Off the SCALE

Anne Crawley worked with Chippenham Park’s historical landscaping and epic proportions to grand effect. Honed by her daughter and son-in-law, this Cambridgeshire estate’s monumental structure is best explored in the still of winter

It is the sheer scale of the landscaping at Chippenham Park that impresses. In winter the gardens are pared right back, revealing the magnitude of the garden’s bone structure. The silhouettes of mature and majestic trees rise above winter morning mists engendered by the parkland’s vast tracts of water: modified lakes carved out from former canals. The low sun illuminates Chippenham’s wide open acres, gilding its architecture and creating an atmospheric and ethereal winterscape.

Elements of the 300-acre estate’s landscape architecture date back to the 17th century. A faded but indelible network of canals and lakes, of AngloDutch design, was introduced in the 1690s by the park’s creator, Admiral Russell. The First Lord of the Admiralty planted vast avenues of trees, creating magnificent vistas from the then considerable country house. These were reputedly laid out to reflect the battleship formation of his renowned naval victory over the French at La Hogue in 1692.

Subsequent mass planting of estate trees, many dating back 200-300 years, survive to this day, their numbers augmented by John Tharp, a sugar baron who bought the estate in 1791 and planted trees in their thousands. Since then, the estate has passed down through the Tharp family, undergoing several ‘Capability’ Brown-style makeovers in the 18th and 19th centuries and coming into the possession of Anne and Eustace Crawley in 1985. The current shape of the gardens can largely be credited to the late Anne Crawley who tended them for more than a quarter of a century. She understood the importance of scale and impressively increased the extent of the gardens, trebling their size from 15 to over 40 acres.

Her daughter, Becca, and Becca’s garden designer husband, Hugo Nicolle, now continue Anne’s legacy, and have enhanced the inherited landscape features with a more contemporary garden design. “My mother inherited the house when she was quite young,” Becca explains. “She lived in London and initially had little interest in gardens, but she became enthralled by the parkland. It sparked in her a passion that lasted a lifetime.” With the input of head gardener, Adrian Kidd, Anne went on to refashion and develop large tracts of the garden.

The house itself had ‘su ered’ several transformations throughout its history, being reduced at one point to a simple hunting lodge. Now, a reinvented neo-Queen Anne house presides over the parkland, set on an elevated crest with views over gardens, meadows, waterways and woods. The gardens in closest proximity to the house are essentially formal. “My mother created a sweeping classical vista, with clipped yew hedging, ornamental topiary and vast, mown lawns,” says Becca. These were decorated with classical ornaments, a fountain, bronze sculptures and stone urns. The main raised terrace spanning the house has since been updated.

“We lifted the cracked – not crazy! –1950s paving and removed old, leggy cypresses that had begun to obscure the view,” Becca adds.

In their place Hugo designed a more modern space with parasol willow oaks. He added the lead-roofed, octagonal gazebo, which chimes with the impressive and appropriately sized zinc artichoke water feature he commissioned from A Place in the Garden. “Previously, Anne’s large ‘Millennium Fountain’ basin was decorated with small, incongruous metal frogs,” he recalls. More large-scale, contemporary artwork is being introduced to sit alongside existing classical pieces throughout the garden.

Anne had extended the original gardens’ remit, but also sought to redefine elements of the existing layout. She honed and reshaped its overgrown and blurred edges, bringing a sense of modernity and momentum. She also strove to revitalise the serpentine waterways and woodland beyond the more formal manicured lawns and terraces. “A large number of old, rather poor trees and shrubs were cleared to create long, meandering pathways, known as ‘Adrian’s Walk’, around the lakes, remodelled from the gardens’ original canals,”

Above The viewing mound, glimpsed through colossal colonnades of clipped x Cuprocyparis leylandii. Right Pink scented flowers of variegated daphne, Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’.

Below The reedbed and majestic trees reflected on the lake’s surface take on beautiful sepia tones.

Becca explains. More recently, eye-catching trees, especially notable in winter, have been added to the waterside plantings. These include peeling, copperbarked river birch, Betula nigra, and gleaming white-stemmed Himalayan birch, Betula utilis var. jacquemontii ‘Grayswood Ghost’.

Inspired by nearby Anglesey Abbey’s Winter Garden, Becca and Hugo have increased existing colonies of hellebores and introduced colour with masses of blue and purple Dutch irises. There are vast collections of scented daphne, winter-flowering honeysuckle, sarcococca and viburnum, which perfume the cold air. Golden flowers of Cornelian cherry, Cornus mas, bring both colour and scent. Its presence, like that of the waterside plantings of vibrant red dogwood, Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’, and pollarded golden willow, Salix alba var. vitellina, is augmented, reflected and redoubled in the lake’s mirror-like waters.

Maintaining the lakes is onerous. “To prevent the banks from collapsing, we had to shore them up with old hardwood sea defences, found in a Norfolk salvage yard,” Hugo explains. The couple also restored the 60-year-old boathouse and Anne’s Monet-esque bridge, which crosses the lake’s midpoint, a ording vast and extensive views right along its length. “I used to joke that Anne’s bridge needed a wisteria, but she argued that would make it too di cult to paint,” says Hugo. He planted one eight years ago, nonetheless: “Anne was right about the painting, but it’s a small price to pay for the masses of pale purple racemes strung across it each May,” he insists. In winter, a twisted rope of thick bare stems appears to knot the bridge firmly together, uniting the north with the south bank.

On the west side of the bridge, turning north, the lakeside walk brings you unexpectedly to a vast, contemporary parterre garden. This expansive four-acre walled garden is concealed behind ivy-clad brick walls. The length of its north-facing wall is lined with a colossal inner colonnade – towering arcades of clipped, evergreen, leylandii hedging, inspired by Mount Stewart’s Italianate gardens in Northern Ireland. “The original intention was to plant yew but, ever impatient, Anne opted for fastgrowing leylandii,” notes Hugo, who is now left with its monumental maintenance. “It needs cutting back hard twice a year,” he laments.

Within the walled garden, Anne reimagined the vast space, quartering the enlarged classical parterres and creating an architectural framework of clipped beech hedging with curved entrance arches leading into each of the quadrants. Each section has its own theme. One harbours a ‘theatre of yew’; another a rock and cypress garden. The third, the so-called ‘Spanish Garden’, is scattered with huge terracotta urns, now mostly obscured by tall miscanthus. From the fourth, an immense viewing mound rises above an orchard of quince. “It was the result of covering over a pile of old farm machinery and iron from the decrepit, unsalvageable glasshouses,” Hugo explains. From the top of the mound, a visitor can fully appreciate the gigantic proportions and particular design of the four-acre parterre garden. The quadrants’ contents are varied, as are the hedges that line or interline them: some are warm bronze beech, Fagus sylvatica; others are formed of ornamental pear, Pyrus calleryana ‘Chanticleer’, with an inner lining of yew hedging. Peer over the hedges, through the colonnade, and you’ll see the garden continues southwards into a huge area known as The Wilderness: a shrubby kind of arboretum with specimen trees and shrubs decorating almost 20 acres of largely deciduous woodland, threaded through with meandering paths and walkways. Sheet upon sheet of brilliant white snowdrops, single Galanthus nivalis and double Galanthus nivalis ‘Flore Pleno’, smother the woodland floor in February, attracting hundreds of visitors eager to experience another of Chippenham Park’s upscaled and impressive winter scenarios. n

Above Pyramidal holly and the blazing stems of Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’ are reflected in the lake. Right In February, The Wilderness is carpeted in single-flowered Galanthus nivalis and double G. ‘Flore Pleno’.

Chippenham Park Gardens, Chippenham Park, Newmarket, Cambridgeshire CB7 5PT. Opens on selected dates throughout the year. Tel: +44 (0)1638 721416; chippenhamparkgardens.info