a visit to Mark's Hall

I paid a visit this morning to Mark's Hall Gardens and Arboretum near Coggeshall.  It was a while since I'd been there, and it's vaguely equidistant between our house and that of a friend I hadn't seen for ages either (though more recently than I'd been to Mark's Hall).  A walk around a garden and woodland on a fine autumn day, followed by coffee and cake in a traditional timbered barn, what could be nicer?

The estate, like Peake's House, was a gift to the Nation, and the Nation was not initially sure what to do with it or how to cope.  There had been a hall at Mark's Hall from Saxon times, and a Medieval deer park, and a fine collection of trees, and lakes and a walled garden, but by the time the estate landed in the nation's lap, much was gone.  The great house had been pulled down, the trees had mostly been felled to make room for conifer plantations, the walled garden was choked with scrub and the lakes silted up and their brick banks wrecked by tree roots, and odd ribbons of tarmac left over from a wartime airfield zig-zagged across the landscape.  There was no money to do anything.

The Nation came into its estate in 1966, and began to get to grips with the bequest in slow and stately fashion.  There was some investment in the estate farms, which consequently began to yield a little more, and charity trustees were finally appointed in 1971.  A mere twenty-two years later the arboretum finally opened to the public.  We've been visiting occasionally for the past decade or so, during which time there has been slow but steady progress.  A modern formal garden by Brita von Schoenaich was opened in 1993 within the walled garden, and even that had to be designed so that the planting could be done in phases as funds became available.  There has been a steady stream of tree planting in the arboretum, and a lot of the specimens are labelled, which is a great help to tree nuts like me who would like to relate the little things they have seen (and sold) in pots to established plants in the landscape.  Slowly and steadily, Mark's Hall is on the up, and that's great, since this part of the world is short of good, large gardens.

Brita von Schoenaich's design is first class, and the staged planting has worked out really well. There are some rare and interesting shrubs and small trees nestling in the protection of the old wall, including a Chaste Tree, Vitex agnus-castis, a huge Rosa mutablis, and some pomegranates that were thick with flowers.  I haven't yet caught the formal garden when nothing's been out, and the design and use of space would be interesting even in the absence of flowers.  Equally good and quite different is an area of the arboretum called Gondwanaland, a large grassy clearing among the conifers planted with great drifts of Pampas grass and Wollemi pines.  I have never seen so many of the pines planted together anywhere else in the country: generally you just get one, often enclosed in a wire cage to keep off deer (and people) or at the most a group of three.  At Mark's Hall they have planted dozens, which happily have come through the recent hard winters (I've seen a lot of dead Wollemi pines in garden visits over the past three years).  The effect of Gondwanaland by this stage of the year is of eerie monochrome beauty, the Pampas seed heads gently waving, the dead seed heads of wildflowers in the long grass creating a background of brownish grey, the Wollemis like something out of a lost world.

Altogether I like Mark's Hall very much, and entrance at five pounds (four-fifty for the over sixties) strikes me as incredibly good value.  I would go there oftener, if only it wasn't on the opposite side of Colchester and a tiny bit of a faff to get to.