two gardens

We visited two gardens, both attached to grand houses.  Yesterday we went to Wimpole Hall, a National Trust property 7 miles southwest of Cambridge.  The historic gardens are Grade I listed, and according to my slightly elderly Telegraph Gardens Guide are the historically most important gardens in Cambridgeshire.  Besides formal gardens near the house, there is a vast parkland, which multiple 18th century designers seem to have had a crack at:  Bridgeman (1720s), Capability Brown (1760s), and William Emes (1790s).

The modern visitor approaches the gardens from a sideways angle, not originally intended by any of the architects of the landscape.  From the pay-and-display carpark a distance from the house (free to NT members, remember your car window sticker) we were led via the stable block (cafe and retailing opportunities) around the side of the house, and popped out looking sideways-on across the parterre, and with a diagonal view across the parkland to a splendid gothic tower with associated ruins (built in 1750, I later learnt).  I assume that when the house was in use, your first sight of the gardens at the rear of the house would have been more head-on, so that you could perceive the symmetry of the parterres, and see the tower in the centre of the view framed by an avenue, as we saw it once we'd walked over to the centre line of the house.  At least it is possible to stand on the terrace.  I appreciate that if a family is still in residence they may not want visitors loitering immediately outside their windows, but it frustrates me when parts of a garden that were intended to be key viewing points are out of bounds.

The parterre is nicely done, crisp and healthy, with neat box hedges surrounding bedding, that looked distinctly stressed in the drought and wasn't flowering yet, and blocks of variegated Euonymus fortunei, cut a few cm taller than the surrounding box.  This was very effective, would adapt to a modern garden, and reminded me what a good low hedging or infill plant this Euonymus can be.  The parterre is divided from the park beyond by stout iron railings, not a ha-ha, and we wondered (fruitlessly) whether this had always been the case, or whether the formal garden had once flowed seamlessly into the parkland.

Beside the parterre is a pleasure ground, with gravel walks, trees and shrubs.  To reach the remainder of the formal gardens you double back across the parterre, through a relatively narrow belt of grass and shrubs (the formal part of the site is a most peculiar shape).  I liked the use of iris in long grass, and wondered what sort they were, and whether they would naturalise or had to be planted anew each year.  The formal garden widens out again, to incorporate two walled gardens, one within the other.  The outer wall is Victorian, the inner (I think) eighteenth century, and is hollow, so would once have been heated, though now it is home to wild bee colonies instead.  The gap between the two is planted with fruit trees in long grass, some traditional flower borders with roses, Nepeta and so on, and an attempt at Modernist herbaceous planting with strips of grasses, which shows how hard it is to do that sort of thing well (much better at Marks Hall, or Scampston in N. Yorks).  The inner garden houses neat rows of vegetables, which are used in the cafe and sold in the shop, and flowers, I think largely intended for picking.  There is a fine greenhouse, not open to the public.

The parkland is glorious.  To the front of the house is a big gravel sweep (very Downton Abbey) and immediately beyond grass, and a great avenue stretching halfway to the horizon, which was replanted with limes in 1980 after the previous elms died in 1976.  Subsidiary avenues lead out in the opposite direction at the back of the house, and at right angles, lining up with the central axis of the parterre.  The grass is horribly dry, though, the scene more August than early June.

We looked at the house as well, since we were there with plenty of time to spare, and like that sort of thing (besides, might as well get full value from the NT memberships).  Wimpole Hall was originally Elizabethan, and extended and altered over the centuries, ending up with a Georgian facade but surprisingly modest doors front and back.  A grand reception room was required at one point, and Sir John Soane managed to insert it into the volume of the existing house, sacrificing seven rooms and a staircase to do so, but without disrupting the external line of the building.  It consists of a central square rising through both storeys of the house, and topped with a dome, supported by four arches each leading to a further space beyond like a Byzantine church, and is an extraordinary feat of architectural shoe-horning.

Wimpole Hall was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1976.  I had not realised until going there that it was previously owned by Rudyard Kipling's daughter and only surviving child Elsie, who was enabled to buy it upon inheriting Kipling's estate in the late 1930s.  The house had been through multiple ownerships, as an excellent interpretation room revealed a pattern repeated over centuries of owners buying it, spending all their fortunes and more improving it, and having to sell it again.  When Elsie and her husband acquired the hall it was virtually stripped of its contents.  He died after only a few years, but Elsie lived there alone (apart from the servants, obviously) for another 33 years, repairing the house and furnishing it.  She did apparently succeed in tracking down some objects that had previously been associated with Wimpole, but it is an odd and rather sad thought that most of what the visitor sees today is a facsimile, a recreation of a way of life that had already passed, assembled by a solitary and increasingly elderly widow.

I have one major gripe about our visit, and might even write to the curator with some visitor feedback, if I get organised.  In the hall itself there is a very good display charting the history of ownership, including copies of archive maps and accounts of how the designed landscape evolved.  In the booklet available for visitors to buy (£5.50) there are barely three pages on the gardens and park.  The vast majority of the book was devoted to the house itself, and I didn't bother to get one.  Given that the National Trust is custodian of the most important historic garden in Cambridgeshire, it would be nice if they could produce something about the garden for those visitors who are interested in garden history.  I was left unclear about the dates of much of what we could see.  For example, it sounded as though at one point avenues were swept away as fashions changed, in which case when was the now-lost avenue of elms planted?  I'm afraid that as the National Trust strives to make its properties more 'accessible' and attract visitors from ethnic minorities, the socially disadvantaged etc etc, it is ignoring the needs of visitors with a more detailed interest in history.  (I don't want the opportunity to dress up in fake period clothes, thank you very much, and the thought of a bench talking to me in the voice of Stephen Fry makes me frankly queasy).  We had exactly the same experience at Ickworth in Suffolk, which makes me think it is a systemic NT issue.

It was lucky we went to Wimpole on Saturday, and not Sunday as originally planned, as it turned out that today Wimpole is hosting the Cambridgeshire County Show, and the traffic will presumably be bad.  This morning we visited Knebworth, which turned out to be much closer to both the M1 and Luton airport than I had realised.  It is still in private ownership, presumably striving furiously to pay its way, so there are a plethora of events (archery in the grounds today), and a banqueting and conference centre.  The house is a Victorian fantasy castle, with an unbelievable quantity of gargoyles and groteques, tongues extended, numerous patches of different coloured stone where repairs have taken place, and a sign on the part of the terrace that is roped off reading 'Beware falling masonry'.  I imagine living there as being a nerve-wracking process, whereby each time you manage to make a bit of cash holding a rock concert or a Morris Minor convention, another bit falls off the house and you are back to square one.

It was the home of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, famous for his opening sentence 'It was a dark and a stormy night', which has inspired a competion all of its own.  Poor old Bulwer-Lytton, after Sir Walter Scott died, Edward B-W was considered England's most popular novelist.  There again, who reads Galsworthy nowadays, and he won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 1932 (so did Kipling, in 1907)?  The architect Sir Edward Lutyens married into the Bulwer-Lytton family, and so played a part in reshaping the gardens at Knebworth.

These are formal, with a rose garden, a pergola, some topiary, some statues, pleached limes, a terrace, a herb garden recently constructed from Jekyll plans that were not originally enacted, a maze, and a pet cemetary, plus a walled vegetable garden.  The less formal grounds beyond hold a collection of life-size model dinosaurs, that we didn't bother with, but that were giving great pleasure to visiting small children.  There are now 4 gardeners, plus volunteers, compared to 14 at the peak, and although Lutyens reduced the quantity of bedding and simplified the design, I was left with the feeling that 4 gardeners were not really enough.  Nothing was dreadful, but things were a bit shabby, with a lot of jobs that needed doing.  The numerous suckers around the bases of the pleached limes and the epicormic growths on their trunks needed removing, for example, and weeds were growing up into the base of the box hedges and between the bricks of the paths in the rose garden. True it was tidier than our garden, but we aren't charging people eight quid a head to get in.  They have a rabbit problem, to judge from the use of wire netting and odd scrapes in the borders, and possibly a box disease problem, though it could have been environmental stress.  The planting is OK, but not top-notch, being a bit gappy, and relying on a fairly bread-and-butter plant palette for the most part (there were some standards made out of a red and white flowered climbing honeysuckle, that were very effective).  As at Wimpole, the current route into the garden is not anything like what a resident in the house would have experienced, and deposits you randomly into the rose garden, a way from the building.

The park has fine clumps of trees, and an impressive avenue leading to a memorial obilesk for Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's mother.  We thought that the later (Lutyens?) planting had probably obscured the view to the memorial from the house to some extent, though you might still be able to see it from the upstairs windows.  We didn't go in the house, although you can if you want to.  One sad set of Victoriana seemed enough for the weekend.

We would probably have been more appreciative of the garden if it hadn't been a grey and a windy day, cold enough that we put our coats on as soon as we got out of the car (and maybe if we hadn't been standing in a slightly chilly party teepee until nearly midnight the night before).  As we left, not profoundly disatisfied but not overwhelmed either, the Systems Administrator described it as a nice example of its type, but lacking the wow factor.  I think that's a very fair summary.

If you would like to go yourself, here are links to their websites  Wimpole Hall  Knebworth