CLIMBING over arbours, creeping along red-brick walls and rambling in borders, the kaleidoscopic spectacle of rose blooms at Mottisfont Abbey, Hampshire, is enjoying its brief annual moment in the sun. This year, which marks the collection’s 50th anniversary, the roses have bloomed slightly early.
In the 1970s, horticulturist and rosarian Graham Stuart Thomas, then gardens adviser to the National Trust, furthered his mission ‘to bring forth these lovely things from retirement’ by laying out roses and perennials in the old walled kitchen garden at the Augustinian priory-turned-country house, an achievement he later called his masterpiece. He used old-fashioned roses that only flower once a year, deemed all the more beautiful for their blooms’ rarity.
More than 1,000 individual rose plants of 400 varieties in every fragrance and hue are currently out, some of which may otherwise have been lost forever or can only be seen at Mottisfont. Highlights include Rosa gallica var. officinalis, a pale-crimson, deeply scented shrub brought to England from Persia by the Crusaders, the highly scented ‘Quatre Saisons’, an autumn damask grown by the Romans, and ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, a palepink bourbon rose inspired by Empress Joséphine’s garden. A pond and fountain, eight clipped Irish yews and herbaceous beds brimming with agapanthus, geraniums, peonies, pinks, lilies, phlox and nepeta complete the idyll.
Opening hours have been extended into the
