The Garden at Upton Grey

The garden of Upton Grey manor house just a few miles from Junction 5 off the M3 in Hampshire is the most meticulously researched and brilliantly executed garden restoration project. The restoration was not undertaken by a large organisation such as the National Trust or English Heritage, but by two people who at first had no idea of the historic importance of their garden. They had an even less idea of gardening at that time let alone the work involved in a full restoration project. The support they received by prominent garden historians such as the renowned Penelope Hobhouse more than made up for this shortfall in their knowledge and experience. Rosamund Wallinger and her husband John were the couple who bought Upton Grey manor house in 1983 and they were to discover that the overgrown and derelict garden of around five acres was in fact a lost Gertrude Jekyll garden, making it of vital historic significance. The garden was designed by Jekyll when she was sixty six in 1908 for Charles Holme a man highly ranked in the arts & crafts movement. Despite Jekyll’s advancing years she was working on fifteen new garden designs at this time from 1908-1909, one of these being Hestercombe. This did not mean that Jekyll visited every garden she worked on, often she asked for measurements and plans of the garden or area of the garden to be re-designed and she fitted her existing designs to these.

The rise of the middle classes in the 19^th and 20^th centuries meant that smaller less ostentatious houses were needed for such people as lawyers, doctors and the new professional business men. These smaller houses still required gardens but the formal gardens of England obviously did not suit them. The arts and crafts garden did suit though and was far less costly to create and maintain. Upton Grey fell into this new category, an old manor house converted into the new arts and crafts style with a garden to match. The aristocracy of course shunned this movement; they still required the formal garden, the gardens created by London and Wise to show their status. The grip of Edwardian classicism was never released.  

As already stated at first the Wallinger’s did not fully appreciate the garden that they now owned. The manor house needed to be made habitable first; money constraints and an icy winter did not make work on the garden a priority. Rosamund explains what turned out to be a fortunate situation in her book, ‘’I now appreciate how lucky we were to buy the house at the onset of winter and when there was a great deal of work to be done on the building. It prevented us starting random work on the garden before we began vital research, because both weather and limited finances ensured that we moved slowly. I think there is a strong chance that, had we moved in with six summer months ahead and cash available, we might well have launched an ignorant and damaging assault on the dilapidated garden’’. Once the restoration had started a few of Jekyll’s original plants were found and these could very well have been lost in an unplanned rush. The Wallinger’s in their research to discover the history of the manor house had inadvertently discovered that the garden was in fact a Jekyll garden and they decided that it could be restored and more importantly they wanted to restore it to its former state.

The very act of garden restoration is in itself expensive and difficult.  Undertaking the work yourself is backbreaking, not a task to be considered lightly. There are people who would be daunted and not want the problems a project such as this would bring. The Wallinger’s, being made of sterner stuff were not put off, but they also had the benefit of not being gardeners at this time so not fully appreciating until they had started how hard the work was going to be. By then the restoration was in progress and it was too late to stop.   

Rosamund after time and research acquired copies of all Jekyll’s original plans for the manor house garden. These were not the plans given to the client but her own working plans which made them extremely hard work to decipher. Jekyll used her own style of short hand and abbreviation which took Rosamund a long time to fully understand and make sense of.  But these plans did mean that a full and accurate restoration could now be possible.

Rosamund and John decided to restore the garden as closely as possible to the original, creating a living historical document for the future. Students, garden designers and the public the world over would benefit from this, and now do so. Visitors come many thousands of miles to see the garden, from such countries as America and Japan. Rosamund decided that the original plant species Jekyll used  should be searched out and re-planted in the garden in their old positions to make the restoration as accurate as possible. If a plant species had disappeared then a substitute that was as close as possible to the original would be utilised.

The garden is a living museum, by the very nature of an accurate restoration it has to be. The difference with Upton Grey compared with some other garden restorations is that the garden is an ephemeral creation; it has fluidity, movement and progression. The garden clearly displays the genius of Jekyll but it also displays something of the character of Rosamund and John. They are not simply museum custodians but have made the garden their own.  

There are two distinct types of garden at Upton Grey, the wild garden and the formal garden. The wild garden created by Jekyll extends to around one and a half acres and the formal garden makes up the rest of the space.

The wild garden is bordered on one side by the long winding driveway and on the other side by the church. This garden had become totally overgrown and was full of brambles. There were trees that had seeded themselves and plants not in the original plan that had been added. There were a few survivors from Jekyll’s original planting, one being a bamboo, Arundinaria simonii. This is an invasive plant which would explain its stubbornness to remain. There were still some wild flowers that had survived and naturalised such as snowdrops, cowslips and fritillaries. The wild garden has sinuous mown pathways cut into it which gives this relatively small space the feeling of depth and length as you walk around. Unlike the formal garden there are no straight lines and the grass is kept long.

The restoration saw the complete removal of all the invading trees and plants not included in Jekyll’s original plan. The wild garden is now accurately restored, complete with the pond and full of all the original plant species far too numerous to list.

The entrance to the wild garden has a set of shallow turf steps created by Jekyll that look like an amphitheatre in miniature; this is a simple but extremely beautiful and striking feature. While walking around this garden looking at the many plants and trees such as a favourite of mine the Juglans regia, and admiring the natural pond and its planting, you can easily forget just how extremely difficult it is to keep a garden looking ‘wild’ and still under control.

 

The formal garden extends from the back of the manor house. The word formal is not necessarily a term you associate with the arts and crafts movement but as at Upton Grey there was symmetry and geometric borders softened by the planting. Even at Gravetye manor the former home of William Robinson there is a degree of formality in the hard landscape design and border shape.

A narrow formal lawn on a terrace created by Jekyll sits above the rose garden. This top lawn is connected to the rose garden by steps. The pathway to the steps is covered by a stunning oak pergola which has rope hung from it as in Jekyll’s day. There are climbing and rambling roses as well as other climbing plants which create a profusion of colour and scent. In the distance through the rose garden, across the bowling green and tennis court lawn can be see the rose arbour which makes an excellent focal point.

Each side of the rose garden are the main borders running along the yew hedging packed full of plants which typically signify Jekyll’s designs as they move from the cool tones through to the bright hot colours. Jekyll used drifts of colour creating harmony and unity with surrounding parts of the garden. Each part she created was used to compliment other sections, the garden considered as a whole not just a series of individual parts.  Jekyll wrote about unity in garden design in an article published in 1918 in ‘Country Life’, ‘’we are growing impatient of the usual rose garden, generally a sort of target of concentric rings of beds placed upon turf, often with no special aim at connected design with the portions of the garden immediately about it, and filled with plants without any thought of their colour effect or any other worthy intention’’.

There are eight main rose beds on the rose lawn four on each side and each bed has nine peonies, eight roses, seventeen lilies and fifty three Stachys lanata. (A complete plant list is available from Upton Grey). These beds surround the two stone centre squares which have Canna indica and Lilium regale. The Canna extends the flowering period of this area quite considerably.

There are three dry stone walls that frame the rose garden made from Purbeck stone. These walls hold a multitude of plants that flower long and hard also extending the season.  You will find the planting framing the steps leading down from the rose garden to the bowling lawn includes rosemary and lavender as Jekyll wanted people to brush past these plants so releasing the scent into the air. 

Upton Grey also has a long kitchen garden and orchard and a nuttery all adding to the overall interest in the garden.

There are many borders containing many hundreds of plants with around fifty different rose species all flowering in the garden, far too many for me to list or describe in this short article. I cannot recommend a visit to Upton Grey enough. For anyone even vaguely interested in Gertrude Jekyll and her work it is a must see. The garden is living testimony to two remarkable women, Gertrude Jekyll and Rosamund Wallinger. Rosamund has written two excellent books on the restoration and its completion, ‘Gertrude Jekyll’s Lost Garden – The Restoration of an Edwardian Masterpiece’ and published in August 2012, ‘Gertrude Jekyll- Her Art Restored at Upton Grey’. I leave the last word on Upton Grey to Rosamund, ‘’every year visitors express amazement that a garden designed one hundred years ago can rank alongside todays finest gardens. They admire the strong simplicity of Miss Jekyll’s design, her acceptance and use of new plant material from around the world, and her artistic use of drifts of colour to paint her landscapes’’.

Upton Grey Manor is open by appointment only.

www.gertrudejekyllgarden.co.uk

A complete plant list is available.

Bibliography

Wallinger, R. Gertrude Jekyll’s Lost Garden- The Restoration of an Edwardian Masterpiece. Garden Art Press. 2000

Wallinger, R. Gertrude Jekyll- Her Art Restored at Upton Grey. Garden Art Press. 2012