The Nineteenth Century Gardens

Despite the growing fashion for landscape gardens in England during the eighteenth century there is little sign that Sir William Heathcote’s successors at Hursley made any substantial alterations to the Georgian gardens he had laid out in the 1720’s until the arrival of the 5th baronet, another William, in 1825. Even Sir Thomas Freeman-Heathcote, the 4th baronet, who was responsible for the first serious changes to the House, appears to have focused his gardening attention on Embley Park, his home following his marriage in 1799, where he constructed a large ornamental lake, only for the retaining dam to fail and flood the surrounding area.

There are suggestions that Sir Thomas had begun a process of change at Hursley, including starting the construction of the building that was to become the Hursley Vicarage. However, it was the Park, rather than the gardens per se, that Neale focused on in his 1822 book “Views of the seats of noblemen and gentlemen, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland”

“... the lawn in front is of considerable extent, and is ornamented with many fine old trees and beautiful shrubberies. The Park is well stocked with deer and all sorts of game.”

When Sir Thomas died unexpectedly in 1825 his will left his young nephew and successor, Sir William, stripped of many of the assets needed to support the house and estate. Initially therefore his efforts were focused on restoring the estate. Even years later he told his great friend, Sir John Awdry, that,

“Things go on here much as usual, i.e. continuing building and repairs, to conquer the effect of many years’ neglect”

However, by the mid 1830s and with the support of his much loved wife, Caroline Frances, the grounds were beginning to take on their new form. The Park boundary was changed, bringing the southern meadows inside the park fence and making the Keeper’s cottage an estate Lodge. Around the estate new lodges were constructed to meet the current fashion for inexpensive but aesthetically pleasing and picturesque workers’ cottages based on pattern books like Robinson’s 1828 ‘Rural Architecture’ (one of several books on architecture in Sir William’s extensive library).

Around the northern boundary of the Park a flint wall was constructed from Anmery Lodge to Merdon Castle. To the south the lakes were further enlarged and deepened, the extracted material being used to help repair existing roads and to create new carriage drives, including one through Ampfield wood to Jermyns House.

To the south-west of the House, alongside the lawn, William and his wife began to create a “pleasure ground”. This featured many ornamental trees, often rare examples that would not be out of place in Kew. However, the sudden death of Caroline in 1835 had a devastating impact on Sir William who became melancholic, taking him away from Hursley for long periods and leaving the house neglected.

In 1841 Sir William married Selina Shirley and life began to return to the estate. Probably at about this time the pleasure grounds were further extended westward forming a bulge in the garden perimeter. Rhododendron bushes created an enclosed garden between the rose garden and a new alpine garden, possibly inspired by the couple’s tour of Switzerland in 1845.

An article published by the Gardener magazine in 1869 described this new garden ...

“...at the western extremity of which stands a pretty elevated summer-house, built in the form of a Swiss chalet ... from which the spectator looks down upon an entirely unique rockery of the most unformal kind...The rock-work resembles mountainous and rugged scenery in its formation, and in one corner is a miniature lake, in which fish disport themselves in great serenity. This secluded spot forms a most delightful retreat, and might almost tempt the busy man of the world to turn hermit, so quiet are its surroundings.”

The fashion for Swiss-styled buildings was also used in the construction of Merdon Lodge to the north of the old castle.

The article on Sir William’s gardens also described the narrow Italian flower garden that ran along the southern face of the house and the ‘pretty sunken rose garden’. In the 1867 Ordnance Survey map of Hursley the outline of both the Swiss chalet the rose garden are clearly visible, the rose garden forming a distinctive ‘D’ shape with entrances at the north and south. A design which is retained in both the 1896 and 1909 revisions of the Ordnance Survey map.

To the eastern side of the lawn was the kitchen-garden. Covering six acres, walled on three sides (the fourth and most western edge that flanked the lawn being formed by a large yew hedge). The 1869 article in the Gardener gave a detailed description of how this walled garden functioned:

“the outer sides ... are devoted to the growth of trained pear-trees of all the best kinds, which are this season in fine health, and producing a heavy crop of fruit. A wide border in front of these trees is devoted to the culture of vegetables, and on its outer edge is a long line of circular-trained Apple-trees running from the north-eastern to the south-western corners, a broad grass walk again bordering the whole.”

Whilst inside a combination of paths and herbaceous borders created an illusion of a flower garden whilst still functioning as a working kitchen garden.

Inside the walled garden we find that in the centre, and running its entire length, is a very broad smoothly-mown grass walk, the same being carried crosswise. On either side of this walk is an herbaceous border, in which many of our old favourite plants are cultivated, the back of each border being fenced off by continuous lengths of trained espalier fruit-trees, the quarters devoted to vegetable culture being within. The inside portions of the walls are devoted to the growth of stone fruits; but the trees here, as in too many other gardens, bear evidence that our English climate has gradually become unsuitable to the culture in the open air of the more tender and choice fruits. Singularly enough, however, there is growing, in a sheltered corner in the garden, a large Violet Hative Nectarine tree, trained upon a trellis in umbrella fashion, that has not received any other protection than its situation affords, and is literally loaded with fruit that will ripen in September. This is a decided novelty, and is also an entire exception to the general rule.

One section of the garden contained the glass houses which were limited in extent, and are devoted almost exclusively to the growth of Grapes and the housing of plants in winter. These are enclosed by a remarkable Yew hedge, some 8 or 9 feet through, and which looks like a massive green rampart, so smooth and neat is it kept.

From the House, now with the main entrance moved from its original central position on the north front to a new eastern vestibule, access to the kitchen garden was via a continuation of the terrace walk that ran along the southern face of the house, through an arch in the yew hedge and along the grass walk described by ‘The Gardener’, passed a sundial purported to have belonged to the Cromwell family and then out of the eastern wall where it joined the Walnut avenue down to the Church.

Together with the improvements to the estate lodges and houses in the village this was part of a programme of “beautification” carried out, in part, to provide much needed employment to farm labourers during periods of agricultural depression. The resulting layout of the C18th lawn flanked by kitchen garden and pleasure grounds, all contained within the landscaped Park, was to remain little altered in basic form until the mid C20th. Indeed pictures taken for Country Life Illustrated in 1902, when the house was owned by Joseph Baxendale, show an estate and gardens hardle altered from the description of 1869. However, like the House, this was soon to change with the estate’s new owners and it was to experience a major re-vamp during the Edwardian era.