The garden

“My biggest concern was when Pat Gosling said to me ‘I think you should start the garden’; I thought where do I start?”

Margaret Farrow was put in charge of the hospice garden.

I was involved from the very first because Dr Hall went to the original meeting and came back and told me about it and we started fundraising and then of course as soon as we got to the flattening stage, Pat Gosling said to me ‘someone’s got to be in charge of the garden – we’ll design a hospice and then we’ve got to do a garden’. He said ‘you’ll have to do that’.

Elizabeth Hall and I worked together when I was a nurse. I did my health visiting training but by the time I met Elizabeth I was a family planning nurse training other nurses. We worked in clinics in Colchester.

When Elizabeth told me about the hospice idea, I thought it was wonderful. I think most people did because the local councillors were so enthusiastic. I’d never had anything to do with local councillors before but people like Mary Fairhead, they were so supportive that I think we just got going. Apart from fundraising I didn’t do much until the actual building was built because they had separate committees for building and staffing and finding matrons.

I remember seeing Myland Hall for the first time. I don’t think that concerned me, I thought it was a lovely site for a hospice, my biggest concern was when Pat Gosling said to me ‘I think you should start the garden’; I thought where do I start? The pond was my biggest worry and it was absolute miracle because the pond froze hard, the winter was incredibly cold, absolute solid ice. When Pat Gosling asked me to take on the garden I said to my husband what do you think and he said ‘well you can’t garden like that!’ I said if I do it will you promise to support me and he said ‘well you know the answer to that’. So two things happened; he came with machinery and lifted all the debris from the pond. It was nothing but debris, it was muddy water. He got this machine and drenched it completely. There was a beautiful willow tree but it had to go. It was too big to be left. Then we got as far as dredging the pond and we were left with a huge area.

Mr Gosling was an exceptional man. He was so thoughtful and he was a kind person and he knew how to pick the right people. We had superb committee members.

So the pond was done. When I felt depressed about it because I thought I don’t know where to start, and my husband John did that first job, that lifted me and he said ‘we’ll just have to use people we know’. So lovely farmers came and from this produced that. Farmers Peter Rix and Andrew Davidson ploughed it, levelled it, seeded it. You just had to say you needed something and word spread around us. It really was a group of volunteers that got everything going.

When the plans were drawn up they produced a conservatory, they also produced an aviary with birds in. It meant we as gardeners were responsible for this aviary and someone had got to come along and clean it out, feed them, and fortunately a lovely lad called Pam Ryan said she would do the birds. So that was solved. I had lots of contact with a superb gardener called Jim and he came and put marvellous plants in the conservatory.

The first royal visitor we had was the duchess of Norfolk and she knew I was probably going to look after the garden and she said ‘get a load of sheep in, they’ll eat it down for you’. The farmer said to me ‘if you want to be up all the time chasing sheep!’

We had to start with having some rose beds, there were people that had been so enthusiastic about the hospice who’d left us roses in their will, named roses.

We had droughts, hurricanes, freezing weather. We had all sorts of problems in the outside. The garden changed all the time and we had to accept that. It was quite hard to accept what one had designed at the beginning lasted months, years, and everything altered as it was extended.