Shropshire Magazine

Ken Tudor salutes a new book by a Shropshire academic, in which she has combined her formidable skills as a local historian with her gardening expertise

Dr Katherine Swift, author of The Morville Hours.

Dr Katherine Swift is a well-respected historian, wonderful gardener and a superb writer – and has combined these extraordinary talents to write a masterpiece about her glorious garden and the wonderful varied lives of people who have lived in Shropshire down the centuries.

Her exquisite skills as an author have helped her to write an amazingly detailed story which combines the 20-year labour of love in creating her stunning garden at Morville and the awe-inspiring stories of people who have lived in the area and the wider county since Roman times.

It is a story that grabs you from the first few lines, explaining how Katherine found The Dower House only after looking around the country for similar properties.

The work in the garden has been remarkable in itself, a story of dedication that I have witnessed at first hand, ever since the first opening dates when I visited to see the gardening academic’s creation.

It was remarkable because the first thing Katherine did was to get a bulldozer to clear the site, before starting to weave her intricate design of historical themes which has fascinated thousands who have visited over the last 10 years or so.

She had arrived in the village of Morville in August 1988, with two removal vans of books, three cats and two car-loads of plants, to set up home and create a garden. And as she worked away at the creation she was conscious of the church clock in the village.

“The sound of the church clock became the regular accompaniment to my daily labours in the garden,” she says.

As it struck the hours, the clock recalled for her the Hours of the Divine Office, and the monks who once worked the ground under the rule of St Benedict. It also brought back her childhood, when her mother converted to Roman Catholicism and had her Book of Hours.

A Book of Hours contains a collection of texts, prayers and psalms, along with appropriate illustrations to form a reference for Catholic Christian worship and devotion.

“It has been a long time because I have been writing the book for 15 years, and it is something that has been difficult, but a pleasure to complete,” says Katherine.

“It is the story of making the garden, but is really all about Shropshire too, from woolly mammoths to modern motorways, and is full of the stories of other people who inhabit the same landscape – hedgelayer, gravedigger and tramp.

“It is also about the lad who delivers the logs and the local butcher, vine-grower, local farmer, the shepherd who planted snowdrops, the great lady in her grand house, my neighbour who came to Morville Hall as a maid 70 years ago and picked violets from the hedge bottoms for her mother on Mothering Sunday.”

The cover of The Morville Hours.

It also relates to the landscape itself: the history of the local roads and hedges, the rocks and soils from the glaciers that arrived in the Ice Age, the stream, and the field names.

“It refers to people who lived in Morville in the past, with each chapter taking a particular period of the village and the house’s history, and relating those people to the part of the garden I was working on in that chapter of the book,” she explains.

They relate to different historical styles in the garden, tying in to different periods in the occupation of the house.

“So we have the 12th-century rebellion of Robert de Bellême and the building of the Norman monastery, which inspired the Cloister Garden,” she says.

Then there was the Knot Garden made for Frances Cressett who lived there in the 1550s and 1560s, and who may have been party to her husband’s murder, and went on to marry three more times. There was, too, Juliana Warren, one of seven spinster sisters who lived in the big house from 1873 to 1928, and for whom she made the Wild Garden – and so on around the garden beds.

Katherine goes on to explain that each chapter represented a different month and a different time of the day or night as well as a different historical period.

Roses feature heavily in Dr Katherine Swift’s Morville garden.

“For example midnight in midwinter, dawn chorus in March, noon in June and back to midnight the following Christmas, linking the activities of the present-day people in the landscape to the illustrated calendars found in some Books of Hours,” Katherine adds.

The book is fascinating, but it’s the garden that always interests me, being part of a collection of five or six around the Morville Hall complex which opens regularly for charity.

It is a clever and thoughtful garden, which has plantings to enthuse the visitor whatever the season, running from the hellebores and blossom of early spring, through the narcissi and feathered-petals of English tulips and on to the amazing roses and clematis of the summer.

Over the years I have visited scores of times to see seasonal changes and always come away enthused – the turf maze is amazing, the colourful Cloister Garden oozes class and the ornamental fruit-and-vegetable garden a joy.

One of the formal gardens at The Dower House.

It seems that everything Katherine does is appreciated – the garden is well-known, she was a Times gardening columnist for four years, and now her new much-acclaimed book is to be the Book of the Week on Radio 4, starting on May 5.

• The book The Morville Hours by Katherine Swift is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99. Katherine’s garden opens regularly for the National Gardens Scheme and also every Wednesday, Sunday and Bank Holiday until September, 2pm–6pm. Admission £4, children £1.