It is easy, for those of us who have seen many adaptations of her novels, to imagine a carriage swaying up the path. But Jane and Cassandra would not have seen, as I stopped to undo the gate, the figure I did, weeding the front steps. This is Julia Weaver, head gardener (and enthusiastic weeder) at Chawton House. She is to provide a portal to the past via the gardens and landscape here.
Jane was born in 1775 and this year's 250th anniversary has prompted even more than the usual Austen interest. There are two gardens here that Jane knew well: the grand one at Chawton House (which now houses a library of early women's writing) and the smaller one at the house where she spent the last eight years of her life, with her sister and mother, during which time her books were published.
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From Chawton House there is a sweeping view across the fields, made possible by a ha-ha, created in the 1780s. First Weaver takes me through a woodland that was known in Jane's day as the Wilderness. It was planted with ash and beech, and certainly wasn't even wild, much less a wilderness, but it would have given Jane and her sister somewhere safe to walk. We meander through it on our way to the walled garden that was created by Jane's brother and was in the planning before she died in 1817.
The walled garden is a romantic place, with fruit trees (apple, peach, damson, greengage, quince) and a herb garden. Roses climb through the branches of the apples, laden this year to the point where one has fallen over. There is a mulberry at the start, enhanced by a quote panel from a letter written in 1811 by Jane to her sister: "I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead but I am afraid they are not alive."
There is a "rose walk" with Rosa 'Pride and Prejudice', lightly scented and apricot, that has been newly enhanced with underplantings of hardy geraniums and lamium. "This will keep going till December unless there's a frost," Weaver says. "This is such a good doer. I love this rose. I want more of it in the garden." She has also this year created a "Jane" border with flowers the author would have known, including sanguisorba, agastache, sweet williams, peonies, philadelphus and lilacs. There is an atmosphere of old-fashioned informality here that is welcoming and calming.
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Any roses true to Jane's period would not have been hybridised and this is emphasised in the gardens around her own house, just down the road, which include 30 old varieties of richly perfumed gallica, alba, centifolia and moss roses. The garden was larger in Jane's time, with flowerbeds, an orchard, a shrubbery walk and a vegetable patch. Now it also has a dye garden, with chicory and woad, madder and pulsatilla.
There is no garden layout from her time here but it is assumed it was a simple country garden style. What we do know is that it was loved by Jane herself, who wrote this in a letter in May 1811: "Our young Piony at the foot of the Fir tree has just blown & looks very handsome; & the whole of the Shrubbery Border will soon be very gay with Pinks & Sweet Williams, in addition to the Columbine already in bloom."
Greengage plum: "We are likely to have a great crop of Orleans plums, but not many greengages -- on the standard scarcely any, three or four dozen, perhaps, against the wall."
Syringa vulgaris: "I could not do without a syringa, for the sake of Cowper's line." (She is referring to William Cowper's poem The Task, which references laburnum.)
Rosa 'Emma': Hybrid tea bush, soft pink blooms, sweetly scented, long flowering from June well into autumn.
Rosa 'Persuasion': Floribunda with rich deep pink blooms that are tinged with purple. Spicy scent. Flowers from June to late autumn.