In writing about the garden at Hinton and in giving some account of its development over the past 30 years or so, I must at the outset confess, before it becomes too obvious to the expert, that I am not a very knowledgeable plantsman. But starting as I did in the early '30s with almost no experience at all, I have come to know, often by unexpected reverses, which plants will and which will not consent to grow in the poor limey soil at Hinton, and also how to treat them so that they give as good a display as I can hope for. I have still much to learn, but I intend to continue adding to my knowledge as long as I am compos mentis.
My interest lies, I think, more in shrubs than in flowers, and perhaps more in trees than in either of the two former, but it seems to me that it is essential to use all three in harmony in order to form an attractive and successful garden. I have learnt during the past years what above all I want from a garden: this is tranquility. It is a quality which most gardens can have whether they are of the 'cottagey' sort with an ordered confusion of plants or designed on broad formal lines as at Hinton. It is achieved by the avoidance of harsh and brilliant colours such as strident oranges and scarlets, or by violent contrasts. It seems strange that so many new roses are produced of these difficult shades, but presumably they are generally popular; and a garden such as that at Hinton, where the colouring is in a low key, may seem to many to be decidedly lacking in display.
I have said that the soil is limey. That is perhaps describing it too kindly for in places, particularly on the east side of the garden, solid chalk comes to within a few inches of the surface. Elsewhere there is a depth of a foot or more of loam above the chalk, while here and there are pockets of the coldest clay - wet and sodden in winter, dry and cracked in summer. Away on the north side of the garden is an area of good deep loam, where the chalk has vanished far down. This small piece of ground I shall describe later, but it is provoking to see how luxuriantly plants grow here compared with their behaviour in the major part of the garden.
The soil, then, is a drawback, but the site, as I have said in the first chapter, is a definite asset. The ground slopes gently southward with a wide landscape spread out before it. The wind is a trial, for shelter from the south-west gales, which are the strongest if not the coldest, cannot be obtained without obscuring the view; in compensation, however, the beds below the terrace walls receive any sunshine that there may be.
I think, too, that the garden at Hinton has another advantage, and since it is, like the site, in no way a work of mine, I feel I may be allowed to praise it. It is this: it has a great sense of antiquity. This comes from the fact that there has been a house and garden on the site for centuries; and of course the venerable trees, of which there are a good many, are conducive to this atmosphere. But it is not this alone, for houses are often built on sites where good trees are standing and yet a feeling of maturity is not there. The sense of antiquity is indefinable, and perhaps to many imperceptible, but it exists, and I think that Hinton in spite of the fact that the garden has been so altered and expanded in the past 30 years, and that the house has been twice rebuilt in this time, has this sense in large measure.
It is impossible to say when a garden was first made on the site, but vestigial remains of the layout surrounding the Tudor house still survive. The main kitchen garden, with walls surrounding just an acre of ground, was certainly created before the old building was demolished in 1793, as it is on the same axis and must almost have adjoined its western side. The north wall of the garden was exactly in line with the north front of the house, and below these two ran a long terrace, the form of which is still apparent, although it is now partly obscured by shrubs. This terrace was no doubt the bowling green which was detailed in the Parliamentary survey of 1649, as mentioned in the first chapter. The drive which was made by my parents in the first years of this century down to the main road in the valley to the north cuts through it.
The terrace may have formed an excellent bowling green, but must have been a chilly spot facing north and shaded from the sun by the house and the walls of the kitchen-garden. However, our ancestors seem to have been more pre-occupied with keeping cool than warm, as the aspect of their houses often shows, so this shady green may have suited them. From this terrace there was an agreeable view northwards over a stretch of park-land descending rather steeply into the valley along which now runs the Winchester to Petersfield highway. Beyond the valley the ground rises to the long Lamborough ridge, and to the wide area on which the Battle of Cheriton was fought, as has already been described in a previous chapter.
This part of the park lying to the north and north-west of the house was always called by my father the Deer Park, but when it obtained this ambitious name I do not know, for it is neither as extensive nor as bosky as this name would suggest. It does, however, contain a few trees of great age, of which three squat and massive oaks appear to be the most venerable. It is impossible to make an even faintly accurate guess at the age of these trees, and the hopeful suggestion that oaks or yews may be a thousand years old is generally wide of the mark. In the case of the Hinton oaks I would hazard an age of anything between 500 and 700 years. The trunks are now more or less hollow, and the girth of the largest at 5 feet from the ground is 21 feet 10 inches. This is no record - there are a number in the country larger - but it is a respectable size. A photograph of this tree taken about 1860 shows that the change in its outline in the course of a century is negligible.
The Tudor house was inhabited by the Stewkeley family and the Stawells for two centuries until the demolition in 1793, and since they were far from poor one would expect that there would have been some attempt to lay out a garden in the formal Dutch style which came into fashion after the Restoration of 1660. The Survey made of the Manor House in 1649, which has been quoted in an earlier chapter, mentions sundry courtyards and these may have been developed into a formal layout of some sort. But there now remains only one feature, and this is a narrow avenue of lime trees which extended opposite the front door of the house southward down the slope to the edge of the steep bank which formed the boundary of the park and also of the parish.
In a map of the county made in 1759 the avenue is shown, so one must suppose that the trees by that date were large enough to record, thus they were probably planted about 1720. The avenue was 'clumped' into three groups probably when the Georgian house was built in 1793, a period when formal avenues were out of fashion and when in any case the avenue leading to a no-longer existing front door must have seemed purposeless. Now the slowly decaying veterans of the clumps still stand, showing that limes are not short-lived, and as will be described later they have been worked into the scheme of the garden.
These sparse details are all that survive of the surroundings of the vanished house, and as with the building itself they were allowed to disappear into oblivion without so much, apparently, as an amateur's watercolour to record their existence. When the new house was built on a site 60 yards to the south, just below the crest of the hill, formal gardens were entirely outdated and the principles of Capability Brown prescribed that the rough turf of parks should sweep up to the very walls of country houses. With enthusiasm landowners followed the new trend and swept away the walls and clipped hedges of the Stuart layouts round their houses and the avenues across their parks, and in their place endeavoured to create a scene that appeared both natural and romantic.
At Hinton, which was no more than a modest manor house, there seems to have been little to destroy, and equally the last Lord Stawell made small attempt by planting to give any romance to the park and, indeed, as the area was not great it would anyhow have been difficult. Furthermore, since the new house was turned slightly to the westward while the Tudor house faced exactly north and south, any existing formality would have found itself entirely adrift, and only the kitchen garden and the stables, which were concealed by a shrubbery were able unobtrusively to survive.
The 1793 house can have depended on little except trees for its setting and on its view as an additional amenity. From the steep lane which led up the hill from the highway, a drive entered the precincts by the church and swept in a wide curve through a shrubbery to reach the front door directly from the east; while those making for the back door followed the line of the present drive, which skirts the churchyard wall and passes the site of the demolished house and the stables, and so reaches the kitchen yard, being kept discreetly out of sight behind bushes.
Along the south side of the house ran a narrow terrace, raised above the level of the park by a wall. Perhaps the pleasure of sunshine was already beginning to be appreciated, for undoubtedly this terrace, and in fact the general aspect of the house, must have been more agreeable than anything in the building it replaced. On the north-east side of the house a grove of beech trees was planted which is now highly effective in providing protection from the coldest winds and maybe that for this and for a number of lime trees less than two centuries old I should be grateful to Lord Stawell.
I do not think that either of my grandparents were particularly interested in gardens, and indeed the enthusiasm for horticulture which is so widespread nowadays is a comparatively modern development. But as long ago as 1841 Mrs. Loudon published her highly successful book Gardening for Ladies, which stimulated an interest in many women who had previously supposed that work in a garden could only be done by those who were paid to do it, and that the nearest the lady of the house could come to manual labour was to cut a few roses for the drawing-room. Mrs. Loudon's book, with its admirable advice, suggested that there was nothing demeaning about working in a garden, and that the most elegant women with the aid of gloves, secateurs and trowels could make themselves very useful amongst their shrubs and flowers. This notion would have startled Jane Austen whose heroines confined their useful activities to indoor work and restricted their outside exercise to walking.
Thus although both knowledge and interest in gardening was developing during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, it does not appear to have been a subject which impinged very seriously on my grandparents. But having rebuilt their house in 1867 on an ambitious scale, it was obvious that the restricted surroundings of the Georgian house were entirely inadequate as a setting for the Victorian Tudor mansion, and that more extensive 'pleasure grounds' were essential. In order to achieve this they decided on a number of quite bold undertakings.
On the north side the drive, which had approached the front door of the Georgian house, was reduced in width and importance to no more than a gravel garden path winding between laurels and aucubas, while in front of the house a large, roughly rectangular forecourt was dug out of the rising ground and was reached from the service drive through a narrow opening. A sea of laurels was planted on either side of this opening so that any tradesman's trap on its way to the back door would be only momentarily visible from the front. The wide expanse of gravel was carried up to the very walls of the house, so that there was no fringe of grass or shrubs to soften the austerity of the architecture.
Besides its ugliness there was a practical objection to this bleak parade ground which my grandparents had not envisaged: it formed an all-too efficient catchment area. Only inadequate drains had been provided, so that after a heavy storm, water poured down the slope to the house and flooded through gratings into the cellars. Larger drains still failed to solve the problem, and I remember when I was young that it was not a rare sight after a heavy thunderstorm to find a sombre sea upwards of a foot deep covering the cellar floors. When I altered the house in 1936 I reduced the area of the forecourt and gave it symmetry by laying a wide stretch of turf against the house and this, although carried out for appearance, was effective in keeping back the storm water.
The construction of the forecourt entailed digging out many tons of soil, here heavy clay, and this was deposited to the southeast of the house so as to form a level roughly rectangular platform about 30 yards by 20. Round it were planted the inevitable laurels interspersed with yew trees and ilex, while to the south a flight of narrow steps was built down the long slope to a grass path below. A garden of sorts was thus beginning to take shape.
This platform with its sheltering evergreens seemed the obvious place for the planting of a rose garden, and a little layout was made for this purpose. Two gravel paths were made crossing from side to side with a circular bed at their intersection, and standard rose trees in little pools of open earth alternated with variegated maples. In the four quarters thus formed were a number of odd-shaped beds planted with hybrid tea roses, while on the east side stood a pair of weeping ash, their pendant branches trained over iron frames like the whalebone beneath the crinolines which were currently in fashion. As they grew they formed in summer agreeable arbours into which dappled green sunlight percolated through the foliage.
This garden remained unaltered when I was a small boy, and was quite an attractive example of mid-Victorian design, of which Mrs. Loudon would on the whole have approved. There was, however, one unfortunate drawback: the roses were always a failure. The fallacy that hybrid teas will thrive in any sort of clay dies hard, and both my grandmother and my mother remained convinced that this little garden contained exactly the soil that roses needed. But in fact the heavy impermeable and lime-impregnated ground filled the unfortunate little plants with almost instant despair, and a wet winter condemned them to nearly certain death by drowning. But these reverses were optimistically attributed to the choice of the wrong varieties, and every two years or so another batch of little victims was procured which inevitably died away in a season or two. However, this was the rose garden and roses it must contain, although the beds of moribund twigs could hardly be said to give much visual pleasure.
My grandparents' other extension to the garden was on the south side of the house where they replaced the retaining wall of the terrace by a grass bank and formed two long grass terraces with another low bank between them. From the lower of these a ramshackle flight of wooden and grass steps led down another steep bank to an area of mown lawn ornamented with two Thuyas and sundry small beds filled in summer with the inevitable scarlet geraniums and lobelia. This area was separated from the park by a high iron fence, along which ran a mown path leading on the east to the steps descending from the rose garden, and on the west petering out beneath the branches of a group of horse chestnuts.
It is thus that I remember the garden in my earliest years, when it still remained almost exactly as my grandparents had made it, except for an added maturity, 25 or 30 years before. My father had no interest at all in the garden, indeed he resented the expense of maintaining something which seemed to him unnecessary. The growing of some vegetables and the mowing of an area of lawn close to the house would have been to him fully adequate. My mother, although no plantswoman, had a strong sense of the setting required for a rather large house, but with the difficulties of running the house and bringing up a family the garden during the first decades of her marriage had little of her attention.
She made alterations, however, in the rose garden. This, from having been typically mid-Victorian in design, and so, to the taste of today, rather charming, became at the turn of the century obviously old fashioned. To my mother it seemed fussy and crowded, which undoubtedly it was, and something simpler and bolder was more to the taste of the dawning Edwardian era. Thus the weeping ashes, the maples, the standard roses were all swept away, and the many little beds were replaced by four large ones, one in each quarter, while round the central bed a circle of posts supported alternately Dorothy Perkins and Crimson Rambler roses. The new beds were, of course, again planted with hybrid teas, which in due course wilted and died as before. The new arrangement had at least one unquestionable merit, it was easier of upkeep.
In 1912, when my parents' financial position must have been easier than it had been during the earlier years of their marriage, although my father would never for one instant have admitted that this was the case, my mother undertook a bold and quite expensive alteration in the garden. Probably the greater part of the cost came from her own resources, as I hardly suppose my father would have made more than a token contribution.
This undertaking consisted of uniting the two long narrow terraces below the south front of the house into a single broad sward, and containing the far side with a brick wall topped by a stone balustrade. Much thought was given to finding a suitable design for the latter, and since the house was Tudoresque in style - in so far as it was anything - my mother concluded that something with a Tudor flavour would be appropriate. She consulted the illustrated books on gardens and country houses published by Country Life, such as Gardens Old and New, and In English Homes, and in one of these found a design that pleased her. This was accordingly reproduced. The original was no doubt attractive, but the reproduction was coarse and heavy in execution, and I regret she did not decide on simple eighteenth-century style balusters.
Basically, however, the scheme was a good one. The single wide terrace was a decided improvement, while from the windows of the house the balustrade, in spite of its clumsiness, agreeably framed the view and gave it an added depth and recession. But unfortunately there were drawbacks which mitigated against the success of the alteration. For one thing my father's croquet lawn, which was at the east end of the house, jutted out on a higher level into the new terrace, and could not possibly be curtailed, and so formed an aggressive promontory; and for another there was the difficulty of finding a suitable axis for building the balustrade in front of an entirely unsymmetrical house. In the end it was vaguely centralized on the unequal bow-windows of the drawing room and dining-room with the result that the central steps, which in any case were too steep, and too narrow, had no relation with the house at all, and in fact this was the trouble with the whole balustrade.
There was another difficulty which I had not appreciated until I came to alter the house in 1936. The builders of the balustrade had taken their measurements from the fronts of the two bow-windows, not realizing that that of the drawing-room projected about 18 inches further forward than the other. The balustrade, therefore, was never parallel to the main body of the house, and this when I began to develop the garden in later years worried me considerably. However, so inexact is the human eye that I believe this inaccuracy in the layout is not generally apparent.
My parents were not fortunate in their choice of head gardeners and a succession of incompetent men were in charge. Perhaps their incompetence was due to the lack of knowledge of their employers, and certainly from my father they received no stimulus whatever. But in 1931 my mother (my father was then 84 and took no part in the proceedings) by some miracle secured the services of a young man, Walter Holloway, who was a gardener of remarkable gifts. Had he lived he would have gone far in his profession, but in 1937 - two years after my father's death - he died after an operation for acute appendicitis. I grieved for him deeply, both as a friend and as an employee, and I shall always be grateful to him for having stimulated in me an enthusiasm for gardens which I had barely had before I knew him. In the few years he had worked at Hinton he had lifted the garden out of the dreary rut it had been in for so long as I could remember, and was beginning to give it interest and beauty.
In the following year I had the great good fortune to find Herbert Gray to take his place, who now, almost 30 years later, is still with me. Together, in perfect harmony and with the aid of a band of admirable assistants, we labour constantly to improve the standard of the garden. We are both fully aware that the condition of a garden can never remain stationary: if it does not go forward, it goes back. In fact we know in the words of the Red Queen that 'it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place', so we continue to run as fast as our increasing age will allow.
In January 1935 my father died within three weeks of his 88th birthday, but some years before his death he had prudently handed over to me capital which provided sufficient income to pay the gardeners' wages, so that the control of the garden had for some time been in my hands. A year before his death he had agreed to my making what was the first material alteration I had undertaken. I had happily made a couple of hundred pounds on the Stock Exchange, so I was able to carry out the work without financial assistance, but it was an achievement to obtain his consent, particularly as my plan entailed the removal of the escarpment caused by the croquet lawn, which in any case had not been used for several years.
I had already taken to heart the well-known lines of Alexander Pope in his Epistle to the Earl of Burlington:
Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide;
He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds,
Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds.
These sagacious words where directed to the laying out of parks on the grand scale, but can be applied with equal force to gardens. The garden at Hinton at that time, it must be owned, did not fulfil a single one of these directions and my enterprise in 1934 was an attempt to carry into effect at least the last three words of the quatrain.
To this end the earth from the croquet lawn was wheeled to a position below my mother's balustrade so as to form on this slightly sloping site the raised south side of a sunken garden; a brick wall 18 inches high was built round the garden, and a yew hedge was planted round three sides, with the balustrade closing the fourth. I am not inclined to think that this, my first attempt at landscape gardening, was an overwhelming success, but it achieved two of the objectives I had in mind. Firstly the little terrace on the south side topped by the yew hedge effectively 'concealed the Bounds', in that the severe iron fence which formed the boundary between park and garden was no longer in full view, and would be completely hidden as soon as the hedge grew; and secondly there was now an effective wind-break so that the four oblong beds within the sunken garden were well protected. Until this alteration was made the beds were exposed to the full force of the south-west wind and flowers such as tulips were often decapitated in quantities just as they were reaching perfection.
If the sunken garden was not a very striking achievement, a further alteration which stemmed from it was, if I may praise my own work, quite satisfactory. This was the formation of a grass path, long and wide, from the eastern edge of the garden to the western, a total length of over 200 yards, which passed midway through the sunken garden. It was not an altogether easy operation: there were several large trees to be considered and also a tennis court, cut into the slope some years earlier, which butted into the line which seemed indicated. However, these obstacles were overcome: the trees were negotiated, the tennis court was shortened by a few feet without detriment, and we then found that the path at its east end would centre very happily on a large Irish yew.
Even so the work was considerable, for a formal path, such as this was intended to be, must be perfectly level from side to side. That it should rise or fall in its length is no drawback, rather the reverse, but here the ground sloped slightly to the south so that a certain amount of digging out on one side and making up on the other was entailed. Along the western section of the path we planted an avenue of Irish yews, fifteen on either side, and I foresaw that in years to come the effect would be quite noble. At the time, however, these lines of 3 feet trees looked rather absurd, while the fact that the path ended in an ordinary farm gate into the park increased the bathos. It was not until more than a decade later, after the war, that I was able to replace the gate with a cattle-grid so that the eye was carried unimpeded along the path and out into the park, thus once again 'concealing the Bounds'. About the same time as we made the cattle-grid I found an eighteenth-century statue of Diana, which I set against the Irish yew at the east end, whence she gazes out over the garden to the wide landscape stretched before her.
From these first fumbling efforts at laying out a garden I learnt a great deal. I learnt that in a garden such as Hinton it was essential that the basic bone-structure should be conceived on logical grounds. When I took over there was no bone-structure at all, and no logic. Little extensions, little pools of interest, had been made here and there, but nothing led to anything else. There was in fact no overall plan. My constant intention, which I would hesitate to say has been fully successful, has been to make the garden 'flow', so that a visitor is led on from point to point, and vistas, long or short, come here and there into view.
A good basic plan seems particularly essential in a garden such as Hinton which is fairly large but where the soil is poor so that a very luxuriant effect is difficult to achieve. Satisfactory lines are some compensation for not very robust plants. I have had another principle in mind when developing the garden, which follows from the basic bone-structure, and this is to treat the garden as an artist, an old master let us say, would his canvas- to allow no dull or wasted areas. By this I do not mean that every part of the garden should be broken up with some planting or object to give interest, for in fact nothing is so satisfactory or peaceful as an area of plain lawn, but that every part should have some purpose, should be designed to have some visual effect. At Hinton I am inclined to believe that the most attractive area is the sward of plain lawn lying between the church and the house with the tall, jade-green stems of beech trees rising beyond it. There is spaciousness and tranquillity here, which my more elaborate efforts elsewhere have not achieved.
Tall deciduous trees are of course an immense help in giving a garden an agreeable atmosphere, and at Hinton there are fortunately a good many. But they have very obvious drawbacks. If they were planted when the layout of the garden was made, and one thinks of William Kent's masterly early eighteenth-century designs, they form a superb unity; but if the layout has to be adjusted to existing trees, it is a different matter. At Hinton many difficulties arose, and I have often thought how easy it must be to lay out a garden on a virgin site; but perhaps difficulties overcome in the end add interest, although to sacrifice a tree for the sake of a new path or shrub bed is always a painful decision.
In an earlier chapter I have described the rebuilding of the house between the years 1936 and 1938. These drastic alterations gave the main part of the house complete symmetry. The middle section, five bays wide, now reassumed the appearance it had presented when it was built, while it was flanked on either side by a pair of comfortable, semicircular bay-windows. In the centre was a French window, with an imposing architectural surround, and curving steps leading down to the top terrace. At last it was possible to base the garden properly on the house: when it was a jumble of mid-Victorian asymmetry the one could have no relation to the other.
The first feature to tackle was the balustrade, the embarrassing balustrade, which was now more adrift than ever, while in the new atmosphere of classical reason the design was completely out of place. I was in some doubt whether to remove it or so to alter it that it had a proper relation to the house. Another alternative would have been to take away the Tudor frets and replace them by balusters, but this was an undertaking I could not afford, and in any case I had become so accustomed to the design that, I think, its impact on me had lost its force.
In the end I decided to adjust it to the new form of the house, and this worked out fairly well. The central steps were moved a few feet westward and doubled in width and given an easier descent, and the balustrade was extended by several bays to conform with the new outline of the house. This entailed also enlarging the sunken garden lying below it to coincide with the lengthened balustrade. Now, with the clumsy stonework discreetly covered with climbing roses and clematis the general effect is not unattractive. More than a decade later the whole composition was improved by making a wide opening through the south side of the sunken garden and building steps down to a large semicircular bastion retained by a wall extending out into the park. Thus an adequate foreground to the house was created, a feature it had previously singularly lacked.
With the outbreak of war and the taking over of the house by the Portsmouth Day School, it might have been supposed that all improvements would be at an end. But during that first sinister year of delayed hostilities the calling up of young men moved slowly, and the State showed no wish for the services of the younger gardeners. There was thus little to occupy them; and the headmistress of the school begged that they should be kept away from close proximity to the house as their presence, it seemed, distracted her little charges from their studies. I therefore decided to carry out an improvement which I had had in mind for some time, and which fortunately was on a site well out of view of the windows.
The plan was to make the remains of the old lime avenue, which had led up to the Tudor house, and now extended in a desultory way across the park, into a feature as seen from the garden. To achieve this we made a broad grass path branching southward from the long east-west walk and aligned on the avenue. On either side of the path we made beds of shrubs, which now that the plants have grown, successfully guide the eye down the avenue. Various other paths were formed between the shrub beds, one taking a wide curve on to the former tennis court and another looping down below the steep bank of the court and rising again on the far side at the point where the statue of Diana was later to stand.
All this was successfully carried out and, though not very helpful to the war-effort, was successful, I believe, in fulfilling the headmistress's injunctions, but since I could rarely be at Hinton I knew little of what was occurring. Very soon all thoughts of improvements were at an end, and with the intensification of hostilities the upkeep of the garden was reduced to a minimum, the lawns became hayfields, the shrub beds and herbaceous borders a tangle of weeds, and nettles, ground elder and convolvulus flourished everywhere. Before one's eyes one could see how quickly a neglected garden reverts to a wilderness, and centuries of care and work can be wiped out in a year or two. Only the kitchen garden was kept properly in order, for here were grown the vegetables for the school. The yew hedges were my own special care, and each year when I had a week of summer leave from the Foreign Office I would come up to Hinton from my mother's house where I stayed and clip away for hours at a time. The work was not very expertly done, but at least the hedges were kept more or less in shape.