Designing history

Princess Beatrice's garden at Carisbrooke Castle:
Edwardian? Mediaeval? Or 21st century?

I’ve been wondering a bit lately about all these historic gardens we’re restoring.

I spend a hefty proportion of my days writing about garden restoration projects. We seem to be in a restoration frenzy: in the last two or three years alone we’ve seen Wrest Park rise from the ashes, the Elizabethangarden at Kenilworth Castle recreated, the Crystal Grotto atPainshill Park rescued from oblivion and Chiswick Park overhauled to within an inch of its life.

And that’s not even counting Hidcote, the Liverpool Garden Festival site, the Seafront Gardensat Felixstowe and Myddleton House, EA Bowles’s pad in Enfield, Middlesex.

I can’t prove it, but I'd be willing to bet we've restored more historic gardens in the last four or five years than at any point in the last 50.

A good time, then, to take a step back and really think about what we’re doing here.

Note the many different words we use for the restoration of a garden: recreation, revitalisation, reconstruction.... When we take a neglected garden and return it to something people will pay to come and see (and after all, that’s – at least partly – what it’s all about) – what, exactly, are we doing?

Ancient and modern: grass plats and mulberry trees

In a rather timely sort of way, the Professional Gardeners’ Guild held its annual seminar on Historic Buildings Parks and Gardens earlier this month, during which they considered this a lot more coherently than I can. They looked at the choices you make when you decide to restore a garden: do you restore them to a historic plan, perhaps the original design you’ve discovered at the back of some dusty cupboard in the Big House?

Or do you come up with a new design – perhaps echoing the style of the original garden, or evoking a historical reference but with a modern twist?

As it happens, I’ve been to visit one of each this year.

Hestercombe near Taunton in Somerset is a faithful restoration of what was there originally: and who can blame them. They had one of the most historically important landscapes in the country on their hands, including an iconic Jekyll-Lutyens design. They had lots of maps, documents, drawings, plans: so what you see now is pretty much an exact replica of what was there when each of the various parts of the garden was in its heyday. Double rills, terraces, pergolas and bedding in fancy formal layouts. Very beautiful; very late Victorian; very faithful.

Hestercombe: a truly faithful restoration

There is always, however, something of the museum about these gardens. I love Hestercombe, don’t get me wrong: and there’s something wonderful about being able to taste living history like this, to experience life as it must have been in the 19^th century (with added tea-shops).

But it is Victorian life preserved in aspic, and gardens are living, breathing things that above all change: perhaps the essence of the paradox that lies at the heart of garden restoration.

At the other extreme: when English Heritage decided they wanted to return what was essentially a small field within the walls of Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight back to its Edwardian incarnation as the privy garden used by Princess Beatrice, daughter of Queen Victoria, they decided against a restoration, in the classical sense. Instead, they brought in Chris Beardshaw to design what you might call an evocation of the original.

Berkheya purpurea - it just looks historic

It does use the layout you would have seen in the original early-20^th century garden, but the planting is noticeably modern. It does ‘reflect the feel and spirit of the period’, as the blurb says: there's something about Berkheya purpurea that always looks like it's been around a long time.

But superb colour combinations such as Agastache 'Black Adder', Sedum telephium 'Purple Emperor' and Geranium wlassovianum had the exciting, vibrant feel of 21^st-century planting. There were subtle references – a blue, red and gold colour scheme reflecting Princess Beatrice’s crest, for example – but it felt like a modern garden.

And that was odd, because it wasn’t. Actually I think this was further complicated by the fact that Princess Beatrice clearly had a penchant for the mediaeval: I suppose it was all those castle walls looming over her. So there are grass plats, and flowery meads, and spreading mulberry trees over seating areas. Very lovely, and a relaxing space to stroll around, but undeniably in the vaguely Mediaev-Eliza-Tudor mould. So not Edwardian at all, then.

Again – I don’t mean to give the impression I disliked the garden: actually, I loved it, especially the enclosed, intimate feeling. The big figs in planters didn’t work for me, leaving one side of the garden feeling rather unresolved, but that wasn’t really Chris’s fault as he was trying to avoid sending roots into the foundations of a 13^th-century building they discovered while creating the garden. By such compromises are history-riddled projects beset.

Sublime planting... though perhaps not what Princess Beatrice
would have seen. But does that matter?

But I felt that as a garden, it wasn’t really sure what it was. A celebration of Edwardian style and elegance? A modern take on the mediaeval tradition? Or a homage to a lady who lived in the early 20^th century but rather preferred the 12^th? Perhaps all those things.

It’s clearly possible to capture the spirit, or the essence of a garden: Chris himself is a past master at it, and has successfully converted bare plots at Chelsea into slices of Boveridge House in Dorset, Hidcote, and next year Furzey Gardens in Hampshire.

But when you take that to the actual place – the location of the original garden – you end up with something akin to pastiche, or at best a mildly uncomfortable dissonance.

The PGG seminar concluded that design, and designers, have an important part to play in garden restoration. But Lord Cavendish - who has I think a better solution by commissioning Kim Wilkie, of Orpheus fame, to build him an unashamedly 21^st century earthworks in the late 18^th century grounds of Holker Hall (opening next spring) – made the point that gardens these days are used differently now to how they were in the past.

And, he added, perhaps saying the unsayable, ‘Some gardens will be lost. But gardens are and should be ephemeral.’

Which puts a whole new slant on the question: should we be restoring gardens at all?

Off-season garden visiting: Hestercombe

I love visiting summer gardens in the winter. Those which will let you in the gates at this time of the year are in the minority, but if you can find one, you will find a garden out of its vibrant, party-animal summer finery. You might even say you can never truly know a garden's character until you have seen it in winter.

The Edwardian Garden at Hestercombe: a masterpiece of garden structure

Gardens in winter are quieter, more reflective. They show off less: there's less 'look at me!' competition and though high points are fewer and more subtle, there is so little else around at this time of year that you're inordinately grateful for a cluster of flowers, a scent, a shaft of sunshine glancing off snow-white bark. Each highlight, however small, takes on a significance which summer flowers can struggle to achieve.

The scent of wintersweet (Chimonanthes praecox) hung heavy on the air, trapped in the intimacy of the Victorian terrace

Berries and flowers on the same plant: Skimmia japonica worked its magic in great frothing heaps, making eyecatching splashes of colour

Bark is just one of the things unnoticed in summmer but showing its true beauty in winter: here a bank of dogwoods (there were silver birch behind, too)

We were at a loose end on Saturday and it was - miracle! - a gloriously sunny day, so as staying in was simply not an option and the gardens at nearby Hestercombe are free all through January and February, off we went.

They did pointless buildings so well in Victorian times, didn't they?

They weren't too bad at rills, either...

Hestercombe is one of those great restoration stories, in a similar vein to Aberglasney and Heligan. The original garden dates back to 1750, and there's a second terrace in fine Victorian style: but its finest moment was when one Edwin Lutyens moved in just as the 20th century began to create the Edwardian Garden, a tour de force of symmetry, grandeur and beautifully-judged stonework sweeping out from the front of the house towards a fine view of my house in the Blackdown Hills. Oh all right, you can't quite see my house from the back garden of Hestercombe, but it's there somewhere (and was when Mr Lutyens was at work, too).

The bare shape of an acer emerges twisted and tortured like exquisite sculpture

He was followed shortly after by the redoubtable Gertrude Jekyll who did the planting. The whole lot amounts to some 35 acres, and it must have been utterly breathtaking for all of twenty years - until the World Wars came along. After that the story is drearily familiar: army barracks, garden staff whittled down to two harried souls: trees felled randomly or left to grow where they shouldn't. Finally it was completely abandoned.

Saxifrages clung to the craggy walls and basked in the winter sunshine

Then in the 1970s, planting plans were found in a potting shed: more exploration revealed a disused waterfall, the ruins of garden buildings and follies including an 18th century water mill. Some helpfully detailed paintings surfaced of the garden as it was in the 18th century by its original owner, a landscape architect by the rather wonderful name of Copplestone Warre Bampfylde: and the restoration was under way.

These figs were wonderfully trained against a sunny wall: tiny fruits were dotted here and there on the branches

With generous funding from the National Lottery work began in earnest in 1995 and it's still going on: there are half-rebuilt ruins and bits of ground with no obvious purpose here and there around the edges. But the majority of the garden has emerged triumphant, a paean to the Victorian sense of occasion: sweeping vistas and grand statuary give way to intimate terraces, rills trickle playfully and all pay homage to the majestic view spreading out like some amphitheatre at your feet.

The glistening deep green of this water pennywort growing out of a damp wall by the mill was like an echo of summer

The craftsmanship is superb, with lovely craggy stone holding back the banks of grassy hillside and archways framing paths laid with the precision of an artist. Alot of it is all looking quite 'new' still: and perhaps that steals a little of the sense of history. But as the moss and the lichen creeps its way in, it will settle into its landscape once again, no doubt. I hope I shall be here to see it.