Lady Anne Berry obituary

iIn the world of horticulture, only a few people have managed to create a garden of world renown. Lady Anne Berry, however, played an active part in making two. In the UK she is known as the founder of Rosemoor, the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden in Devon, and in New Zealand is admired for her role in nurturing the beautiful grounds of Hackfalls Arboretum on North Island.

Berry, who has died aged 99, donated her house at Rosemoor, plus its eight-acre garden and a further 32 acres of pasture, to the RHS in 1988, having established a collection of rare and unusual trees, many of which were grown from seed she had collected herself. Two years later, after marrying the dendrologist Bob Berry, she resettled on his family’s ranch, Hackfalls Station in New Zealand, and set about expanding and improving upon its Homestead Garden, planting hundreds of rare specimens and native plants.

Together, both gardens have attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors over the years. Although Rosemoor is the smallest of the RHS’s properties, it is one of the most interesting in terms of its planting and was visited by more than 200,000 people in 2018.

Anne consciously wanted to recreate it as what she called a “mini-Wisley” – a reference to the RHS’s flagship garden in Surrey – and to establish a place where rare and interesting plants could be found growing in conditions that were favourable to them. Devon, with its mild climate, is an ideal for such aspirations; for the RHS, whose mission is to educate the public about plants and how to grow them, it was an important addition to their portfolio.

In the same way, Hackfalls Arboretum provides a living textbook of trees. Many people regard arboretums as rather bland, mainly because there are few flowers and not much in the way of colour apart from autumn foliage. But the Homestead Garden, which consists of about half an acre of mainly flowering shrubs, provides an additional attraction for those who like their gardens to look more domesticated.

Anne was born in Wolterton Hall in Norfolk to Robert Walpole, the fifth (and last) Earl of Orford, and his wife, Emily (nee Oakes). Anne inherited Rosemoor, a salmon fishing lodge, on her father’s death in 1931, and continued to live there with her mother until 1939, when she married Eric Palmer, a colonel in the territorial army, and moved away to follow him on various postings. During the second world war she leased Rosemoor to the Red Cross to house evacuees, but in 1945 returned with her family to run the estate as a dairy farm.

Up to and beyond this point Anne had shown no real interest in gardening, and by her own admission the grounds of Rosewood were “dull”, with little of note apart from the conventional displays of summer annuals.

In 1959, however – while convalescing in Spain after a bout of measles – she met Collingwood Ingram, a world authority on Japanese cherries and a distinguished ornithologist and naturalist. He and Anne went walking in what is now Los Alcornocales natural park in Andalucía, and he introduced her to the concept of “right plant, right place”. He also invited her to visit his own garden, The Grange, in Benenden, Kent.

Catherine Horwood, in her 2010 book Gardening Women, describes how Anne later returned from a “raid” on The Grange with a Land Rover and trailer laden with plant material. This provided the foundation of the transformation of Rosemoor from a neat but boring Victorian set-piece to a garden that blended into the Devon landscape and offered a plethora of choice plants to admire.

Apart from Ingram, other mentors included Joyce Heathcoat Amory, who with her husband, John, was pioneering woodland gardening at Knightshayes Court in nearby Tiverton; Lionel Fortescue, owner of the Garden House at Buckland Monachorum in west Devon, who advised her on grouping plants to show them at their best; and Harold Hillier, the nurseryman and founder of the Hillier Arboretum in Hampshire.

Hillier introduced her to Carl Ferris Miller, the arborist, who inspired her with a love of holly. Soon she was returning from a visit to John Bond, former head gardener at the Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park, who offered her some of the recently introduced blue holly hybrids (Ilex x meserveae) and she recalled returning to Rosemoor, “with my little car absolutely buried in holly plants inside and on the roof”.

Eventually her accumulation of holly became so well regarded that the National Council for the Conservation of Plants and Gardens (now Plant Heritage) made her one of its first “national collection holders” – individuals who grow a particularly good range of species from any one genus.

Bond was instrumental in persuading Anne to donate Rosemoor to the RHS in 1988. It was not an easy decision, but by then her husband had died (in 1980), and, now nearly 70, she felt that by handing over her beloved garden it would at least continue to be maintained to the highest standards. It became only the second garden to be donated to the RHS, after Wisley, which was donated in 1903.

Within a year of transferring ownership Anne was in New Zealand on an International Dendrology Society tour. She had visited the country as a child and then again in 1977, when she had first met Bob Berry. At the time both were married, but when Anne returned in 1989 both were widowed, and when she met Bob again he proposed to her.

Anne accepted, embarking on her new life on North Island with gusto and making significant improvements to the garden at Hackfalls, providing an aesthetically pleasing space that was also populated with a wide range of interesting shrubs, including native species.

When Bob was 90 and Anne was 87, the couple finally moved away from Hackfalls to live at the Kiri Te Kanawa retirement village in Gisborne in 2006. There Anne carried on with more modest horticultural interests, working in the garden of St Mark’s Church in Gisborne and propagating many of the plants herself. She kept in close touch with Rosemoor via email and wrote the occasional piece for the Devon branch of the Plant Heritage newsletter.

A cistus (Cistus x fernandesiae) was named Anne Palmer in her honour and is still widely available around the world. In 1986 she was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour, the RHS’s highest accolade.

Bob died in 2018. She is survived by two sons from her first marriage, John and Anthony.

• Anne Sophia Berry, horticulturist, born 11 December 1919; died 8 September 2019