When I wrote about the National Garden Scheme recently, I asked its team to name several top gardens for our enjoyment. I discovered that I had not visited any of their choices. The most readily accessible from my garden is Cadenham Manor in Wiltshire.
Serendipity intervened. At the Chelsea Flower Show, one of Cadenham’s owners, Martin Nye, introduced himself and urged me to visit. As this sunny year has brought everything out so early, he recommended the very next Sunday, the last in May, as the roses and peonies were already “spectacular”. So I accepted, anticipating a flowery English garden. I found far more than expected.
Cadenham Manor is near Foxham, a few miles from junction 17 of the M4 motorway. It is a beautifully kept place, with a fascinating architectural history. In 1690, it replaced an older house that had nearly collapsed. It reused some of the old pieces and preserved a Tudor dovecote. Other elements were added later to its facade, making a distinctive patchwork.
One of the farm buildings round the house has been transformed into an orangery with elegant windows. In it I met Nye, his wife, Victoria, and had a glass of champagne. I tried not to spill it while taking notes, as she gave me a synopsis of the garden’s history and a scale plan of its interlocking sections.
The garden’s four acres are far younger than the manor. They began with Victoria’s widowed grandmother, Mrs Elizabeth Blackwell, who bought the place in 1945 when the sale brochure described the garden as “simple and inexpensive to maintain”. We looked out on to a neat courtyard patterned with lavender, while a climbing rose, pink Cécile Brunner, looked back at us. The ease of maintenance has long given way to formal gardening, but simplicity remains, in a different mode.
This year, Martin Nye is high sheriff of Wiltshire. Other high sheriffs-to-be, he explained, were coming to lunch separately and when Victoria brushed some dirt off my jacket, I sensed that best behaviour was required meanwhile. I happened to ask if Cadenham had ever been used as a location for a film. Indeed, the Nyes replied, it was used for scenes in the Disney+ smash hit version of Jilly Cooper’s novel, Rivals. From best behaviour to worst: I was sharing a location with that egregious transgressor, Rupert Campbell-Black. I was about to tread on the very lawn where he and his lover Sarah had played a notorious game of naked tennis, one which the series’ trailer used as bait.
All winter, as rain flooded country living, an unfailing topic of lunchtime conversation was the filming of Rivals, the aptness or not of black-haired Alex Hassell as usually fair-haired Campbell-Black, and whether the script included Rupert’s famous call on the tennis court that his naked lover had just served a tit-fault. I was about to see the site of its baseline; could I give an umpire’s judgment?
It is a tribute to Cadenham’s garden that thoughts of Rivals vanished as soon as we entered the lovely long borders on its south side. Old fashioned roses among fine deutzias were at their best, from purple red Rose de Rescht to lovely Fritz Nobis and dark Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. Green hedging faced them across a mown lawn and set off two superb trees with peeling russet bark, each an Acer griseum, a superb choice if you need a tree about 12ft high now and can wait for 10 years to see it develop.
Cadenham’s garden has been labelled “French” by an expert admirer, I learned later, but the label is not helpful. Its lines are straight, but the main plan is an English one of rooms outside, defined by hedges of yew or box or hornbeam. Elements like lavender or statuary can be traced ultimately to France, but Elizabeth Blackwell consulted experts in England where her own eye was formed. On Fridays in London, she used to talk with Mr Eden, an expert draughtsman, and on site every week with Paul Hills-Spedding, an expert plantsman who worked at Cadenham for 35 years. A white garden, a weeping silver pear above a big flowerpot and a peony walk owe nothing to direct French inspiration: Sissinghurst Castle is their main source, rethought, however, by Blackwell’s eye. The English garden has always included European elements but it has a dominant English style nonetheless.
On a seat under clipped yew, I learnt how Blackwell loved gardening, the classics and foxhunting. I wish I had known her so that we could discuss all three. From English foods, such as Branston Pickle and others in the Crosse & Blackwell range, she derived the family funds that enabled her to garden on a major scale for 45 years. In her final year, she still ordered masses of acid top soil to improve the clay banks of the canal along one of the garden’s boundaries. The planting is now excellent there, including exceptional Lysichiton, or skunk cabbages, with bigger leaves than any I have seen.
Victoria notes that her grandmother moved on to make yet another green-hedged garden room when an existing one became dull or out of season. Inter-seasonal planting in layers was not her style. The results might have become an unrelated muddle but they are held together by her excellent plantings of trees, whether fine Parrotia along the canal bank, or big Catalpas, or a beautiful silver variegated oak, a variety of Quercus cerris which is rarely seen. The garden is one in which to sit, ponder and maybe plan.
In recent years, Victoria has extended its seasonal interest and addressed the changes in climate, with the help of long-serving gardener George Timmins and others in her team. As we returned to the garden facade of the house we walked through an archway in a Hornbeam hedge, the very one through which wonderful Taggie ran in Rivals, fearing the approach of fire. Instead she found Rupert’s naked tennis match in progress. I cannot report as a linesman because the lawn only briefly became a tennis court for filming. No lines now define the players’ scope for faults. I can, however, confirm that there are no thistles to prick actors’ bare feet.
In box-edged beds overlooked from the house, Elizabeth bedded out 2,500 red and yellow fibrous begonias each year. They too are not simply French: English parks and roundabouts used them often. They have now been replaced with mixed plantings, leading up to an excellent line of Benton End irises, bred by the artist Cedric Morris.
Above these irises’ pastel colours, I sat and reflected on the social model this fine garden represents. It employs four workers, the equivalent of two full-time gardeners, and attracts groups of visitors by appointment, whose entry fees all go to a local charity. Like the unpaid high sheriffs, it supports the voluntary networks that play such an exemplary part in British life. When I said so to a high sheriff-to-be, she gave me another invitation: would I visit her house in its nearby park? It too relates to a network — one, however, that is currently top of Wiltshire spectators’ watch lists. It is the very kitchen in which Rupert put his hand on Taggie’s backside, having realised, redeeming himself, that she was the woman to be his wife.
cadenham.com; ngs.org.uk
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