ALL THAT GLITTERS
With its swathes of silvery grasses and seed heads rimed with crystal, winter is nature’s masterpiece at the Trentham Estate in Staffordshire
With its swathes of silvery grasses and seed heads rimed with crystal, winter is nature’s masterpiece at Trentham Estate
On a sparkling winter morning, with the light dancing off the silver mirror of the lake and every seed head robed in crystal, it’s hard to believe that this pristine scene was once one of the most polluted spots in Europe. A tiny gust of breeze scatters the fountain jet into diamond drops, and sets the grasses trembling so that the densely planted beds seem to shimmer through a golden mist.
It is said that winter is the true test of the gardener, when the garden is stripped of colour and the palette reduced to muted greens and greys, beiges and browns. If so, it is a test that Trentham Gardens pass with spectacular success. The plantings are designed to delight as much in winter as in summer, beguiling with a quieter beauty proceeding from texture and form.
Grasses are key: the tall, golden arches of oat-grass Stipa gigantea, gauzy clouds of tall Molinia, feathery plumes of Pennisetum and silken tassels of Miscanthus. Between these airy forms grow drifts of perennials selected for their distinctive seed heads – the layered whorls of Phlomis russeliana (perhaps even more handsome in seed than in flower), lacy fennels and spiky balls of Echinops, sturdy clumps of Hylotelephium (formerly Sedum) ‘Matrona’ and the giant thistles of cardoons (Cynara cardunculus), all the more spectacular when streaked and silvered with frost.
The Italian Garden, planted by Tom Stuartsmith, displays his trademark juxtaposition of loosely flowing planting and tightly disciplined geometry: softly swaying grasses and glittering swathes of perennials spill from the stone and box-edged beds of a vast formal parterre, marshalled by rows of evergreens – rhythmic lines of columnar Irish yews and broad umbrellas of Portuguese laurel growing in handsome Versailles planters.
While plants are repeated throughout the garden – notably in the ribbons of tall grasses, which thread across it in a pattern representing the Trent and its tributaries – every bed is a distinct composition. This, explains garden manager Carol Adams, is because “the planting conditions vary so much from the top of the garden to the bottom. But it means you could reproduce any one of them in your own garden, and it would work on a domestic scale.” You might have only two evergreens rather than 20, she suggests, but the balance of ethereal movement
and permanent form would prove equally successful. She points to the masses of Stipa gigantea and Verbena bonariensis dancing through the drier upper beds. “That veil effect, looking through taller, diaphanous plants rather than placing them at the back of the border, will bring movement and life to any size of planting.”
Flanking the great parterre are two long borders designed by Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf, doyen of the naturalistic New Perennials style. He is also responsible for the adjoining Floral Labyrinth – perennial planting on a spectacular scale, but where the detail offers delicious contrasts of form between the skeleton plants, such as the spiky fingers of veronicastrums and flat umbels of achilleas anchoring a haze of tall Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Transparent’. He, too, has followed a riverine theme, planting ‘rivers of grass’ in a damp meadow area alongside the (now clean) Trent, perhaps remembering Trentham’s pioneering head gardener, George Fleming, who became famous for a rivulet of forget-me-nots he laid out in imitation of a meandering stream.
Trentham has always been a showcase for new gardening ideas. Its mile-long lake is a relatively early work (1759) by Capability Brown, chief
exponent of the English landscape style. Seventy years later, Victorian architect Sir Charles Barry created the immense and highly ornamented Italian garden. It was for decades the most fashionable garden in England, admired for the novel planting of George Fleming, with his influential experiments in the new garden technique of bedding out, using tens of thousands of brightly coloured plants.
It was this spirit of innovation that was the inspiration for the rebirth of Trentham in the early years of the 21st century. For after its Victorian glory years, the estate fell rapidly into decline, rendered uninhabitable by the stench of the nearby Potteries, its lake flooded with sewage from the filthy River Trent. The house was demolished and the garden became a public pleasure park, abandoned for over a decade until 1996, when local property company St Modwen stepped in with a bold proposal for the site – to turn it back into a garden of note, in the biggest garden restoration project in Europe.
The project was led by Michael Walker, who arrived on site in 2004 with a heroic record of restoring 19th-century gardens. He was eager that Trentham should not be historic pastiche, but rather a garden that would embody all the energy of the Victorian age in a modern idiom, calling on our own most forward-thinking designers. Today’s planting schemes are as complex and as vast in scale as anything Fleming devised, while round the lakeshore lie a further three kilometres of flower meadows and plantings for autumn colour, created by Professor Nigel Dunnett, another champion of ecological planting design.
The great benefit of this style, explains Carol, is that it is relatively easy to maintain – left to its own devices through the winter, then chopped back at the end of January. It is also very welcoming to wildlife. “One thing that makes the winter garden so special is all the birds,” she says. “We get huge numbers of goldfinches and greenfinches feeding on the seed heads, and as you come into the garden in the morning, they just rise up in flocks. Because we’re in a bit of a valley, mists will often linger over the lake, while hoar frost forms on the plants. So on a sunny morning, you’ll get this amazing low light back-lighting all the plants, and then when the birds go wheeling up into a bright blue sky, it is hard to imagine you could ever see anything more beautiful.”
THE TRENTHAM ESTATE Stone Road, Stoke-on-trent, Staffordshire. For opening times, visit trentham.co.uk.