I was going to take a break from the discipline of daily postings, but here I am sitting in Gloucester Docks with time to spare before the museums open. So here are some observations on what we have seen so far in the West Country.
Westonbirt Arboretum Westonbirt is a wonderful place at any time of the year. We were too early for the bulk of the autumn colour, but nobody who loves trees could fail to enjoy walking around Westonbirt. It's years since I last called there, and the Forestry Commission have moved the car park and built a swanky new visitor entrance. The site is so vast that an entire day would not be enough to see it all, so we walked around the Old Arboretum, and once again I missed seeing the gigantic lime stool in the native Silk Wood. I was smitten by a holly that I've written down as Ilex aquifolium 'Dragon Lady', but see that most web entries have as Ilex x aquipernyi 'Dragon Lady'. Certainly the leaves had a clawed quality, making it well named, and suggesting something beyond the common holly in its make-up. It is an upright growing, pyramidal variety with a fairly open habit, lustrous, slightly curved dark green foliage with obvious spines, and was thick with bright red berries. A beauty.
Painswick Rococo Garden I had long wanted to see Painswick, and was not disappointed. The Rococo was in fashion for a few decades in the eighteenth century, and was applied to gardens as well as to dress and domestic furnishings. Few examples survive, and if you were being strict about it you would say that Painswick had not so much survived as been reconstructed, since most of what visitors see today above soil level has been rebuilt or replanted since restoration began in 1984. It is garden design as fun, as party time, as a place to hang out, without any lofty messages about politics or the state of the nation. Asymmetry, flourishes of decoration, a mixture of the straight line and the joyously wiggly, odd little follies, and a cheerful refusal to take itself too seriously are hallmarks of the Rococo, as exemplified by Painswick. So a white painted exedra with gothic pinnacles presides over a vegetable patch, and the Eagle House does not contain any traces of eagles. In winter Painswick is famous for its snowdrops, but obviously we missed those. However, we were enormously pleased with the garden, and with our cream tea (consumed in lieu of lunch, which is how to maintain your cream tea intake while on holiday).
The gardens are licensed for weddings, and I did take the precaution of calling before we went, since it was a Saturday, to check that there wasn't one, as it would have been galling to get there and find we weren't allowed into half the buildings because they were being used for a private function. I guessed from the way the person who answered the phone replied that perhaps they didn't actually get too many weddings, licence or no licence. Maybe competition for bridal trade is fierce, since Westonbirt do them as well, indeed we saw Adam and Becky's guests assembling, but Westonbirt provides a dedicated function room so normal visitors to the arboretum need not be inconvenienced. (One of the tutors at Writtle made a special trip to Chiswick House to see the camellia house, about two restorations ago, and found it was being used for a wedding reception. She was so loathe to miss out on the camellias after travelling all that way that she simply slipped in and mingled with the crowd. The canapes were very nice, apparently).
Rodmarton Manor Rodmarton is the last large Arts and Craft House built in England. Begun in 1909 in the final high days of Edwardian pomp, it was finished twenty years later, just in time for the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. It was built for a stockbroker and his family, who live there still. If you look carefully at the upstairs windows, you see that quite a few have towels along the bottom to catch the rain as it drives in, and I should say that living there was something of a strain. The garden was started at the same time as the house, and is one of the last Arts and Crafts gardens of the original wave, although the movement has continued to influence garden design up to the present day. The stockbroker and his family were subscribed to Arts and Crafts ideals, and the house contains an important collection of Cotswolds Arts and Crafts furniture made by local craftsmen using local materials and traditional techniques. House and garden are available to public viewing on two afternoons a week.
I'd long been aware of the existence of Rodmarton, and its historic significance, and was pleased to see it. The Systems Administrator hadn't, and was amazed and faintly mind boggled by the entire experience. It is utterly weird, an anachronism even while it was being built, and while the furniture is indeed historically significant is is also for the most part hideous. It struck us both as we were going round what a desperately uncomfortable house it was, too big to heat, the fireplace in the big sitting room smoking abominably to judge from the soot staining the chimney breast, windows now leaking, painstakingly hand-made pieces of ugly furniture standing marooned in vast, uncarpeted rooms. The garden is quintessential Arts and Crafts, all crazy paving, low walls dividing the space, topiary, stone troughs of alpines, maze like paths, yew hedges. And it could desperately do with the injection of a fat wedge of cash and the services of another gardener, preferably two or three. The family are doing well with whatever resources they've got to keep the grass cut and the hedges trimmed, but it's no Dixter. Flowers were in short supply by the time we got there, which need not be the case in mid September, as you will hear when I come on to write about the other gardens we've seen, and dead leaves on the paths and weeds in the paving gave it a tired look.
I thoroughly enjoyed it for the atmosphere of decay, redolent of past glories and lost Empire. The garden writer Tim Richardson wrote in an article in the Telegraph in 2012 (I would give you a link, except that my computer is now refusing to let me open it in Chrome, having been perfectly happy with it two days ago) that Rodmarton is his favourite, much more so than Sissinghurst and Hidcote, because it is so authentic. Hmn. Richardson is a serious, heavyweight writer and his views on gardens must be taken seriously, but the modern cult of authenticity is as apt to mislead its followers as any other cult. Rodmarton is under-resourced, and the horticulture being practised there is no longer of the highest.
To be continued. In the next instalment, Hidcote and Kiftsgate Court.
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