We have just watched a documentary about the creation of the garden at Hidcote. It was not part of a hot new garden history series that you have somehow failed to hear about. No, the programme was made in 2011 and we missed it at the time, but there's all sorts of good stuff available now on catch-up. I'm happy to have held off watching until we'd visited the garden anyway.
It was a bit of a shock seeing how the camera can lie. Hidcote is famously a garden of rooms, many of them quite small, but on TV some appeared closer to warehouse size. As Chris Beardshaw walked around the perimeter of a circular pond as large as a fair sized swimming pool I was left scratching my head. I remember that pond, partly because the motor running the fountain pump made too much noise and I thought that as part of their multi-million pound renovation the National Trust might have put it in a soundproofed box, and it was a normal size. Bigger than your average garden pond, but nowhere near as vast as it looked on the telly.
I had a similar shock when I saw the garden at Barnsdale some years ago. My Japanese friend from horticultural college was working there for a year's placement, so I went up to see her, and was thrilled to finally stand in the gardens where Geoff Hamilton had stood. Thrilled, and amazed that they were so tiny. When I saw them on Gardeners' World each compartment had looked the size of a reasonable modern back garden. In the flesh several were diminutive, only a few paces across. I was still very happy to see them, to the bemusement of my Japanese friend who had not had the joy of several years of Friday nights spent in front of the TV glued to Geoff's every word. I still remember his obilisks made from lathes and ballcocks.
Hidcote is a funny garden. It is so very, very famous and influential, though perhaps not quite as much in a league of its own as the programme suggested. Sissinghurst has been massively copied as well, for starters, and Biddulph Grange was equally laid out as a series of discreet areas that cannot be seen at the same time, completed before Hidcote was even begun. I think Chris Beardshaw put his finger on an important point near the end of the programme when he said that Hidcote was one man's garden, never designed to be visited by coach loads of people.
We have visited twice, last year after the restoration, and many years previously. Our first visit did not entirely impress. We drove out and back in a day, a birthday treat for me because I wanted to see this famous garden, and so I could never decide whether our lack of appreciation was entirely Hidcote's fault or just that it was too far for a comfortable day trip. I found the planting so-so, and the Systems Administrator found some of the garden rooms claustrophobic. On our second visit we liked it more, but still didn't love it, and the SA still found the smaller spaces cramped and fussy. Was that Hidcote's fault, or down to the sheer weight of visitors? If we could have had it to ourselves perhaps we would have liked it better.
Or if we could have seen it in Lawrence Johnston's day. Preferably not with him, since he seems to have been a painfully shy and socially awkward person, but if he'd let us go round while he was out (not that he probably would have since he seems to have been keen on people with titles, money and impressive gardens of their own). The National Trust does its best, and at least it has the esources to keep gardens like Hidcote going, but gardens in corporate ownership do seem to struggle to keep their spirit. We visited Kiftsgate Court on the afternoon of our second visit to Hidcote, now gardened by the third generation of the same garden-mad family, and for us Kiftsgate had a certain magic that Hidcote lacked. But maybe that was just because it had approximately one tenth of the number of visitors.
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