Gertrude Jekyll and the Garden at Upton Grey

right well good morning good afternoon or good evening wherever you are and welcome to this the 12th webinar in the series that we've been running since covet began i hope you're all surviving well and uh getting through it now most of our previous uh webinars have been on edwin lutchen's own work one of them though was an overview of the work of edwin lutchens and gertrude jikel working together on their houses and gardens a gertrude kill as many of you will know is credited with the launch and the extraordinarily rapid development of edwin lutzens's career but it's also true that edwin lutchins with his mastery of geometry and proportion also influenced gertrude in return and today what this webinar will be doing is comparing and contrasting two famous gardens one by gertrude working on her own and another at about the same time which was created as a joint venture between jacil and lutchens together these are the the garden at the manor house upton grey to the southwest of london and hestagum which is in the in somerset in the west country our panelists today um we'll try to answer the question how do jekyll gardens when she was working on her own uh differ from those when she was working with edwin luncheons together and we should be using upton grey and hestakum is the examples to contrast and compare our panelists today are rosamund wallinger who lives at upton grey and my background she was an entrepreneur she was a bookshop owner a professional chef and her husband and she bought a derelict house at upton grey in 1984. that same year they discovered that the garden was by gertrude although in a complete state of uh abandonment to cut a long story short she caught the gardening bug and has spent the rest of her life restoring and caring for this wonderful garden she's also the author of several books on gardening and i bet you that she is the only panelist that we shall ever have who has been personally serenaded by bing crosby and she's got a recording to prove it the second panelist is claire greenslade she is the head gardener the other famous garden hestakum down in the west country this is a perfect example of a g collections collaboration claire started with studies at university in fashion and textiles that led on to an interest in stained glass and although may seem like a big jump at first glance of course that led on to gardening which combines the same skills of combining color and design and with the earlier studies and after several years of experience working in the gardening department of the national trust at various different national trust properties she presides over the gardening team at hestacom so welcome to the panelists and just before i hand over to them i'd like to make a couple of notes for you one is that this session is being recorded and will be available to revisit if you want to in about 10 days time on the websites of the web of the elections trust america of the lations trust here in the uk where i am and also on youtube secondly at the bottom of your screens you will see a green tab oh wait a minute is it green my one's green um for no it's not green question q a at the bottom of the screen there's a q a tab please use that um if you want to raise any questions to type type them in and marcus who is running the technology for this webinar will feel field as many as time allies and the panelists will answer them right with no further ado i'd like to hand over them to ross and claire thank you thank you very much martin i have had the best time of my life with this garden and i've been watching the development of gardens over the centuries and just to put our important arts and crafts gardens into perspective it's interesting to see the evolution from 1700 to 1900 society changed dramatically we had initially in the 1700s capability brown who had this wonderful vision of the great parks that surrounded the architecture of the houses he was displaying the important thing was vista and he was designing for only the affluent the rich the top of society and royalty and the middle classes didn't exist the lower classes were servile and in order so when we look back at the great gardens of particularly capability brown we see the start of great gardens in england and throughout the world the next one this slide shows us the extraordinary evolution between his death bran's death and hump-free repton who was very luckily able to take advantage of the amazing collection of plants which our plant hunters were bringing back from around the world literally they were largely kept at queue and their queue they were cared for and then distributed to the nurseries of england and that made the plants available to so many people the industrial revolution is really the item that changes society so dramatically that suddenly gives birth to a middle class the self-made man a professional an industrialist who has money but he still wants to make his mark on the world with his house and his garden and he wants a practical house near his clay place of work not thousands of acres not attached to farmland and woodland and it's an intimate association with garden and house the next slide please and this is our miss jiggle who luckily for her was born at such a propitious time she was born in 1843 lived a long time died in 1932 but she was a perfect wonderful example of an affluent middle-class woman a snob as a lot of us and there are and she is photographed now when she's in her late 40s wearing i think the very hat covered with feathers that she wore when she was invited to tea with a near neighbor in surrey where she lived harry mangles harry mangles was a important rhododendron collector and there were several people at t but the youngest and the quietest almost was young edwin lutchens luncheons was just 20 miss gigle was 46 and she impressed him as he impressed her he described her talking quietly and everybody listening and the feathers on her hat forever prancing forward as she spoke and then he adds and he had this lovely sense of humor he was a soft character and she and he formed this wonderful relationship of affection throughout her life he said on leaving tea miss jiggle handed me her card having spoken not a word to me and bid me take tea with her the following saturday at four o'clock i was there on the tick of four and this is the start of the evolution between this charming young man who was prepared to learn from miss jikel because she had experience knowledge as martin was saying of the new classes around cities and towns who wanted a smaller more practical house fewer servants and she knew these people she'd already designed 13 gardens in 1889 when she'd met luncheons and she'd published several articles so she was quite well known in her own field and she introduced him to many of his initial clients next slide please this just proves a rather touching thing because when i came to upton grey in 1984 gertrude was not completely forgotten but certainly not well known by joe public and elections was immortalized in his buildings but he did appreciate her he turned to her for advice throughout his life and always with a chuckle and if they disagreed it never ended badly but here he is kneeling down and the cartoon says i make obeisance meaning i owe her an enormous amount and he described her as missed bumps for the very obvious reason she was quite round now the next slide will show us the lovely struggle he had to give her immortality she was very well known in her own lifetime but busy busy until the end of her life and this is a portrait of her boots painted in 1920 and it's peculiar standing on its own it's because luchen begged her to sit for sitting by his really wonderful artist friend william nicholson and she said no i'm far too old i'm unattractive i haven't time but she did so enjoy luncheons company and wanted to please him so she agreed to sit for nicholson provided he came to her house monstered wood and painted her after dark in winter months well that started another very dear relationship but only for another 10 years she died in 1932 but it just shows she had an ability to communicate with anybody everybody if they were genuine people but my goodness she was easily riled by people who would ask a question and then ask the nest before she danced and she was a little temperamental but when it was daytime when miss giggle was out in the garden or busy writing nicholson had nothing else to do so he painted this glorious portrait of her boots a wonderful sense of humor he shared with legends so the next slide will show us the man who is responsible for commissioning miss jiggle for my garden charles holm born uncovered much the same time as gertrude jigel a slightly shorter life was a very important arts and crafts figure and remember we're now in the arts and crafts period that we've arrived at through evolution he had started the studio a very important arts and crafts magazine that opened the gate for so many crafts and raised them to the status of applied art that was very important so craftsman was now considered artists and this cartoon on the right is by aubry beardsley and it was a very brave publican publication that actually used aubry beardsley as an illustrator because he did profoundly obscene if you like for those days but just beautifully drawn rather shocking pictures looking at them today um very soon i mean beardsley died by the time he was 30 so they didn't employ him for long but i have some wonderful copies of early studio magazines and now i'm going to show you the house that charles home bought and the tail of its of its garden in the foreground is a cow field to the right is the local church and that is the old manor house that has stood there since 1500 and charles holm came from red house in kent which where webb had built for william morris bought a great deal of upton grey surrounding land and two major houses this his slightly minor house he wanted to make a monument to the arts and crafts movement so he employed ernest newton as you'll see in this slide as his architect it's built on the bones of a sort of tudor house it hasn't got the bravery of luncheon's architecture but it's a charming house and it stood in one side of it a car field the other side of its sloping slopes it was finished in 1906 and gertrude was asked to design the garden in 1908 which is much the same time as she was working with luncheons at hestacom and she designed it with 19 plans for various areas altogether this aerial picture so you can see and it is dramatically different from has to come but both are beautiful in a different way this is a small modest um and simple garden in the foreground you'll see a very formal garden with colors and herbaceous small five acres all together in fact slightly under and in the far side of the house winding grass paths through trees and shrubs running gently to a pond and nature in the distance this is ecologically quite remarkable of jacob she loved wildfree meandering woodland as much in fact i think rather more than her form of gardens but when you see hestakum with claire you'll see grand formality which is just breathtaking next slide please and this is just to show you how her plans looked they are several of them and they survived thanks to your beatrix found the americas who was also a great landscape gardener a woman a lot younger than gachujika but she'd met jekyll towards the end of jiggle's life she'd admired her enormously and when gertrude died beatrix fair and thank goodness bought all the plans documents that were available in fact nearly all and left them to the reef point collection at the university of berkeley in california so that is the reason why we can put back jekyll's plans to how they looked a hundred years ago thank goodness next slide please and this just to give you a chuckle is the house that john and i bought in 1984 from london this is what my friends in the village called our dolly london car and we're looking from the top of the house through a window at the wild garden out of the house these berries and green things are catonyasta growing out of the roof so this was a very good discipline i had to be as economical as possible to clear to replant but the wonderful thing about nature although it hasn't got the amazing ability to survive like a building can and luncheons houses it is restorable if you know what was there and the next slide will show you after about 15 years work so not so very long we've got this beautiful view exactly the same view as the one before of you entering the wild garden greeted by rambling roses in the summer running in the distance through walnut trees unfortunately bamboo because charles holm loved japan and japanese art and japanese art was very popular from the end of the 1800s to the beginning of the 1900s and everybody was using it in furniture materials and implanting and i have really ghastly invasive bamboo growing in the wild garden that i just chopped down i'm not allowed to cut it out i've made this rule but i cut it back furiously and then we lead on to the pond in nature next slide please this is claire a testicum hi um unfortunately unlike roth um pesticum doesn't belong to me it's a shame but um we are just to sort of give you some background we're an independent charity open daily to the public as a visitor attraction um the estate itself is now just over 300 acres and nearly 50 of which is is gardens so alongside the deeply lutkins garden we've got three areas of garden design in one space so we have a georgian landscape garden dating from the 1750s we have victorian terraces and then we have this fabulous collaboration between luxurians and angie were built in 1904 so really similar time to upton grey um between the two world wars the gardens fell into a lot of disrepair as you can imagine and in fact in the second world war um the estate was given over to the american army to use as a base and um poor old mrs portman was um made to just use like a handful of rooms while the american officers were living in the house and it must have been a really strange time for her because she would have been you know in full victorian veiled morning garb while american soldiers were running around her estates strange times and she died shortly after the second world war um in the 50s and then um hestagon became home to the somerset fire brigade so all of the 999 calls came to hestakon all their fire trucks were here they did all their training here um and by 1974 luncheon's um garden had started to fall apart a bit the pergola was unsafe and wobbly the walls were collapsing um and the fire brigade were really keen to flatten the garden and to make a new training ground they needed more space so they had a vote and we have the minutes of this meeting that was held at hestacom to vote on whether to flatten the garden or not and heston just won by one vote um which meant that you know everyone had to sort of pull together to make it a safe space and it started a long restoration project within the gardens and as with any garden the restoration project will go on forever and ever and ever it's it's one of those um so the histories between upton grey and hesticum are quite quite different in the way the homes were i think you'll find as we go through the slide they hold many similarities um i think the best way to describe it is in the feel of it the atmosphere that they provide next slide well now we're through the wild garden back at upton grey which is relatively small about two acres you can see the massive bamboo on the left and the grass paths just meander naturally through wildflowers which we'll see in the next slide please have sprung up everywhere unplanted by me it just shows that nature is a survivor this gives terrific confidence to all of us these days masses of snowdrops of all types galactus novalis and in the next slide we have star bethlehem it was called or on [Music] whoops something like that um i had to learn a huge amount i mean claire had done a lot of training but here we are at the pond now looking back towards the house and see how cleverly jekyll has used her planting in the wild garden not at all formally but the next slide will show you that changing in season and how she's used plants in the distance that have vibrant colors in the autumn from every angle and the next slide across the pond it's a small pond but it was naturally spring-fed see how beautifully the whole area is decorated with the glorious autumnal colors of autumn and this is just using wild natural parking back a little capability brown in a way yes that's it i think we ought to look at testicum yeah the um the main difference for me in a way between the two um gardens is ross has a beautiful house unfortunately the house that has to come i mean i'm gonna go as far as to say it's ugly um and um for whatever reason luncheons didn't gain the permission to remodel the house at the same time it was probably a financial decision i guess and so that leaves us with a garden that is a stand-alone luncheon's design i think it's the only one where he's only designed the garden because normally he would remodel the house and the garden so they flowed between each other um so it's quite unusual um and i think because of the ugliness of the house and he was so passionate that he wanted to change the house and wasn't able to i think he then put his energy into diverting the eye away from the house as much as possible and he used a lot of really clever techniques so um the garden has lots of levels so wherever you are in the garden the eye looks at the structure the walls are all planted up they all have flowers flowing through them so um if you're in the sunken part of the garden you have a really tall wall that's really flariferous so your eye never once gets drawn up either side of the sunken garden are these reals that you can see in the picture here um and as you walk towards them and they have these unique features water features at the end which is on the next slide um and so your eye is instantly drawn towards that and so i often wonder um that also we have at the end of the garden there's a pergola which frames the view of the countryside the waterways all flow away from the house and so it's leading you in that direction and they have these beautiful features to distract you and in the sunken center the paths are diagonal so that again you're never led your eye you're never sort of encouraged to look at the house and i often wonder um without the ugly house would we have such an outstanding garden and so this is um looking back at it through one of the reals so these waterways are really precious to us and then um you just you almost don't notice the house almost up to gray now completely different but we're going to look at our formal garden which is jiggle's sort of modest scale of has to come but quite different too we're leaving and we're coming to the formal garden here it is nothing but straight lines no curved lines the house has the burglar running to a rose lawn beneath that a bowling lawn and right at the bottom of the screen a tennis lawn so she's designing a garden for a family who wants sports who want color it's a it's a fun garden it has no status but it's it's very pretty i think perhaps upton grey's garden is pretty and hester cum's garden is beautiful to make a rather sad comparison now we look at it carefully bit by bit and i'll show you how she's composed this picture so the next slide i think will show us the oh yes has to come from the airport so as a comparison um this slide is an aerial view over hestacom if you look to the left-hand side of the house this is where the um this is where the landscape uh georgian landscape garden lies and then you have this sprawling mass of victorian house which underneath it part of it is medieval part of it is georgia and it's just been layered and layered and layered and then at the you can see the victorian terrace which was added on by the portman family before the rest of the garden was commissioned and it's a very sort of um victorian bedding plant scheme and then it's all inverts with this slutkins and g call design which as you can see there looks really geometric from above and here we are back at upton grey to show you how it gave how charles home gave birth to the garden homer's wife is sitting standing on the right hand left-hand side of the picture and the whole house before jekyll designed the garden at all is on a grass slope that runs to the white bench and then on down jiggle disliked grass slope she said they were hard to manage and a waste of space so let's go to the next one please and this is the house we bought in 1984 this tumbling of green muddle and weeds is in fact covering the dry stone walls and i was only 40 thank goodness i didn't really worry about anything i just had lots of energy and i couldn't get over every time we cut something down oh how exciting the massive tree on the right is a leyland eye far too big we chopped that down that made good firewood next slide please and this is much nearer the house to show you the grass banks that jekyll had to change to dry stone walls and the beauty of dry stone walls no wonder they were so popular so next slide please and we're going to look exactly the same angle at the one dry stone wall the next slide please shows you how wonderful they look really early season before most of the herbaceous flowers have started the walls are beginning to flower in february march april all these little rock plants chico chose her colour so carefully and in the walls although the walls do need an enormous amount of upkeep and care because dry stone is just literally stones slid into the earth the plants in them like dry roots they like facing the sun and they just give this lovely far prettier effect than a lump of grass running down next slide please i love that last slide of yours ross it's so pretty it's so lovely um so this slide here this is um the gray walk so this is the the top balustrading there is from the victorian garden so it's gone from this very formal very smart victorian garden into a slightly wilder well planting wise slightly wilder garden um and jake was using plants here and across across both of our gardens i think is really painterly um almost as a watercolor the colors kind of blur and bleed into one another they cascade from top beds down the walls onto secondary beds you know so the whole thing that it really unites the whole garden together and we've even got planting plans for that you know says what to put in the walls it's one of the hardest parts of my job i would say is trying to get something to establish within the wall um because you know back then she would have you know the garden team would have had young boys that could have walked around posing down and spraying but it's really hard to get them established and then you have that fine balance between some of the plants that she suggests that we put into the walls and actually make really big tap roots and break the walls apart so you have that really difficult balance going on all the time but i wouldn't be without them and i wouldn't be without the flowers in them i think they're really lovely and i always describe it as though luncheons has put down the hard landscaping and jupiter just throws a blanket of flowers over the top of it you know and anywhere she can she puts flowers and for that reason i totally forgive myself for having daisies in the lawn i feel like she probably would have approved and it's no big deal the other interesting thing here is that um luncheons uses the local stone so this stone is actually quarried from the estate and it's a seam of stone called malt slate and it's quite unusual as most of the rest the most of the stone around the area is a much redder version much redder in color and also locally we have an amazing sandstone called hamstone which is a yellowy in color easy to shape easy to carve and makes a great dressed formal stone so i think it's really interesting that he chose this really rustic looking stone instead of something um sort of posher looking if you like um and i think it's very purposeful and i think it changes the look of the garden it's a great aid to jeep was planting really helps it blend in with its surroundings rather than make a big statement and shout like the balustrades do above it kind of just softens the whole thing and it's not so it makes it look slightly less grand and even the orangery which which is which we have at hessicum which is designed by lutchings has ham is mainly built of hamstone but he uses mort slate within it as well so it has that nice vernacular feel and it fits into its own landscape next slide please there you go and this is the last photo is one of mine this is a professional photographer's picture so you can see you can see the difference um and we have to remember that i think that the way that gecko laid out plans laid out her plants to us now is quite it's quite normal to put grasses shrubs herbaceous annuals all in one border together but back then this would have been really extraordinary because the victorian era was very much about carpet bedding or about showing off exotics um and yet here's gqual allowing plants to tumble over one another to support each other to create planting communities and overlays of texture and color is so different from the victorian culture um and it gives her a real chance to sort of play with with colors and textures and i'm sure she would have used monster wood as her own training ground for that next slide please i think the next slide is going to show you um how closely elections and g call work together because um the slide will show um there we go and luncheons purposefully left holes in the wall for jeeper to plant into so he was that's a really close relationship between an architect and a garden designer i think and that shows how much they appreciated each other's style i guess and um this is a great example oh no i've done that bit and luncheons used a lot of clever trickery and he also um both him and g paul um had different skill sets that they took to different places so the circular steps is is probably as most you know it's quite a classic kind of luncheons look and it interests me because i think um again it's working to soften an area because if this was a straight set of steps it would have a really different feel to it so i feel like it romanticizes the garden um and he's really good at um using the self-seeding plants allowing all the cracks to feel or she is and embracing a sort of wilder fuller look amongst all these like very orderly straight lines now we have adopted grey and this is just to show you that he loves circular gentle movements even into the wild garden which is completely unformal it's grass steps lead you in in a beautiful way rather like the hestakon steps and here at the bottom you see the plan outlining them now this is a look back to see how all architects luncheons and juco and gardeners if they could would really frame the house the architecture and demonstrate its beauty but balance it because it's a heavy house with heavy walls leading down to the tennis lawn at this point i was going to say jika was quite old by the time she designed upton grey she was 65 her eyesight which had never been better than six inches and by then she was wearing heavy glasses she'd even gone to germany for an operation on her eyes in her 50s which makes you shudder to think but she's a very practical gardener she's given up close work needlework painting she's talking about her gardens it's painting the land with living things and see how she loves this shallow step where there's space it's a bit more less economical of stone and space but the steps from the bowling to the tennis lawn are just a very practical thing for a woman who wasn't all that agile and by her age certainly not uh able to pull a wheelbarrow up and down an interesting thing between us is i don't think as far as i know of chico that she ever visited has to come she may have done but she certainly didn't visit upton grey we're almost certain that all communication was done by letter instruction royal mail she very rarely traveled far from surrey by 1900 and this is 1908 so she's doing an enormous amount of her planning from plans that the architects have given her and her ability to convert an architectural plan into a garden i think is quite extraordinary a lovely thing that you said claire about exotic plants no she didn't almost everything in my garden is something that was readily available strong and easy to grow there were one or two plants that were rather new to the world like the appalling japanese knotweed polygam cuspidatum um which luckily by the time she designed this garden because she used it often in her other in others by the time she designed this garden she was actually writing in her various circular notes to magazines avoid polygonal custard art and polygonum compactum is a far more manageable blood so she's practical throughout her designs and and they work very pretty next slide please and just to say rosamond that the games area was part of the garden design correct it certainly was and that's another nice thing it's a family house with a family garden nothing grand enough to to really do away with areas like that so she's she's incorporated them for the family and she's doing one quick thing because this will apply to your garden too out there at upton grey she is a woman working for men man and she's definitely slightly trying to please them she had a strong character and if she disagreed german if she did but where possible she just agreed with the owner and that's why ours is a very comfortable family garden and hestagon is please make my garden magnificent i think she must have been quite an unusual woman for her time mustn't she is a spinster poor darling and i'm very admired by both sexes for her intellect not her beauty so this view here shows um as luncheons would like the view away from the house this is from one of the windows upstairs this is actually i mean how lucky is the accountant this is his view out of the window of where i work crazy um and i think what's really nice about here you can see that what we're looking down on at the front of the slide is the victorian terrace so that very formal um kind of ordinarily this is a bedding scheme but this is one i've designed so it's gone a bit wild but um below that the sort of geometric layout of the formal gardens and and the work between actions and ngco and i think you can start to see luncheons and kind of trickery at work here and how great he was as a garden architect so things like i think the reals are made to look extra long because the borders are actually quite thin and the real is actually quite thin the borders are probably less than well they're less than two meters across so it's not like a huge great herbaceous border um and yet juco really makes the great use of these narrow beds um so everything is crammed in there i think probably like me she had a more is more philosophy um and we really try to emanate that at work and i've always got a spare something to drop in somewhere so um i try and do succession sewings and annuals so if ever a gap appears i've got something to sort of bang in there and keep the floriferousness is that word i'm not sure that's the word that's what i'm going to use today and so yeah this i just i just can't imagine that she would have been a minimalist and yet she needs in a way in this garden she needs those sharp lines of luncheons to contain that yeah it's lovely that comparison isn't it this is just very brief we'll look at her plan for the rose lawn at the top of the screen the house the terrace with its burglar that leads to the rose lawn a very important pergola and then the bowling and the tennis so now we'll look at it in the flesh as she hoped it would look we came in 84 he has the first photograph taken of the garden the winter of 1983 actually this is well no not 83 january february 84 no leaves virtual um next slide please actually worse than leaves it's just the garden look so next slide please oh anyway that is putting out the borders for the garden a lot of hard work we had all machinery we bought nothing until we knew what we were going to need forever and we marked from duke's very clever mathematical plans exactly where each border was it all fitted now there is jiggle using in a way a lunch and strong design but suddenly so much with the pretty flowers that it looks like uh a rather young girl dressed up a little too grandly for the ball i think but i love this view mid-summer first of all early flying peonies then later flowering peonies and then iris quite new to england these iris and right at the end of the year in the center indica so she's again very practical she wants the season to be extended as long as possible with her planting and her knowledge of plants gives you that extension and here's a plan of the sunken garden at hestagon so this is probably what uh jica would have received from luncheons and you can see her notes down the side there um and it's really interesting because on all of the plans that we have of hers for hestakon she actually indicates exact numbers of plants that she wants in the space and i think that it's quite interesting for me having to sort of manage this garden and try and keep it as um as as though g cool was there if you like um it's really hard not to it's really hard to not make that look too blocky and too sterile when you're fed the kind of like recipe so i really actively encourage all of the garden staff to read as much of jekyll's writing as they can because all the clues and all the hints that we need are actually in her books so that would say she never we don't think she ever visited hesticam she certainly never gardened there so it's it's trying to get into her mindset of understanding what she would have put in how she you know when one plant went over what she would have put in its place um so it's quite i often wonder if it's what she 100 plus years later whether if she came to visit me today would it be what she was expecting to see or would she be actually just really angry with me for not embracing newer more vigorous varieties would she sort of say to me god's sake why are you still using that rose it gets black spot use a modern david austin i don't know and thankfully i'll never know because she looked really stern i think i'd be frightened to death of her and the next slide this this shows this is quite interesting from an architectural point of view so this is the east side of the garden and the top um sketch is the showing the elevation of the garden so this um is like a vertical drawing uh going going down to the little circles on the left hand side there the little holes in the wall the clairvoyance on the pergola so that's what gives you a sense of the scale and then the flattened drawing underneath is the planting bed um underneath that elevation so she's got in there everything that you know everything that you need all the keys you need to to make this border i suppose she even puts thing um and in this case it's anchoring us but she even adds what um what annuals you should put in and in what color order that's really important to her so the annuals run from right to left sort of going down the hill really hot reds hot pinks softer pinks almost movie colors and then it goes to white and then to yellow so she's really got it planned out in her head as to how she wants it to look and i love these photos so the top photo shows um the beginnings of so the house has already been victorianized um but the tower there is a water tower that would have uh had a would have been gravity fed from a reservoir above it and so they could have flowing water that you know even a shower which back then you know was an amazing shoei off the accomplishment i guess and you can see there the balustrading which is holding in the victorian um but you can see then the land just slopes away and so that's the sort of pre-elections and g pool there's the picture underneath shows the work in pro progress so this is the mort slate that has been quarried from the estate um and there were a team of men that used dynamite to blow up the quarry um to get the stone i'm not allowed to use the dynamite anymore but we do still use the quarry and so it's not quite as exciting as it could be but it amazes me ordinarily i would correct myself on this but the amount of manpower ordinarily i'd correct myself and say people power but back then this was literally manpower um that would have gone into creating these gardens but it's sort of quite nice in a way i feel that that a lot of men created this garden and yet it was almost semi-led by a woman in as in jeeper and that ros and i are both looking after these gardens as women as well it's quite an interesting way of looking at you know i'd never have got to have been a head gardener in 1904 and this view here just shows um how full all the borders can be the view away from the house and we've got all of the you know the straight lines that were constructed by all that malt snake and so i love the mix of these sort of sharp edges and the fullness of planting and here we are just to show you that it is actually breathtaking when you walk around the corner and you see pianis that flower according to the lactiflora and the um the earlier and the later flowering peonies they have a very long season it's beautiful next slide please and when the next slide that when that when we see the next slide oh sorry that's tesla i'm going to skip on to the pergolas because we're running short on time right okay well very briefly the pergola will take you across the rose lawn it takes you in a direction to in the far side on the left you can see a rose alba to jiggle it was important to have focal point a leading to focal point b with as much variety and beautiful as possible and an important thing to jiggle wherever she garden was smell you walk through jasmine aficionalis and you get the color of the roses and the beautiful leaves but where she could rosemary jasmine filling the edges and here we are seeing on this side how virginia creeper will keep in the center go purpley red towards the end of the summer and keep the liveliness not throughout winter but as long a season as possible it's a very clever planting and then this is the burglar at hestakum which um is almost like the similar but polar opposites at the same time so this pergola doesn't isn't built to lead you anywhere and it just it it's used to sort of frame the view and i think what's really interesting is you get that feeling that you're in an enclosed garden but there's still glimpses through to this wider landscape and at either end of the pergola we have these oval shaped um sort of holes in the wall like little windows and claire boyes i think they were called that again you look out onto the wider landscape onto the parkland what we discovered when we um when we had to restore this pergola was that the levels change ever so slightly so the length of the columns changes ever so slightly as they go along and and when you actually when we actually looked at it it would have been as the land fell away it would have looked really odd to to make all the columns all the same size so that's a really clever trick and you'll see on there on that slide that some of the pillars are square and some around and i think that was very purposeful as well because i think if they'd all been one or the other it would have felt very austere and very formal the planting on the pergola however very similar to roses honeysuckles roses jasmines all about a complete sensory overload of light reflections smells sights you can see the little clairvoya window at the end there well i'll very quickly here it's just simply her plan for the main borders which is how she's best remembered color in the flower garden was herbaceous and you'll see the plants running in drifts we'll look at the next slide please in each case she gives the name the species the cultivar the amount and to my great amusement when i discovered this goldman museum her plant lists for upton grey upton grey only nearly 3 000 plants provided from her nursery at monster wood and either claire or you robin said yes wasn't she commercial she would supply as many plants as she could for her gardens from her own nursery so no doubt she gave her own plants quite a a good bit of um prestige and publicity but she's a commercial mind doing commercial things at a time when it was difficult but she's certainly got her accounts out to her customers and here is the border looking at its best i find herbaceous borders such hard work and as claire said has to come with shrubs and herbaceous is rather easier but in the center of this border which is 60 feet long 10 feet wide hot colors in the center running out to cool colors at either end moving in drifts so planting beautifully and carefully next one shows you how in the autumn the pale colors of spring the hot colors of midsummer have given to an overall gold i think this is like music at the end of the triumph whatever concert you're listening to there's a boom boom of all the noise which isn't nearly as beautiful but they're doing their little gold coloring and in the background an enormous amount of important plants from the americas there is the mirror border opposite penelope hall palace was my great garden help and she said that where possible jika would have a garden border reflecting that on the other side but this space is north the other face is south in the center bright red oriental poppies and the next slide please shows you how it looks towards the middle and end of the summer still full and abundant but not quite the high strong ones of the americas this is an american plant that chica was quite it had been in england for quite some time hemorrhage and this is hemorrhage fulva flora plana quanzo it grows almost like a weed on the west coast but it's one she loved to use and that kind of extra dimension that g cool gives to a garden is that sort of extra dimension of time and by that i mean like a seasonality so this is the east reel um and this is the west rural uh this is east realty so they've they've um they've both got that so they start off early on in the season with lots of asters uh sorry with lots of irises then later on in the season we get this run-through of asters so there's always this kind of up and down movement of plants coming and going to keep a look fresh um have the next slide please analysts we're running a little bit short of time you go there's a slide should we just go bling bling bling through them yeah i think so you want to stop completely martin quickly quickly if you can go through this an overall view from the main herbaceous border to the kitchen garden in the far side next slide please use her kit allowed for kitchen gardens because of course it's a family house now i use it as a source of plants for replacing in the main borders because after 38 years some plants weaken but it's beautiful next good going down the spring the summer the next one please see how the colors change they're all plants but used at random not artistically and it's still rather a triumphant look at just nature doing its own thing like naughty children in a swimming pool she needs to asleep she puts his feet where she wants you to sit isn't she practical with a view of the garden along the bowling lawn it's all very peaceful the last one is me mowing the lawn way way back a long time ago dog's thinking it's tea time duck was the only survivor after the fox and it was on the front of american hustle garden and suddenly everybody wanted to come and see it the cover of my second book all about the earnest gardener and the actual plants and the other book was about the catastrophe of starting from scratch this i say applies to every gardener keep it up don't ever give up and enjoy it the fruit oh yes goodbye to nature winter comes kills it all and it revives i love these months i don't have to work much wonderful i have no you happy with that's a lovely finale congratulations to you both marcus could i ask you to field a few questions yeah we have a couple of questions one was um the who painted the lovely aerial plan of upton grey and somebody else was uh was it by john jonathan miles lee yes it was he became a great friend it's a lovely tale how he became a friend have you got a minute it's literally arrived a rather shy worried young man i sat him in the kitchen to discuss price and everything and a coach load arrived and i'd forgotten completely like i forget so much and he and i ran up scones and cream and did the most amazing event um and they didn't know i'd forgotten at all that's jonathan the painting has pictures of your family all throughout at the tennis line yes you're right yes everybody doing what they love john at a table sitting reading a newspaper and you're gardening yeah but he pays for it the questions marcus there's a question from andrew ragic uh reggie a question for us um do you think that jiggle would have embraced the modern prairie style if she was gardening now do you know i think she must have because she had an eclectic mind and an appreciation of everything natural now it's difficult to make it magnificent but there's something called sussex prairie gardens in england that does just that largely influenced by pete adolf and it's breathtaking but in a completely different way and it's modern i think she would have learned to love it like you can learn to love any art if you study that's a nice answer um there's one last question how did uh from john purpley um how did you discover that chico had designed the garden at upton grey you know so lucky we bought it because it was very very cheap close to london julia drummond was a great friend she started the hampshire gardens trust said i believe it's a uh jiggle garden she introduced me to penelope hob house richard bisgrove and then the world surrounded me with yes this is how you get the plans england is a country of gardeners today not shopkeepers um so that's all the questions that we have for today um like to wrap it up robin yes thank you all for listening thank you for coming if you uh would like to support the work of the elections trust america or the legends trust we would love to have you join us as a member or as a donation i want to let you know that the legends trust in the uk is developing a complimentary lecture series that you'll be receiving information about their next their first lecture will be this coming tuesday on old new and new old edwardian houses so thank you again thank you

Channel: Lutyens Trust America

Views: 10,894

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Id: RA4Z2P54yFE

Length: 58min 17sec (3497 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021