Our dear friend, Sarah, asked if I would do a blog post for Sage. Since I have gardened in the USA and in the UK, she felt that having a foot in these two worlds would be interesting. Some of you may remember me, and I have gone on a couple of Sage trips as well. Since it is a quiet time in the gardening season you might enjoy this rather 'wordy' missive. There are labeled photos at the end. So here we go!
With huge excitement, we arrived in Amberley in October 1991. We came for Jim's work which was mostly in Europe, but based in Crawley. We had visited England as tourists several times. We were unprepared (in a good way) for what we fell into that October. After looking at a large number of rental properties we settled in Vine House in Amberley. Our lives would be changed forever, and better than we could have imagined.
Living next to Pam and Geoffrey Ffoulkes Roberts was a large part of our introduction to Sussex and areas further afield. What we learned from them as 'tour guides', gardeners, and cultural educators is immeasurable. Geoffrey showed us the tiny lanes and locations of special pubs which were a huge part of our fun times together. I drove and they enjoyed sightseeing and pointing things out. I learned every back road, and most footpaths thanks to Geoff. His local knowledge and good cheer were boundless. They have been family to us ever since. We miss him so.
We had lived in Connecticut prior to the move. There I enjoyed gardening as a novice and on a small scale. In New England, unless you live in a town, the forest is forever trying to take back the open land . It is a constant battle with weeds and wilderness. Obviously living in Amberley was a total surprise.
I soon realized that Amberley was a village of very keen, passionate and knowledgeable gardeners, who had been gardening for their whole lives. Vine House still has a very large and well stocked beautiful garden thanks to the Townsends, who bought it after we left in 1993. Our rental for for Vine House came with several hours a week of a lovely, old fashioned gardener, Bert Viney. He knew how to tend every plant and vegetable with old time skills and patience. He taught me a great deal, but he rarely knew the names of many of the more interesting plants! The Latin names were quite a surprise for me, almost no one in the USA knows any of the proper names for their plants. I know more now, but it was a job.
Pam was a gardening mentor as you can all well imagine. She taught me so much about English life, as well, I can never begin to thank her. The laughter was a huge part of that. Jim and I mispronounced words, and needed much coaching on village life and general Englishness. We still laugh today about those times, and how "foreign" we must of sounded and how "American" we must have acted. My parents loved England, and on their visits they became Pam and Geoff's great friends. We shared several holidays on both sides of the Atlantic with Pam and Geoff. Sarah and Mike have been to visit New England many times and we have had great trips together.
We were at Vine House for two years, then a year in Horsham, and then back to Amberley at Rock Cottage for a year. We spent two years in Singapore, upon our return from Asia, we bought a small village house in Arundel in 1996 and retired there. We were incredibly happy! We had a small flint walled garden that we loved. That is where I learned to do more typical English gardening in a small space. The most important lesson was pack the plants in snd feed them! I miss those 16 years we spent in our own small English home.
The hand of man has tamed England for eons . It is a gardeners' Eden. The soil is rich and not rocky in the south. Large gardens are not that common. Walls keep weeds and wildlife at bay. But most important of all is the climate; long growing season, temperate, damp, with few extremes. How I miss that! Sleeping with a window open most of the year... with no screens!... was a revelation. The fields and lawns are green all the year round! To me it was gardening heaven. I had a lot to learn, but loved every bit of it.
We returned to America to live in Maine, which is one of the most northerly states in America, in 2012.
Most of our family is in northern New England. That was a reverse shock!! We bought a 170 year old ship captain's house in a small town. We have an acre of land with 20 ft border of trees, brush piles and wildness edging the back area of lawn. It makes for good bird habitat with many squirrels, and the odd skunk and woodchuck! Much of our land is either too wet in spring or too rocky. We have blueberries, blackberries and two raised beds for veg and some cutting flowers. There are several gigantic white pines and a huge four trunked white birch trees in our lawn area near the house. They give much needed shade in the summer. The hammock and Adirondack chairs are well used! The sugar maple tree in our garden looks wonderful in the fall.
Maine is 70% of the size of England with only 2.5% of the population. It is in the northeast corner of the US. Most Mainers live within 40 miles of the coast. We live in Richmond, on Pleasant St... and it is that! The rest of the state is largely wilderness of forests with many lakes and mighty rivers. Lupins thrive in the meadows.
Much original forest was a source for the King's Navy in the 17th and 18th centuries. The coastline is rocky and very rugged, but beautiful. My family has had a 'camp' or summer cottage on an island off the coast for 100 years. Pam, Geoff, Sarah and Mike have all been there.
When in England I learned more about plant varieties like clematis. We have many in our garden. I also found nicotiana sylvestris and Alata which do very well here and bloom all summer.
Sarah gave me a Pritchard's Blue campanula which thrived in our Arundel garden. In Maine, I had to do some serious work finding a source for the Pritchards. We now have several and they are wonderful. The tall salvias and verbenas in rich blue and purple are also fantastic and bloom until frost. Sadly, they do not winter over so new plants need to be bought each spring. These two plants are favorites of hummingbirds.
Red cardinal birds are seen through the eastern United States
Cleomes are another true winner here. They get to be very tall and bloom all summer. These particular tall plants work very well in our two flower borders. They run along the white picket fence that surrounds much of our property. It is certainly not the same as those Sussex flint walls! We have two Canadian hardy roses, but roses can be a struggle here. After seeing Pam and Sarah's voluptuous roses for so many years, I really can't see investing in more here! We have a good base of various perennials, and lots of bulbs. One joy when we moved here was finding 6 well established pink Sarah Bernhardt peonies. They produce about 100 large blooms each June. We also have 5 or 6 ancient enormous lilacs. That was about all that was here.
So here we are, trying to garden with a very tough climate. Hot short summers, bitter cold and snowy winters when the ground is frozen more than a meter and a half down. This morning it was -17 C. The temperatures can fall to -30 C once or twice each winter. Autumn is lovely but by late October the leaves are gone, the frosts have long killed anything above ground. Winter snow is a factor, but it is good for the gardens as insulation against thawing and freezing, and adds moisture for spring. We get 85-100 inches of snow a year, with an average of 6 to 12 inches on the ground from December to mid April. And spring! .... it is fleeting, appearing in mid April, and turning to summer in May.
The tiny black flies come out for several weeks tormenting us. We call them the State Bird of Maine! Then the mosquitoes descend. In a sense, we have an Alpine climate. Plants burst forth late spring, bloom then set seed for the next season. It all seems to fly by, especially now that we are older.
The summer mean lots of watering, feeding and weeding. Temperatures are usually above 26 C most days, and we usually have a two week or so run of temperatures above 32 C. every summer. The more hot and humid the weather the better crop of weeds. The other 'fun' thing is the number of rocks! You dig down 6” and there is one in each shovelful of dirt that is the size of a cricket ball... then another... and so on. The melting glaciers left us a large crop! But it makes for good exercise and many New England dry stone walls!
In a typical Maine gardening season many of us lose perennials in winter due to the harsh weather. In 2015 we had such a huge amount of snow that a bucket loader came to get it off the driveway and up next to the barn. However the fellow also scooped up much of my perennial border along with the snow and deposited it on the lawn 40 feet away!
As the snow pile melted over the spring, various plants surfaced and I replanted them! Greenhouses and conservatories are very rare. The heating would be very costly in winter and summers are too hot to make use of them. There is a lot of plant sharing and plant sales as there are in England. We have seen a huge increase in gardening interest with the pandemic this year. It has given hope and purpose to so many of us.
I am very grateful for what I learned in our years in Sussex and continue to try to apply it to our life here in Maine. What a gift! But the best gift of all has been our friends.
Best wishes,
Leslie Freeman
