Gardens of the National Trust by Stephen Lacey

Author:Stephen Lacey [Lacey, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since the early nineteenth century, the clocks have ticked slowly in this private and remote estate. Owned by the Lewis family for ten generations, it came to the Trust in 1989, its farm, park, pleasure grounds, and walled fruit and vegetable gardens in poor repair but remarkably intact.

You have your first glimpse as you drive up the wooded valley, away from the sea and the cheery harbour town of Aberaeron. There on the valley floor, sandwiched between trees and meadow grazed by sheep and Welsh black cattle, appears the ochre-washed villa. It was remodelled in the early 1790s for Colonel William Lewis by John Nash, who would later become the presiding architect of Regency London. It is not known who advised on the accompanying landscape, but the influence of Humphry Repton, the leading landscape designer of the day, is certainly felt in the framed views, tree clumps, and the formal separation, by iron railings, of house and park (from the mid-1790s, Repton collaborated with Nash on various English commissions).

The pathways, formerly impenetrable with brambles, have now been opened up; they offer views out into the park and lead you to the lake with its oval island. A deep stone-walled leat, which once carried water for use in the house, winds through the trees and the pleasure grounds, and at one point you come upon a pair of rockery mounds, a popular feature of the period, adorned with quartz, pumice, and other local and alien stones. Nearby, a series of scallop-shaped beds, edged in stones, supports a collection of ferns.

You are now met by a door in an old garden wall – the paintwork a beautiful cracked turquoise overlaying rusty red. It is an irresistible invitation, and you open it to find yourself in a huge enclosure, the first of two adjoining walled gardens, each 0.4ha (1 acre) in size – this one framed in brick 3m (10ft) high, its sister garden largely of stone. Extracting clay for all the bricks, together with those needed for the house, is likely to have created the pit that formed the lake.

Thanks to grants and a small army of volunteers, this garden has been returned to an impressive level of production. Plums and gages are newly trained on the walls, and historic apple varieties have been planted on the orchard lawns and path fringes to augment the surviving trees, which include a splendid old espaliered ‘Northern Greening’. Rhubarb, a soft fruit cage, and an extensive range of herbs complement the rows of legumes and root vegetables. While the high rainfall dictates much cultivation in raised beds, continual working and liming of the heavy acid clay over the centuries has produced an excellent crumbly soil.

Flues, incorporated into the south-facing wall, used to conduct warm air from fires in the outhouses behind in order to heat a series of frames and glasshouses, enabling much early and tender produce to be grown. The remains of one of the early nineteenth-century glasshouses can still be seen; in its central beds, fermenting manure was used to heat the soil for pineapples and melons.

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