YESTERDAYS and TOMORROWS

Mendips is owned by the National Trust and is a mecca for Beatles’ fans. While the house itself is contemporary to the 1950s when John Lennon lived there, the garden contains modern plants.

John Lennon in the garden at Mendips with Aunt Mimi, Uncle George & Squeaker the dog.

Simon Osborne, the National Trust’s Liverpool Property Manager, said: “Mendips was given to the National Trust by Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s widow, in 2002. We have restored the building and its contents faithfully and accurately to recreate the environment in which John grew up with his Aunt Mimi. But the garden features varieties of plant that simply were not grown in domestic gardens in the 1950s.

“We want the garden to look as close as possible to the one that John and Aunt Mimi would have used and enjoyed every day. That is where the University of Chester students came in.”

The students, in the second year of their History degree, volunteered for a six-week work placement with the National Trust so that they could research a replacement planting scheme for Mendips. Under the direction of their course leader, Dr Donna Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Modern History, they have been trawling through gardening history books to discover the type of plants that would have been popular in the 1950s, as well as through archives and old photographs of Mendips.

John Lennon outside his home, Mendips, early 1950s

Dr Jackson said: “The team had a couple of useful pointers to start with. It was already known that Aunt Mimi liked growing soft fruit and John Lennon’s cousin volunteered his memories of the garden layout and content. However, the sources are limited. The difficulty of this task has been compounded by the importance of John Lennon and the Beatles to Liverpool and to cultural history.