David Cholmondeley, the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, Earl of Rocksavage, Earl
of Cholmondeley, Viscount Malpas, Baron Cholmondeley of Namptwich and Joint
Hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain (and that is just his British titles), is
intrigued as to why the new garden dedicated to his grandmother at Houghton
Hall, his 4,000-acre estate near King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, has been named
Historic Houses Association and Christie’s Garden of the Year.
“I can’t think why we have been voted,” Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley) says
of the award, to be presented at Houghton tomorrow. “There are so many
gardens with so much going on in this country.”
Such modesty belies what Peter Sinclair, executive secretary of the
association, calls “an amazing achievement”: the creation, over the past 17
years, of an impressive garden in the five-acre walled former kitchen garden
that lies beyond the stables to the south of the house.
Cholmondeley, 47, who is unmarried, inherited the estate, which draws 20,000
visitors a year, on the death of his grandmother in 1989. A few months
later, his father, Hugh, the 6th marquess, died, and he inherited
Cholmondeley Castle, in Cheshire, and the surrounding 7,500-acre estate,
where his mother, Lavinia, still lives. “It was a busy time,” he says, with
understatement. As well as looking after both houses, he also makes films:
the latest, Shadows in the Sun, shot in Norfolk and starring James Wilby, is
awaiting release. This year’s Sunday Times Rich List estimates his fortune
at £60m, although much of it is tied up in art.
Cholmondeley’s grandmother was born Sybil Sassoon in 1894, the daughter of Sir
Edward Sassoon, of Baghdadi Jewish Indian lineage, and Aline de Rothschild.
A formidable woman, she was a superintendent of the Women’s Royal Naval
Service during the second world war. “She was a clever woman, a great
linguist, and she loved literature, music and painting,” Cholmondeley says.
When Houghton opened to the public in 1976, “she got really keen on it,
sitting selling guidebooks on the house. She loved that - she loved talking
to people. That’s what kept her young at heart”.
Although interested in gardening, Sybil and her husband had other concerns.
“They had plans for a water garden,” Cholmondeley says. “I remember Grandma
saying, ‘We thought of doing something, but we had to choose, and we chose
to spend our money and time on refurbishing the house, which was in a
terrible state.’ ” Their priority was installing decent water and heating
systems, although they removed inappropriate Victorian parterres from the
front of the house and created a fine pleached-lime plantation linking the
house and the stables.
During Sybil’s lifetime, the walled garden had been mostly grassed over, with
a few cutting beds and some fruit and vegetables, and needed attention. So,
a couple of years after her death, Cholmondeley set about creating a new
garden in her memory, which opened to the public in 1996.
Five acres is a lot of flat space to fill - the garden probably originally
contained kennels, which would account for its vast size - so the first
thing was to divide it up with yew hedges, “rather like Sissinghurst [Vita
Sackville-West’s garden in Kent]”, Cholmondeley says. “The garden is four
walls and no features. It all has to be in the planting.”
The space is laid out on a formal grid of discrete areas or rooms, with
different interest and moods. There is an Italian enclosure, with box
parterres; a formal rose garden, dotted with statues and based on one of the
William Kent ceilings in the house; a French garden of pleached limes and
plum trees, underplanted with spring bulbs; and a croquet lawn. The hedges,
some cut in swags, give height and form, teasing you into exploring round
the corner.
Paul Underwood and Simon Martin, the gardeners who laid out the plans, have
since moved on, and there is now a full-time team of two, led by Mhari
Blanchfield, with four part-timers. Julian and Isabel Bannerman, whose work
Cholmondeley had seen at Wad-desdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire, and
Highgrove, Prince Charles’s place in Gloucestershire, were brought in as
consultants to design some of the hard landscaping and borders in 1999. “We
needed new ideas and knowledge,” Cholmondeley recalls.
The Bannermans built the rustic temple pavilion that is the focal point at the
end of a 120ft double border running down the centre of the garden, moving
colourwise from cool to hot. They also designed a large oak-beamed fruit
cage housing cherries, kiwi fruits, currants and red and white gooseberries,
modelled on one of the turrets in the stable block next door.
The formality is in accord with the house, built in the 1720s on the site of
an older property by Robert Walpole, effectively Britain’s first prime
minister, who made a fortune at an early age and became the first Earl of
Orford. It was designed by James Gibbs and Colen Campbell, with interiors by
William Kent to a grand plan that, says Cholmondeley, “was built to impress
and to show Walpole was as good as any duke”. His political enemies,
however, “thought it was terribly vulgar and over the top: too much
gilding”.
Inherited by the Cholmondeley family through marriage in 1797, Houghton Hall
is surrounded by 1,000 acres of parkland grazed by white roe deer (their
antlers decorate the pavilion). It has 13 bedrooms, along with several state
apartments that are never used, as they are adorned with precious
18th-century fabrics, but are open to the public. “I don’t know who slept
there last,” Cholmondeley says. “Probably George IV, who said he had never
spent a worse night. Maybe he saw something unpleasant – we always thought
that particular room was very spooky.”
From about 1880, the estate was rented out – it was popular with tenants who
indulged in the cull-like shoots that Edward VII made popular at
Sandring-ham, next door. “We have pictures of him sitting there surrounded
by thousands of birds.” It was after the first world war that the future 5th
marquess and Sybil, his wife, came to live at Houghton and set about
restoring the estate.
In one of the rooms in the walled garden, a new sculpture by the Danish artist
Jeppe Hein is being installed, surrounded by laburnum bushes and irises,
which, Cholmondeley admits, will have a short but brilliant season of colour
for just three or four weeks in early summer. The sculpture, however, which
consists of a jet of water surmounted by a ball of flame, should intrigue
visitors throughout the year. “I hope it will be good fun,” he says.
This is the first sculpture within the walls, but the 18th-century parkland
designed by Charles Bridgeman already houses several contemporary pieces. To
the east of the house is a circle of Cornish slate at the end of a path mown
through the grass. Designed by Richard Long, it is one of the works
Cholmondeley has commissioned for Houghton. He has the space and the money
to let artists do what they want – “If you can do that with artists, it is
great fun, and nice for them, too,” he says.
In a wooded area to the side of the west front are two modern follies. The
first is Skyspace, by the American artist James Turrell: an oak-clad
building raised on stilts, in which you sit and contemplate the sky through
the open roof. (It is more interesting than it sounds.) The other is a
sarcophagus-like marble structure, sitting at the end of a path and dappled
in the shade of the trees around. Nearby is a copper-beech hedge by Anya
Gallaccio, based on Sybil’s signature. When it has grown to full height,
Cholmondeley jokes, you might need a helicopter to see it to full effect.
As well as creating the new garden, Cholmondeley has been working to restore
the park to its original splendour. This includes reinstalling a semicircular
ha-ha in place of the barbed-wire fence he remembers from his childhood,
beyond which were fields of sugar beet.
Now the beet has gone, and in its place is a wide grassy avenue, with woodland
to either side. Lining the edges, double allees of lime have been planted,
giving the woodland almost two miles of bright green fringes when in leaf.
The wildernesses of shrubs and trees nearer the house are also being
replanted to an 18th-century plan. It may not be as dramatic a change as in
the walled garden, but, as Walpole’s youngest son, Horace, wrote of William
Kent in his 1780 essay On Modern Gardening: “He leaped the fence, and saw
that all nature was a garden.”
www.houghtonhall.com
What an interesting and well composed article! It is good to see so much loving care being lavished on a property with such a history. As a grandmother myself I can think of nothing more flattering than to have a garden created in one's memory. I am sure the award was well deserved.
Mrs Jean Gilliland, Oxford,