Garden to visit Packwood House has a magical topiary garden
This romantic Warwickshire garden enjoyed its heyday in the roaring 1920s. Melissa Mabbit explores the highlights today
For imagination, jewel-bright colours and labyrinthine paths, Packwood House in Warwickshire can’t be beaten. The garden has a magical ‘Alice in Wonderland’ atmosphere that reaches its zenith in summer, when the rich tapestry of herbaceous planting overflows onto the grassy paths and the sun casts long shadows from a towering citadel of ancient yew topiary. This incarnation of Packwood is the vision of one man, Graham Baron Ash who, in the roaring 1920s, turned this already-antique property into his flight of fancy. Ash was a collector and conservationist, interested in preserving ancient houses, gardens and their artefacts. His fantasy world extended from the house, which he filled with antiquities, out to the garden, which contained an historic collection of enigmatic yew topiary. This spectacular backdrop became the setting for glamorous parties, outdoor concerts and plays, which are easy to imagine today as you roam among the flower-filled terraces and red-brick walled courts. The main structure of the garden, including the towering yews and red brick walls, dates from the 17th century. To these Ash added brick summerhouses, a sunken garden and more yew hedging, flanked by deep mixed borders. He wanted to create the quintessential romantic garden, the perfect setting for lavish entertaining where he could play out his fantasy of fashionable, 1920s-style country living. Inside the house Ash banished anything dark and Victorian in favour of the more fashionable Jacobean style. In the garden he replaced formality with more romantic, rustic flourishes and a lavish-but-relaxed planting style. He enriched the garden with deep mixed borders and urns overflowing with exotic blooms and foliage.
Hot borders
This lavish look is faithfully recreated today by the National Trust. Its gardeners have tended the estate since Ash moved to Wingfield Castle in Suffolk in the 1940s. Now, the red-brick walls are complemented by hot-themed borders filled with glowing late-summer plants such as fiery crocosmia, hot-pink penstemons and rudbeckias in shades of rust, copper and gold. These are liberally laced through with ornamental grasses and the bobbing neon-purple heads of Verbena bonariensis,
“Ash wanted to create the quintessential romantic garden for lavish entertaining”
giving the deep borders an invitingly tactile and textured look. Huge containers still zing with dramatic foliage and exotic flowers, while the romantic touches are still in place too – rose-clad doorways and beautifully scented roses bubble up between the yew buttresses along a high brick wall.
Dry garden
One development has been the introduction of a dry planting scheme in the sunken garden surrounding the rectangular pool. It’s filled with South African and Mediterranean plants such as kniphofias, eryngiums, succulent echeverias and sedums surrounded by gravel, which creates a pared-back look that contrasts well with the effervescent herbaceous planting elsewhere. But it’s the looming yew trees that really catch the imagination – the most iconic feature of Packwood. They make up one of the most striking topiary gardens in the UK, with more than 100 towering trees clipped into tapering cones and cylinders that look like giant chess pieces. They’re on one hand mysterious, on the other playful; the perfect opportunity for a game of hide and seek. The yews are thought to date back at least 350 years, and in the Victorian era were said to represent the Sermon on the Mount. There are 12 ‘apostles’, four central ‘evangelists’ and many smaller yews called ‘the multitude’. In the centre of the trees is a small mound circled by a spiral path leading up to one tree at the centre, called ‘the master’.
Yew restoration
The yews are undergoing a phased restoration, with some cut back to their main trunks and looking like fuzzy totem poles. Yew is one of the few conifers that can regenerate when cut right back, and the work being done at Packwood is a good example of how any yew hedge or topiary can be renovated by hard pruning. It’s worth noting that the compacted clay soil here isn’t ideal for the yews, so access can be restricted in bad weather. But even if access to the yews is restricted, there are plenty of other curiosities to enjoy at Packwood. Keep an eye out for the traditional bee ‘skeps’ (woven hives) placed in arched recesses in one of the warm brick walls. A separate walled kitchen garden is
packed with vegetables grown for their colour as well as taste. The garden is also currently home to modern art installations including a huge four-poster bed made from felled oak, and the ‘InsideOutHouse’ cottage – a fairytale house made from reproduction Tudor furniture. These modern follies add another charismatic flourish to the garden, playing on its uncanny atmosphere and shifting sense of time and scale. Nothing is quite as it seems at Packwood. It’s authentically historic but also a modern 20th century creation, a theatre for playing out a dream of country life. It’s small and intimate for a National Trust garden, but has a majestic grandeur in its rich tapestries of plants and high walls. And its old yew trees can be daunting or playful, depending on how close you get. It’s a garden full of creativity and enchantment and one of the quirkiest yet loveliest places you can visit this summer.