Inside the painterly walled garden of a 16th-century Wiltshire castle
From the top of Longford Castle’s circular Elizabethan towers, the view to the east is of the sparkling River Avon, of lush pasture and Constable clouds. The southerly windows, though, frame a very different scene – an exquisite formal garden lightly held within low scalloped walls, a soft wash of colour flooding across a sequence of square grass plats, ornamented with fat yew plum puddings and delicately textured planting that seems to ripple in the light.
From here can be seen the satisfying ground plan of the garden, renovated by Longford’s chatelaine Melissa Pleydell-Bouverie, Countess of Radnor, to a design by Tania Compton. Each square is subtly different, but linked by generous swirls of catmint, low box hedges and small obelisks of yew. Box-edged beds of roses enrich the texture, like appliqué on a quilt, while further height is added by pyramids of clematis and perennials chosen to stand tall in the wind – crambe, sanguisorbas, silvery thistles (both Onopordum acanthium and cardoons) and the creamy-white plumes of Persicaria alpina. Despite the protective embrace of ancient undulating hedges, the wind whisking off the river can be brisk.
As Longford was being built in the 1590s, new-fangled Renaissance notions of creating symmetry and unity between house and garden were just entering England. So the idea of laying out a sunken garden to be admired from the principal rooms of the house was a daring French-style innovation – as novel and startling as the triangular plan of the house, with a round tower at each corner. Legend has it that this grand design threatened to bankrupt its owner, Sir Thomas Gorges, who was then serving as governor at Hurst Castle, the coastal fortress in Hampshire. Happily, his wife Helena Snakenborg was a close friend of Elizabeth I and persuaded her to grant her salvage rights to a Spanish galleon wrecked offshore. It was laden with treasure, and the house was completed.
Since then, the house has been refashioned several times. At the turn of the 19th century, James Wyatt was engaged to update it to a hexagonal plan, but the money ran out and the family decamped to Coleshill House in Berkshire. Building recommenced in the 1870s, under the auspices of historicist architect Anthony Salvin. So Longford Castle today is a beguiling amalgam of Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian – and this is equally true of the garden. The walls date from the 1830s and the hedges and topiary from Salvin’s time, while the handsome stone vases that adorn the plats probably arrived in a Georgian reimagining of the Elizabethan garden.
The pattern of squares may well be original: formal arrangements of well-kept grass were greatly admired in Tudor England. Or the layout could be the work of William Andrews Nesfield, master of Victorian parterres. He was Salvin’s brother-in-law and often collaborated with him on his restorations. There is no documentary evidence, though, that Nesfield ever worked at Longford.
When Melissa’s husband William Pleydell-Bouverie, 9th Earl of Radnor, inherited Longford Castle in 2008, the formal garden was in need of refreshment. Longford has been home to the Earl’s family since 1717; the story goes that his ancestor Sir Edward des Bouverie spotted Longford while out riding and bought the castle there and then with the money he had in his saddlebags. In a delightful trope worthy of the Elizabethans, the revamped formal garden makes reference to the current generation at Longford: the first two of its eight squares celebrate the Radnors’ two daughters; the central four, their sons; and the last two, Lord and Lady Radnor themselves. Blending into a unified whole, each plat is a self-contained garden, reflecting the interests of its dedicatee. Two stone plaques set into the path record the family’s initials: though the planting may change again, a memory of the garden’s present character will remain for future generations.
‘Each of the eight squares had to be different, so to link the whole, we selected plants with lots of varieties that would do well here,’ explains Tania. ‘Each member of the family has their own blend of irises, oriental poppies, peonies, delphiniums and salvias, with unifying ribbons of Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’.’ Two long, flanking shrub borders, simply planted with fragrant daphnes, sarcococcas and silvery Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’ complete the picture, elegantly containing the exuberance within.
This year, Storm Eunice inadvertently created the opportunity for a new chapter in the garden, inspired by a Victorian photograph, found by Melissa and her son when going through Longford’s archive in lockdown. ‘It showed an avenue of trees beyond the statue of Flora at the end of the formal garden, so when the storm brought down an old hornbeam and poplar, we planted an avenue of 32 hornbeams,’ says Melissa. ‘It links the new garden with the parkland, and the past to the present, celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee in June.’
From the first jewel-like bulbs to the fleeting voluptuousness of peony season, through midsummer roses and on to September’s filigree of perovskia wreathed in glittering cobwebs, the garden offers a succession of charming vignettes. Longford is famed for its exceptional Old Master paintings and, following the family tradition, William has built a fine collection of modern paintings and ceramics. Among Longford’s collection there is a small flower painting by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Each flower is a gem, rendered with infinite delicacy. Yet the whole is magically greater than the sum of its parts, a fine metaphor indeed for the making of this garden.
Melissa is the patron of Horatio’s Garden horatiosgarden.org.uk. The National Gallery offers tours of Longford Castle and garden: nationalgallery.org.uk | Tania Compton: tania@taniacompton.co.uk
