Proud of their exquisite gardens hidden away for years, an exclusive list of Sussex families and owners have let horticulturist Barbara Segall peek over the garden wall
Sussex is brimming with exceptional ‘secret’ gardens in private ownership. But thanks to the generosity of their owners, there are occasional opportunities for us, too, to step beyond the garden gate and enjoy the horticultural delights within.
Some of the gardens have been under the same family ownership for generations, while others have been transformed by new owners. Some open privately or occasionally for charity. But all are expressions of their current and past owners’ love of plants and place and showcase their creativity.
GRAVETYE MANOR
East Grinstead, West Sussex
The lane to Gravetye Manor winds alongside tree-clad slopes that sparkle with bluebells in spring, signalling the horticultural legacy that its 19th-century owner William Robinson left at the property. Records show that Gravetye and its estate have been worked and inhabited since 1570, but its modern garden association began in 1885, when Robinson (1838–1935) bought the property. He had started as a garden ‘boy’ in Ireland, worked his way to Regents Park in London and by 1867 was The Times’ horticultural correspondent.
At Gravetye, Robinson was able to put into practice the views he voiced in his garden magazines and books. Here, he would be able to grow a flower garden, make a wild garden, naturalise bulbs in grass, and plant trees and shrubs. He also created natural, more informal gardens, diverting gardeners from the rigidity of Victorian bedding that he so disliked.
In 1958, some 23 years after Robinson’s death, Gravetye became a prestigious small hotel. There have been periods of disrepair but, fortunately, in 2010 Jeremy and Elizabeth Hosking took it over. ‘We were concerned that someone else would not restore the garden to its full glory, respecting Robinson’s legacy for the future so that it wasn’t lost,’ explains Elizabeth.
The Hoskings hired Tom Coward, former deputy head gardener at Great Dixter, ensuring that the garden and kitchen garden would play a lead role in the hotel’s success. Tom is clear about the garden’s aim: ‘It is important that it is managed as an historic garden, but it is dangerous to obsess about history,’ he says. ‘It is a living landscape and constantly changing.’
When Tom arrived, the garden’s infrastructure had declined and there were perennial weed problems. In the Kitchen Garden there were brambles and thistles and no clear system for cropping. Tom and his team set about updating the irrigation system, installing deer fences and digging out the garden.
They also dug out the entire Flower Garden, also infested with weeds, and tackled the problem long term by introducing successional plantings of annuals alongside the perennials, grasses and dahlias, to outcompete the weeds.
In 1898 Robinson had decided to move the Kitchen Garden to a south-facing slope above the hotel, where it is now. It took three labourers three years to dig it out and build the walls of the unique oval shape that he felt would best suit crops. The Kitchen Garden is one of the areas that guests now most enjoy walking in – spotting the baby veg, watercress, gooseberries, blueberries, raspberries, pears, apricots and around 40 varieties of apple, as well as the cut flowers for every room.
The Orchard, holding some of Robinson’s original trees, is the actualisation of his wild garden principles. Seasonal colour, starting with narcissi, bluebells, camassia and even pockets of peonies, asters, geraniums and lilies, rolls out in the long grass.
Tom plans to keep the beauty going, with successional plantings in woodland, meadow and flower gardens. As the reputation of the modern garden at Gravetye Manor flourishes, one of Tom’s hopes is that interest in Robinson, undoubtedly an ‘influencer’ and household name in his lifetime, will also be revived.
Gravetye Manor, Vowels Lane, West Hoathly, East Grinstead, RH19 4LJ; 01342 810567; gravetyemanor.co.uk. Open April to October for garden tours of up to 20 people on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
CLINTON LODGE GARDENS
Fletching, East Sussex
Lady Noel Collum has gardened the six acres of Clinton Lodge for more than 50 years, arriving here in 1972 with her husband, the late Sir Hugh Collum, and their two children.
‘I loved the idea of a garden,’ she says. ‘I had no childhood experience of gardening but I knew that if I ever did have garden space I wanted to make it enjoyable and peaceful. Looking back, what I loved most at Clinton Lodge was the view, and I wanted to enhance its relationship with the Georgian part of the house.’
Noel has been helped by her friend, garden designer Julian Treyer-Evans. ‘I would have a vague idea and Julian would make it work!’ she says. For the last 16 years, she has also appreciated the work of head gardener Gavin Whitton.
Simplicity is paramount to the garden design: to suit the late Georgian architecture of Clinton Lodge she wanted to set it off with a lawn lined with trees, linking the house to the distant view. A double row of hornbeams running at right angles from the house, parallel with each other, provided the framework. These were clipped into formal box shapes and eventually backed by a yew hedge.
The formal gardens that Noel has created, including the Herb Garden, a Wild Garden, the ‘Banqueting House’ Garden, the Rose Garden and the Cutting Garden, are mainly to one side of the house, each enclosed and hidden from view by clipped yew or beech hedges. On the other side there is a tiny orchard underplanted with pink crinums.
The gardens are accessed by characterful passages, some hedged and some with plant-clad metal arches or pergolas, so that you can walk from one garden room to another without being distracted. There are also five long vistas to discover.
Given Noel’s interest in history, it is no surprise that the 17th-century Herb Garden is laid out as a traditional knot garden with covered lime walks, box-lined quadrants and knots filling corner spaces. All the plants would have been grown at that time for the kitchen or medicinal use.
From the herbaceous borders you step into the peaceful arcaded Cloister Walk, draped with white wisteria in summer and lined by two borders holding white-flowered clematis on metal supports, and borders filled with white astrantia, white lilies and hellebores and hostas. From this walk you can glimpse the Wild Garden, which in spring is full of pheasant’s eye (Narcissus poeticus) and in summer buttercups and daisies.
Noel has also made changes to the Rose Garden where hybrid tea roses once dominated, replacing them with old historic roses whose scent in high summer is powerful. In 2010 it was renamed The Pye Garden, after the sculptor William Pye, who she commissioned to design a water feature, Tavoleau, for the space.
Clinton Lodge Gardens has been opening for the National Garden Scheme for the past 40 years. Even though countless people have visited, for Noel it remains a tranquil setting, a very personal space, full of plants that offer fragrance and simplicity.
Clinton Lodge Gardens, Fletching, TN22 3ST; 01825 722952; clintonlodgegardens.co.uk. Open to the public under the NGS (ngs.org.uk) on selected dates.
MALTHOUSE FARM GARDEN
Hassocks, East Sussex
Richard and Helen Keys came to Malthouse Farm at the start of the millennium, transforming the 5.5 acres of field and stable yard where opera singer Dame Josephine Barstow had once kept Arabian horses. It’s now the setting for a series of intimate, distinctive garden rooms and large-scale field installations.
In this time, Helen has experimented with colour and form, and created several enclosed areas, before turning her attention to the wider landscape. Below the main, intensively planted, colourful garden rooms, she has deftly transformed
a former field into two installations of land art, using simple shapes and repeating plants.
Helen brought the knowledge and experience of her previous garden to Malthouse Farm consolidated with a course given by garden designer Mariana Hollis. ‘Although I wanted this garden to feel less contained than my former garden, I had to have adequate hedges to protect the plants from the fierce South Westerlies that blow through,’ she says.
Some gardens have an exciting, borrowed landscape, and at Malthouse Farm the South Downs are the pre-eminent, borrowed view. While Helen’s aim was to have protective hedges, this had to be tempered by the fact that the view itself was the fourth boundary and the majestic, ever-changing light of the calm and rolling landscape had to be visible from the house and garden.
The first thing Helen did on arrival was to cut and shape the massive hornbeam hedge running north–south from the house. She also cut an arch into it so that there was a clear east–west axial view through the garden.
In addition she gradually expanded the garden outwards from the terrace that runs east–west in front of the house. These intensively gardened areas, including a cottage garden, a late-summer flowering garden and a kitchen garden planted with vegetables, each enclosed by protective hedges or brick walls, are like coloured jewels.
Equalling the vegetable garden in terms of shape and size is the cottage garden. Here, there is colour in every season, reaching its height in summer when grasses, asters, dahlias and penstemons offer mounds of colour.
Below the tennis court and the late-summer garden, the style and atmosphere changes as, once beyond the field gates, wild flowers in rectangular blocks contrast with the shapes of orchard trees. Beyond the wild flowers and orchard, Helen has created several large-scale plant installations with the assistance of long-term gardener Alex Bell.
Without compromising the drama of the borrowed South Downs landscape, Helen has protectively enclosed the varied intricate, intimate and effervescent plant collections that surround and sweep away from the farmhouse, as if cantering, like the horses the land once supported, to the field edges.
Malthouse Farm, Streat Lane, Streat, Hassocks, BN6 8SA; 01273 890356. Open to the public under the NGS (ngs.org.uk) on selected dates and by arrangement May to September for groups (10–30 people).
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