By Harold, he’s got it
AFTER 30 years researching the work and life of the great Edwardian garden designer Harold Peto (1854–1933), gardener and garden historian Graeme Moore seems to have finally struck gold. It was back in 1983 that he first saw Peto’s notebook, a handsome blue folio album with Garden Designs embossed on the spine. The book is kept at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Centre in Washington DC, US, where Moore was doing a summer fellowship. He pored over this treasure trove of more than 270 photographs and postcards of gardens, garden architecture, statues and ornaments with cuttings from journals—including plenty from COUNTRY Life—wonderful penand-ink sketch studies and designs on scraps of paper that he either pasted in or left loose.
All were eventually linked to specific sites, but the places shown in four tracing-paper sketches (folios 63v, 64, 64v and 65) eluded him. Two of the drawings showed four groups of plants in a lawn and two showed the section and plan of a water garden, but stare at them as he might, he could find no clues as to which garden this was. The first breakthrough came when Dumbarton Oaks decided to digitise the album (now online) enabling Mr Moore to study it at his leisure. The Eureka moment came, however, on one of his many visits to Peto’s home, Iford Manor, near Bath. Wandering through the garden, it suddenly dawned on him that the huge conifer he was looking at, Chamaecyparis lawsoniana Wisselii, could well be the plant shown in one sketch as a tiny low-growing plant marked ‘Wis[?]elii’, now fully grown. The puzzle finally fell into place, enabling Mr Moore to match the beds in the drawings to those in the Rock Garden below the Great Terrace at Iford and the Spring Garden. Further work suggests the drawings were made in 1904 and the planting established when the garden was photographed for COUNTRY LIFE in 1907. TD