Rhododendrons enjoy a Himalayan spring in Wiltshire

If paradise exists, I hope it looks like the garden I saw a month ago. It is a wooded garden, apparently artless, but not wild at all. Under a canopy of old oaks and above carpets of English bluebells, benches of color open one after the other, some spreading sideways, others leaning like towers above the grass paths. Their origins date back to the 1850s, but they and their wood have been owned by the same family ever since. The flowers are rhododendrons. If you write off the Rhodesians as incongruous intruders on the British landscape, you’re wrong. I will inspire you to go next spring and see how wrong you are.

At Bowood House, near Calne in Wiltshire, the park and walled gardens of the Lansdownes are rightly admired. The lake alone is worth visiting as it is a masterpiece of Capability Brown, that 18th century landscape genius. Its curves and lines are perennially satisfying, but Bowood’s rhododendron and azalea wood further down the road is even finer. The first planting of rhododendrons took place 170 years ago, but since then they have been expanded and bred. They have never been prettier than in this extraordinary year for gardeners.

In early spring, the camellias were gorgeous and the magnolias were amazing, frost-free for weeks on end. Lilacs continued with a vintage year, but the shrubs that were most stunning are the rhododendrons. They enjoyed the cool wet intervals last summer. They reveled in the wet winter and set more flower buds than ever. The chill and wetness of March continued to suit them.

If you read memoirs of great collectors from China and the Himalayas, you will understand why. Sometimes they depict entire forests of rhododendrons shining through fog and storms at high altitudes. In Sussex three weeks ago I marveled at the density of flowers on rhododendrons in rather modest gardens. East Grinstead is no Kathmandu, but the rhododendrons of Sussex, Kent and Surrey had a Himalayan source.

Upon entering Bowood’s forest, Lord Lansdowne, its chairman caretaker, explained the preferred soil. It sits on a long ridge of green sand that runs southwest from the Wash and allows rhododendrons and lime-hating plants to grow in surprising places. I had brought with me another limeless woodland owner, Nicola Taylor, whose RHS councilor father spent his last years clearing and planting rhododendrons in Northamptonshire’s Evenley Wood, also on greensand, in an area slightly probable.

He bought 60 acres for £1,000 nearly 50 years ago. Nicola’s daughter has taken it to new levels and attracts visitors by the thousands. She and Lord Lansdowne were pleased to discover that they lived on the same long ridge of green sand, two owners of rhododendron groves, one new, one old.

As they examined its layering in a cut bank, I marveled at a stunning prequel to the visit, a pale pink rhododendron called Game Chick. Next to one of the main grass walks, he made a shrub about 7 meters high. This year it is covered in wonderful flowers. It is one of the Loder rhododendrons, bred in 1901 by master Edmund Loder, the planter of the superb rhododendron gardens at Leonardslee in Sussex.

While photographing their hundreds of flowers, the ladies in our quartet identified themselves as hunting dogs, but we’ve since discovered the story behind the name. There was no allusion to flamboyant women, and no tribute to roosters or pheasants bred for sport. In October 1901, the year of its origin. a racehorse named Game Chick, belonging to another member of the Loder family, won the Dewhurst Stakes at Newmarket, a top race for two-year-olds. The rhododendron honored the victory.

Leaving Game Chick at the starting line, we headed to the main grass road through the woods, about 35 acres in total. As the sun filtered through the tall oaks, I stood in awe among huge bushes of another Loder winner, Rhododendron loderi, pink to white with trumpet-shaped flowers. It is still my first choice for larger gardens.

Opposite was a huge specimen with variegated bark and purple flowers, labeled curienum and credited by Lord Lansdowne with an origin in the 1850s. It has since disappeared from catalogs and trade. Bowood is a haven of rare arrivals, some of which have yet to be re-identified, even by visiting experts.

Bowood’s white, scarlet, pink, pale yellow and purple-blue are never invasive. They unfold like a Technicolor dream transporting viewers to another frequency

Are rhododendrons in such colors unnatural invaders of a British forest? Purple-flowered Rhododendron ponticum is a notorious pest, invasive and difficult to eradicate when given a chance in gardens. However, Bowood’s white, scarlet, pink, pale yellow and purple-blue are never invasive. It unfolds like a Technicolor dream, transporting viewers to another frequency. After all, what is nature but our own idea?

In parts of Scotland, rhododendrons have been planted in coniferous evergreen forests, sometimes their natural companions in wild Asian habitats. Those conifers have a somber note, while Bowood’s oak tree never fades, especially when the leaves turn fresh green.

In his wonderful poem “The Garden,” Andrew Marvell wrote, “Never saw white or red/So great as this wondrous green.” At Bowood the green of the grass was particularly vivid, but the red and white around it are equally in love. Interspersed with pink-and-white loders, the lovely Rhododendron Augustinii is a tower of lavender-purple flowers that commemorates Augustine Henry of Ireland, a transformative forester and plant collector, especially in China.

Beyond this wonderful memorial to him, my eye was drawn to a wide-spreading variety with bell-shaped flowers, a scarlet joy. It’s Armistice Day, explained Lord Lansdowne, a rhododendron named after the end of the First World War.

Walls of color stretched out before us the further we walked along the edge of the green valley, either Penjerrick, awarded an Award of Merit in 1923 as a fragrant cream-yellow, or Moonstone, a pink with a pale color. Broad-leaved Rhodes are connoisseurs’ treasures: Bowood has a magnificent broad-leaved macabeanum whose flower spikes, up to 20 at a time, are pale yellow with darker markings. It was introduced from Manipur to India in 1928.

In short, early May wood is heaven. It’s not fake fiction, like the gardens and wisteria in that scary TV series Bridgerton, although it took a graphics expert to tell me they were CGI fakes. From Bowood’s Rhododendron Mrs. Lionel de Rothschild, pink-white with a red mark in the center, to exquisite Cool Haven, a soft pale yellow, I floated more dreamily than through any field of “native” buttercups.

I bless the owners who have kept this wood to such a standard. The irons must be cut, the grass must be cut, but the hand of the maintainers does not come out anywhere. I arrived at the Lansdowne family mausoleum in a glade in Rhodes, before and after it. “Do you have to poison the brambles?” I asked Lord Lansdowne, their vigilante killer. “No,” he replied. “I go through them myself, leaning back and digging into each one.” What an excellent prelude to an afterlife buried in the family vault among all this thornless beauty.

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