I took my parents to see the Spencers, at Great Yeldham. The S.A. and I went there once before with friends, for a folk concert that had good acts but not enough audience, and the grounds looked promising. Searching on the Red Cross open gardens website for somewhere to visit this weekend Spencers came up, and the description of the walled garden, not open when we went to the folk concert, sounded very nice. The whole garden turned out to be excellent, well worth the hour's drive to get there (which was a relief as it would have been rather embarassing if it had been dull, or horrid).
The house is Georgian, built around 1760, probably on the site of an older building, and sits in a pleasant park with some fine trees. There is a terrace and some foundation planting around the house, then the rest of the formal garden is separated from the house by lawn and trees, so that you are not aware of its existence until, like Mary finding the secret garden, you go through the door in the wall. Inside you find a gem, a charming, formal arrangement of beds packed with well-grown plants, and some really novel touches. After I got home I read the Spencers' website more carefully, and discovered that the gardens are still in the process of renovation following a master plan drawn up by Tom Stuart-Smith. That goes far to explain all, as the saying goes, since he is probably my favourite designer working today (it would be a tough call between him and Piet Oudolf). A lot of credit also goes to Spencers' gardeners, because the standard of cultivation throughout the whole formal garden is very high, far better than Knebworth.
A lot of the planting is uber cottage garden, with masses of foxgloves, old fashioned pinks (white with a split calyx so I guess 'Mrs Sinkins'. There are no plant labels anywhere), sweet williams, Aquilegia, peonies, snapdragons, herbs, and lots and lots of roses, including a magnificant climber trained in a dense mass over an opening in one of the hedges like a giant, pink-studded tea cosy. There are big stands of blue delphiniums (I now know from the website that they are the variety 'Lord Butler', named after Rab Butler who lived at Spencers until his death). The delphiniums topped 2m and were glowing with health; I have never seen such good ones outside of the great marquee at Chelsea. There is a wooden pergola covered in small flowered climbing roses and honeysuckle, a sundial made out of part of the old London Bridge, and a fabulous wooden greenhouse built at the same time as the house and said to be the oldest in Essex, stuffed with flowers.
The formal divisions of space are very Tom Stuart-Smith, such as the idea of putting the delphiniums in wide rows in long, narrow, parallel beds like something out of a botanic garden or Monet's garden at Giverney. The use of formal hedges to divide the space is also characteristic. However, there are very few grasses, apart from some Stipa gigantea, and the whole planting is so sympathetic to the Georgian house and very English parkland and surrounding countryside that any suspicion one might have that he just trots out a design formula each time would be banished at once. He was responsible for creating the stone terrace around the house, big random laid stone slabs of varying sizes, with lavender and Alchemilla mollis growing through the gaps, that looks as though it has been there for ever, and it turns out was laid in 1995. As you approach the walled garden from the house you go through a white garden, with white flowered shrub roses and (an inspired choice) white standards (I guess 'Iceberg') in long grass (a neat goosefoot mown through it) crammed with white oxeye daisies. The use of standard roses in the flowing grass and wild flowers is unexpected and beautiful.
In the walled garden is a restrained, very effective piece of planting I have never seen anywhere else. A large square is laid to white clover, humming with bees at this time of the year, and a mown grass path curves through it. Around three sides are four-tiered espaliered trees, with shining leaves I marked down as some sort of pear. Luckily I found a gardener to ask, and they are a pear, Pyrus calleryana 'Chanticleer'. They went in four years ago as maidens, and the gardeners have done all the training themselves. Normally you see this as an upright, vase shaped tree, but it turns out it will train beautifully. I found this a wonderful and restful area, and was very pleased to find a bench right at the back of a border, with slabs leading to it, where I could sit surrounded by foxgloves while looking at the geometry and the green. It produced a completely different response in a little girl, who ran round and round the path.
After the complicated pleasures of the walled garden, and the very nice Red Cross tea by the swimming pool (it said cream teas on the website, and turned out to be cake, but they had coffee and walnut so that was fine), we wandered through the woodland walk, and back across the park. The woodland is being planted up with shrub roses and other flowering woody things, and the walk takes you down to the river Colne, looking very small so far upstream, with a red lacquer Chinese bridge over it. The transition from bright and busy to green, shady and calm is a classic element of a good garden, I think, where space permits.
When I first looked at the Spencers website it appeared to me that the garden didn't open all that much to the public except for groups by arrangement, since they also use the house to host events and parties, but looking again more carefully there are some other open days coming up soon. They are open next weekend for the NGS, and are doing a couple of guided tours with lunch for £20 a head, and it looks as though they routinely open in the summer on Thursday afternoons from 2.00 until 5.00pm. Certainly there is an honesty box on the way in, which suggests there are or were regular openings at some point. Here is a link to their website so you can double check all these things for yourself, and it has nice photos on it too, so you can see what it looks like, since I didn't take any pictures: link to Spencers But I would say to everybody (especially those of you living in Castle Hedingham which is only just up the road!) do go. It is really, really good.
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