Sample: The English Garden February 2022

THE

english

GARDEN FEBRUARY 2022

For everyone who loves beautiful gardens

www.theenglishgarden.co.uk

Witch hazels for flowers and fragrance The appeal of collecting snowdrops

Gardens with

HISTORY Five special places with stories to tell

Top 10 INDOOR plants

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GREENHOUSE gardening kit

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Grow Tazetta DAFFODILS

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EXOTIC crops at Wisley

9 771361 284149

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£5.25 02

Fresh ideas for February

CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Cooke Ann is a freelance writer and garden enthusiast. She is RHS qualified and writes a blog called Green City Gardens, which focuses on small space and urban gardening.

She explores Biddulph Old Hall on page 44.

Dr Toby Musgrave Toby is a historian, author and garden designer who writes about ‘forgotten’ garden features on page 63. His new book, The Garden: Elements and Styles, is out now. Find out more at tobymusgrave.com

Welcome I

n a bid to banish wintry gloom, we bring you five out-of-season gardens in this issue, all linked by enjoying rich histories. Whether it’s the romantic garden that was created by Nigel Daly and Brian Vowles among the crumbling ruins of an Elizabethan mansion in the grounds of their home, Biddulph Old Hall, or the allegorical gardens created by Victorian writer John Ruskin at Brantwood in the Lake District, these gardens all tell a story beyond the plants and beautiful views.

At Brantwood, visitors ascend the steep hillside via a path, the Zig-zaggy, which represents the ascent through purgatory as described by Dante, ending in a terrestrial paradise at the summit.

Five months in at my new garden and ‘paradise’ remains some way off, but I have empathy with the purgatory part as I dig up buried rubbish and continue to do battle with brambles and self-seeded hollies of the prickliest variety. Perhaps it’s my fault for giving in to some deadly sins: there was certainly some wrath when I discovered what the squirrels had been doing with my newly planted meadow bulbs, and I will admit to a fair amount of pride in the completion of my new compost bins!

I hope you enjoy the issue and its fascinating gardens, and while we eagerly await the first snowdrops of the year, may your bulbs remain in the ground and not inside a squirrel.

IMAGES NEIL HEPWORTH; RHS/HELEN YATES

CLARE FOGGETT, EDITOR

Bhupinder Sohanpal A former lawyer, Bhupinder presents RHS video series Get Set, Grow!, volunteers at Wisley and writes about gardening and wellbeing. She visits Wisley’s new World Food Garden on p93.

ON THE COVER Elegant borders with dreamy planting at Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

Photographed

by Annie Green-Armytage.

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FEBRUARY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 3

FEBRUARY

People to Meet

Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Advolly Richmond

RECOMMENDED

Advolly’s favourite gardens

INTERVIEW PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES PAUL RICHMOND

The garden, landscape and social historian on the pleasures of research and how understanding plant history will make you a better gardener Many gardens are created to be experienced in a particular order. The Villa d’Este in Tivoli is a magnificent High Renaissance garden spread over terraces. The original entrance was at ground level, but now you enter via the villa at the top. When I visited with my daughter, I forced her to run down to the bottom entrance while taking in as little as possible! It was worth it to enjoy the gardens in the intended way, ending at the top with its breathtaking views of the Roman countryside.

Garden history is for everyone. It relates not only to gardens but also to places like cemeteries. The local park is a historical landscape that would have been given to the public by a 19th-century philanthropist. Garden history can help you become a better gardener. To understand where a plant has come from is to understand its optimum growing conditions.

First and foremost I am a historian. I’m happiest when researching because everything else I do stems from this, be it presenting, lecturing or podcasting. There’s nothing nicer than to sit surrounded by piles of books – ‘fortifications’ as my husband calls them – and build a picture from a jigsaw of stories and facts.

Stockton Bury Gardens Herefordshire There is an intimacy to this four-acre garden, which overflows with the exquisite planting of its creators. Discover unusual plants and knowledgeable planting combinations.

Tel: 07880 712649; stocktonbury.co.uk

Blenheim Palace

One story I am particularly proud to have told was about the gardens at Alton Towers for an episode of Gardeners’ World. In 2019 the theme park got 2.1 million visitors, yet very few people have heard about its beautiful gardens.

I’m currently tackling two projects: The Garden History Podcast is an A to Z of people, plants, places and features that you might find in garden history, and we published ‘k’ for ‘kentia palm’ the other day. I’m also researching the life of Anglo-African botanist

Thomas Birch Freeman for a biography that I’m in talks about writing.

I leave my garden alone over winter so the wildlife can enjoy its treasures. Then, in February, I cut it all back so I can enjoy my snowdrops. I’ve got over 70 different varieties and I’m particularly fond of the waffled petals of ‘Diggory’. The little faces of snowdrops come out in even the harshest weather: they carry on regardless, which in my opinion is an excellent mentality. advolly.co.uk

Oxfordshire You can trace garden history and design styles across this vast 2,000acre landscape. There are so many contrasts, from the Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown waterfall to the peace of the still lakes.

Tel: 01993 810530; blenheimpalace.com

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20 THE ENGLISH GARDEN FEBRUARY 2022

At the cool-toned end of the double borders sits a rustic oak temple, adorned with antlers,

by Isabel Bannerman.

FLIGHT OF FANTASY

Take off into the dreamlike world of Norfolk’s Houghton Hall where the redesigned Walled Garden’s 23 rooms are filled with classical water features, astonishing sculptures and vibrantly imaginative planting WORDS FIONA CUMBERPATCH PHOTOGRAPHS ANNIE GREEN-ARMYTAGE

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T

here is a dreamlike quality to Houghton Hall, which is tucked away in the North Norfolk countryside, 15 miles from the historic maritime port of King’s Lynn. Pass through Houghton, a single-street village lined with white cottages, continue through ornate white gates and an estate is revealed where a herd of pure white fallow deer graze and the turrets of the elegant but imposing Palladian mansion appear like a mirage against the endless Norfolk skies.

Built in the 1720s for Great Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the imposing house was designed to reflect the lofty status of its owner.

The surrounding 450-acre grounds were created by Charles Bridgeman to include ‘twisting wilderness paths’ with blocks of woodland and parkland that evoke the feeling of a secret domain. The grounds include a five-acre Walled Garden that has been transformed by the current owner and direct descendent of Sir Robert, David, the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley. Houghton is now a family home that he shares with his wife Rose, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, and their three children.

The Walled Garden is divided into quarters with 23 rooms. Some are formal and classically elegant, like the Italian Garden at the entrance with its rows of pleached limes and a tall obelisk. There is a Rose Garden, with as many as 150 different varieties growing in arbours and sunken areas, and an undulating yew hedge framing views of the area. A huge Victorian glasshouse is crammed with orchids and exotics, and the Kitchen Garden provides fruit, vegetables and cut flowers for the Hall and for the visitor café during the open season.

Yet amid the conventional country house beauty lie some big surprises. Alongside lichened statues and classic water features are contemporary sculptures, including Waterflame by Jeppe Hein, a fountain rising from a pared-back pond that simultaneously jets out a turret of water and tongues of flame. Then there is the organic, abstract shape of Flask II by Stephen Cox, and Richard Long’s Houghton Cross, comprising roughly hewn chunks of slate that are sunk into the croquet lawn amid meadow planting. These elements reflect Lord and Lady Cholmondeley’s passion for modern art. They have a growing collection of large-scale permanent sculptures in the wider grounds and stage acclaimed annual exhibitions of work by artists such as Damien Hirst, Tony Cragg and Anish Kapoor.

As recently as 1996, areas of the Walled Garden were lying fallow and the glasshouses had fallen into disrepair. Keen to reinvent it as a memorial to Lady Sybil, his late grandmother, Lord Cholmondeley, who inherited the estate in 1990, oversaw the project to divide it into contrasting ornamental gardens.

The initial reworking was carried out with help from 22 THE ENGLISH GARDEN FEBRUARY 2022

Above Box-edged beds are filled with peonies, including ‘Nice Gal’ and ‘Mr G. F. Hemerik’.

Below Classical statues, an octagonal sunken fountain and arches smothered with pale pink Rosa ‘Climbing Cécile Brünner’.

“The balance of raw with refined, traditional with contemporary, works beautifully”

Above Early sun slants through swells of yew hedging into a border of Iris ‘Black Knight’, mock orange, and purple and white foxgloves.

Left Wisteria floribunda ‘Macrobotrys’.

former head gardener Paul Underwood and, later, designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman.

The balance of raw with refined, traditional with contemporary, works beautifully, and the Walled Garden has never looked better now that it is under the relatively new stewardship of Richard and Rosie Ernst, head gardener and assistant head gardener respectively. The couple have been at Houghton Hall since February 2020, and they make a redoubtable double act with complementary skills honed over a lifetime. Richard previously worked at Chequers and Waddesdon Manor, while Rosie lists Sir Martin and Lady Audrey Wood’s Manor House in Oxfordshire and Mill Barn Garden, home of Sir Richard and Lady Valerie Lapthorne, on her CV. Underpinning the design of the Walled Garden is a central axis, a vast double border that runs from north to south, with hot colours at one end and cooler tones at the other. This is united on both FEBRUARY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 23

A dreamy view across the hot-toned end of the double border, with glowing lupin ‘Towering Inferno’ offset by billows of Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’.

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“Underpinning the design is a vast double border that runs from north to south, with hot colours at one end and cooler tones at the other”

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