A walk back in time at Hergest Croft

It’s the Kington Walking Festival and Elizabeth Banks, ex president of the Royal Horticultural Society (probably the UK’s most authoritative gardening society, which organizes the yearly Chelsea Flower Show), lead a tour today around the impressive collection of trees at her family home, Hergest Croft.

It was a walk back into the late 19th century, an era of adventure, when archeologists were busy unearthing unsuspected treasures in Egypt and Greece, geologists busy digging and botanists were risking their lives to collect and bring back unknown specimens of plants and trees from places as far afield as China and South America. Liz’ husband Lawrence’s grand father, William Banks, bought several plants brought back from China by Ernest Wilson in the late 1800s. Wilson worked for a nursery called Veitch, which employed several Chinese plant hunters. Wilson’s journey to China in 1899 was rather poignant as he was expressly asked by Veitch to bring back a ‘davidia involucrata’ (a dove tree named after French missionary and keen naturalist Armand David, who lived in China in the 19th century and incidentally was the first Westerner to see a giant panda). Wilson’s trip included a stop at the Harvard Arboretum in Boston, before arriving in China in full Boxer Revolution, being arrested as a spy, capsizing in a boat crossing, until he finally got to the very rare ‘davidia’, only to find it had only just recently been cut down.

He consoled himself by bringing back over 300 species of plants not yet known in England.

The walk was punctuated by a litany of evocative Latin names such as ‘tormentum’, ‘tortuosa’, spinosa’. Trees are clustered by family, the oaks, birches, the beeches, the limes, the  old rhododendrons with amazing bark…

It was a time when one upmanship was about having gardens with the most species, the rarest ones, the biggest trees. Liz and her husband Lawrence are both very keen plant experts, they travel extensively to bring back rare specimens, following in the footsteps of Lawrence’s ancestors, and I can’t help smiling when she explains with pride that they have 90 ‘champion trees’ (trees which are particularly large in height or width), more than Kew or Westonbirt!