My friends had the greenest of fingers
The year 2016 saw the loss of three influential and inspiring women gardeners. Each of them, vastly disparate in their lifestyles and attitudes, nevertheless proved gardening’s positive health-giving properties by living into their nineties and remaining pretty much active until the Grim Reaper came a-calling. The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury was born in 1922; Joan Loraine in 1924; Mirabel Osler in 1925. I sat on a horticultural committee with Mollie Salisbury in the mid 1980s and, soon after, visited her former garden at Cranborne Manor in Dorset, where – years before, in pioneering fashion – she had banished the use of pesticides. Her fingerprints remain on that garden, despite her 1972 move to Hatfield House in Hertfordshire when her husband succeeded as 6th Marquess of Salisbury. The developments and improvements to Hatfield’s extensive gardens and grounds are her legacy. Upon her arrival, the original elaborate and once-famous gardens (laid out...
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