Duchess of danger April 10, 2011 - yorkshirepost.co.uk
THE Duchess of Northumberland is coming to the Harrogate Spring Flower Show as the new president of the organisers. Mark Holdstock met her.
The Duchess is very much a hands-on person, but in this case the demands of the North of England Horticultural Society are largely ceremonial. “They wrote me a letter and asked me to be president and I imagine it was because it was a special year.” She has agreed to do the job for two years and is spurred by the potential of events like this to encourage the young.
“They’ll do it well and what I hope to see is plenty of involvement with children. I love the big flower shows, especially in the spring when it gives you something to look forward to for the summer. As a child we used to have a little show in Peebles where I came from. We would always do miniature gardens so I love the children’s section. I love the funny things they make from vegetables. We used to do them on biscuit trays.”
Education and enthusing young people about gardening are at the core of everything she does. It applies to her work with communities around the world and in the garden she has spent 15 years restoring at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland (you may have seen part of it as the backdrop to Quidditch matches in the first Harry Potter film). They decided on an open door policy a long time ago.
“In about 1850, the Duke allowed people from the town to walk through the gardens at weekends. It was quite unusual for the time. ”
It was in disrepair when she arrived and she threw herself into a massive project to bring it back to life for local people and tourists alike. “The ornamental garden is the classic plants-persons’ garden. It’s the biggest collection of European plants in the UK and it isn’t symmetrical so it was quite a design feat for the Wirtz to do.”
Jacques and Peter Wirtz are celebrated international garden designers from Belgium.
“We grow blueberries, and raspberries and all sorts of alpine strawberries. There are no rules in the Alnwick Garden so children are allowed and actively encouraged to get into the flower-beds, and pick every raspberry and eat it if they want.”
Although her role at the Harrogate show, which runs from next Thursday to Sunday, is hands-off, she hopes some of her philosophies about gardening and the role of horticulture will take root there.
“I’m particularly interested in how people’s lives are enhanced and enriched by gardens. You can make gardens into public spaces where lots of events are going on and these are a real asset in the same way that libraries are to people and to communities. With any public space, you can do so much.” She points to her experience of the excellence of the provision in America, especially in Brooklyn where she has lectured, and in Chicago.
Is there a corner of the Harrogate show that she is dying to see? “Anything that smells good. For me a flower isn’t a flower unless it’s scented, it’s got to have a great smell. I’m particularly interested in poison, so I love things like Datura. They’re my favourite flowers because they’re such great killers, and incredible aphrodisiacs.”
One area of her Alnwick Garden where the children can’t run riot is the Poison Garden. “It came about because I quickly realised that the same plant that kills, usually cures. No-one who comes is allowed away from a guide. We have a licence from the Home Office to grow the drugs – I have a licence to grow cannabis and cocaine and magic mushrooms, or ricin or whatever, and you have to be with a tour group.”
It was ricin which killed the Bulgarian diplomat Georgi Markov in 1978, stabbed to death with an umbrella as he waited for a bus on London Bridge. The minuscule metal pellet for the poison which was hidden in the point of the umbrella carried by the assassin from the Bulgarian secret police, was subsequently displayed under a magnifying glass in a case in Scotland Yard’s private black museum.
It’s the ghoulish which she knows appeals to children’s imaginations. “If you take a child into an ‘apothecary garden’ and start teaching how aspirin’s made from the bark of a tree, well that’s boring and I’d have switched off.
“It’s different if you take a child up to a strychnine plant and say: ‘There was a woman who was put to death in Italy for helping 500 women kill their husbands using this plant and this is how you’d use it’. So we train up story tellers and I’m always looking for young people in the area who are looking for a holiday job.”
She concedes that had she lived in the Middle Ages and possessed such knowledge, she would have been more circumspect about admitting it.
“I’d have been dangerous. My husband often says if he dies inexplicably, he’s written it down that he wants a full autopsy.”
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