May Day and, fittingly, I am tearing along the Cambridgeshire countryside in the company of the Chelsea Flower Show’s resident wild woman, eco-horticulturalist and multiple award-winner Marney Hall. A former government conservationist, Hall is the woman responsible for Chelsea’s eschewing of decking in favour of luxuriant wildflower gardens. This year her entry will focus on stress relief, again rather appropriately, as within seconds of clambering into her soil-scented car I am immersed in a foxglove crisis: 200 white specimens must be sourced in the next few hours, her own having being struck down by lurgy.
“It’s like putting on a play with very unpredictable actors,” she laments. “Still, I’m a Christian and that sustains me. I do pray for the plants a bit.” An encounter with breast cancer two years ago has added a carpe diem attitude to this spiritual bent, a philosophy made all the more apt in that her career demands a literal gathering of rosebuds.
Marney, 56, is putting the nerve-testing finishing touches to her exhibit, The 4head Garden of Dreams, 21.5m wide by 10.5m deep (70x35ft) of prestigious main avenue frontage. The more ambitious show gardens can cost between £150,000 and £250,000. “It’s a bit like being an artist,” she says. “But you can’t afford the canvas, the paints, or the brushes, and suddenly somebody comes along and allows you to do it.” The somebody in question is her sponsor, 4head, the natural headache remedy, which contains a menthol salve that is thought to dilate blood vessels thus allaying symptoms; a particularly efficacious cure for stress headaches. In a spirit of fortuitous coincidence, Hall’s intention had been to build a de-stressing idyll, an earthy, earthly paradise.
The Garden of Dreams will be one of the largest wildlife havens created at Chelsea, complete with indigenous trees, a meadow, babbling brook and sculpture of a sleeping girl, secluded behind a thorny hedge to block out the stresses of the everyday world. The climax of this whimsical journey will be a magnificent stumpery, an awesome 15ft sculpture constructed out of Canadian driftwood, in which visitors will be invited to linger and muse.
Hall and her co-designer, Heather Yarrow, pored over ancient herbals to identify the 100 species that make up their Eden, three quarters of which possess therapeutic qualities. There are sedatives (cowslip, red clover), soporifics (lavender, chamomile), hallucinogens (poppies), antidepressants (lemon balm, evening primrose), plants to induce calm (pennyroyal, rue) and plants to reduce blood pressure (hawthorn, mistletoe), and, of course, headache cures (not least, the black peppermint that supplies the menthol in 4head).
A committed Christian, Marney believes that everything is on the planet for a purpose, a philosophy that informs her enthusiasm for herbal medicine. “People were sucking willow bark for pain relief 1,000 years ago. Quinine for malaria is another classic, digitalis for the heart. My scientific background makes me question things, but to me it’s bloody obvious. I think: ‘Why are people so sceptical about this? That’s why these plants are here’.” Her
2004 Chelsea entry, From Merlin to Medicine, celebrated these themes.
Hall says that gardening is also a consummate means of relaxation. “I use gardening as therapy. A lot of people will chop some wood or prune a bush and use the garden for taking their mind off the stresses of modern life without even knowing it.” She cites prison allotments, where diverting convicts’ energies into growing is a well-known inspirer of character transformations; and the way in which plots express the personalities of their owners, with prim, clipped hedges the creation of prim, clipped people.
According to this principle, her chaotically abundant cottage garden marks her out as the wild card she so evidently is. Brought up in decidedly ungreen North London, as a child she constructed mini gardens on plates. Today, her home in the medieval town of St Ives, in Cambridgeshire, may be conveniently just off the A1, but is also a two-minute stroll from water meadows and gravel pits. “People who are obsessed with living things need to be with them. I can’t imagine life without plants. It would be like living in a desert,” she shivers.
Professional recognition came relatively late in life. For 21 years Hall was a government science officer working for the Nature Conservancy, assessing the effects of toxic chemicals on nature. In 1988 she and her then husband set up a nursery in response to the gap in the market for wildflowers. Divorce in the mid-1990s forced the business to be sold, propelling her into fulfilling her more creative side. In 1996, her first solo entry at Hampton Court won Best in Show and since then she has earned sufficient from her designing to put her daughter Samantha, now 26, through sixth form and university. A silver lining amid the trauma of divorce? Hall’s voice, otherwise robust, softens. “It made me realise that I wasn’t dependent on someone else.” She remarried last October to Paul, an engineer and friend of 30 years.
Not only has Hall been successful in her own right, but her example has caused a fundamental change in direction in the horticultural world. Under her influence, ecology has become a permanent fixture. “When we did our first wildflower garden in 1990 fellow exhibitors offered us their lawnmowers and weed killer. I grew six metres of native hedge and they were the only six metres at Chelsea. Last year my nursery grew 200 metres for people. Now nobody offers to cut my meadow any more.”
Wildlife may flourish in such environments, but Hall maintains that human beings are the ultimate beneficiaries, not only psychologically but spiritually. “What’s good for wildlife is good for the soul. When you’re out there digging you’re in touch with Nature, you’re in touch with Creation. By digging your hands in the soil you become part of what we are. By getting into a garden, even if it’s only a window box, you’re touching base, touching the dust that you came from.”
This sense of spiritual rootedness came to the fore when Hall was struck by a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer. Despite her enthusiasm for herbal medicine, she took a conventional treatment route: lumpectomy, lymph node removal and radiotherapy. “If I hadn’t gone for a routine mammogram I’d be dead,” she says bluntly. “The cancer would have been everywhere.” However, she did take Black cohosh and Mexican wild yam herbal remedies for the accompanying hormonal upheaval. The cancer has not recurred, but the experience has proved focusing.
Marney discovered that she had the disease two years ago in the middle of the flower show preparations at Christmas, had the operation two months later, holding off radiotherapy until after Chelsea and after she had been scuba diving, another passion. “Diving has been an inspiration, particularly when I was really ill and had been given the worst-case prognosis. I’d wanted to do it since I was a little girl, but always thought: ‘I’m too old, or I’m too fat’.”
The sea must be something of a relief after Hall’s attempts to manipulate the less yielding earth. Fresh from the chiropractor, she declares that “anybody who says they’re a gardener who hasn’t got a bad back is either lying about the back or lying about being a gardener”. Until recently, her daughter required no such subterfuge, detesting plants for having taken her mother away from her, not least during her birthday, which falls during Chelsea. However, some sort of daughterly interest has sprouted recently, with pots and planting advice being requested for this year’s present. “There is a God!” guffaws her mother, ever the dab hand at cultivation.
The Chelsea Flower Show, May 23-27. Call 0870 9063781 or visit www.rhs.org.uk/chelsea
