Heritage and landscape consultant Deborah Evans on the challenges of recreating the past and why all gardens need to evolve. Portrait Justin Foulkes <\/p>
The biggest mistake people make is thinking there can be no change,\u201d says Deborah Evans of her work as a heritage and landscape consultant. \u201cI\u2019m old enough to remember the huge brouhaha that ensued when Christopher Lloyd<\/a> ripped out the rose garden at Great Dixter. It set the cat among the pigeons, but as a horticulturist he knew it no longer worked.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Deborah has a masters in the conservation of historic landscapes, it was two roles as head gardener for prestigious properties that gave her a particular and unusual understanding of the horticultural realities of working with historic gardens.<\/p>\n In 1998, she was appointed head gardener at the open-air museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff, where in addition to restoring the formal 19th-century gardens around St Fagans Castle, Deborah was in charge of recreating gardens for the \u2018village\u2019 of rescued and re-erected houses that give visitors an insight into different aspects and periods of Welsh history. \u201cThis ranged from the garden of a peasant\u2019s house, which would have been thrown up overnight, just containing simple herbs<\/a> and potatoes, to a rich yeoman\u2019s garden with pigs, chickens<\/a> and beehives<\/a>, and sophisticated crops such as sea kale and salsify.\u201d Within the gardens of a row of miners\u2019 cottages, Deborah and her tem grew flowers, such as auriculas<\/a>, that are typical of those grown by 19th-century florist societies.<\/p>\n Her team also grew heritage potatoes, including the cultivar \u2018Lumper\u2019, a particularly blight-susceptible variety that contributed to the Irish Famine, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs only permitted its inclusion as there were no commercial potato crops growing locally it could contaminate.<\/p>\n