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House & Garden Magazine June 2007
LIFESTYLE
Liz Elliott meets Danaë and Robin Duthy, owners of cut-flower company Country Roses, which they founded in 2001 on their farm on the Essex/Suffolk border
As you approach Josselyns down its avenue of pleached limes, the classical building with its line of arched windows and dormered roof looks as though it might be more at home in the Loire Valley than in the heart of Constable country, overlooking the Stour Valley. This is the home of Robin and Danaë Duthy, managing directors of Country Roses, the increasingly successful cut-flower business that they set up in 2001, which is as determinedly British as any bulldog.
Robin was born and grew up in Old Joscelyns, a handsome Elizabethan manor house further up the hill from his present home. His parents, who had a house in the South of France and loved the large, sun-filled rooms of French eighteenth-century architecture, decided to capitalise of the spectacular views enjoyed by what was then their vegetable garden, and commissioned architects Raymond Erith and Quinlan Terry to design them a house built along those lines.
The completed building was everything they’d hoped for; it is essentially one room deep so that sun streams in throughout the day. You enter through a large, airy, elongated hall with a curved staircase leading to the four bedrooms and bathroom above. On the right is a square, window-lined drawing room, a study and a bedroom, and to the left is the dining room with the kitchen and domestic offices beyond. In order to take advantage of the view, each room, including the hall, has French windows that open on to wide, paved terraces that overlook formal rose gardens and the valley beyond.
Robin and Danaë met at Oxford; but both then went their separate ways. Robin became an investment analyst and invented ‘Art Market Research’, a unique indexing system for tracing the value of paintings old and new, which is used by Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Danaë, who still works under her maiden name, Brook, is senior features writer for The Mail on Sunday, and wrote television documentaries and several books, including Naturebirth (Heineman & Penguin), which helped launch a worldwide campaign for women’s rights during childbirth.
When Robin’s mother died in 1998, Danaë and he moved into Josselyns from his previous home, a Georgian town house in Stoke Newington. Two years later they married. They each have three sons and, to date, four grandchildren between them.
Jointly established at Josselyns, they set about deciding how to us the 45 acres that surrounded the house. ‘We wanted to generate money and at the same time offer employment to local people,’ explained Danaë. ‘My aunt had a beautiful garden in Kent and taught me a lot about roses. And here I was surrounded by them: each weekend visitors staggered home happily clutching huge bouquets of wonderful roses that they could not buy in shops. Here, we thought, was a gap in the market.’
So they dug up a former orchard and planted 500 rose bushes. Even in the first summer they had an incredible showing and Danaë took a carload up to London. ‘My first stop was the florist Wild At Heart in Notting Hill, which took the lot.’
Encourage by this enthusiastic response they planted more, and today Country Roses has over 10,000 roses in 60 different varieties. They deliver to florists and individuals and last year provided the roses for the Queen’s eightieth-birthday lunch. In October they were invited to show at the RHS Halls in Vincent Square and won a bronze medal, on the strength of 2008. ‘This means that the roses have to be brought on a month earlier than those grown out of doors,’ explains Danaë, ‘so we are building a hug greenhouse to bring them on by the beginning of May, which also means that we can provide roses for weddings in May.’
Aided by set decorator Trisha Edwardes, who was nominated for an Oscar for her work in Finding Neverland, when she used the roses, Danaë runs Country Rose Parties, decorating private events. For their friends Annabel and Graham Baker’s summer dance at Eye Park in Suffolk, they filled the fifteenth-century house, marquee and cart lodge with sumptuous scented roses.
Fed with seaweed compost and manure, the plants are as pesticide free as possible. The company employs four regular workers, and more come in to help during the summer months. Morning picking starts early and finishes around 11am, as the heat in the middle of the day shortens the flowers’ vase life; a second picking sometimes starts again for an hour or two in the evening. One large barn is used for sorting and storing the roses in cold rooms prior to delivery. Petals are dried in a smaller barn before being mixed with orris root and lavender to make Country roses’ pot pourri.
The office, another barn, overlooking the chicken house, is run by Ginny Carter. ‘I used to be a special needs teacher but decided on a change of direction. Now I come in each morning and think how lucky I am. I get given freshly laid eggs and I sit surrounded by roses. There could not be a better place to work.’
However, their peace came under threat five years ago, when plans for a country theme park were drawn up. Nominally to celebrate the life and times of John Constable and the English countryside, several restaurants and a retail centre were to be created in the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. ‘John Constable’s mother had lived in the village and he gave the church an altarpiece in her memory. If the plants went ahead I think he would spin in his grave.’
Widespread local opposition to the scheme prompted Robin, with others, to form the Stour Valley Action Group (SVAG), in order to fight it. So far they have been successful although, as Danaë says, they are always vigilant. ‘Although the application has been withdrawn twice, they will try again. There’s too much money in it for them to give up.’
Robin and Danaë are also active in supporting local causes and each year help to run a tennis tournament to raise funds for the repair of the fabric of St Mary’s Church, Wissington, parts of which date back to the 1100s. Now in its tenth year, ‘Wiston Wimbledon’ is played over 14 courts in local gardens. Players pay £15 a head to take part – last year they raised £2,500 – and matches are divided into children and adults.
Danaë is now writing a book on roses – both their cultivation and their history – and writes in a fishing hut on the edge of the small lake below the house. Surrounded by weeping willows and nesting waterfowl, John Constable might well have felt at home here.