Both gardeners to the rose and lily Queen Transported now themselves, sleep here, and when Angels shall with their trumpets waken men And fire shall purge the world, these hence shall rise And change this garden for a Paradise.
It is this connection that provides the raison d’être for the Garden Museum. In its well-stocked shop, visitors can buy an excellent account of the founding of the museum, compiled and written by Elizabeth Fleming, one of the team of volunteers, who in the 1970s helped to save the church from demolition, and who, after restoring and making the fabric of the building watertight, then created the delightful seventeenth-century century-style knot garden, filled with authentic plants of the period. An interested gardener myself, I was fortunate in being able to meet the author during a visit to the museum. In recent times, the building , which stands on the site where a church has stood for over 900 years, had become derelict and was threatened with demolition. Although the main body of the church had been extensively rebuilt in the nineteenth century, the original tower still stands and dates back to the fourteenth century.
The Museum’s first purchase was the 1656 catalogue of the Musaeum Tradescantianum. A new structure provides an upper floor to the church and serves to house the collection of memorabilia and gardening tools, assembled from gifts and acquisitions. These wonderfully sturdy objects include some that must have been the creation of imaginative gardeners themselves – like the picturesque, if somewhat cumbersome combined trowel and rake, or the ‘daisygrubber’. The Elizabethan thumb pot apparently worked by suction, while the eighteenth-century Dibbler is not unlike those of today, and the chunky seventeenth-century watering pot was made of glazed earthenware. It is suggested the origin of the word ‘rose’ on a watering can may have originated from the French arroser, to water.
Among the twentieth-century inventions are a ‘sweet pea counter’ and the ‘bulb measurer’. I was intrigued and touched to read the neat writing on display in the gardener’s diary kept by horticultural student Doris Palmer during the First World War, and wondered, as one does, what became of her.
In the adjacent small education room I admired a delightful array of toy boats on show, imaginatively created by local schoolchildren, in homage, I imagine, to the great river that flows past the Garden Museum. The current exhibition, mostly photographs, is devoted to the late Derek Jarman’s shingle garden, which he famously created in the shadow of the Dungeness Power Station (another unique garden that I love and have visited often in the past.) The Garden Museum receives no money from the Government, and is dependent on donations from the public, and on money raised from events such as plant sales and from the cafe, which sells the most delicious carrot cake I have ever tasted – helpings there are generous, as befits the appetite of hungry gardeners.
Seeking God in a Garden Following Sofia 99 on Trees, Cicely Herbert visited the Garden Museum next door to Lambeth Palace.