The far south west of the UK is regarded as one of the very best areas to make a garden. Blessed with the Gulf Stream just to the west and one of the first places to receive moisture blowing in from the Atlantic, this area usually enjoys benign winters and moderately warm summers, with ample rain to help plants grow.

Cornish gardens are either jungles or woodland gardens, garden styles guided by generations of gardeners and garden makers taking full advantage of topography and climate. You won’t find classical English gardens here, nor will you find big prairie-style gardens. If you want something different you must travel to a different region.

Wiltshire

I periodically travel to Wisley, the Royal Horticultural Society’s very important London garden.

I leave my home at a godawful hour and drive east. The journey is long but not too tedious; I have my music and audiobooks to listen to, and there’s a lot of interesting countryside and vegetation to enjoy along the way.

The scenery in Wiltshire is quite different to Devon and Cornwall

Britain has virtually no truly wild spaces. Our landscape has been shaped by millennia of human activity, and nowhere is that more visible than when I pass the ancient landscape around Stonehenge. When Stonehenge was built the land looked quite different; for one thing it had a lot more trees.

Today this is agricultural land, open to the sky. Wiltshire is where I really become aware that I’ve left the lush green of home and am heading into a much drier region.

In Search Of Something New

I’d heard gushing praise for the garden at Iford Manor (pronounced eye-ford) on social media. Generally I’m wary of blindly following the recommendations of others; whether a garden is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ really depends on what you’re looking for.

Iford Manor

I’m rarely impressed with the supposedly ‘best’ gardens. I guess I’m looking for something different; generally most people seem to prefer big and showy gardens. I’ve had my big and showy phase and I’m now looking for more intimate, more human. I’m not looking for perfection; I would go as far as to say that the joy of a garden is often in its imperfections.

I would rather see a garden I don’t like than another soulless bit of showing off. Having lots of plants in a big space is not the same as having a great garden. While I appreciate technical skill, for me a garden should touch your soul. It should mean something to you.

Iford Manor

My visit to Iford Manor was on its last open weekend of the year. What fortuitous timing.

The English garden is a blend of styles

Iford represents what I would refer to as the classic English Style. It has good structure, with clear influences from other parts of the world and lots of planting. Usually attempts at English style gardening lacks that key structure, and instead gardeners fall into making a chocolate-box mish-mash of colour. I didn’t really get the sense of that at Iford; the planting and the structure seemed fairly balanced.

I’m a romantic at heart, beneath my layers of cynicism and cold, heartless logic. I want to feel something, and Iford has remained in my mind. Is this a good garden?

Harold Peto

I’ve heard of Harold Peto in passing. He was an influential landscape architect and garden designer whose style was heavily influenced by Roman/modern Italian and Japanese design.

Peto bought Iford Manor in 1899 and lived there until his death in 1933. As Iford was Peto’s home, this was where he was most free to work on his ideas: it could be argued that Iford represents Peto at his most liberated, subject to budget of course.

Italianate Garden

The Roman-style building at one end of the core garden is just incredible. While it does feel just a little out of place in rural Wiltshire, the quality of the workmanship is exquisite. It illustrates a principle that I think should be universally recognised in gardens: when it comes to structures get the best you can afford.

A large stone building is out of reach for all but the wealthiest of garden owners, as indeed are the structures of the Italianate garden, but the message here is that it’s better to do one structure or feature really well rather than try to do lots of things cheaply.

It’s said that Peto’s greatest talent was positioning structures well and in context. Certainly I would go along with that based on Iford.

Passing Of Time

The garden is around a century old, and while the core of the garden remains fairly good you don’t have to go far to find signs of the passing of time.

The second half of the 20th century was hard on British gardens built on the ready availability of cheap labour. There’s a sense that there has been a period of decline at Iford, and that it is slowly emerging from a period of neglect. The Japanese garden for example, designed not by Peto but by John Hignett, seems to be ticking over rather than being actively gardened. A century of tree growth has left it rather dark and gloomy, and the area around the garden feels overgrown and semi-neglected.

The Japanese Garden

It’s interesting to note that Iford’s website talks about restoration and ongoing development. Maybe I was seeing areas that have been renewed and renovated – I’m not a fan of the idea of ‘restoring’ gardens – and some where work is still pending.

Planting

Aside from the fact that the garden is now closed, the website warns of the importance of booking your visit during peak season. I clearly came at the wrong time to see it at its best.

That said, it was still worth seeing.

Lovely pot display at the base of some steps

I loved the use of containers to create little pockets of detail around the garden. For a garden of this size the use of containers is a bit of a drain on resources; containers must be watered at least once a day during dry weather, and in a garden like Iford that means either hiding a network of taps through the garden or asking gardeners carrying watering cans to reach pots in awkward places.

Not only should the gardeners be complemented on their work, but the owners too; the owners have made the decision to allocate their resources to container displays, and in turn deserve some of the credit.

If I was a little critical I might suggest that the planting isn’t particularly well knitted together in some places. I suspect that I was seeing areas that have been renovated and replanted fairly recently. In addition we have had a dry summer this year, and the often dry county of Wiltshire will have suffered the effects more than many regions. The effect wasn’t massively detracting, just in a few places it felt as though the rhythm of the garden was a bit off.

I suspect that it will all improve in the future.

Will I be back to Iford Manor?

It’s clearly a loved garden and there’s a really nice atmosphere to the place. Access roads are narrow even by British standards, but take your time and be ready to reverse into a passing place and you’ll be fine.

The big appeal of Iford is that it is quite different from anything we have down here in Devon and Cornwall. Yes it’s a garden of national importance anyway, but my visit has really drawn my attention to how strong the identity of particularly the great Cornish gardens actually is.

A mock Roman villa makes quite a statement

I’d never really thought about it but I’m not aware of any big and impressive garden buildings in Cornwall, even though so many gardens would lend themselves to follies and buildings emerging from the vegetation. Picking the iconic valley garden of Trebah as an example, there’s a lot of planting and interesting topography, but nobody in the garden’s past thought to build a feature building.

Given the frequency of rain in Cornwall you’d think that Cornish gardens would lead the way when it comes to places to stay dry!

I look forward to seeing Iford Manor earlier in the season, but also to see how its planting comes together. It’s not all that far from home; it would be interesting to see the garden at different times of the year, and see how the planting evolves.