A Glorious Legacy Of Plants

Reinvigorated planting and a continuation of the spirit of the great age of the planthunters inspires George Plumptre on a visit to a famous Sussex garden

In 1895, James Comber became the first head gardener to be employed by Ludwig Messel, who acquired West Sussex’s nymans in 1890. It says a lot for the stability and continuity of nymans that the present head gardener, Stephen Herrington, who has been in charge for the past four years, is only the fifth head gardener at the estate since 1895.

Messel had the largesse and energy that typified the Edwardian garden-making era and much of nymans’ reputation rests on its exceptional plant collection, gathered on a series of overseas collecting trips by Comber’s son Harold. This, combined with Comber’s management and propagating skills, propelled nymans into the vanguard of 20th-century gardening in Britain—a position further secured by Messel’s son, Leonard. William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll both visited and the Messels corresponded with Lawrence Johnston at Hidcote, which was also being developed at that time.

Within a grand structural framework of trees and architectural features that typified the period, new plants also arrived from expeditions by two other distinguished plant collectors, Frank Kingdon Ward and George Forrest. Between them all, over nearly three decades, they collected from far and wide—the Andes, the Himalayas, South America, South Africa and Tasmania—as Nymans established a reputation for rare and outstanding plants.

The National Trust took on the garden in 1953, six years after the main house was almost destroyed by fire. Much of the latter only survives now as a sombre shell. Mr Herrington is constantly responding to the garden’s heritage and, as he says, ‘working to keep alive the real tradition of wild origin and species collection’. It means that he aspires to a balance between the quantities of cultivars and species in the garden.