A complete education

As one might expect from the founder of the English Gardening School, Rosemary Alexander’s garden is packed with the lessons learned from a lifetime in horticulture

- Tilly Ware

CERTAIN gardens provoke frantic scribbling on the list of Things to Copy. Sandhill Farm, the Sussex home of Rosemary Alexander, has this effect in spades. ‘Line of Polystichum polyblepharum with Narcissus Têteà-tête: PLANT’ shouts a line in my notebook. ‘Sarcococca hookeriana, NOT confusa’ commands another, followed by sketches with, triple-underlined, ‘DO THIS’ alongside.

Mrs Alexander is the principal and founder of the English Gardening School (EGS), ‘the best school in the world for amateurs’, as she describes it, ‘and what I wish I’d had when I started’. She grew up in Scotland, married at 18 and was in charge of 20 acres near Dunblane by the age of 21. Her landscaper thoughtfully agreed not only to redesign the garden, but also to explain the process along the way—‘it was a complete education, added to by visiting anywhere with labels’.

She worked as a landscape architect in Glasgow before an Inchbald design course introduced her to tutors John Brookes and Anthony du Gard Pasley. Both became lifelong influences: du Gard Pasley was the first to support her idea for a school that combined design principles with practical skill and plant knowledge. ‘All there was at the time,’ says Mrs Alexander, who was awarded the prestigious Veitch Memorial Medal in 2011, ‘was basic gardening advice or the academic rigours of Kew or Wisley.’