Unforgettable Gardens E-Book

The Gardens Trust

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 255

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A glorious celebration, this landmark book is an exploration of the greatest gardens, parks and landscapes in Britain, with stunning photography accompanied by insightful text from leading garden historians and conservators. It is lovingly curated by The Gardens Trust, a prominent UK conservation charity dedicated to preserving, studying and spotlighting historic gardens. Arranged chronologically, it covers around 60 individual gardens, specially selected to give a broad historical overview of British garden design from the Early Modern Period up until the Millennium. Each chapter also includes an intruiging essay, exploring the wider changes in social context, taste and style in each period. Entries include: • Elizabethan splendour at Kenilworth Castle. • Spectacular landscapes by Capability Brown at Alnwick Castle and Chatsworth. • Birkenhead Park, the Victorian inspiration for New York's Central Park. • The classic cottage garden created by Margery Fish at East Lambrook, Somerset. • Ian Hamilton Finlay's modern Scottish masterpiece, Little Sparta. Go on a voyage of garden discovery with this beautiful book, and learn more about the gardens and landscapes that are a much-loved part of our shared national story.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction

GARDENS IN THE 16TH CENTURY

The Elizabethan Garden, Kenilworth Castle

St Donat’s Castle

Holdenby

Lyveden New Bield

GARDENS IN THE 17TH CENTURY

Aberglasney Gardens

Bramshill House

Oxford Botanic Garden

Drummond Castle Gardens

Wilton Garden

Ham House

Hampton Court

Chatsworth

Powis Castle

Bramham Park

GARDENS IN THE 18TH CENTURY

Castle Howard

Wrest Park

Studley Royal

Rousham Gardens

St Paul’s Walden Bury

Gibside

West Wycombe

Painshill

Painswick Rococo Garden

Alnwick Castle

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Hafod

Tatton Park

GARDENS IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Belsay Hall

Sheringham Park

Endsleigh

Scotney Castle Gardens

Sheffield Botanical Gardens

Westonbirt Gardens

Derby Arboretum

Abney Park Cemetery

Shrubland Hall

Biddulph Grange

Birkenhead Park

Old Town Cemetery, Stirling

Inverewe

Avenham and Miller Parks

Waddesdon Manor

Leonardslee Lakes and Gardens

Athelhampton

Munstead Wood

GARDENS IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Hidcote Manor Garden

The Japanese Garden at Cowden

Allerton Cemetery

Great Dixter

Wicksteed Park

East Lambrook Manor

Denmans Garden

Beth Chatto Gardens

Little Sparta

Campbell Park

Plaz Metaxu

Index

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Picture Credits

Wrest Park, Bedfordshire (See here).

Althelhampton, Dorset (See here).

Introduction

The UK has the finest collection of historic parks, gardens and designed landscapes in the world, something of which we can be truly proud. They range from the grandest stately homes, outstanding private gardens, and botanic gardens to public parks and even cemeteries. Some are managed by public bodies, such as the National Trust, English Heritage, and local authorities. Others are cared for by private owners, charitable trusts and volunteers. They embody our rich history of garden-making from the 16th century right up to the present day. They also provide much-valued quiet spaces to escape to for wellbeing, recreation and reflection.

The gardens in this book are just a selection. All are special, equally unforgettable, but vulnerable to change. A primary purpose of the Gardens Trust is to protect and conserve them for present and future generations. As any gardener knows, no garden is ever finished. Always, it is evolving. Without constant care and attention, it will rapidly fall into neglect and become an overgrown wilderness. Then, all too easily, it will be lost for future generations to enjoy. Parks and gardens are also under constant threat from development. This may cause significant harm directly, or more insidiously, by damaging their character, their setting and sense of tranquillity. Ill-considered change can so easily cause irretrievable harm. That is why the protection of historic parks and gardens matters so much.

The Gardens Trust was formed ten years ago when the Garden History Society and the Association of County Gardens Trusts merged. Today, it works in association with the 36 County Gardens Trusts spread across England, the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and Scotland’s Garden and Landscape Heritage. It plays a vital role in protecting our historic parks and gardens. In 1983, Parliament created a Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Significance, recognizing that they are a fragile and finite resource; Scotland and Wales have their own systems of designation and protection. The creation of the Register was in response to a campaign, persistently and valiantly fought, by the Trust’s predecessors. We are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first entries to the Register in 2024, and today there are over 1,700 sites entered on it. Almost all the parks and gardens featured in this book appear there. In 2023, Parliament accepted that there was a need for further protection and legislated to impose a requirement on all planning authorities, when deciding whether or not to grant planning permission, to have regard to the desirability of preserving or enhancing the registered site or its setting. We have yet to see what difference this will make in practice, but it provides an important additional safeguard in a time of rapid change and pressure to release more land for building.

The role of the Gardens Trust has never been more important. Within the English planning system, it is a statutory consultee. This gives it the right to be consulted on any application that affects a site on the Register and to make representations on whether the proposed development should be permitted or not. We could not fulfil this huge responsibility without the hard work of our volunteers, both within the Trust and the County Gardens Trusts around the country. Together, they provide essential support to our small but dedicated conservation team. However, this protection only extends to sites that are on the Register. We therefore support research which helps to uncover and record the history of other significant parks and gardens and advocate for them to be added to the Register.

It is not just historic gardens that need protection. New gardens of today can be historic gardens of tomorrow. In 2020 we worked with Historic England to identify post-war gardens and landscapes deserving protection. As a result, 20 new sites were added to the Register, including public parks, the gardens of housing estates and the landscapes of a factory, university college and offices. You will find articles on several of them in this book: Campbell Park in Milton Keynes, Denmans Garden in West Sussex and Beth Chatto Gardens in Essex. More recently, we organized a project that enabled volunteers to research important historic parks and gardens in Suffolk. This has resulted in seven gardens and landscapes being added to the list, including Thorpeness Meare, England’s first purpose-built holiday village.

One garden in this book, Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire, was rediscovered after its owners read an article in the Gardens Trust journal, Garden History, by historians Timothy Mowl and Roger White. They had been inspired to write about it having seen a painting of the garden. The bones of this delightful 18th-century pleasure ground, together with its many garden buildings, were revealed beneath a modern conifer plantation. Other landscapes have benefitted from the careful, considered advice of our conservation team, helping to guide necessary change in a way that minimizes the impact on the landscape and its historical significance.

We are keen to encourage more people to enjoy and recognize the value of these gardens and landscapes, by sharing our knowledge, organizing events, online talks and in-person visits, and by recruiting and training volunteers. You can find more information about all we do, or how to join us or support our work on our website: thegardenstrust.org.

The Gardens Trust is immensely grateful to all the historians and experts who have given their time to contribute to this book. The landscapes, parks and gardens described here in the essays and 50-odd individual entries are just a small and necessarily partial selection. There are many, many other inspiring places that could have been included. Now it is time to dip in and enjoy! We hope the book will inspire you to visit some of these unforgettable gardens, and that you will want to join us in supporting them. The protection and conservation of our heritage of historic parks and gardens has never been more important, and we need all the support we can get for the work that we do.

Peter Hughes, Chairman, the Gardens Trust

The world’s oldest topiary gardens, dating back to the 1690s, at Levens Hall, Cumbria.

GARDENS IN THE16TH CENTURY

The quest for gardens before about 1500 is tantalizing because there are no survivals. While a small number of sites have been revealed by archaeology, and there are a few modern reconstructions, most gardening would have been for food crops and basic medicine. Examples of such gardening can be seen at the Weald & Downland Living Museum in West Sussex.

The title page of John Gerard’s Herball, 1597.

Bayleaf medieval farmstead, Weald & Downland Living Museum, West Sussex.

The late 15th century was a turning point globally with European exploration opening up trade routes to Asia and the Americas. In England, the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 marked the end of the Wars of the Roses, and the accession of Henry Tudor bought relative civil peace for the first time in a hundred years. This meant fewer military expenses, and more taxes paid, so the amount of time and money that the Crown and small band of the nobility and other elite had at their disposal increased immensely. Castles became redundant and new fine domestic residences no longer needed to be fortified, so new architectural fashions could be employed.

Although Henry VII himself had a well-deserved reputation for being fiscally prudent, when he rebuilt the royal palace at Richmond, he spared no expense. Described as ‘the bright and shining star of building’ he surrounded it with elaborate gardens. While many of the features – such as the ‘carpentry work’, mazes, raised beds and mounts – grew out of well-established medieval traditions, there were innovations too. Galleries, two-storied and made of wood, ran around the perimeter, offering space for entertainment as well as easy access to the gardens, which were planted with ‘many vines, seeds and strange fruits’. They also contained heraldic animals ‘carved into the ground right well sanded and compassed in with lead’ as well as ‘Rampande Lyons, stode up wonderfly, / Made all of herbes, with dulcet swetenes’.

Richmond was the first of a series of great early Tudor palaces which included Hampton Court, Nonsuch, Greenwich and Oatlands. In those the heraldic theme was developed by Henry VIII with widespread use of brightly coloured Royal Beasts, usually seated on pillars, taking pride of place. Each was a visual reminder of the Tudors’ connection to earlier dynasties and were a way of reinforcing their place in history and their own dynastic ambitions.

The Tudor palace at Richmond from the south-west by Anton van den Wyngaerde, c. 1558–62.

Chapel Court, Hampton Court Palace.

Henry VII and his son Henry VIII reformed the government and in doing so created a class of professional administrators to run it, who were dependent on the Tudors for their positions and wealth. Royal building and garden-making cost money and when the treasury was empty Henry VIII, supported by these ‘new men’ organized the seizure of the wealth of England’s monasteries. This provided a massive injection of property ripe for conversion or demolition for building materials, as well as of money. It led to a massive wave of new building and garden-making.

Some monastic buildings, such as Laycock Abbey, were remodelled for residential use, others were demolished and the materials recycled in grand new houses, such as Hengrave Hall. Meanwhile, castles such as Framlingham, Raglan and St Donat’s, were being domesticated with formal gardens laid out outside their once defensive walls.

Although the political and religious uncertainty of the mid-century led to a pause in building, it resumed again early in the reign of Elizabeth I. This time it was not the Crown who led the way but the queen’s courtiers. Headed by her chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and her Lord Chancellor, Christopher Hatton, aristocratic palaces sprang up all round the country, including a veritable roll-call of our favourite stately homes: Burghley, Holdenby, Kirby, Longleat, Wollaton, Montacute and Hardwick. They were the match of anything in Europe. Very quickly they were copied on a smaller scale by both country gentry and the City of London’s commercial elite.

John Thorpe’s survey of Theobalds, 1611, including some of the planted grids of the Privy Garden (north) and Maze Garden (west).

William Cecil built not just one but three grand houses. He had a large town house on the Strand in central London, plans of which are the oldest extant garden designs, while Burghley near Stamford was his country base. Even more spectacular though must have been his long-destroyed palace at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, which was, according to visitors, ‘of immense extent … where a man might walk two miles before he came to their ends.’ They contained imported Italian sculpture, labyrinths, summerhouses, ‘columns and pyramids of wood and other material’ a fountain where ‘the water spouts out from a number of concealed pipes and sprays unwary passers-by,’ and even ‘a ship floating on the water complete with cannons, flags and sails’.

Matching Theobalds in extent, if not contents, was Holdenby in Northamptonshire, the largest house in the country and quite possibly in Western Europe, built for Hatton. Its garden was beautifully surveyed by Ralph Treswell twice in the 1580s, and although the palace was largely demolished in the mid-17th century, the remains of the garden can still be made out in parts and are there waiting for the archaeologists to uncover.

John Thorpe’s plan for Dowsby Hall in Lincolnshire, c.1603, shows that the gardens had begun to be integral with the house.

The architecture of these prodigy houses, as they became known, staggered the viewer with their scale, their great expanses of glass, and their openness to their surroundings. As John Thorpe’s plan for Dowsby in Lincolnshire shows, the garden was now beginning to be designed integrally with the mansion. It was no longer an afterthought, but the setting for the architectural jewel that was the new house, which sat in a network of connected and carefully planned spaces that were designed to impress and overawe visitors. Usually approached through vast deer and hunting parks, the house was reached through a series of increasingly formal courts, perhaps with grand entrance arches, such as at Holdenby, as the house came into view.

Prodigy house gardens were often not visible on the approach but only once inside. They were designed to be as spectacular as the architecture, often taking the simple geometric designs shown in early gardening and architectural books and playing with them, mathematically or philosophically, as Thomas Tresham did at Lyveden in Northamptonshire. Contemporary images often show repeated geometric beds – usually square, but frequently with varied patterns of internal planting. They show, too, long arboured tunnels and walks, banqueting houses, prospect mounts, statues, topiary, canals and fountains. Heraldic Beasts are no longer quite so evident but were installed on a smaller scale at Kenilworth, Warwickshire, in 1575 and they have since always been seen as ‘typically Tudor’ in later recreations such as St Donat’s in the Vale of Glamorgan.

By the later 16th century, England had become less isolated, as the elite travelled more, collected, and read books in foreign languages, while Continental books were also translated faster. Particularly important were architectural books, such as those of Sebastiano Serlio or Vitruvius, with collections of designs that could be used interchangeably for embroidery, wall panelling, plasterwork and garden design. Garden makers such as Thomas Tresham of Lyveden, William Cecil and Christopher Hatton had large libraries including many of these architectural texts but are also known to have collected plans and architectural drawings to draw upon for their projects.

At the same time the range of plants available was increasing too. Elizabeth I, and later James I, encouraged merchants and adventurers to explore the world, particularly North America, and started the first colonies. Inevitably this led to new plant introductions from the potato and tobacco to the pumpkin and the chilli, the crown imperial (Fritillaria imperialis) and the tulip to the sunflower, and the so-called French and African marigolds. These new plants are recorded in John Gerard’s Herball of 1597, which shows that such new exotic plants were becoming collectable items. While it’s difficult to be precise about the dates of introduction, the Stradling family probably grew the first tomatoes and other solanums in Britain at St Donat’s before 1590.

The turn of the 16th and 17th centuries was the beginning of the age of collectors and consumers – novelty and wealth provided the opportunity to show off your knowledge and learning, new discoveries and a fascination with nature. The aristocratic elite of late Elizabethan and Jacobean England were early victims of consumerism, and gardens were one of the ways they consumed. It meant that gardens became places to show off their wealth, status and education. We know from contemporary publications by her courtiers that the gardens served – at Kenilworth, Theobalds and Elvetham, Hampshire, among many others – as backdrops for extravagant entertainment for the queen on her progresses. They were often proudly included in the backgrounds to portraits in stark contrast to the standard dark background of earlier Tudor portrayals. In her own portraits, which were all carefully stage-managed and controlled, Elizabeth used plants and flowers as symbols. Her adoption of the eglantine rose as her personal flower helped develop the cult of Gloriana, as exemplified by Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature, ‘Young Man Among Roses’.

Yet all this is achieved with very little advance from preceding centuries in horticultural technology, knowledge or skill. These do not change until the arrival of large numbers of Huguenot refugees, fleeing religious persecution in France and the Low Countries from the 1550s onwards. Over the following century, they helped transform England’s commercial gardening, introducing new techniques, ideas and crops, boosting food production, and eventually helping gardening become a recognized profession, with the establishment of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners in 1605.

The Tudor garden was marked by complex designs, extravagantly made features, beautiful objects and brilliant colours that helped make up for the lack of plant variety, all of which meant that the 16th century truly was a golden age of garden-making.

David Marsh

For a visit to Elvetham Manor in Hampshire by Elizabeth I in 1591, Edward Seymour created a village in the ground to host the court and provide a backdrop for elaborate entertainments. A half-moon-shaped lake was dug that was large enough for three islands.

The Elizabethan Garden Kenilworth Castle

Warwickshire–Robert Langham– c. 1570–75– Registered Grade II*

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (1532–88), created the most significant of Kenilworth’s gardens, recorded in a detailed letter by Robert Langham describing a stay by Queen Elizabeth I in July 1575. In 1563 she had granted Dudley, her favourite, the titles Earl of Leicester and Baron Denbigh, as well as Kenilworth Castle and other property. Leicester refurbished the castle, building a new wing, gate-house and garden influenced by the latest European thinking.

While the Queen was out hunting, Adrian the gardener let Langham view the garden. His letter described the garden as having a raised terrace, ‘ten foot high and twelve broad’, with fine arbours ‘redolent by sweet trees and flowers’ at each end. The balustrade was decorated with obelisks, spheres and white bears, and sand paths were ‘smooth and firm, pleasant to walk on as on a seashore when the water is availed [has retreated]’. The garden was in four equal quarters, each with a porphyry obelisk topped by an orb at the centre. The planting was ‘deliciously variable’ with scented flowers, fragrant herbs and ‘fruit-trees bedecked with their apples, pears and ripe cherries’. Apart from the fruit, the garden is not designed for culinary or medicinal use, but purely to please the senses.

Against the north wall a large aviary for songbirds had a cornice ‘beautified with great diamonds, emeralds, rubies and sapphires, pointed, tabled, rock and round’: set in ‘gold by skilful head and hand’. Inside, two holly trees provided shade and perches. At the centre ‘a very fair fountain cast into an eight square, reared a four foot high’ of ‘rich hard marble’, surmounted by two ‘atlantes’ holding a large ball ‘from whence sundry fine pipes stream water to the pool below’. The letter also describes five of the eight panels that form the pool, carved with stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; the Earl of Leicester was patron of the first English translation.

Reconstruction painting showing an aerial view of Kenilworth Castle as seen from the north, as it may have appeared at the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s visit to Kenilworth in 1575.

Fountain at the centre of the garden at Kenilworth.

After Leicester’s death, the son of James I, Henry, Prince of Wales, bought the castle, which was then inherited by his brother Prince Charles. It became a Parliamentary garrison and was made defensively ‘untenable’ in 1650. After the Restoration it was left a ruin and the gatehouse became a farmhouse. From the early 18th century Kenilworth became valued as a romantic ruin and Sir Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth (1821) made it a tourist attraction. John Davenport Siddeley, by 1939 1st Baron Kenilworth, transferred the castle to the Office of Works. Archaeology in the 1970s found no evidence of a garden, and William Dugdale’s 1656 plan of the castle was used as a basis for a new garden, planted with box-edged beds and yew topiary.

By 1990 this was in poor condition and from 2006 English Heritage investigated reconstructing the Elizabethan garden with a team of experts, including archaeologists, historians and plantsmen. Geophysical archaeological investigations and a full excavation uncovered the fountain’s structure, with chips of white Carrara marble still attached, and the position of the northern curtain wall. The major findings all corroborated Langham’s letter.

It was decided to build a new garden based on the archaeology and Langham’s letter. Completed in 2009, we are now learning how to manage an Elizabethan garden fit for a queen.

John Watkins

The view looking over the Elizabethan Garden to Leicester’s Gatehouse at Kenilworth Castle.

St Donat’s Castle

Glamorgan–Sir Edward Stradling– Late 16th century– Registered Grade I

The garden of St Donat’s Castle is one of the grandest, best preserved and most important 16th-century gardens in Britain. The position is spectacular, ‘descending’, as Samuel and Nathaniel Buck described in 1740, ‘in Terrasses from ye Castle Wall to ye Severn Sea; which forms a most glorious Canal between it and Somersetshire.’

A postcard of the Rose Garden from 1926.

The Edwardian Rose Garden on a lower terrace of the Tudor garden.

The castle was largely built in the 14th and 15th centuries by the Stradling family, while the garden was created in the second half of the 16th century by Sir Edward Stradling (1529–1609), a wealthy Renaissance man who moved in court and scholarly circles.

The main garden is formally laid out in five massive terraces, with flights of steps between them, which drop 40 metres (130 feet) from the castle to the sea wall, also built by Sir Edward. The retaining and revetment walls are massive, built of the local Lias limestone. At the bottom is a level area and another terrace, labelled ‘Garden’ on the earliest, 1818, plan of the garden. To the west the ground drops steeply to a further section of the Tudor garden, a levelled valley floor flanked by two long terraces with a wall between them. This area is labelled ‘Orchard’ on all the early maps.

Two contemporary poems show that the garden was greatly admired in its day and that it had Italianate features and exotic plants. The first, dating to before Sir Edward’s death in 1609, is by Sir John Stradling, Sir Edward’s successor. In this Virgilian Latin poem he mentions violets, white lilies, vines and ‘glowing’ [marble?] columns. The second is by Dr Thomas Leyshon. Originally in Latin, it was translated into Welsh by a friend of Sir Edward; the Latin original was lost and it is from a fragment of the Welsh version that it is known. Leyshon mentions bees, ‘gleaming’ stones above gateways, vines, roses and lilies. He singles out for special mention two exotics, ‘nards’ and ‘amomum’. Nards are spike lavender (Lavandula latifolia), a south European native, and amomum is winter cherry tree (Solanum pseudocapsicum), from America. Leyshon also mentions ‘golden apples’, the name given at the time to tomatoes. As this poem dates to before 1590, this means that the earliest recorded cultivation of tomatoes in Britain was at St Donat’s Castle.

After 1609 the only changes to the garden were minor additions. Its Tudor structure survives in its entirety. Between 1901 and 1909 Morgan Stuart Williams transformed the third terrace into a ‘Tudor’ garden, with king’s beasts on pillars and a seat in the centre, using the well head from the inner court of the castle. A summerhouse was built above the fourth terrace, which became a formal rose garden.

In 1925 the American newspaper tycoon, William Randolph Hearst bought St Donat’s and lavished money on the castle. From 1931–36 it was the summer retreat of Hearst and his Hollywood friends. In the garden the only additions were a new pavilion on the fourth terrace and a loggia on the fifth. The castle was put up for sale in 1937 and in 1962 became a school, Atlantic College.

Elisabeth Whittle

Edwardian King’s Beasts and former well-head seat in the Tudor Garden at St Donat’s Castle.

Holdenby

Holdenby, Northamptonshire–Designer unknown– c. 1580–87– Registered Grade I

The gardens at Holdenby complemented Sir Christopher Hatton’s mansion, the largest private dwelling in Elizabethan England. Created for a visit from the queen, Elizabeth never came. In 1580 Hatton commissioned Ralph Treswell to make a survey of his house, gardens and land, now in the Northamptonshire Record Office, along with Treswell’s second survey of 1587 to celebrate his new hunting park. Estate maps were often produced to show the boundaries of new parks, which were status symbols, the right to empark being granted by the queen herself. Treswell enlivened the survey with jolly hunters with falcons, deer and cavorting rabbits. These represent the economic benefits of the park: the provision of food, material for clothing, and building materials and fuel from the new plantations. The two surveys are a unique record of the development of an Elizabethan garden.

The Basecourt Arches from the original palace of Holdenby still stand today.

The Pond Garden.

In 1580 the house was complete, but not the grounds. The village lay to the north-east. To the south were the orchard, a grove, some ponds and, adjacent to the house, ‘ye garden’ is shown quartered with a central feature, flanked by two areas of narrow, parallel lines, inscribed on each side, ‘ye Rosiary’. To the west another garden had nine square compartments, a mount in the north-west corner, and a ‘sestern [cistern] house’, supplied by a conduit, in the centre of the external wall.

By 1587 the village had been moved, the entrance courts enclosed and completed with a banqueting house and new gateways. In the gardens, the ponds shown in the first survey had been dammed and the water diverted to form a geometric arrangement of ponds. ‘Ye garden’ to the south was now more intricately planted and the west garden turned into an orchard. The mount and ‘sestern house’ remained; a banqueting house seems to have been built on the southern end of the terrace.

Because maps at this time did not include contour lines, we only know from descriptions that the ‘rosiaries’ were, in fact, narrow terraces leading down the steep hill from the house. The effect was described by John Norden in his A Delineation of Northamptonshire (1595):

And above the rest is especially to be noated with what industrye and toyle of man, the garden have been raised, levelled, and formed out of a most craggye and unfitable lande now framed a most pleasante, sweete, and princely place, with divers walks, many ascendings and descendings, replenished also with manie delightful Trees of Fruite, artificially composed Arbours, and a Destilling House on the west end of the same garden, over which is a Ponde of Water, broughte by conduite pypes, out of the feylde adjoyninge on the west, quarter of a myle from the same howse.

Hatton was a bachelor who also owned nearby Kirby Hall. His successors preferred the latter and, within a century, Holdenby House was in ruins. Nathaniel and Samuel Buck’s engraved view of c. 1770 shows the remains of the house and the two magnificent arches that flanked the outer court, based on the designs of Sebastiano Serlio. These two arches, along with extensive earthworks, remain today, dramatically visible in aerial photographs.

Paula Henderson

A 1587 survey of Holdenby by Ralph Treswell, one of the leading surveyors of the day.

Lyveden New Bield

Northamptonshire–Sir Thomas Tresham– c. 1594–1605– Registered Grade I

Gardens by their very nature are ephemeral – they inevitably evolve and change, and we rarely see an historic garden in the way that was originally intended. This is what makes Lyveden New Bield so special. This garden was designed and created in the late 16th century by Sir Thomas Tresham, although the project was abandoned on the owner’s death in 1605. It has remained virtually undisturbed ever since, allowing today’s visitors to experience the garden in much the same way as Sir Thomas’ contemporaries would have done.

An aerial view of the garden at Lyveden New Bield, viewed from the north, showing the lower orchard and the moated orchard, separated by the raised terrace.

Walking through the gardens is a journey of discovery. Beginning at the Manor House, the visitor, then and now, walks up through a series of gardens which gradually reveal themselves and the panoramic views over the estate, until they reach the main focus of the garden, the remarkable lodge, or New Bield, at the top.

After leaving the house, the ascending path through the grounds, which in Tresham’s time was lined with sycamores and elms, brings the visitor up to the lower orchard. This has been replanted according to the original plans with approximately 300 fruit trees in regular rows and divided into four quarters – an Elizabethan connoisseur’s display of fruit cultivation on a grand scale. The lower orchard is bordered to the south by a high terrace, with a mount at either end. From here it is possible to see the full extent of the garden, looking back down over the lower orchard to the house or turning to view the moated orchard above. This, if all had gone according to plan, would have been an unforgettable sight. A series of ten concentric borders, planted with cherry and plum trees around the outside and a combination of roses and raspberries in the inner circles. This area was to have been surrounded by four canals, although only three sides of this moat were ever dug out. At the southern corners are two spiral mounts, also surrounded by canals. It is still possible to see the extent of all this today, as apart from the planting in the centre, all the other features remain.

The Water Garden.

Walking round to the far side of the moated orchard offers the first glimpse of the garden lodge, but stopping to climb one of the spiral mounts, much higher than the prospect mounts on the northern corners of the moated orchard, and accessed by a small wooden footbridge, offers views in all directions as the path winds around to the top. From here, the impressive lodge is clearly revealed, the pinnacle of the garden.

Much has been written about the religious symbolism imbued into the design of this lodge, and most likely into the design of the garden as well. Indeed, much is still to be discovered as archaeological work on the site continues, but what we can be sure of is that Lyveden provides us with the rare spectacle of a wonderful extant Elizabethan garden which, it would be nice to think, Sir Thomas himself might recognize.

Jill Francis

The garden lodge at Lyveden New Bield.