News From the Garden

Our new gardener, Dave Balian gives us a little background to his gardening life.

‘To Plant a Garden is to Believe in Tomorrow’

Audrey Hepburn

Pre-school I went to June Bentley’s famous breeding kennels with my mother who looked after the newly born pups. I was allowed to play in the gardens and orchard that stretched down to a small tributary of the River Darenth. Even now I can tell you every plant and tree that grew there. The smell of lupins and cat mint take me straight back to that garden, a real jewel in the Kent landscape.

It was here I first climbed a tree - one of the old apples had low branches and an easy way through the centre up to the low canopy, and from this angle I could see the entrance to a coal tit’s nest in the tree next along. I would take a small net down to the stream and spend hours trying and usually failing to catch one of the tiny fish.

My love of nature meant that after a few years of guitars, music, building and travelling I found myself at the Embankment gardens, sister to the Chelsea Physic Gardens and home to the Chelsea Flower Show. At this time, my rock ‘n roll years, I remember specialising in not getting caught sleeping in the borders. I worked there with George Ferguson, an Irish fiddle player who with his wife had adopted and fostered dozens of children, and had the lightening wit that the Irish use to such devastating effect.

The real diamond in the mix at The Embankment was an old Chelsea pensioner called Percy.

I used to open the gates at 6:30 am – no mean feat given that I had probably got in from the previous night’s gig just a few hours before. Percy would be there waiting at the café in full Chelsea Pensioners’ Great Coat, hat, medals and pristine shiny boots, to walk around and open up. Percy had been a farrier in the British Army in India.

During what was a particularly cold winter, Percy’s tales of daring do in the Raj were just perfect. He told me that for one month each year he would be tasked with preparing an expedition into the Bengal Jungle to hunt tigers. Apparently teams of soldiers, royalty, beaters and carriers would head off into the jungle. Percy described how after copious snake bites, food poisonings, falls and disasters, they would, when the month was ended, stagger back to the barracks. I asked Percy how many tigers were killed. He replied that in the many years he spent in India he never saw one. “We made far too much of a din,” he said.

I was falling in love with life in the parks and gardens of London. Those unique spaces of social interaction, wildlife and plant life that make London a truly green space. When I return it is often just to go and revisit old friends like the Plane trees of Berkley Square and the Dawn Redwood of Holland Park.

Percy was the oldest man in England when he passed a few years later aged 107. By then he was a local legend; a friend to everyone in the city garden of a garden city.

It is a real pleasure and privilege to find myself many years later Head Gardener of Chalice Well. My aim, as it has been throughout my gardening life, is to help the garden into harmony and abundance by listening to her voice and following her guidance.

I look forward to meeting you beneath the Yews.

One morning we walked around the garden in deep snow. The BullRing was a small circle just outside the garden which was a viewing point for the beautiful Wren Church and barracks that are still home to the Chelsea Pensioners. Percy and I found the body of an old streetdweller half-buried in snow in a cardboard box.

I will never forget how gentle this old guard was, with me and my emotions, with the spirit of the past unknown soul and with the paramedics who arrived later. In the spring, Percy would walk around the garden with members of the public. He would by now have left the blue Great Coat behind and be in the Bright Red of the Chelsea Pensioners. He really was on duty every day, opening with me in the morning, locking up at night and taking the tourists around and talking to any and all in between.