I know you have all been desperately wondering what on earth happened to the Best Garden reviews. ‘Before Christmas’, I said. Hm – well Christmas was its own pressure and was then closely followed by a horrible chest infection which has kept me miserable right up to today.

But today I am fit enough to return to my desk and here we are with Pat Webster’s Best. It seems from my researches that it would be hard to visit – Pat went as part of a booked group to Haseley Court in Oxfordshire, UK. That might be the only way – there’s not even a website. But I started my gardening life in awe of the Nancy Lancaster legend. and the value of garden reviews goes way beyond whether they are worth a visit: see here.  

Don’t you agree?

Anne Wareham, editor

The Best Garden I visited this Year by Patterson Webster

The garden at Haseley Court was designed by Nancy Lancaster, the Virginia-born woman whose London firm, Colefax and Fowler, set the style for mid-20^th century English interior design. By the 1950s, the Oxfordshire property she acquired had fallen into disrepair, and a topiary chess set, laid out in a sunken garden,was the only element that remained. Drawing on her experience from former homes, at Ditchley Park and Kelmarsh Hall, in short order Lancaster designed a garden that has been called one of England’s greatest mid-century creations. 

What makes Haseley Court deserve such an accolade when it could easily be dismissed as a genteel ‘pearls and twin set’ garden?

Nancy Lancaster’s personal style makes the difference: her flair for design combined with the determination of its present owners, Fiona and Desmond Heyward, to maintain the balance she established between restraint and exuberance. But there is a personal element also: the connection I felt between the woman who made it and my own roots in Virginia.

I left Virginia behind more than 50 years ago. Yet this garden spoke to me in unexpected ways that I can only attribute to my roots there. A tree-lined entry led through farm fields like those outside Charlottesville, where Nancy was born, less than an hour’s drive from where I grew up. The welcome our small group of Canadian women was given by Fiona Heyward reminded me of the hospitality that characterizes so many southern women of my generation, warm and unaffected but never effusive, and always with a little something held back.

Intimations of Lancaster’s native Virginia permeate the garden. Furniture is painted a Confederate grey, and the chairs and benches positioned throughout the garden invite a visitor to slow down to a southern-style pace. The trellis arbour in the walled garden resembles those found in many southern gardens, including one in a Richmond park where I played as a child. Even the cupola on top of an outbuilding mimics those at Williamsburg, Virginia’s first capital. In less skilful hands, these reminders of the past could feel unpleasant – the South has a dark side that can’t be ignored. Yet laced as they are at Haseley Court with a decorum that is unmistakably English, the garden’s southern aspects become a positive link between two countries that Lancaster loved. 

Haseley Court’s garden balances contrasting elements with ease and grace — and with a wonderfully light sense of humour. In a corner of the courtyard that fronts the manor house’s Georgian façade, plants pop up from the gravel as if spontaneously combusting. In the sunken garden, over-sized topiary chess pieces crowd the lawn, while small succulents in formal pots smile down from the terrace balustrade. A few steps beyond, giant tetrapanax leaves tower over similarly shaped miniature leaves beside a dark burgundy Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’ that threatens to snap up anyone who comes too close. 

Playful touches are evident not only in terms of proportion and the choice of plants. Behind a bench flanked by handsome urns, an opening cut into a hedge gives a view onto nothing more than the tree trunk beyond. A stony-faced herm standing inside an arrow-shaped opening marks only the boundary of the hedge itself. Stone balls atop a bridge echo topiary balls atop columns as square shouldered as whisky decanters. A rough-cut face over a door opens its mouth to reveal the sky, and a pale bench with Lancaster’s trademark spider web design traps lightness in the dark.

A sense of drama is created by repeated contrasts of light and shade. Moving out from a sunny courtyard, a path points into the gloom. Edged by sheared boxwood spaced left and right like the curtain wings on a stage, the path leads to a dark stream as romantic as any in the Old Dominion.

There are of course touches of other gardens, in other places. The straight paths and movement from sun to shade recall elements found in many Italian gardens as well as in Lancaster’s beloved Charlottesville home, Mirador. The vista on the south side of the house extending over lawns edged by lime trees echoes a similar vista at Kelmarsh Hall, where Lancaster lived in the 1920s and 1930s when married to Ronald Tree, her second of three husbands. Most memorably, a topiary pinwheel in the walled garden fills the space to overflowing, forcefully reminding me of how the elevated pool at Hidcote Manor fills its small space to such fine effect.

A much-lauded laburnum tunnel was not in bloom when I visited Haseley Court, and by late September the strong colours that Lancaster favoured were beginning to fade. No matter. The bones of this garden made its virtues clear. Its ten acres mix formality and informality, restraint and exuberance. There is a judicious balance between open and closed areas, darkness and light, predictability and surprise. The garden reveals itself in a sequence of experiences that differ enough to be memorable while remaining consistent enough to establish integrity. In short, the garden is authentic.

I visited several dozen gardens in 2018, in England, Canada and the U.S. Favourites include four in East Anglia — George Carter’s Silverstone Farm, Piet Oudolf’s Millennial Garden at Pensthorpe Natural Reserve, Lord and Lady Howard’s delightful garden at the Old Rectory Castle Rising and Houghton Hall, where the Marquess of Cholmondeley is combining grand expanses and exceptional contemporary art in unusual ways. Finally, I was captivated by Hillside, Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan’s garden near Bath, where nature and garden flow easily, one into the other.

Yet despite this stiff competition, choosing Haseley Court was surprisingly easy. It is stylish, confidently planted and designed with uncommon flair. Undoubtedly it is the Virginia connections that cemented my choice. It is a reminder of how personal our reactions to gardens must always be, how much our individual experiences shape our tastes and expectations. At Haseley Court I felt welcomed, as if I were at home, and happy to be so.

Patterson Webster  

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