The improvements to the surroundings of Hinton have not been confined only to the garden: they have also been extended outwards into the park and have even embraced some areas of the adjacent landscape.
I have the impression that the Tudor house may have had a fairly extensive park, but when it was replaced by the Georgian house, which was little more than a shooting box, the park was curtailed and the timber cut. Certainly the 25 or 30 acres of grassland studded with ancient trees was quite adequate to the size of the house. But when my grandfather transformed it into a Victorian mansion the surroundings were woefully out of scale with the new splendours. This, I think, he perceived, and expanded the boundaries somewhat and planted a few trees.
Thus the park remained until just after the turn of the century when my parents made a new drive down the northern slope to the main road in the valley. I say my parents, but it was in fact my mother's undertaking for she had been bequeathed a sum of money by her father specially to be used on making some improvement at Hinton. The drive, with the not very attractive gate and lodge were the outcome of this fortunate bequest. The drive traversed, once it had left the neighbourhood of the garden, what were little more than two fields. A certain number of trees were planted to break the bareness, but not nearly on a lavish enough scale. During my father's lifetime I was allowed to add a little to this parsimonious afforestation, but it was not until a few years before the war that I was able to make plantations as I wished.
The plantations consisted of beech interplanted with softwoods, Scotch and larch, to act as nurses to the beech which are notoriously slow starters. During the six years of the war the trees were left to their own devices, and when I came to examine them in 1945 I found that the nurses, which had made exuberant growth, were fast suffocating and starving their little charges. I started to cut out the softwoods immediately, a certain number every year so as not to expose the beech too suddenly, but even so the beech took a year or two to recover from their wartime experiences. Eventually, however, vigour returned and they grew swiftly.
It is my intention that these little plantations shall not develop into clumps, but into groups of trees. That is to say that each tree shall keep its natural form. This entails, of course, constant thinning, a few trees every year. If I can achieve this, of which I am doubtful, each group will not only have the deep shadow created by the cattle-line, but there will also be shadows between the trees, and this will add greatly to the richness of the texture of the group. In this I deviate from the principles advanced by Humphry Repton in his Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. He advocated a casual style of planting as creating a natural and picturesque effect, and this, he explained, would be enhanced by trees which were in themselves poor specimens. These were his words:
Those pleasing combinations of trees which we admire in forest scenery, will often be found to consist of forked trees, or at least of trees placed so near each other that the branches intermix, and by a natural effort of vegetation the stems of the trees themselves are forced from that perpendicular direction, which is always observable in trees planted at regular distances from each other. No groups will therefore appear natural unless two or more trees are planted very near each other.
I remain, however, unrepentant, much as I admire Repton's tenets in most directions, for misshapen trees in a park are anathema to me. Rejecting Repton's advice, I have also planted a number of single trees, but once again in groups. They are mostly the usual park trees, limes, chestnut, both horse and Spanish, Norway Maples which turn a brilliant clear yellow in autumn, Turkey oaks which have a delicate foliage and elegant form; also a few plane trees which are not a success in spite of a good depth of soil on this northern slope. Thus this area is fast becoming well furnished, but another century will have to pass before it becomes an impressive park. The area to the south of the house gave more scope for dramatic - modestly dramatic - planting for the lie of the land in the middle foreground was propitious for a scheme of this sort. As with the garden, I had the words of Alexander Pope constantly in mind, and the following verse was fairly applicable to what I hoped to achieve.
Consult the genius of the place in all;
That tells the waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th' ambitious Hill the heav'n to scale,
Or scoops in circling Theatres the Vale,
Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
Joins wilting woods, and varies shades with shades.
Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending Lines,
Paints as you plant, and as you work, designs.
Needless to say these noble precepts were severely modified in my scheme, while the second line had no place in it at all, since only in the wettest of winters does a temporary lake appear in the valley. However, the middle foreground is highly important to the landscape as seen from the windows, and its proper planting greatly enhances the panorama of down-like hills which rises beyond the groves of trees which encircle and hide the village of Kilmeston in the middle distance.
When I began my operations the southern slope of the park was bounded, at little more than 200 yards from the house, by a wide row of hazel and sundry elm trees, which ran along the top of the steep bank marking the parish boundary. At the bottom of the bank was, and still is, a grass track on the line of the ancient highway from Winchester to Petersfield. Beyond the track the slope rises and undulates towards Kilmeston, It was criss-crossed with hedges, which obscured its contours, but was bare of all trees except for a copse on the west side. It was in fact a very bleak area.
The first task was to remove the hazel row and the indifferent elm trees; by this means the view from the house was opened on to the opposite slope. On the summit of the rise I persuaded my father to allow the planting of a wide belt of beech trees, thus, in a humble way, helping 'th' ambitious Hill the heav'n to scale'. It was necessary to take a long view, for on this very chalky ridge the trees have been slow to grow; but now, forty years later, they achieve the effect of making the rise seem higher than it is. At a later date all the distracting hedges were removed, and the eye is now directed by the presence of the beech belt on one side and the copse on the other along a shallow valley into the groves of trees in the middle distance.
Along the lane on the west side I planted an avenue of beech, which thickens at one point into a plantation, while a belt of beech was planted on two sides of a meadow on the west effectively furnishing this area. On either side of the slope we made two large plantations of mixed trees, chestnut, beech, Norway maple, roughly circular in shape and these, like those on the north side, will eventually appear as groups of trees and not clumps. Though still far from full-grown, they already cast long morning and evening shadows across the undulations of the grassland and have converted a bleak and barren slope into something of beauty, while the changing colours of their foliage add greatly to the interest of this middle foreground.