The Garden Gadabout - David Austin Gardens

A Botanical Adventure - A lifelong love that lead me to the David Austin Rose Garden in the UK. (Plus useful DA Garden links and our own Rose Garden List and Map and links to our Rose Guides 1 and 2).

‘Olivia’ the perfect pink rose at the David Austin Gardens in Albrighton, UK in late spring.

Roses were my gateway plant into gardening. It really is as simple as that and here we are over a decade into my career in horticulture, hundreds of roses planted, since seeing my first rose 40 years ago and falling madly in love, now newly returned home from being in the very place that is every rose lover’s Holy Grail, or should be. The David Austin Gardens in Albrighton, United Kingdom. I am still fizzing from the experience, getting to explore the place of provenance to the most popular new roses of the 20th Century, and my personal favourite roses of all time.

Pulled, I now believe, by a genetic predisposition to love them like I do, knowing the compulsion generations of women I come from have felt to grow roses, paint them and collect them, my free fall into full blown David Austin Rose Tragic, my official title/condition, is a story many of you were there for when the bug first bit. In the early days of building the garden at Little Oak and turning my whole life upside down, when I walked away from a corporate career (and stable income) that I’d come to hate (not the stable income) and was deeply affecting my capacity to ever relax and enjoy life, roses single-handedly swept in and saved the day.

The Little Oak cottage garden created around David Austin roses with Darcey Bussell in the foreground and Gertrude Jekyll trained on a timber trellis behind.

Every time I stepped into the saving grace that was my new garden, creating it with zero idea and even less money 12 years ago now, I heard the call to throw it all to the wind and make a life in horticulture. I was truly the happiest I’d ever known myself and I was only there, standing waist high in my new reality, the world of plants and all the life they support, because of the rose. They, roses, had driven me to build that garden, my desire to grow them bubbling up from some deeply buried desire woven into my DNA, that I could not deny.

Roses therefore, in my mind, are not just simply a flower, they symbolise so much more. They are responsible for a connection and sense of kinship with a family I felt largely estranged from, separated by an ocean as a baby, raised in a world and a way that was entirely foreign and often confronting to them. When it felt as if there was nothing we shared but for blood, we shared the rose. They are the hero of the story I have told of finding one’s hands in the dirt and inexplicably, beginning to find one’s way. Neurologically rewiring the trappings of a troubled start in life, it seemed that the simple act of planting a rose began a trajectory of transformation I could never have anticipated, toward becoming the person I was always supposed to be.

You can imagine then, that getting to visit the very gardens in which the late David Austin himself lived and bred roses, and where his family carry on this tradition and open them, including the late David Austin Senior’s personal garden (accessible from this summer to the public), I was a little bit beside myself. To get to do this under the guidance of David Austin Senior Rose Consultant, Liam Beddall was not something I had ever foreseen all those years ago when this journey first began and I am so grateful to have had the chance to fulfil a dream. What awaited me would not only meet every expectation I had but would surpass them and I can’t thank Liam and David Austin Roses enough for that day, and the hundreds of roses they have created that have brought such beauty and joy.

Liam and I post our walk around the David Austin Rose Garden.

I was 5 years old when I saw my first rose. I stood in my grandmother’s garden in New Zealand on a frigid morning, dew soaked and the air lathered with the smell of homemade apricot jam on warm buttered toast. Yes, this is how visceral this decades old recollection is, and has always been.