener

Less well known is the tale of how he and his wife Grace, known as Gay, transformed a “six-acre piece of scrubland full of brambles, willow scrub and long grass that had not been cultivated for over fifty years” into a remarkable Sussex garden.

Their daughter Penelope Hellyer has written a memoir entitled The Haphazard Gardener, a sentimental journey through the story of Orchards at Rowfant, near Crawley. It traces the garden’s unpromising beginnings and development by her parents, her childhood spent in the garden and her restoration of it after her parents’ deaths.

She is the eponymous “haphazard gardener”, the inheritor of a garden with which she “was in love” but which ultimately she would be forced to give up.

“To take on the garden of such a professional amateur should have been a daunting task,” Penelope writes. “But for me, it was a pleasure.

"The house and garden at Orchards was my home for 57 years, and the most rewarding period of my life was when my ambition to open my own specialist nursery was fulfilled and the garden of the great Arthur Hellyer became accessible to the general public.”

Arthur Hellyer and his wife Gay, who taught zoology, botany and biology at schools including East Grinstead Grammar School, bought the land at Rowfant in 1933 when he was already an established gardening writer as the author of The Alphabet Of Gardening book and simultaneously working at Amateur Gardening magazine, which he would go on to edit for more than 20 years.

Early in their marriage Arthur and Gay lived in Merton Park, but were searching Sussex for a plot to garden and build a weekend shack on when they found Orchards.

“Gay, the botanist, fell in love with it,” writes Penelope. “Arthur... said, ‘If you think I am making a garden here, you’ve got another thing coming.”

Despite his misgivings, they had a well sunk and over the next few years began building a house to Gay’s design of a Canadian barn, which was completed just before the Second World War.

In 1939 the Hellyers moved in and ran Orchards as a market garden, planting apple, pear, plum and cherry orchards.

They also cultivated large fruit gardens of red, black and white currants, black and white gooseberry bushes, raspberry and strawberry beds, a small grove of nut bushes and a large vegetable garden.

Many ornamental trees and shrubs were planted too, Penelope reveals after discovering a Garden Record book among old papers. Roses were planted in 1938 and the orchards in 1939.

After the war, by now in their mid 40s, the Hellyers adopted two baby boys who they named Edward and Peter. Then in 1949 they fostered Penelope.

As they were making plans to adopt her in the early 1950s, they steadily added trees, shrubs and roses to Orhards, introducing rhododendrons in the spring and autumn of 1952 and more in 1958 and 1971.

A “huge number of camellias” were planted in a top corner in 1953, and 36 unidentified azaleas were bought in 1955.

“I believe they were probably Azalea mollis,” writes Penelope, “with yellow or orange flowers that filled the woodlands with heady scent. Hundreds more shrubs, roses and climbers were introduced by them both over the years.”

Penelope describes an “idyllic” childhood, the three children free to roam as far as they liked.

Mother's encouragement

“The garden at Orchards was a wilderness you could lose yourself in,” she writes.

Used as a training ground for Gay’s students and as a photographic backdrop for Arthur’s books and articles for publications such as Country Life magazine, the garden inspired Penelope’s own interest in horticulture.

“Gay had been my driving force; always the educator, keen to share her knowledge,” she writes. “I felt certain that my appreciation of plants was down to Gay, not Arthur.

"He was always so busy working the garden, writing about it, editing, travelling, lecturing and judging.”

When Penelope married she and her husband moved into a service bungalow in the grounds of Orchards where she created her own garden.

Her parents encouraged her by giving her her own greenhouse for her 24th birthday.

“Maybe they were tired of me taking over theirs,” she writes. “Although I already grew vegetables, at this stage my outlook was lazy and haphazard.”

Following her mother’s death in 1977, Penelope swapped houses with Arthur and the garden oscillated from periods of neglect and revival.

Penelope’s “huge campaign of restoration” when she first moved into the main house was sadly wasted when her marriage began to break down and the greenhouse became her refuge instead.

In despair she put the house on the market, only to quickly withdraw it again.

The decision proved wise, as the following year she met her second husband, Philip, and inspired by family friend Rosemary Verey, the late garden designer and writer, they made the garden their “labour of love” together.

Early changes earned the approval of Arthur, but when he died in 1993, caring for the garden “became a way of life”. Walls were rebuilt, borders and plants moved, and new features, trees and plants introduced. While the garden was still a work in progress, Penelope and Philip opened it to the public.

“We wanted to share our patch of heaven with anyone who wanted to come and see it,” writes Penelope.

“And they came in their hundreds, so many glad to be able to see where Arthur had written his books and drawn his inspiration.”

Ill health forced Penelope and Philip to sell Orchards in 2004 and retire to Italy, where they have created a new garden with roses, climbers and shrubs from Orchards.

“I still love it and miss it, but I no longer ache for it,” she says.

“I could still tell you where particular trees and shrubs were in the garden, how it must look in certain seasons. But my overall sadness at leaving it was tempered with relief. I feel at peace with my decision.”