Apr 1, 2011 Laura Harrison McBride
The gardens at Cotehele, with summer house - LMcBride/SPTileyBy mid-March, Devon, one of the two southwesternmost counties in England, is alive with flowers. Camellias in front gardens offer abundant red, pink or white blossoms on tall bushes with dark green leaves. Roadside banks spring with yellow daffodils, or yellow and white ones. Primroses--pale yellow on soylent green leaves--nestle along roadsides. Here and there, in particularly sunny spots, a hawthorne will push out its tiny white flowers.
Devon men and women are hard at it by then visiting garden shops for plants, tools and garden décor, and strolling through extensive public gardens for inspiration.
Below, read about one of each, and the other springtime delights to be had at each.
Endsleigh Gardens Nursery is just outside the bustling market town of Tavistock, in a quiet village called Newton Abbot. Once part of the estate of the Duke of Bedford, the nursery winds through both standing buildings, made in Victorian times of local stone, and some ruins from that era and earlier.
Not the largest garden shop in the area by any means, it may nonetheless be the most charming. Almost certainly, you’ll be led to explore the nooks and crannies full of plants, and poke into a yard featuring garden ornaments somewhat different than the run-of-the-mill red-hatted gnomes that are so common as to be pests. Endsleigh offers winged creatures, cunning devils (not mean ones), fairies, angels and incarnations of the Green Man.
The Green Man is an ancient symbol of we know not what. Some think he is a fertility image; others think he’s less benign. The question is: How evil could he be, decorating as he does a great many of the cathedrals of Europe?
A Green Man sculpture will have branches and leaves for hair, and often for eyebrows. Sometimes the Green Man sticks his tongue out. Sometimes the Green Man is totally vegetation, with plant life for ears and nose, and only the eyes showing as truly human. And sometimes, there is a Green Cat or a Green Dog. Indeed, the parish church at Tiverton, Devon, England is, according to Mike Harding in A Little Book of the Green Man (p. 37), “a wild-looking moggy with more than a dash of the human in his nose and eyes. He glares down from his capital into the body of the church, spewing foliage but, though he looks fairly frightening and impish, I find it hard to see him as wicked or evil.”
Endsleigh Gardens Nursery offers Green Men, and an assortment of jolly devils, vaguely scary bird creatures, and the ubiquitous Celtic cross in miniature. Celtic crosses are relatively abundant in the Devon and Cornwall landscapes, both having had the most Celtic of England’s pre-modern populations.
If you hang around for a while, you might see a small black and white dog sleeping on the broad sill of an upstairs window in the house next door. On certain days, you can visit the extensive gardens at Hotel Endsleigh, next door.
Reach Endsleigh Gardens Nursery by using the map you can find here.
Cotehele is a favorite day out for many Devon and Cornish folk. It is the ancestral home of Lady Hilaria Gibbs, descendant of the Edgcumbe family (her full name being Lady Hilaria Agnes Edgcumbe Gibbs), whose family had owned Cotehele at least since 1363. Lady Hilaria lived there for two years during World War II; the south counties, except for the City of Plymouth, which was devastated, were relatively safe from German bombing, and many children, too, were evacuated from London, Coventry (two other frequent German bomb targets) and Plymouth to the southern counties. The house was given to The National Trust shortly after the war, in 1947, although Lady Hilaria continued to have contact with it and indeed celebrated her 100th birthday in the house.
The house is medieval, and is more true to its origins than many great houses that remained family homes over the centuries; although the Edgcumbes maintained Cotehele, they shifted their base to Edgcumbe House near Plymouth a couple hundred years ago.
While Cotehele House is closed for the winter months, the gardens and grounds are open all year. The National Trust invites visitors to view, “formally planted terraces, or lose yourself in the Valley Garden, which includes a medieval stewpond and dovecote. Seek tranquility in the Upper Garden or visit the two orchards planted with local apples and cherries.”
Find Cotehele here.
Harding, Mike. A Little Book of the Green Man. Aurum Press, 1998.
The Sunday Times. Dec. 4, 2009. "Lady Hilaria Gibbs: former owner of Cotehele" Accessed 1 April 2011
at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6943204.ece
The gardens at Cotehele, with summer house - LMcBride/SPTiley 
Endsleigh Nursery winged creature garden statue - LMcBride/SPTiley 
Typical English Green Man sculpture - Wiki Commons $(function() {$(".imageCarousel").jCarouselLite({btnNext: ".next",btnPrev: ".prev",visible: 3});});
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