Leaving no rock or stone unturned (Filed: 18/08/2001)
The most fascinating corner of the historic Chelsea Physic Garden has finally been renovated. Rebecca Dunbar tells the tale
UNTIL recently, you could visit the Chelsea Physic Garden and not even know that it had a rock garden. But now that this ancient, eccentric cousin of the garden rockery has been renovated, it is hard to miss.
Some of the plants in the renovated rock garden: pitcher plant, stachy and verbascum
The black and white rocks from which it is made are striking. And so is the story of how they got there. In 1771, the Society of Apothecaries began to create an area of garden in which to grow "plants as will only thrive in stony soils". But they could not afford to be choosy about their materials.
"The apothecaries were so poor," says Sue Minter, the curator, "that they were effectively accepting builders' rubble." But what extraordinary rubble.
Work started only after the Society's Praefectus Horti, or director, Stanesby Alchorne, spent money of his own on 40 tons of stone that the Tower of London was discarding. It turned out to be a startling white colour and some pieces were ornately carved.
To this, a donation of chalk and flint was added. But perhaps the most remarkable contribution was made in 1772 by the explorer and botanist Sir Joseph Banks. As his ship, the Sir Lawrence, sailed up the Thames, Banks dropped off some of the soft, black lumps of Icelandic lava that had been used as ballast.
With this collection of monochromatic materials, the apothecaries' head gardener, William Forsyth - an ancestor of Bruce Forsyth - created a stony oval mound just 40 paces around, which was known simply as The Rock. It was decorated with an assortment of oddities that the Apothecaries had hoarded over the years: unusual minerals; pieces of brain coral and giant clamshells brought back from the South Seas by Captain Cook; even a bust of Banks, who had sailed with Cook in The Endeavour.
Over the next 200 years, the rock garden slowly went into decline. Much of the chalk and flint disappeared, as did many of the strange trophies that had decorated the garden. When the great plantsman Bill Mackenzie came to the Physic Garden as curator in the 1940s, he removed - but, luckily, did not destroy - most of the white stone from the Tower. By 1998, the pond next to it was leaking, and the overgrown rock-garden had slumped and spread like a gooey brie.
Last winter, with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund and other grants, renovation work began, under the direction of head gardener Fiona Crumley. Her first task was to remove all vegetation so that an archaeological dig could take place. It revealed fossils and other small finds.
Next, the contractors resoiled the garden with sterilised compost and rebuilt the pond. All the surviving rocks - the flints, the Tower stone, and the Icelandic lava - were put back, and the one remaining giant clamshell, which had been used as a punch bowl by recent curators, was given pride of place. Finally, the rock garden was ready to be replanted.
The apothecaries' minutes made no mention of what plants had originally been grown. So the planting could not be strictly accurate. But it would be in keeping with the 200-year-old aim of growing plants on stony soils. And it would also, says Minter, "remain faithful to the original intention of creating an ecological habitat".
Among the plants chosen were several threatened Mediterranean species, which have been propagated at the garden. Lovely silver-leaved verbascums, oreganums and stachys sit among the black and white rocks. Around the pond are clumps of flag iris, and in the middle is a small boggy island on which grows the insect-trapping sarracenia, or pitcher plant.
When Sir Hans Sloane gave the Physic Garden's freehold
to the Society of Apothecaries, he did so on condition that
it kept it "for the manifestation of the glory, power and
wisdom of God, in the works of creation". How pleasing,
then, that the restored, Grade II-listed Pond Rock
Garden, with its imaginative and conservation-minded
planting, is keeping that tradition alive.
-- Anonymous, August 21, 2001