The wild and romantic restored gardens of St Giles House
On a summer morning in 2005, Nick Ashley-Cooper stood on the dilapidated terrace of his ancestral home, St Giles House in rural Dorset, and confronted his future. Abandoned for half a century, that terrace was a sea of wildflowers. Lawns had turned to rippling meadows. Stonework crumbled under the weight of ivy. But the many trees planted by his conservationist father had prospered; the populations of butterflies and owls he nurtured had thrived. It was ravishing.
In 2004, Nick’s father was murdered. Then, within months, his elder brother died of a heart attack, aged just 27. Suddenly Nick was tabloid fodder: the tattooed New York DJ who was now, inconceivably, 12th Earl of Shaftesbury. Along with a 5,500-acre estate, he had inherited a 17th-century house on the Heritage at Risk Register, surrounded by a neglected park. The follies were collapsing. The once sparkling serpentine lake had silted up. Yet this hauntingly poetic scene of decay could move sharp-eyed historians to rhapsodies of melancholy, while local people treasured the Sleeping Beauty in their midst.
The young Earl proposed to his girlfriend Dinah on the terrace, took himself off to business school and, by 2015, this indomitable pair had raised millions and were winning awards for their imaginative restoration of the house. But how to approach the garden? And which garden? Since Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, had begun his new house in 1651, the garden had been made and remade many times over. So which of its many stories should they choose to tell?
The first Earl had risen to power by judiciously changing sides throughout the Civil War – a flexibility reflected in his garden. He was passionate about his fruit trees, at a time when growing fruit was part of the Commonwealth mission to recreate Eden on Earth. (Apples were believed to offer both physical and spiritual nourishment.) Conversely, the garden’s most distinctive feature was a grand beech avenue – a royal fashion popularised by Charles II.
The 3rd Earl’s garden was equally perplexing. Known as the Philosopher Earl, he has been hailed as the John the Baptist of the English landscape garden, writing in praise of ‘things of a natural kind’ and all ‘the horrid graces of the Wilderness’. His garden, however, remained conventional and formal – yews and hollies clipped into pyramids and spheres, and neatly maintained grass plats.
It was the 4th Earl who embraced the new naturalistic landscape style, creating a serpentine lake, reducing the great beech avenue to scattered clumps of trees, bringing the greensward sweeping up to the house and bedecking the grounds with all manner of follies. This was a time when gardens became vehicles for political propaganda, and as the Earl and his wife Susannah were something of a power couple at the heart of 18th-century Whig politics, it is likely that these follies carried anti-establishment messages that were well understood by their friends.
On the other hand, they made delightful destinations for a picnic or a boat trip. Among them were pretty pavilions, including one devoted to Shakespeare; little islands reached by boat or – the height of fashion – by ‘Chinese’ bridges; a romantic ruined castle; and secluded ‘seats’ furnished with ‘books in hanging glass cases’, according to the Reverend Richard Pococke who visited in 1754. Star billing – for this was very much garden theatre – went to Susannah’s shell grotto. Restored in 2013-4, it is breathtaking – a scene of underwater enchantment, artfully lit from above and encrusted with ‘a great profusion of most beautiful shells, petrifications and corals’, the largest and most exotic sent from Jamaica.
The 4th Earl and Susannah spent a fortune ridding their garden of all traces of formality. Their descendants spent the next two centuries putting it back. A raised terrace appeared around the house, the avenue was reinstated and, in 1902, a sunken garden was dug out to the east of the house. Filled with bright bedding plants, it featured four grass quadrants around a central fountain designed to be admired from a perimeter path – a last hurrah, before two World Wars called time on great houses like St Giles.
It was not until the Sixties that the family finally decamped. ‘There was a magic about that time of abandonment,’ recalls Nick. ‘And we wanted to honour it.’ So in restoring the house, Nick eschewed exact reconstruction, preferring to illustrate its cycles of splendour and decay. The same applied outside. Nick had neither the appetite nor the budget to recreate an 18th-century rococo garden; what was needed was a garden for now – one that was achievable and practical. Architectural historians had criticised the 1st Earl’s unfussy red-brick house as penny-pinching in the name of Good Taste. To Nick, this seemed a virtue; indeed it became a guiding principle. Key historic features would be restored as time and money allowed, but anything new must be simple and easy to maintain.
Garden designer Jane Hurst arrived on site in March 2013 to find the sunken garden filled in, the paths reinstated and time short. She had just three months to transform an empty space into a romantic backdrop for the garden’s first wedding, scheduled for June. (Henceforth this was how St Giles would earn its keep.) The water pressure, the head gardener informed her, was lamentable, which meant the garden had to survive without regular irrigation. The surrounding yew hedges, bonsai-ed by deer, offered negligible protection from the wind. And the perimeter beds, designed to balance planting within the quadrants, were too narrow for the large, architectural plants she originally had in mind. These were deployed instead in bold new borders on the western side of the house and in the dazzling plantings featuring vibrant, hot colours in the stable yard.
Inspired by the gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, Jane chose a palette of what she calls ‘bomb-proof’ plants of interesting texture, creating a sweep of colour from warm reds and purples by the house to whites and misty pastels, which could dissolve into the landscape at the avenue end. Lamb’s ears and purple sage were encouraged to spill on to the path, and she made a virtue of the breezy conditions by introducing Japanese anemones and grasses, which dance in the wind. The past few years have brought heat and drought conditions previously unheard of in damp, green Dorset: the garden has sailed through, looking beautiful well into November, when the last big, red, semi-translucent leaves drop from Cotinus ‘Grace’.
Rather than place high-maintenance pots on the terrace, Jane planted cubes of copper beech, mirroring the castellated parapet of the house. More beech forms stud the lawns south of it. The grass is left to grow long in summer, creating a contrast of shaggy and clipped, and recalling the ‘beautiful disorder’ of the wilderness years. ‘The most magical moment in gardens is on the cusp of chaos, just before everything goes too far and collapses into a mess,’ says Jane. ‘The terrace was never more beautiful than when it was a meadow but, sadly, it’s not a practical proposition.’
‘We cannot cling to the past,’ says Nick. ‘We have to garden in a way that is sustainable, that looks to the future, that can survive with minimal inputs and that doesn’t harm the birds and butterflies so close to my father’s heart. It might not be exactly what people expect to see at a historic house – but so much the better’.
St Giles House: stgileshouse.com
Jane Hurst: janehurstgardendesign.com
Andrew Montgomery1/10The statue of Anteros, a twin of the Eros statue in Piccadilly, was erected as a memorial to the 7th Earl
Andrew Montgomery2/10
Andrew Montgomery3/10Alchemilla mollis and silvery Stachys byzantina showcase the flowers of Aster ‘Mönch’.
Andrew Montgomery4/10The exterior of the 18th-century shell grotto. A stone bridge spans the canal that feeds into the lake.
Andrew Montgomery5/10The beautifully restored interior of the 18th-century shell grotto.
Andrew Montgomery6/10A stone bridge spans the canal that feeds into the lake.
Andrew Montgomery7/10
Andrew Montgomery8/10
Andrew Montgomery9/10
Andrew Montgomery10/10
