When the telephone caller who had interrupted her breakfast identified himself as the Prince of Wales, she retorted somewhat naturally, "Are you joking?"
He was not. It really was Britain's Prince Charles, and he wanted a little help with his garden.
He had phoned the right expert--Rosemary Verey, guru of gardens, lady of laburnum, vicar of vegetables and doyenne of design who single-handedly reestablished the English garden on the modern grounds of her native Britain and across America.
Verey, who wrote 15 books on gardening and lectured widely from London to Los Angeles, died May 31 of pneumonia in London's Chelsea Memorial Hospital. She was 82.
Prince Charles, like Verey's other acolytes, had admired her four-acre garden at Barnsley House, a 17th century rectory in the Cotswolds of Gloucestershire. He hired her to assist him in planning decorative vegetable gardens and other plantings at his nearby country home of Highgrove.
Verey also planned gardens for Elton John, for New York's Botanical Garden and even in rural acreages in such places as Kentucky.
"Keep your garden simple. Simplicity is usually best," she advised a sold-out audience at Los Angeles' Descanso Gardens in 1988, when she headlined an event sponsored by the Pasadena Garden Club.
On that visit, the artistic but blunt-spoken gardener chided the Californians for "pruning and torturing your plants and trees."
Among Verey's books over the last two decades were "The Scented Garden," "Classic Garden Design," "How to Adapt and Recreate Garden Features of the Past," "The Garden in Winter," "Rosemary Verey's Good Planting Plans" and "Secret Gardens."
In 1999, Verey received the Royal Horticultural Society's highest award, the Victoria Medal of Honor. The same year, she was given a special award by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Her own garden earned the Garden of the Year Award from Christie's/Historic Houses Assn. in 1988.
"My writing about gardens and gardening is motivated by my creation of the garden at Barnsley House," she once told the Contemporary Authors anthology. "My approach has become more formal over the years--making a Knot Garden from 17th-century designs in 1972; a small but formal herb garden in 1978; and a potager [ornamental vegetable garden] started in 1972, now much visited and an influence on other gardeners."
