The west country

Day 1

Westbury Court

Visit an intimate and charming restored seventeenth century garden belonging to a merchant rather than aristocrat, and discover the Anglo-Dutch style. See the two canals reflecting the sky, the ‘well clipt’ yew hedges and productive parterres with asparagus, globe artichokes, cardoons, rhubarb, and a huge rabbit warren.

Dyrham Park 

Dyrham Park has been described by Timothy Mowl as the ‘ lost Tivoli gardens’ on a steep English hillside. The magnificent house with two very different facades was built between 1692 and 1704 for King William II’s Secretary of State, William Blathwayt. An astonishing garden was commissioned by its handsome and impatient owner. With six terraces, a wilderness, a cascade of 224 steps, canals, greenhouses, statues, parterres, stew ponds, a kitchen garden, avenues, ponds, flower gardens, pavilions, and mounts, this ‘hyperactive garden’ is being restored by National Trust. 

Day 2 

Bowood 

Bowood House, privately owned by the Marquess and Marchioness of Lansdowne, has one of the best ‘Capability’ Brown gardens in the country. Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown changed the face of eighteenth century England making it a magical world of green. Brown’s lavish plan, drawn up in 1763, was to drown the little hamlet in front of the house, by damming two streams and moving earth with a team of men and spades; all without mechanical assistance. Completed in 1768 the single harmonious landscape with sweeping lawns, belts of trees, sinuous lake  (later embellished with the cascade and Robert Adam mausoleum) make this a grand but very naturalistic garden, clearly fulfilling Brown’s own criteria that a garden should provide: “all the elegance and all the comforts that mankind wants in the country.”  

Stourhead 

Stourhead is a captivating garden, and the ultimate English Arcadia. Henry Hoare II, 'Henry the Magnificent', spent 20 years and £20,000 creating the garden with its glorious lake, and collection of temples and monuments. There was the Pantheon, the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Flora and the Grotto and a plunge pool. Hoare often bathed naked in the plunge pool with his friends, saying: ‘A Souse into that delicious Bath and Grot, fill’d with fresh Magic, is Asiatick Luxury and too much for Mortals’. After the cold bath the group would visit the centrally heated Pantheon to dry off and escape polite convention: there were no windows but was lit from the top. The garden and its buildings provided pleasure for the senses as well as the soul. 

Day 3 

Iford

‘I had always felt that for a garden to contain the highest development of beauty it must have a combination of Architecture and plants.  Old buildings or fragments of Masonry carry one’s mind back to the past in a way that a garden entirely of flowers cannot do.’ So said Harold Peto, the architect who lived here from 1899 -1933. A famous 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. A great traveller and obsessive collector, Iford showcases Peto’s collection of Italian sculpture and sarcophagi and even a catholic chapel.

Great Chalfield Manor

This is a charming 15th-century manor house with an Arts and Crafts garden by Alfred Parsons, the Victorian watercolourist and gardener, who was paid 50 guineas a year for three years to create a garden worthy of the house restored for the new owner, engineer Robert Fuller, in 1905. The two Tudor yew houses are a must see, and the roses in the Inner Courtyard climbing up the walls and courtyard are in romantic abundance, with the soft pink polyantha Rosa ‘Nathalie Nypels’ in the island beds.

Day 4

Hestercombe

Probably the finest example of Gertrude Jekyll’s work, where she showed as an artist she was fully ‘equipped to paint the garden with living things’, and her supreme use of colour. With its beautifully balanced combination of stonework and planting, semi-circular steps, framed views, stone walls, water gardens, wide green walks, seats, feasts of roses and simple seats, Hestercombe is a unique garden. ’Interpenetration of art and nature, contrived in a rare and perfect way, achieves simultaneously serenity, grandeur and incredible finesse.’ (Sally Festing).

Tintinhull

An intimate, tranquil garden created by two great talents Phyllis Reiss, a friend of Johnston and Sackville West and Penelope Hobhouse, garden designer and writer who was a tenant of the property 20 years after Reiss died. “I can't bear any conspicuous place to be void of flower and colour over a long period" said Phyllis Reiss, designing garden rooms of colour as well as tones and shapes.“ I love the idea of secret hidden surprises to be discovered in progression” said Penelope Hobhouse, who restored the garden and extended the flowering season. 

Day 5

Hauser and Wirth

‘The brief was absolute freedom, with no compromise,’ says Piet Oudolf, designer of Hauser and Wirth’s contemporary art gallery’s garden in Somerset in 2014. ‘He wanted me to feel free in what I did; I think that is what he wants to do with his artists, too.’ Wirth wanted the garden to be the essence of the larger vision of the building complex of farm buildings. ‘It would work by itself, but I think it gets more sense of place when it is set in a wider context. In the gallery, there is beauty everywhere; then you come into the garden, which is part of the whole idea of everything that happens there. The 1.5 acre garden 'echoes the tradition of classical gardens, but the variety of species and combination of plants creates a looseness, softening the formality of its appearance'. Grasses, including miscanthus varieties and the purple moor-grass 'Moorhexe', make it an easily recognisable Oudolf garden design. Piet, from Holland, is one of the world’s most revered landscape designers and arguably his most famous work is the planting on the High Line in lower Manhattan, where he has made a former city rail line bloom. 

The Newt

South African-born media tycoon Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, a former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa have transformed Hadspen House and gardens in Somerset in 2019. Penelope Hobhouse, who created the Queen Mother’s garden at Walmer Castle in Kent, established a parabola-shaped walled garden as the centrepiece in the 1960’s, and this has now been restored with terracing and a huge collection of trained apple trees, one even trained to the shape of the double helix DNA. The motto ‘from the egg to the apple’ or from start to finish, inspired the Bekkers and their team to create an historical timeline for the estate. The garden is said to ‘breathe the past’ with cascades, ponds and lakes, a Victorian Fragrance Garden — marked by a Queen Victoria penny coin set into the ground, a cottage garden inspired by Jekyll, colour gardens, a water garden with toads spurting water on unwary visitors, and a state of the art steel cider press making good use of the 3000 cyder apple trees planted.