Digging up past of our gardens

For Henry Scurrah Wainwright, happiness was delphinium-shaped. Michael Hickling and David Overend report on landmarks in Yorkshire's gardening story.

If you want to discover a forgotten local hero, Henry Scurrah Wainwright might be your man. He was not without honour in his time – he was awarded the OBE and was partly fictionalised in a novel by Yorkshire writer Lettice Cooper, a relation of today's better-known Jilly.

But Scurrah's glory lay in his gardens and one flower in particular gave him a national reputation. Delphiniums are his permanent memorial.

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Scurrah came from an upwardly mobile family in the butchering business who made it into the ranks of the Leeds professional class. He was able to purchase a house in leafy suburbia but he did not buy into those two aspects which characterise it, namely privacy and privet. Instead, Scurrah cultivated a notion of openness, the idea of the private garden as a hedge-free zone which anyone could view and enjoy.

A practical man in all things, the canny Scurrah also saw in this a potential business opportunity. He stuck up a sign outside his house saying: "Why opt for privet hedges, so time-consuming and dull, especially when duplicated in house after house. Try something like this instead, to make your neighbourhood, as well as your own home, more attractive! Enquire within."

Scurrah's alternative boundary was a rockery, tiered back from the pavement, with no barrier apart from the rocks. It's not recorded what the neighbours thought of the idea.

In later life, Scurrah expanded on his philosophy in a letter to the Yorkshire Evening Post, in February 1927, where he identified gardens as a powerful force for social good in a neighbourhood. Properly managed gardens, in this suburban utopia, would generate a spirit of benign competitiveness.

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"There are districts in the Leeds suburbs where the morning and evening walk to and from the tram is made full of interest and pleasure by a succession of open gardens with differing colour schemes and well-cultivated flowers," he wrote.

"The owners of these gardens emulate, and vie with one another, discuss and exchange until the whole neighbourhood becomes 'garden proud'. Some of the Englishman's reserve is thereby broken down and new general interest created. Compare this with the dreary avenues of unbroken privet hedges, hiding comparatively barren gardens, which one walks through in other parts of Leeds."

Leeds was a polluted place in those days. Scurrah's father, Richard, had spotted the commercial possibilities that might follow from ameliorating the effects of the unhealthy air on the citizens. He invented a gadget which from this newspaper earned him the title of "Leeds smoke king".

His son, Scurrah, was trained as a chartered accountant. But he had his fingers in a number of pies – financial director of a medical supplies company and directorships in other thriving businesses. He would take his son, also Richard, to hear Communists speak at street corners, but his own thinking was rooted in Liberalism, Methodism and gardens. Especially delphiniums.

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Perhaps that flower appealed because apart from the aesthetic satisfaction of growing them (the name derives from the Greek for dolphin) they also historically had workaday medicinal uses which could be profitable.

This was a time of major slum clearances and the hope of transforming the lives of the poor by shipping them wholesale out of the congested squalor of Quarry Hill and elsewhere and on to garden estates. Scurrah's social conscience drove him to devise useful schemes that might make their lives better. He promoted a best council house garden competition and he chaired Leeds Flower Show for nearly 30 years up to 1959.

The delphiniums we see around today, towering out of herbaceous borders, were the hybrid creation of a French nurseryman in 1850. Scurrah fell in love with them and with one seductive cultivar in particular, Millicent Blackmore. Magnificent Millie got an appropriate setting to showcase her beauty at a large Victorian villa called The Heath, in Adel, the poshest part of Leeds. Scurrah bought it in 1936 as a wilderness of weeds, and devised a long-term strategy to transform the grounds, with delphiniums in the vanguard.

When a new northern delphinium association was formed, he was on the committee. He upped his profile when a national delphinium society came into being and he became deputy chairman, mixing with the likes of Vita Sackville-West. He also set up regular delphinium exchanges with Temple Newsam, that Hampton Court of the North, on the edge of Leeds, owned by the council and where the gardens were landscaped by Capability Brown.

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Such expenditure of energy was impressive because Scurrah's health was not good. Delphiniums were the agency that restored it.

Scurrah summed it all up in a speech to fellow chartered accountants. "Mother Earth, my companion recreation, my garden where one forgets balance sheets and after-dinner speeches. A place whose dividend warrants are things of beauty, with nothing about them of the Proper Office for the Receipt of Taxes and with a Reserve Fund built up by last year's sunshine, showers and fresh air."

Before long, national experts were treading a path to The Heath and declaring what they found there to be one of the loveliest gardens in the north of England. Delphiniums grew in such profusion, it was almost like a maze. They were gorgeous, glorious, gigantic, unforgettable and Scurrah made sure others enjoyed them by opening The Heath to the public for 60 years in aid of the National Gardens Scheme.

In 1957, an exceptionally warm early summer threatened to wreck the delphinium display of the summer show of the Royal Horticultural Society in London. The Wainwrights sent down their best from Leeds by train to help them out.

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Geoffrey Smith, of Harlow Carr and the BBC, used the borders at The Heath to illustrate his 1984 TV series, The World

of Flowers.

Temple Newsam, home of the national delphinium collection, in 1986 received 61 of Scurrah's cultivars. He died in 1968, his garden survived until 2007. His grandson, Martin Wainwright, the northern editor of The Guardian, has written a sparkling account of this man

of many facets, all of which reflected to his credit.

It's part of a book published by the Yorkshire Gardens Trust called With abundance and variety: Yorkshire Gardens and Gardeners across Five Centuries which moves from public park to private plot to palace. It contains inspiring stories of creative gardening, along with passion for plants and horticulture in general, plus politics and immense creativity.

In the foreword, the Earl of Harewood, the trust's president, says: "Gardens remain a major source of pleasure, and I am always sorry for people who don't appreciate them." Sadly we cannot enjoy some of the gardens that feature in the book. They are now no more than faint lines on the landscape.

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Dr George Sheeran of Bradford University chronicles the rise and fall of the Turner family and the creation of their magnificent "garden" at Kirkleatham, near Middlesbrough. There are drawings and maps to prove it existed; there are the remains of buildings; there are tantalising glimpses of a landscape moulded by man. But the real glories have vanished with the unstoppable march of time and progress.

While the garden at Kirkleatham may be long gone, the equally historic one at Wentworth Castle, in South Yorkshire, is thriving. Dr Patrick Eyres delves deep to uncover a story that would befit a thriller. Politics, intrigue and religious dissent are not the normal ingredients for a great garden, but at Wentworth Castle they are. Turn over the pages to discover shades of family rivalry and Jacobite sympathisers.

And although that was more than 200 years ago, Wentworth Castle Gardens (and Stainborough Park) still flourish as the only Grade I Listed landscape in South Yorkshire.

Millions of pounds have been spent on restoring the estate and repairing buildings and monuments, and the majestic Stainborough Castle, built by Thomas Wentworth in 1730, has been consolidated as a romantic folly.

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There are more than 500 acres of historic parkland open to the public, and with Dr Eyres' words to guide, this is a landscape where it's possible, with a little imagination, to see the man behind the grand plan and whose creation still stands as his monument.

Karen Lynch chronicles the history of Plumpton Rocks, a man-made lake and surrounding pleasure gardens designed by Daniel Lascelles against a backdrop of towering rocks eroded by the wind. The lake was extended by a dam built by John Carr, architect of the hall, and the artist JMW Turner was commissioned by Edward Lascelles, 1st Earl of Harewood to produce two paintings of the lake and rocks. These now hang at Harewood House.

Susan Kellerman takes a fascinating look at bath houses in Yorkshire garden and parks, 1688-1815. I have to admit, I had never heard of such a thing, but now I want one at the bottom of my garden, too. A bath house was usually a room with a sunken stone- or brick-lined cistern or tank, filled with cold water from a spring or well, with an attached dressing room with fireplace. It's the perfect plunge pool for the hardy, a wonderful one-upmanship in garden buildings. And although most seem to have vanished, a restored one remains standing proudly at Wetherby, overlooking the River Wharfe.

Landscape architect Dr Fiona Stirling provides another highlight with case studies of two cemeteries in Sheffield. What better monument could there be to man's use of the landscape than those at Burngreave and Crookes? Cemeteries are high maintenance. In the 19th century, this was no problem because labour was cheap and plentiful, in the 21st century, the picture is no so bright.

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Many cemeteries are overgrown, almost forgotten, others have continued to offer a landscape design with a difference. They served a purpose; some still do. They offer peace and tranquillity, act as nature reserves, contain works of art in marble and stone, and are reminders of the mortality of mankind.

A cemetery as a garden? Read the book and perhaps you'll see the possibility.

With abundance and variety: Yorkshire Gardens and Gardeners across Five Centuries, ISBN 978 0 95664347 0 8. Email: publications@yorkshire gardenstrust.org.uk; visit www.yorkshiregardenstrust.org.uk

YP MAG 5/6/10

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