Pamela Helen Schwerdt AHRHS, VMH, MBE
28 September 2009
Pam Schwerdt was born in 1931 in Surrey and studied at Waterperry Horticultural School, Oxfordshire, from 1949 to 1951 under the formidable Miss Beatrix Havergal. There she met Sibylle Kreutzberger, who was to be her friend and colleague for 60 years. On finishing her training, Pam remained at Waterperry on the staff, gaining the Chittenden Prize for the best student in her year on taking the National Diploma in Horticulture (NDH) there; Sibylle worked away for a while before returning. By 1959, both felt that Waterperry was “rather like being at boarding school forever” and decided that they would rather find a walled garden somewhere where they could set up a nursery. They wrote to various gardening correspondents asking if they knew a suitable site. Vita Sackville-West, then writing for The Observer, wrote back to say that she needed a head gardener at Sissinghurst: would Pam be interested. Pam replied “Yes, but we are two”. Vita employed them both.
When they visited Sissinghurst on July 17, they found a garden with excellent “bones” designed by Vita’s husband Harold Nicolson and profuse and romantic planting by Vita. However, there were plentiful weeds and, at that season, little colour. Pam recalled Vita saying “when the (Alstroemeria) ligtus come, it (the season) is over”. This was taken as a challenge to extend the display into late summer and autumn. Pam and Sibylle’s success in achieving this, largely by using annuals and tender perennials, was widely copied and came to transform planting in these islands and beyond.
Vita trusted them to plant using foliage and flowers so that textures and structures as well as colours of every grouping worked satisfyingly together, in the manner of Gertrude Jekyll, though they had not consulted her books. The result was more ordered and less abandoned than the style of Vita: this has sometimes been suggested a fault but in reality was a professional recognition that a romantic state of near chaos is difficult to maintain. When Sissinghurst passed to the National Trust in 1967, the planting policy remained unchanged: Graham Thomas, then the Trust’s Gardens Adviser and another key figure in the history of planting design, let “the girls” get on with it; they had all the expertise that was needed. Sissinghurst was always considered to be a place where artistry in planting mattered more than historical style: there was never an attempt to grow only those plants introduced by Vita, though key elements of the planting, such as Vita’s roses, were kept in their entirety without additions or subtractions.
Sissinghurst became a Mecca for gardeners largely because of the huge number of plant associations that were created there and reworked every year, with about 30 percent of non-woody plants rearranged or replaced annually, encouraging keen gardeners to visit repeatedly. During Pam and Sibylle’s time, there were perhaps more carefully-designed plant combinations put together at Sissinghurst than at any other garden worldwide, a distinction that may have subsequently passed to Great Dixter with its similarly innovative and outstanding planting. The use of annuals and perhaps especially tender perennials to extend the season involved plants that were not at the time especially popular such as argyranthemums and osteospermums, as well as penstemons, salvias, dahlias and a host of others. Because this encouraged visitors in late summer and autumn, the same range of plants was adopted perhaps especially in other National Trust gardens.
Another reason for visitors to go to Sissinghurst was the excellence of cultivation, especially for roses. Each was pruned and trained according to its own habit of growth and the way its displayed its flowers; the training was exemplary, making those that tend to be scruffy and unkempt seem positively soignée; the companion planting was perfectly chosen to make up for the poor foliage and relative lack of structure of the roses.
Pam’s kindness and forbearance in instructing many young gardeners over the years has resulted in Sissinghurst-trained gardeners holding many key posts in horticulture. Since retiring from the National Trust in 1990, she and Sibylle lectured at the English Garden School and Catriona Boyle’s Garden School as well as undertaking lecture tours to both coasts of the United States, also Australia and New Zealand. Plantsmanship, the finer points of gardening techniques and ways to get the maximum display at every season of the year all featured prominently in their topics.
Pam Schwerdt served on several RHS committees over many years and was often a judge at RHS shows. She served on Floral A Committee (now the Herbaceous Plant Committee) for 32 years and the Floral Trials Subcommittee (now Floral Trials Assessment Panel) for 30 years to 2008, both latterly as Vice Chair, and was a generous benefactor of the Lindley Library. In trials, her assessments of plants were informed by a deep knowledge of how they could be used effectively in the garden plus in many cases first-hand experience of growing them. She had a knack of cutting through all our wordy discussions with a pithy comment that summarized why the plant under question was simply not up to AGM standard.
Pam and Sibylle have often been referred to as though they were a single entity, though each had strong views that often differed. Sibylle used to “leave the purples to Pam” but otherwise all decisions on Sissinghurst’s planting were shared. It was their firm friendship and determination to achieve the best for their garden that made them such an effective team. With sufficient resources at Sissinghurst, Pam and Sibylle were able triumphantly to disprove the dire prophecy that any garden automatically dies with its creators. However, it takes exceptional gardeners to respect the traditions of the creators yet keep the garden so vibrantly alive by constantly reworking it.
Pam Schwerdt was made an Associate of Honour of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1980 and received the Victoria Medal of Honour from the society in 2006. She and Sibylle won the Benetton Foundation Carlo Scarpa International Award for Gardens in 1992 and she was also awarded the MBE. Sibylle continues to tend the garden they made together in the Cotswolds, where they received many gardening friends from around the world.
Tony Lord
Tony Lord is Chair of RHS Floral Trials Assessment Panel, Vice Chair of RHS Herbaceous Committee and author of Gardening at Sissinghurst