Ben Pentreath
September is the ultimate month of abundance – the garden overflowing, jungle-like; the month of harvest festival in the church, endless veg: pumpkins, sweetcorn, great cabbages, salad for ever; apples; lilies, roses in their second flowering, dahlias, asters; but also the realisation that summer is shifting relentlessly into the distance – evenings arrive just that little bit earlier, mornings later. It was always a magical time at the Parsonage: mist hanging in the valley and the copper beech beginning to form beech nuts, which would be falling all over the garden a month later.
Photos by Ben Pentreath
In various articles, including a feature in The Sunday Times, Charlie rapidly became known as the ‘Dahlia King’, not least because of his famous dahlia border that spawned a thousand imitations. Eventually (as he explains on page 108) that had to go, because the shade of the copper beech tree became overwhelming, and dahlias, being Mexican, crave the sun. But then Charlie started planting mad dahlias in his allotment garden, of every form and colour, just so long as they were a crazy shape or vivid hue. The garden took on the character of one of those beautiful images from the 1950s, before dahlia shades became soft and fashionable. Chrysanthemums came next. And having all this extra space meant that Charlie could really tend those plants. Success beckoned on the show bench.
Charlie was never one for cutting back the garden, and it remained a beautiful, richly planted, living thing until deep into winter, providing an endless source of food and shelter for many creatures. In the autumn the garden heaved with a wonderful confusion, climbing nasturtiums running riot in the veg garden, huge pumpkin tendrils spreading across the meadow, the orchard filled with apples, climbing roses in their second or third flowering, and creepers smothering the house.
In the last year at the Parsonage, Charlie grew a great variety of pumpkins and squashes that formed a mad display at the front door on his old metal pot stage (see page 39). When it was time to pack and move to Rousay, all those gourds were the last thing to be placed in the removals lorry and for several weeks they gave colour to one of the courtyards up at Westness. A little bit of the autumn in Dorset moved to Scotland and gave us a sense of energy and of life to come in the short days of our first winter there.
On Tuesday 20 October at 6.30pm Ben joins us to talk through ‘A Year at the Parsonage’, his love letter to the house, as he and his husband Charlie McCormick prepare to begin again on the remote island of Rousay, Orkney.
In person tickets and livestream available, watch live or on demand: book
20 Oct 2026
13 Oct 2026
22 Oct 2026