Rosemoor
Lady Anne Berry talks to Sue Scrutton about Rosemoor:
To many North Devonians Rosemoor, Torrington, is well known as the home of Col J E Palmer, who has given long and valued service to the county of Devon. But many people, too, know Rosemoor equally well for its beautiful gardens created during the past 15 years by his wife Lady Anne, a noted horticulturist.
Born in Norfolk and daughter of the late Earl of Orford, Lady Anne’s earliest memories of the house are from childhood visits in the spring for the salmon fishing on the River Torridge, which runs through the grounds. In those days, she recalls there was so little traffic one could “whizz down the hill from Torrington on a bicycle with the brakes off – and without touching the handlebars! Sometimes I could get right to the gate without pedalling at all.”
Now she worries about pedestrians – and particularly school children – obliged to use that busy road.
Lady Anne is descended from the first Prime Minister of England, Sir Robert Walpole, and it is a heritage of which she is justly proud.
She told me that had spent much of her youth in New Zealand where her father had settled in 1928. “He was a sailor and he’d fallen in love with the country many years earlier when his ship called in to those shores. As he had no son to inherit the family property in Norfolk, he handed it over to a distant cousin, which was a generous gesture on his part, made at great personal sacrifice. He did this in the hope that the property and the family name of Walpole might remain together in perpetuity.”
She spoke of her husband and family – two married sons, three infant grand-daughters, one grandson, and of her mother, who now lives at Rosemoor too. Although 84 years old, the Dowager Countess is still very active in the house and garden and only comparatively recently resented losing a measure of independence by having to give up driving a car.
Links with New Zealand have been continued by the marriage of a son in 1970 to a girl from Gisborne. “We went out there for the wedding and it was the first time I’d been back for 32 years. A lovely visit, but very emotional for me, as I felt I was really at home once more.”
Tall and slender with finely boned features, Lady Anne wears typical country clothes – “the older the better” she smiled.
From small beginnings, she has now become a member of the judging committee of the Royal Horticultural Society. She is also chairman of the Tours Committee and Honorary Director of Tours for the International Dendrology Society.
Rosemoor gardens are now a Charitable Trust, open to the public from April until the end of October. They are maintained by Lady Anne and one full-time gardener, with occasional outside help.
Lady Ann is a Governor of the Bluecoat Primary School in Torrington and a member of the Bideford and Great Torrington Bench.
Full article dated 25 June 1976