Joan Loraine gardened at Greencombe close to Porlock in Somerset for over fifty years. The garden is well-named because it’s sandwiched between the Bristol Channel, which is barely half a mile away, and wooded slopes that “tumble between high Exmoor and the sea” to use Joan’s exact words. As a result, Greencombe’s sheltered from the worst of the westerly and easterly winds. Frost, if there is any in this clement spot, rolls down to the fields below. As a result, choice early-flowering plants tend to escape winter damage.
Following Joan’s death on February 19th 2016, her nephew Rob Schmidt and his wife Kim moved from New York to continue her legacy. Rob, who grew up in America, is the son of Joan’s younger sister Mary. From the age of 11 he spent his school holidays here “wheeling barrow loads of compost” in Joan’s words. In 2000 it was agreed that he should be the next custodian of Greencombe and following that decision Joan wrote him a series of letters (published in a pamphlet entitled Letters to my Nephew) explaining how to prune the rhododendrons, for instance. Thankfully the garden will continue to open everyday from the beginning of April until the end of July.
In many ways this narrow three and a half acre strip, which follows the contour of the slope, isn’t ideal. The thin soil is acid, although it’s been constantly replenished by top dressings of homemade leaf mould and compost for decades. Joan once likened her soil to rich, chocolate cake and there are three leaf bins at the lowest end, along the pathway known as The Gut. This completely organic garden is full of bird song throughout the year and that’s one of the first things you notice, even in winter.
It’s north-facing and gets no sunlight for two months in midwinter. In one conversation I had with Joan, well over twenty years ago, she explained that when the first rays of sunlight rose above the hill again in early spring she celebrated with a glass of sherry. She kept the bottle and glass on the doorstep because on the very first day the sun appeared it was extremely fleeting. She didn’t want to miss the moment by having to go indoors to get the sherry!
Joan’s Early Life
Joan Beatrice Loraine was born on April 17th 1924 in Putney, London, the middle daughter of Robert Bilcliffe Loraine (1876 -1935) and Winifred Lydia Loraine – née Strangman (1899 – 1986). Her father, who was awarded the DSO and MC, was a famous war hero, pioneering aviator and a glamorous actor manager. He was particularly associated with George Bernard Shaw and the two became friends. They flew over London in a balloon and also shared a seaside holiday in Wales. And when Shaw’s plays were first staged on Broadway they travelled together.
Loraine was the first pilot to cross the Irish Sea, the first to land on the Isle of Wight and he also crash landed on Anglesey. He was also the first to fly through a rainstorm, quite something in a flimsy canvas and wood biplane. In 1911 Loraine sent the first Marconi wireless message from his aeroplane. He is also credited with inventing the term joystick, a name that conveyed his enthusiasm for aviation, something that stayed with him for life.
The young Joan once asked her father what she should do if confronted by a lion in the jungle. “Stand tall and look him in the eye” came the reply and this became her way in all things. Her perfect Queen’s English, always delivered slowly and meticulously with lots of pregnant pauses, can be heard in Creature Comforts. Joan admits, in her velvet tones that “it’s a labour intensive garden – yes it is.”
Joan, who was only 11 when her father died, also had a strong relationship with her mother Winifred. And if she inherited derring-do from her famous father, she learnt compassion from her mother. When Joan heard about the hardship being suffered by Romanian’s under Ceauşescu, she elicited local help and organised relief convoys for the village of Ursoaia from 1989 onwards. Operation Ursoaia began and Porlock adopted the village. Over the next 14 years she reconstructed a road, installed electricity and water supplies, and in 2000 a village church was completed. The bishops decreed that her name be mentioned in prayers of gratitude at every service.
As a young girl Joan attended St Paul’s School in London, but was evacuated with her mother and sisters to Hartrow Manor in the Brendon Hills of West Somerset once the Second World War began. This is when her love of Exmoor and gardening began, although the war effort meant that vegetable growing and livestock were her main interests at this stage. Joan went on to study teaching in Birmingham and was the founding headmistress of the British Embassy School in Ankara. Rob told me that “she drove out to Ankara with my grandmother.” From there she went on to train teachers in the Ugandan bush, before returning to this country in 1966.
Her Early Days at Greencombe
Joan moved to Greencombe in September 1966 after her mother Winifred, who lived close by, gifted the house to her as a thank you for staying with her during the war years. This was a kindness that Joan never forgot and she dedicated her booklet Greencombe – The First Fifty Years to her mother and also named a wonderful pink erythronium after her.
Joan always acknowledged that she was fortunate that the previous garden owner Harold Stroud, a Minehead store owner, had laid out the bones of the garden after he came here in 1946. Stroud was an experienced window dresser and he had flair and vision. He created three terraces, built some of the stone walls, levelled an area for a lawn in the shape of a grand piano and commissioned the much-photographed moon arch made from local Porlock stone. His paths followed the contours and many of the mature azaleas and rhododendrons were planted by him.
Joan admitted that she was no gardener when she moved here. She spent the daylight hours immersed in the garden, but when the light went she would come in and study using her extensive library of books. Her neighbour Norman Hadden VMH (1888-1971), who gardened at Underway nearby, offered help and countless cuttings and seeds. Shrubs were moved and transplanted on a makeshift sledge, with the help of her gardener the aptly named Ernest Barrow. Lots of stumps were removed, to check the honey fungus that was taking hold and Joan wrote that “a gigantic bonfire burnt for over 4 weeks.” The process involved dynamite and a lot of man and woman power.
In the 1970s new paths were made and there are currently a mile of small pathways positioned to show off trilliums, erythroniums, ferns and small woodland plants. These paths are deliberately narrow, about a metre or less wide, to keep a sense of intimacy. Despite advice from other gardeners, there would be no motorised barrows or weedkillers used at Greencombe. As a result you appear to be meandering through a natural woodland, albeit an enhanced one. Joan loved the wild landscape of Exmoor and she was drawn to simply shaped plants.
Greencombe had a unique planting style and many gardeners fell for it including Joe Swift, the Gardeners’ World presenter. He made a whole programme about the garden in the early 2000s. The old oaks and woodland trees created a cathedral-like canopy. Underneath another layer of choice flowering shrubs, regularly shaped and pruned with great skill, formed an understorey. However it was the lower level, so often neglected in woodland gardens, that made Greencombe special. There was a rich tapestry of ferns, spring-flowering bulbs and woodlanders. The moss and lichens, so often scraped away, were allowed to flourish and gave Greencombe the sort of green lushness found in Japanese gardens in Kyoto.
It meant that walking through Greencombe was a privilege, like entering a personal paradise. Her love of the garden somehow entered your soul. Although Joan never accompanied her garden visitors on principle, she often got out the map and pointed out when to look up! In 2009 the artist John Hurford produced a beautiful triptych, capturing three seasons of her dense planting style perfectly.
Rob told me that “her love of plants went well beyond the obvious and she loved to go out on walks across the moor and see the primroses, the gorse and the heather. She had a great appreciation for wildflowers and she believed that the garden should be “a rich experience from the moss all the way to the tree tops.” Nothing is over restrained. One set of steps is colonised by violets for instance and the house walls are half hidden by roses, clematis and wisteria. A spiral staircase supports more plants.
Plant Heritage National Collections
Greencombe has four Plant Heritage collections – Erythronium, Polystichum, Gaultheria (incl. Pernettya) and Vaccinium. 1960s. Joan was attracted by the paddle-shaped green leaves with irregular red-brown markings, although Hadden rued the fact that they produced so little flower. Forty years later Joan observed that Hadden’s plants had too much space and needed “the stimulus of restriction” to make them flower. She used slates, sunk vertically in the ground, to stop hers “running where they will’ and often got fifty to sixty flowers in 3 square yards.
After that initial encounter Joan ordered erythroniums and planted the commonly available E. californicum ‘White Beauty’ and ‘Pagoda’. At the same time she planted three bulbs of the much more expensive purple-flowered E. japonicum along with three E. hendersonii, the latter a north-west American species. Then quite “unexpectedly the National Collection of Erythroniums fell into” her lap so she had to grow as many of the species and hybrids as possible.” Long evening were spent with the Times Atlas of the World in order to understand their distribution. They circle the Northern hemisphere, with most growing on the far side The Rockies. Joan’s collection mirrors their geographical range.
She elicited the help of Brain Mathew, who was at Kew then, and ordered some more species and hybrids. Keith Wiley, also an expert on erythroniums, helped too. He noticed that her E. revolutum was wrong, but admired some individuals and suggested she move them. He considered that two very special. One good pale-pink became ‘Winifred Loraine’ and another pale-white became ‘The Duchess’ after a family friend.
Once Joan became aware that her E. revolutum was incorrect she decided to assemble wild-collected material and embarked on a series of plant hunting expeditions recorded in her book Hunting the Dog’s Tooth Violet. In 1998 Joan flew to Los Angeles, armed with a simple key devised by Brian Mathew, and teamed up with a local nursery owner specialising in wild plants. They travelled to an old quarry at Slate Creek where E. hendersonii and E.citrinum reputedly grew. On the way Joan saw Polystichum munitum and Trillium albidum, which made up for her disappointment on the erythronium front. On that first trip she also saw E. revolutum and Phyllis Gustafson (I think) taught her how to recognise hybrids by their yellow inner markings.
The following year (1999) Joan travelled to America again having contacted the Californian Wildflower Society and had Chester and Shirley Stone to guide her. In 2001 she sallied forth once again, into the Chiquito range in the Sierra Nevada looking for the golden fawn lily (E. pluriflorum) under fir trees – principally Abies magnificum. She was also searching for E.purpurascens and E.pusateri, or the ‘3 Ps’ as Joan referred to them. Visits to Washington State, Siberia, Japan and Romania followed. This allowed her to understand the needs of each species and also to appreciate the dangers of allowing species to self seed and possibly cross. On one occasion she lost her handbag at the airport, to sneak thieves, and on another she had to detach countless leeches from her midriff.
When the young Chris Clennett, now at Wakehurst Place, was charged with sorting out the genus for his PhD in 2000, because there was a gap in Kew’s DNA family tree, he travelled to Somerset in order to look at Joan’s national collection and to collect leafy material for DNA sequencing. His excellent monograph, The Genus Erythronium, is the result. He told me that “Joan was an inspiration and I honestly believe that without her help and support I would not have completed the thesis, still less the subsequent Kew Monograph on the genus Erythronium. Add to that Joan’s enthusiastic and forthright character and I have memories I shall treasure forever.” Joan was the perfect host and thereafter Chris and his wife Margaret made an annual visit to Greencombe, always in erythronium season.
Polystichums
Joan also had an important fern collection and shady Greencombe was perfect for them, as is the local area. She soon joined the British Pteridological Society and was an active member hosting visits, providing legendary teas, and raising ferns from spores. “Growing them from spores created differences” she observed and she did name some of her sporelings and finds after family members. Her collection contained 2 species, the soft shield fern (Polystichum setiferum) and the western sword fern (P. munitum) and 66 cultivars. She apparently acquired many from Reginald Kaye of Carnforth in Lancashire, who was a friend of her mother’s.
The fern expert Martin Rickard visited her often to help identify ferns, although they did not always agree on their names. He remembers her as, “a good friend and a lovely lady” and even listed his favourite garden as Greencombe – to her great delight. He recalls his first visit to the garden in 1980 and was “gobsmacked” by a tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica) because he’d never seen one in a British garden before.
He told me that among her special things were Polystichum setiferum ‘Plumosum Bevis’, ‘Plumosum Drueryi’ and ‘Plumosum Green’. Rickard believes the latter, produced from spores of ‘Bevis’, is the most beautiful fern of all although it’s in very few collections. Nigel Rowland of Long Acre Plants was a great friend too and is one of the trustees of The Greencombe Garden Trust, first established in 1981. He was allowed to collect spores, with her permission, and bulbils if they appeared. However anything that grew at Greencombe stayed in the garden and even Martin Rickard couldn’t persuade her!
Joan also had good numbers of Dryopteris , Polypodium, Athyrium and Phyllitis. She was interested in setting up a national collection of Blechnum, although it came to nothing. She grew her ferns and erythroniums on small terraces creating pockets of soil contained by peat blocks. These areas were kept moss-free. She was proud of the fact that the peat, which came from the Somerset Levels, didn’t cause any habitat destruction. The blocks decay very slowly and soon become moss-covered so it looks very natural.
Gaultheria and Vaccinium
The acid soil also suited Gaultheria and Joan had 38 species and 2 varieties in her collection. A 2009 article from Horticulture Week recorded that “the larger Chinese types, such as G. yunnanensis, are very good performers and make very dramatic plants. I am still waiting to find out how large they grow but the collection is turning into a selection of large, dramatic plants, having given them the space to thrive. Her favourite was G. fragrantissima and she admired its “wonderful blue berries in the autumn. It requires little upkeep, but should never be forgotten, because it doesn’t take kindly to severe weather extremes and should never be allowed to dry out.”
Her vaccinium collection, of 41 species and 3 cultivars, was almost certainly inspired by the wild whortleberries on Exmoor (Vaccinium myrtillus). Joan could remember when the local school children were given a week off to pick them so that they could be sent to London on the train.
The Loraine Trust
In 1988 she established the Loraine Trust, offering grants of up to £2500 to certified organic farmers and growers for specific projects aimed at benefitting wildlife. Applicants had to farm up to 150 acres of land and have a yearly household income of less than £24,000. That was almost thirty years ago so she was far ahead of her time. In 2001 there were 40 applicants from across the world, but the award went to a Welsh farmer, Cliff Carnell, who had laid hedges traditionally and preserved a wetland area. He had 60 species of wild flower on his mixed Carmarthenshire Farm.
The Later Years
Joan was a devout Catholic, who converted to the faith in her early 20s, and there is a wooden Millenium Chapel in the far end of the garden. Her faith must have tested to the limit after she suffered a severe stroke whilst on her own at home in 2008. She laid there for almost 18 hours, before garden visitors found her, so for the last eight years Joan was confined to a wheelchair and found it difficult to smile. She fought hard to resume some movement and could walk about 10 – 20ft with great difficulty.
Ever resourceful and spirited, she had a four-wheeled buggy that she used in the garden. Rob told me that she could be “quite calamitous and she once drove into the pond at a very slow speed.” The garden changed in the last five years, because of her lack of mobility, but she still welcomed gardening friends and visitors from her Green Room – the wooden building close to the back door. I prefer to remember her as she was in the 1980s, sleeves rolled up and bent over the beds, with such intent that one hardly dared to speak. I’m delighted that Greencombe will continue with Rob and Kim Schmidt at the helm.