I have just been studying how to turn a battlefield into a garden. From Syria to Kashmir, this skill is becoming ever more topical. Sometimes, nature, left to itself, does its green and flowery best. During the first world war, there were blood-red poppies already in Flanders but they have multiplied poignantly since battles ended there in 1918.
What can be done when a battle caused carnage in what was already a well-planted garden? One such garden stood on what became the battlefield of Waterloo. When morning dawned on June 18 1815, Hougoumont farm and château had a fine garden, recently realised from archaeology and research. It was being held by some of Wellington’s troops as an advance position on the right of their battle line. From 11.30am onwards it became a site of intense slaughter and assault. Until 7pm Napoleon sent waves of troops against its doors and walls, but they failed to take it from the English, Scottish and German-speaking troops inside. These failures diverted ever more troops from Napoleon’s other positions.
On the following day, visitors came to see inside the farm’s big gate. “The dead and the wounded,” wrote one witness, “positively covered the whole area of the orchard: not less than two thousand men had fallen there.” Funeral pyres were built from fallen trees to cremate the dead, but not before their bodies had been pillaged for any items of value.
In 2015 I wrote about an initiative to restore Hougoumont’s farm buildings, courtyard and gardener’s cottage. Funding of €3.8mn was needed and in summer 2013 the campaign received a big donation from the then chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne after a visit. Even during his austerity campaign, he contrived a grant of €1.5mn, billing it as funds from the levy on British banks. He described it in parliament as a tribute to history’s most successful coalition, victorious over a power-crazed tyrant who had tried to ruin his own people. Since then, other power-crazed tyrants have emerged to do likewise, but coalitions have yet to match Wellington’s against Napoleon.
I have just visited the site myself. Hougoumont’s buildings have been restored, except for its ruined château. The courtyard has been cobbled and a rather odd bed of white floribunda roses has been planted on a central slope. The next phase will address what was once the bigger garden around and beyond the south gate, a project for which €1.8mn is required, and €1.5mn has already been pledged, mostly by public bodies concerned with Waterloo and its surrounding land. The remaining €300,000 is still needed before full restoration begins, scheduled for 2027.
In the courtyard where bodies had once been burnt I stood with classy Belgian visitors, members of what their social magazines call “High Life” (pronounced “Hig Leaf”). After a two-minute silence, drummers and pipers from a Scottish regiment struck up a tribute. A lump rose in each of our throats as their leader processed in full battle dress through the farm’s north gate, bagpiping in honour of the dead. It was there that British soldiers fought hand to hand at about 12.30pm to repel French efforts to smash through the gates. Forty French soldiers broke into the yard but the gates were shut behind them and every one of them was killed except for an 11-year-old boy, a drummer. One of the most prominent British heroes was Lt Colonel Henry Wyndham, whose descendant, Lord Egremont, has had gates remade by craftsmen on his Petworth estate and installed as part of Hougoumont’s restoration.
To the right of the gates I was amazed by other survivors, hornbeam trees with twisted trunks, witnesses of the fighting in 1815. I then walked up to an opening in the farm wall to watch the planting of a “tree of peace”. It had been grown from the seed of an even more amazing survivor, one of the six ginkgo trees at Hiroshima which lived on after the fire and heat of the atomic bomb’s explosion there in 1945. It struck me as an odd memorial. It was being planted at Hougoumont in a terracotta pot, cast in Tuscany: there had been no ginkgos or atomic bombs at the farm when Napoleon’s troops attacked across wet, slippery ground.
For a response, I went to find the landscape architect overseeing the garden’s reinstatement. François Goffinet is the right person for the job. As a boy he began to love gardening at his parents’ house in Belgium. He moved to England to train as a gardener at Wisley and from there came to the notice of the pre-eminent landscape gardener Russell Page. In due course Page proposed him as the person best able to carry on his masterly designs, including his one for the park around PepsiCo’s headquarters at Purchase in New York State. Goffinet has lived up to the challenges.
“Wrong tree, wrong place,” he remarked to me about the ginkgo of peace. In 2024, at a formal dinner, his own master plan for the garden was presented to acclaim in the Belgian embassy near London’s Belgrave Square. He showed me images of drawings which accompanied it, illustrating a big formal parterre, wild-flower meadows, an orchard and beds with roses, peonies and irises. He also told me of the value of previous studies of Hougoumont. They had been conducted by Waterloo Uncovered, a group linked to the British army and intelligence services.
Building on it, garden archaeologists have found evidence of arched arcades, a formal parterre of 48 beds, divided into four groups of 12, and the planting of an orderly orchard to one side of Hougoumont’s south entrance. Before battle ruined it, Hougoumont’s flowery garden also had fine stone balustrading. Bits of it were recovered recently from an auction of stonework in Namur.
Outside the farm’s south gate, a forest allowed Wellington to conceal troops as reserves. It has since been felled, but Goffinet hopes, as I do, that it will be reinstalled too. Its beech trees will not be reinstated as they will falter in a warming climate. Hornbeams will be used instead.
In the inner garden the site of the château will be marked by a wooden tower with steps leading up to a viewing platform from which the gardens below can be surveyed as if from a window. Would the roses include the fine old moss variety, the pink-flowered Chapeau de Napoléon? Indeed, Goffinet replied, and probably Rose Empress Josephine too. The orchard’s trees will be appropriate for 1815, researched and sourced by specialists at Gembloux Agricultural University. I hope they include Brabant Bellefleur and Belle-Fille Normande, varieties recommended to me in 2015 as ingredients of apple tarts in 1815.
On a second visit to Hougoumont, Osborne remarked to a patron of the restoration, Martin Drury, ex-director-general of the National Trust, “How are you going to preserve the romance of the place?” Wellington saw it differently. “Believe me,” he wrote after Waterloo and its slaughter, “nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Hougoumont’s restored gardens are planned to be educational for visitors: Goffinet needs to combine melancholy and flowery charm.
Robin Lane Fox’s travel was assisted by Wallonia-Brussels International; gardensofhougoumont.com
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