A garden in Perth that is home to a very rare National Collection
At the height of summer, the cheerful yellow walls of Parkhead House in Perth are smothered in climbers. Roses and honeysuckle entwine in scented swags and a hardy kiwi plant, Actinidia kolomikta scrambles upwards, hitching a lift on the wisteria that has wrapped the house in its sturdy vines.
More rampant growth covers the fences that surround the garden and a large pergola is smothered in flowers and foliage.
“If you’ve got some vertical support then don’t just grow one climber, grow as many as you can,” says Madeleine Tinson, who moved to Parkhead with her husband Mike in 1982.
Back then the garden was almost empty of plants, but it was home to a magnificent 350-year-old sweet chestnut tree that lent the garden a sense of privacy, while the acre of grass that flowed around the house provided Madeleine with a blank canvas on which she soon began to work a transformation.
The front slopes gently to the north so here she created broad terraces, packing them with a wide variety of perennials including astrantias, English irises, alliums, peonies delphiniums and penstemons. She dug a pond, made raised beds for vegetables and tucked seating areas into sheltered corners.
At one point she kept bees. “Then I had the colony from Hell, at which point I gave up.”
And when her vegetables suffered recurrent infestations of greenfly, blackfly and caterpillars, she dug these up and created space for more flowering plants.
The secret of keeping flowers happy, says Madeleine, lies in the soil, which is a free-draining loam.
“If you dig down deep enough you can find clay, but this area was a farm for hundreds of years so it has been cultivated for a very long time and I add plenty of my own home-made compost.”
Grass paths are all that remains of the lawns that once covered the garden and some of these are edged with low box hedges, all grown from cuttings.
At one point the path around the houses passes through a fine set of railings, their gleaming black paintwork topped with gilded spires. These once lined the banks of the River Tay where it flows through the heart of Perth, but were removed during flood-prevention works and were put up for sale, so Mike bought Madeleine some of them for her birthday.
In order to build the conservatory onto the back of the house, a large amount of soil had to be dug out and Madeleine used this to smooth out the slope in the back garden. In summer this part of the garden is filled with scented plants, including sweet peas, which Madeleine sows September and in an unheated greenhouse until spring.
“The secret is not to water them over the winter and to pinch them out once they start to grow,” she says
Flowers, admits Madeleine, are something of an addiction, and a visit last year by the National Clematis Society is evidence of her love of climbers.
But amongst the many plants that Madeleine cultivates, it is lilies that are the star of the show. These grow everywhere and in all possible forms, including bold oriental lilies and martagon lilies, which have recurved petals and pendulous flowers. Some lean from tall, clay pots, others are displayed on staging and yet more erupt from borders crammed with the flowers.
The effect is to create a garden that resembles the most glorious kind of flower shop.
‘Lilies are so rewarding and very easy to grow,” says Madeleine who holds a National Collection of Mylnefield , a group of lilies that had all but disappeared until Madeleine rescued them.
They were bred by Dr Christopher North at the Scottish Crop Research Institute (now the Hutton Institute) at Invergowrie, near Dundee. He succeeded in producing lilies that were extremely hardy and completely reliable, but commercial plans for the lilies were abandoned and almost all of the bulbs were grubbed up and destroyed or given away.
When Madeleine first saw some of them in flower at nearby Branklyn Garden, she was so struck by their beauty that she knew she had to rescue them.
“I hadn’t had much success in growing lilies at that point, but I felt that I had to take these on.”
Madeleine began to track down bulbs, tracing some as far as Canada. Others were being grown by Edrom Nurseries at Coldingham in the Scottish Borders, which remains the only nursery in the UK where Mylnefield Lilies are available for sale.
Madeleine bought up as many as she could get her hands on and began the process of learning how to grow and propagate them.
“I grow the collection in terracotta pots in free-draining compost. The advice I was given was to mix grit into the compost and then, when I thought I’d added enough, to add some more.
“I add plant food granules too and then, in the autumn, I turn the lilies out of their pots and search through the compost for the bulbils that grow in the leaf axes and the bulblets that grow amongst the roots.
“I then grow these on until they are large enough to start producing flowers.”
The lilies range in colour from white, speckled with pink, through bright orange to mahogany red. Some have upward facing flowers, indicative of the asiatic lilies in their parentage, others have martagon-style pendulous blooms. They range is size from compact to statuesque and all of them, says Madeleine, are excellent in the garden and have good resistance to botrytis, the fungal disease that can affect lilies.
Dr North named the first series of Mylnefield lilies after Greek gods, including Orestes and Odysseus but the second series he named for the women in his life, a tradition that Madeleine has continued. Three of the bulbs she acquired were un-named, but two are called ‘Rosie North ’ after Dr North’s great-granddaughter, and ‘Stella North’ for the wife of Peter Waister, a colleague of Dr North. The third, still to be register, will be called ‘Catherine North’ for the wife of Dr North’s son, Robert North.
“It’s only with Peter Waister’s help and generosity that I have been able to put together the collection together,” says Madeleine.
Recently she has also helped to establish a duplicate collection of Mylenfield Lilies at Craigtoun Country Park in St Andrews.
Madeleine says: “I am still missing three of Dr North’s bulbs from the collection and I live in hope of being able to find them.”
Garden Notebook
Parkhead House
Parkhead Gardens, Burghmuir Road, Perth PH1 1RB
www.parkheadgardens.com
The garden is open by arrangement until 30 September 2019
Entrance, £5.
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