southern sights 

Day 1

Chelsea Physic Garden

Chelsea Physic Garden is the second oldest botanical garden in Britain, begun in 1673 to grow plants for medicines. It now has around 5,000 different edible, useful, medicinal and historical plants contained within its sheltering walls. The garden's position near the Thames was chosen to allow non-native plants to grow in the warmer micro-climate created by the warm air currents off the river, and provide a  place to unload barges straight from plant hunting trips at home and abroad. Though it is still a botanic garden, it is laid out like an ornamental garden with straight walks at right angles to each other. The largest outdoor fruiting olive tree in Britain and the world’s most northerly outdoor grapefruit tree are here. There are over 100 different tree species: from pomegranates to ginkgos, and mulberries to eucalyptus. The Glasshouses hold a collection of tropical and sub-tropical species, and the Victorian Cool Fernery has a large collection from the time when Pteridomania (Fern-fever!) was rife. The Pond Rockery is Europe's oldest rockery and has an interesting history, with clam shells from a voyage to Tahiti with Captain Cook, and pieces of masonry from the Tower of London. The Garden of Edible and Useful Plants has a Mental Wellbeing Garden within it.

Hampton Court

Hampton Court Place gardens cover 500 years of history. Learn about Henry VIII’s heraldic garden designed to rival Francis I’s fabulous garden at Fontainebleau with lions, dragons and other painted heraldic beasts on posts and see his royal tennis court. The heraldic garden was redesigned by William of Orange as the Privy (private) garden in 1688. William and Mary delighted being at Hampton Court as William suffered from asthma and the air was purer. William wished to recreate his palace at Het Loo, so employed the fashionable garden designers George London and Daniel Marot. They kept Charles II’s canal, planted a network of avenues and made two great parterres, which later monarchs neglected. The Fountain Garden was semi-circular and located below the east façade of Wren’s new building with parterres de broderie and fountains and can be seen in Knyff’s 1702 painting in the palace. The Privy Garden was meticulously restored between 1992 and 1995, cloning the original yews and hollies and propagating 30,000 of the correct dwarf box plants. The magnificent wrought iron screens by Tijou which cost £2160 (approx. £172,000 now) have been carefully restored. Capability Brown was the head gardener here in 1764. He did not introduce his naturalist landscaping here but could not bring himself to have the topiary clipped, Jefferson notes in 1786: “Old fashioned. Clipt yews grown wild.” However, he did plant the Great Vine, in 1768, now the largest grape vine in the word. The restoration of the baroque Lower Orangery garden was completed in 2007.

Day 2

Petworth 

Petworth is a magnificent baroque country house set in a majestic 700-acre park, one of the finest examples of Capability Brown’s landscapes. Petworth has been a family home for over 900 years and is still lived in by the same family. Charles Seymour the sixth Duke of Somerset inherited his title and estates aged 17 in 1678 and in 1682 married Elizabeth Percy of Petworth, making the pair one of the wealthiest couples in England. Known as the proud duke, he made certain no-one would forget his ancient lineage and prestigious position. His children were expected to stand in his presence. On one occasion he fell asleep and woke to see one of his daughters seated, she was disinherited. Inspired by the rebuilding of Versailles from 1661, in the new Baroque style, and by his position as president of the Council to King William 111, he began rebuilding the West front probably using William III’s architect, Daniel Marot, in an opulent, sensual, theatrical and heavily symbolic style. The front was twenty-one bays long, very controlled and refined.

The gardens were also laid out by George London with formal groves, walks, a bowling green, banqueting house and black marble fountain. This was replaced 50 years later by Capability Brown. The views look completely natural, but 'Capability' stripped away the formal gardens and entrance to Petworth House though the Marble Hall. He transported an estimated 64,000 tons of soil, dammed a stream and made a serpentine lake which became the park's centre piece. Brown’s landscape was simple, uncluttered and restrained, comprising sweeping pasture bordered with tree clumps, perimeter shelter belts and screens of trees. The landscape was designed to encourage eighteenth century leisure pursuits including hunting, shooting and carriage-riding. He added various monuments such as the Ionic Rotunda in 1756 to evoke the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, positioning it on the steep hillside to give commanding views over meadow below. 

Upton Grey

The garden at Upton Grey is a very accurately and faithfully restored Gertrude Jekyll garden. Charles Holme was the founder and editor of the upmarket Arts and Crafts Studio magazine and he moved to this Jacobean farmhouse in 1906. At the age of 65 Jekyll was asked to design the garden. The garden consists of a Wild garden to the north west of the house. There are semi-circular grass steps and grass paths which lead through rambling roses to a copse of walnut trees and a pond. South East of the house is the formal garden with planted dry stone walls, a rose garden, bowling and tennis lawns and herbaceous borders which followed her well known Munstead Wood colour sequence: ‘Use warm colours (reds and yellows) in harmonies and cold ones (blues and their allies) in contrast.’ Here the colours run from cool at either end to hot in the centre. These are all enclosed within yew hedging which highlights the colour of the plants and protects them. Outside the hedging there is a nuttery, orchard and kitchen garden. Very few of her original plants survived the period before the current owners, John and Rosamund Wallinger, restored the house in 1984, but they have carefully sourced them, following the original plan plans in the Reef Point Collection at The University of California at Berkeley. 

West Green

West Green House has Tudor origins, but the main house is eighteenth century.  Owned at one stage by ‘Hangman Hawley’  a patron of the notorious ‘Hell Fire Club’ , and the wastrel William Pole Tylney Long Wellesley ‘a spendthrift, a profligate, a gambler in his youth…debauched in his manhood...redeemed by no single virtue’,  in 1975 the lease was taken on by Lord Alister McAlpine, the famous Tory politician and advisor to Margaret Thatcher. He commissioned Quinlan Terry to design some of the garden follies, but in 1990 the house was bombed by IRA who presumed Margaret Thatcher was visiting.  The damage to the house and gardens was very significant. In 1993, Marylyn Abbott, Marketing Manager of the Sydney Opera House and garden designer took on the house and garden. Most of the planting is in the Arts and Crafts style, with unfolding rooms and hidden corners. The old walled garden, originally made in 1770s, has been restored and is entered thorough an arbour of wisteria. There is an elaborate potager filled with fruit cages and colourful vegetables. There is a topiary garden and perennial borders planted from sugar pink, through mauve, vibrant purple and dark red – and know by the gardeners as ‘The Vatican Corner.’ The water staircase survives from the old garden and culminates in the Nymphaeum Fountain designed by Terry. There is also an Islamic Paradise garden with apple trees rising from circular ponds in the garden, and five Chinoiserie bridges across the stream at the end of the garden. Torch lit operas take place on the green theatre lawn.

Woolbeding

Woolbeding Gardens is a twentieth century garden created by the late Sir Simon Sainsbury, great-grandson of the founder of the supermarket chain, and his partner Stewart Grimshaw, bookseller and botanist. They initially commissioned the famous Lanning Roper to create long double borders to the west of the house, with salvias, roses, lavender, white foxgloves, alliums, blue and purple irises, astrantias, and angel’s fishing rods. The old walled garden was the scene for several garden rooms: the Well garden, the Herb Garden and the Fountain garden, and as Mary Keen the garden writer said: ‘At Woolbeding the planting succeeds in pleasing the romantic as well as the plant buff.’  Then the area at the end of the garden and around the lake benefitted from the magic of Julian and Isabel Bannerman, famous for their work at Price Charles’s estate at Highgrove. Stewart writes: ‘the result was a pleasure ground with a ruined abbey, hermit’s hut, Chinese bridge, rustic walk, grotto with river god, Gothick summerhouse, waterfall, rills, stumpery and bubbling source, roughly in that sequence.’ ‘The Long Walk’ has features and follies and feels like it was created in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. The Bannermans made sure the journey ended in the source of the water ‘Julian has a mantra about water in the garden: it must make sense.’

Day 4

Sissinghurst

'The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun. Everything was hushed and drowsy and silent but for the coo of the white pigeons.' wrote Vita Sackville West of her beloved Sissinghurst. Sissinghurst is a dazzling early twentieth century garden and hugely influential – the romance of the White Garden, plants spilling onto paths, roses round old doorways and terracotta urns have been copied around the world. In 1930 Harold Nicolson, a diplomat and author, and Vita Sackville West, a poet and garden writer bought Sissinghurst with its sixteenth century tower and began restoring the buildings and garden. Harold Nicolson laid down the main lines of the garden, he believed in strict geometrical lines, and Vita as the ‘artist-gardener’ was in charge of the planting. The garden is divided into ten separate rooms which include the Rose Garden, the White Garden, the South Cottage Garden, the Herb Garden, where ‘ only the beautiful, the pungent and the elegant are allowed’, the Nuttery,  the Lime Walk, the Delos, the Moat Walk, the Orchard and the Purple Border. The most famous feature is the White Garden, popularising Gertrude Jekyll’s use of colour in planting. Vita Sackville-West wrote, dreaming of her white garden: “I cannot help hoping that the grey ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight.”

Day 5

West Dean

West Dean Manor was remodelled in 1804 in the Gothic style and the garden is an Arts and Crafts garden which was designed by Harold Peto in 1911. Peto was a popular architect, who worked at Gravetye Manor owned by William Robinson; his work was enormously fashionable with royalty and the very rich, to the extent that he worked on so many houses in Cap Ferrat in South of France that it was nicknamed ‘Peto Point’ in Edwardian times. Peto built a 300’ long stone pergola with timber beams – this is still an outstanding feature of the garden, on the north lawn behind the house. The garden is one of the most significant restored gardens in the South and the Arts and Crafts traditions are continued. The restored walled kitchen garden has sixteen Victorian glasshouses with exotic flowers, seasonal fruit and vegetables –from orchids to nectarines, peppers and cucumber, tomatoes to aubergines. There are also four nineteenth century rustic summerhouses, a sunken garden with a pond, Spring and Water gardens, flint bridges crossing the River Lavant and the Wild Garden which is being redeveloped following the principles laid out by William Robinson. Robinson in ‘The English Flower Garden’ 1883 promoted the idea that a garden should allow plants to show off their natural characteristics to best effect, in a seemingly wild, or nature-like environment.

There is also the occasional surreal fibre glass tree in the gardens of West Dean, following the tradition of Edward James who owned the house and collected surrealist art in the early twentieth century. Tom Brown has recently joined as Head Gardener from nearby Parham House and is keen to develop and continue its unique artistic and historical collaboration.

Parham House

Parham is one of the country’s finest Elizabethan houses, built in 1577, known for its rare collection of paintings, furniture and needlework. There is a beautiful four-acre 18th century walled garden which includes a vegetable garden, orchard and a 1920s Wendy house. The old kitchen garden now contains colour-themed herbaceous borders, as well as vegetables. The adjoining pleasure grounds include a lake, specimen trees and a new brick and turf maze. The new head gardener is Erika Packard who is supported by her husband and horticulturalist Tim Miles as Assistant Head Gardener. Lady Emma Bernhard, the owner says that her vision for the garden is that: “The emphasis should remain on it being a uniquely beautiful, tranquil family garden of exceptional quality.” 

Great Dixter

Great Dixter is a fifteenth century house which was enlarged in 1909 by Sir Edwin Lutyens for Nathaniel Lloyd, author of books on brickwork and topiary. The extraordinary high tiled roof with tall chimneys is the most obvious element of Lutyens’ work, with other more discreet additions such as the floor level window in the day nursery, known as ‘the crawling window.’ Lutyens designed the framework of the garden and Christopher, Nathaniel’s son, who was a gardener and writer developed this stunning twentieth century arts and crafts garden. The mixed borders are original, as Lloyd says: “The borders are mixed, not herbaceous. I see no point in segregating plants of differing habit or habits. They can all help one another. So you’ll see shrubs, climbers, hardy and tender perennials, annuals and biennials, all growing together and contributing to the overall tapestry.” Traditional ideas of colour are also challenged: “I have no segregated colour schemes. In fact, I take it as a challenge to combine every sort of colour effectively. I have a constant awareness of colour and of what I am doing, but if I think a yellow candelabrum of mullein will look good rising from the middle of a quilt of pink phlox, I’ll put it there – or let it put itself there.”

Christopher died in 2006 and the garden is now under the stewardship of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust and Fergus Garrett, who manages the garden in Lloyd’s spirit: “We go for high-impact visual displays but also intimacy in our combinations. All of this is within the strong infrastructure of buildings, garden hedges and landscaped trees…. The borders are mixed plantings of trees, shrubs, perennials, biennials, annuals and climbers. the trees and shrubs give us structure, the perennials give us our main season along with self-sowing biennials that soften the picture. Everything is underplanted with bulbs, with pockets of annuals and ephemerals that stretch the display from spring through to autumn. The gardening style is intensive but plants are allowed to look comfortable.”

 “Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade.” 

Rudyard Kipling

“The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives” Gertrude Jekyll