A view over the part of Madresfield’s garden that’s encircled by the moat; its focal point is a wellhead that dates from 1897.
Pinnacle of Success
The grand old pile of Madresfield Court is a landmark in the Malvern Hills and the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited. As you might expect, it has majestic moated gardens to match with design input from such luminaries as Thomas Mawson and Tom Stuart-Smith WORDS JAMES
ANDREA JONES
Lost & FOUND
Hidden in a Dorset valley, Littlebredy Walled Gardens have endured many peaks and troughs over the years. After a fall from their productive 19th-century peak, they have been rescued from neglect by a team of volunteers – but once again the future is uncertain
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS CAROLE DRAKE
The River Bride flows through Littlebredy Walled Gardens, the retaining wall colonised by a great froth of Erigeron karvinskianus
The sunken White Garden, designed by George Carter and Verity Hanson Smith, is built where a grand Victorian glass domed winter garden once stood.
From Time TO TIME
The majestic gardens at Suffolk’s Somerleyton Hall span epochs, with stately features including a sunken garden, maze and a historic parterre, with plenty of fascinating tales to tell from across the centuries
WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS JOANNA KOSSAK
Active Heritage
Formerly one of the country’s grandest show gardens, built to a ‘Capability’ Brown design and filled with an array of hothouses, Bedfordshire’s Luton Hoo is undergoing restoration while functioning once again as a productive garden
WORDS SANDRA LAWRENCE PHOTOGRAPHS MATTHEW BRUCE
The towering walls cast long shadows across the mysterious, eight-sided garden. In the foreground, neat grass paths intersect simply cut beds filled with lush herbaceous borders that sparkle through the early autumn mist. Further back, fruit trees are neatly pruned; only their gnarled trunks and twisted limbs belie their great age. Yet the eye does not linger even here, for something stranger looms beyond: the gigantic timber skeleton of what was once one of the largest hothouse complexes in Britain stands defiant against the decades, glassless but unbeaten.
The enormous Luton Hoo Estate is located 35 miles north of London and just a few miles south of Luton Airport, yet it seems a million miles away from either. The hoo – ‘hoo’ being an Anglo-Saxon word for the spur of a hill – has been a landmark for millennia, but the estate’s fortunes have waned as well as waxed. Starting as a small manor house, at one point owned by Anne Boleyn’s grandparents, at its height the estate covered more than 10,000 acres and boasted a magnificent Palladian mansion, vast lake, farmland and a reputation for lavish entertaining. Today the house and gardens have become separated, the house now run as a luxury hotel, but 1,200 acres are still owned by the Phillips family, including that octagonal walled garden.
THE WALLS WERE CALCULATED TO ENSURE THE GREATEST SUN EXPOSURE AND TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SUNRISE AT SOLSTICES AND EQUINOXES
Horticulture became a major part of Luton Hoo in 1764, when John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, commissioned Robert Adam to rebuild his mansion and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape his park, damming the River Lea to create interconnected lakes. Brown did not, however, stop at opening up grand vistas. Recent research has revealed that he was every bit as careful in the design of the curious, octagonal 4.83 hectare walled garden as he was in conjuring entire landscapes. The slightly odd alignment and different lengths of the eight sections of wall, which were previously thought to have been accidental, have since been proved to have been mathematically calculated to ensure the greatest sun exposure and to take advantage of the sunrise at solstices and equinoxes.
Lord Bute was crazy for plants, creating a magnificent pinery and a conservatory for his extensive collection of botanical treasures.
Researchers have tracked down a list from 1777 of more than 1,000 of his plants, but when the Earl moved in 1784, he took the collection with him, and the rest of his botanical exploits are, alas, a mystery.
A view across the garden to the magnificent 1911 Mackenzie & Moncur hothouses with their central fernery.
Fine Detail
Rui Jiang has embraced the intricate art of botanical illustration, capturing the wonder of plants from every angle and at every stage of their development in beautiful multi-layered watercolours
Rui Jiang at her home studio in Kent, surrounded by plant materials, art, and the microscope she uses to view plants’ parts.