Gardens
Sir David Scott
Ursula Buchan
It is by no means unusual for a person of exceptional qualities, who has already en- joyed a career of distinction in one field, to take to another and become equally assured of a place in posterity. Miss Gertrude Jekyll turned to gardening com- paratively late in life after failing eyesight prevented her from continuing her ambi- tions as an artist and craftswoman. Similar- ly, Sir David Montagu Douglas Scott, who died recently aged 99, after a distinguished career in the Foreign Office became well known in his later years as a great plantsmaritgardener. Together with his second wife, Valerie Finnis, they formed a remarkable and celebrated partnership, winning many awards for their plants at Royal Horticultural Society shows and receiving a succession of knowledgeable pilgrims to their garden.
He is best remembered in his working life for raising the morale of the Consular Service (the 'Cinderella Service') and for being largely responsible for the 'Eden Reforms' which amalgamated it with the Foreign Office. He retired, as a Deputy Under-Secretary of State, aged 60 in 1947.
In that year, he settled in what is now called the Dower House, a part of Bought- on House, near Kettering in Northampton- shire, which is owned by his cousin, the Duke of Buccleuch. Here he made a memorable tree and shrub garden out of two acres of parkland which had reverted to wilderness. Almost single-handed, he cut down the trees, cleared the scrub and, by dint of extreme hard work, turned a most unpromising north-facing, alkaline clay garden into what he called 'a home for plants'. His first wife, who had helped him, died in 1965 and in 1970 he married the well-known flower photographer and rock- plant specialist, Valerie Finnis, who brought several thousand alpines and small hardy plants with her to the Dower House garden and made beds for them in what had been part of his vegetable garden.
David was an immensely wise, funny, and cultivated man, with a natural courtesy and a gift for friendship which was blind to social distinctions. He appeared to have only two dislikes — pretentiousness and small talk. He had a delicious twinkling wit and the ability to talk informedly on anything from modern art to Greek poetry or the extreme taxonomic difficulties posed by the genus Rosa, depending on the interests of his companion. He had an astonishing memory which never failed him and was able not only to remember the name and position of all his plants but also to recall the fun of seeing sweet peas germinate in a garden in Australia in 1890. He was optimistic by nature and continued to plant shrubs even when he was very old. That same optimism prompted him to ask for a five-year diary for his 99th birthday.
He would not admit a hoe in the flower garden for he believed that careful hand- weeding, on the knees using knee-pads, was the best way of eradicating perennial weeds. So committed to it was he that, less than an hour after his marriage to Valerie, they were back in the garden working on the ground elder. Hand-weeding also en- sured that any interesting seedling would be preserved and, as a result of careful observation, some extremely good garden plants have gone out into the world with the Boughton name. Hebe cupressoides 'Boughton Dome', for example, he found growing as a sport on the ordinary species in a garden in Scotland, while on his last honeymoon.
He was not interested in fashions in garden design, preferring to concentrate on the individual attractions of plants and on understanding their ways. Yet he suc- ceeded, apparently without trying, to cre- ate a garden of great beauty, where curving paths lead around some 90 thickly planted beds of well-grown, often most unusual, trees and shrubs. The only deliberate plant association that he would admit to was the felicitous grouping of ornamental willows and cornus, Salix daphnoides, S. britzensis, S. alba vitellina, and Cornus alba sibirica (with stems in winter of lavender-silver, orange, yellow, and red) in a place where they would catch the low winter sunlight. The Grand Design is so commonly advo- cated that it is refreshing to discover it is possible (although it takes someone of David's abilities) to make a lovely garden over a period of years by the piecemeal but sympathetic placing of plants where they will be happy.
He had the rare virtue, which most gardeners cannot claim, of never, being unnerved by the enormous nature of any task. He maintained that what took the most time was deciding where to start. It was practical, back-breaking, hand- dirtying gardening which he really loved, an honourable occupation requiring skill, application, and serious thought. Miss Jekyll wrote, in a passage which applies as much to David: . . . is it a blessing or a disadvantage to be so made that one must take keen interest in many matters; that, seeing something that one's hand may do, one cannot resist doing or attempting it, even though time be already overcrowded, and strength much reduced, and sight steadily failing? . . . I only know that to my own mind and conscience pure idleness seems to me to be akin to folly, or even worse, and that in some form or other! must obey the Divine command: 'Work while ye have the light.'
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