The garden at Balmoral Cottage, Benenden, Kent
The home of Donald and Charlotte Molesworth
GEORGE SAUNDERS, Booker Prize-winning novelist and professor of creative writing, recently published a bestseller that unpicks how literature works. How exactly does Chekhov conjure such bittersweet emotion? Why does Turgenev’s The Singers leave us feeling so transcendent? As Prof Saunders notes, the authors have, through instinct and infinitesimal microdecisions, found the way to an emotional truth. Without that, it’s all merely fancy words on a page. It is the same with gardens. You don’t simply want to look at it, you want to be consumed by it, transported by it. A great garden needs an underlying emotional power.
At Balmoral Cottage in Benenden, Kent, Charlotte and Donald Molesworth have planned, grown and tended every inch of their two acres with intense and unwavering personal vision for 40 years. Their garden and an ancient fig,’ remembers Mrs Molesworth. ‘But we inherited a perfect site: flat, great soil, protected. Being an old productive garden, it was a well-worked loam clay and moisture-retentive.’ The house sat hunkered up to the northern boundary, a towering windbreak of , Douglas fir and a smattering of Ingram’s original cherries planted in about 1918. A field sloped gently downwards to the west, a paddock to the south. Ingram’s old potting shed, a lopsided barnish structure with a low, sloping roof, squatted in the centre.
