Senior Super-Gardeners

July 30th, 2013

I’m not easily stunned.

The entry to England’s hidden-gem Holehird Gardens.

Especially not at my rapidly advancing age.

But the senior citizens in northern England’s Lake District impressed me with the most determined, unlikely and immaculate gardening effort I’ve ever seen.

Let me back up.

I’m just back from leading 20 local garden-lovers through a dozen of the finest gardens in northern England and Scotland. (Click here to see a Photo Gallery of 46 pictures from the trip.)

We saw an incredible classic English double herbaceous border as long as two football fields at North Yorkshire’s Newby Hall.

We saw centuries-old walled flower and kitchen gardens around a half-dozen of Britain’s iconic castles.

And we saw one of the world’s largest privately built parterre gardens at Scotland’s Drummond Castle, one that rivals France’s famous Versailles gardens.

But the surprise hit of our 2-week trip was Holehird Gardens – a little-known 17 acres that sits on a windy northern England hillside, overlooking Lake Windermere and its green-mountain backdrop.

Holehird overlooks Lake Windermere and the mountains beyond.

This place is off the usual garden-tour radar that typically includes the likes of Kew, Dixter, Wisley and Sissinghurst.

Even the Brits don’t know much about Holehird.

Yet its scenic beauty, its plant diversity, its layout and especially its precision maintenance ranks Holehird up there with any garden I’ve seen.

Amazingly, it was all planted and cared for by volunteers.

Only the guy who cleans the bathroom gets paid anything.

Even more amazing is that practically the whole crew is age 60 and up.

Our group was there on a Wednesday, which happens to be the main maintenance day.

One gray-haired woman was edging an island bed inside the main Walled Garden with some long-handled shears.

Another was deadheading the roses over in the Rose Garden.

And about two dozen “veteran” gardeners were running wheelbarrows of snipped leaves, spent flower heads and assorted weeds from beds to compost bins.

They’re all members of the Lakeland Horticultural Society – the group that formed in 1969 specifically to turn this hillside into a public garden.

The land once had been a walled kitchen garden and landscape around an 1869 mansion built by local industrialist John Macmillan Dunlop.

As so often happens, the once-beautiful gardens turned into a weed-hidden mess by the 1950s.

By then, the land and mansion had been willed to the county.

The incredible part to me is that enough local citizens – 250 of them originally – stepped up and said, “We’ll make this into a garden. And we’ll pay for it and do the work.”

Can you imagine that happening in Pennsylvania, where some of our citizens (at least in Carlisle) fight efforts to allow community gardens and our capital city actually bulldozes them?

Forty years later, the volunteers of Holehird are still doing exactly what the original people set out to do.

Holehird is filled with all sorts of great plantings – a hydrangea collection, a sprawling rock garden, a beautiful hillside water garden, dozens of uncommon specimen trees, scores of antique roses and just about any perennial flower you’d ever try to grow.

Members bought most of these plants, tools and even a tractor with their own membership dues. Visitor donations and a few bequests help along the way.

The Society is up to 1,700 dues-paying members. About 200 of those put in hands-on work in the garden.

Lots of them volunteer a full day each week, keeping the place up to the care standards you’d find at our own Longwood Gardens.

From what I saw, these 60-, 70- and even 80-year-olds could work circles around some paid (and much younger) crews.

Their main worry seems to be whether the next generation will step up to keep this devotion going.

One gardener told me that his wife, who helps him maintain one of the herbaceous borders, is 58 and the youngest of the hands-on team.

He said the hope is that today’s baby boomers will start pitching in as they hit retirement age.

This older age group earned the name the “Greatest Generation” mainly because of what it sacrificed during World War II and accomplished afterward.

What I saw in action on this English hillside showed me this generation is still doing great things – just now in our communities instead of on battle fields.

I hope the boomers notice and follow suit.