Picture perfect
IT has been a busy yet productive few months since leaf fall at Iford Manor. The priority over my first winter here was to embed good systems and ways of working, but I was also very keen to look at the woody backbone of the garden, particularly the hanging woodland behind the house, and to use the opportunity of the dormant period to carry out some muchneeded pruning.
I looked in broad terms—where light and shadow falls, where we have solid mass and where there are voids—but I also scrutinised the detail, the individual plantings and individual specimens to identify where too much growth has obscured the original vision of Harold Peto, the Edwardian designer and architect who once lived here.
Meandering paths lead from the formal garden at Iford up the steep limestone slopes that form the hanging woodland of towering beech. Principally planted by the Gaisfords, who owned Iford from 1777, the woods were intended to offer far-reaching views through sudden clearings and glades, but have become very overgrown.
My focus was two-fold: firstly, to re-open the occluded vistas, both within the garden and out from the garden to the landscape beyond; and, secondly, through a programme of pruning of mostly self-sown box and other evergreen shrubs to create halos of light allowing space for new tree plantings to be made.
Vistas that reached beyond the garden boundaries to distant focal points decorating the landscape were important features in gardens and landscape parks of this period. Not only do they offer a view to a series of ‘pictures’ as one perambulates the garden, but they act as a device to deceive the eye, affording an extension or a prolongation of the garden. The concept of the borrowed landscape, or the art of shakkei as it is called in Japan, is an important element at Iford. Views were designed to slice through the woodland from the ridge to the valley floor 100ft below or, through the framing of beech trunks, to focus on distant cedar trees beyond the garden.
At Iford, the shrubby layer colonising the steep slopes under the beech consists mainly of our native evergreens, including box, holly and yew in tandem with introduced Prunus laurocerasus, the cherry laurel. They have all encroached on views and threaten to overwhelm Peto’s ornamental plantings of Japanese maples, although none so much as the cherry laurel, the outstretched limbs of which reach far beyond its demesne.
All the plants within this shrub layer can be hard pruned, even coppiced—that is, cut to ground every few years with high probability of regrowth. This approach is quick, apart from the removal of the prunings, and can be a useful technique. To aid our management, I have mapped out the entire hillside, indicating which plants and in which year we shall coppice. I plan to coppice cherry laurel every 12 years, but will leave a longer interval before pruning the holly and yew. (One must coppice enough plants each year to make a difference, but not so much to leave the hillside denuded of cover.)
Elsewhere at Iford, we are planting cherry trees as part of the Sakura Cherry Tree Project. This is an initiative launched in 2017 to mark 150 years of friendship between Japan and Britain and the continued co-operation between our nations. By the end of this year, the hope is to plant more than 5,000 cherry trees throughout the UK.
Peto travelled to Japan in 1898, one year before he bought and moved to Iford. Here, he installed his idea of an Oriental or Japanese garden, complete with pagoda, three-step pond and an enormous boulder, which he christened Mount Fuji. Although this garden is different in tone, atmosphere and planting palette from the rest of the garden, Peto was a master of transition and, now, the Japanese garden sits comfortably at the heart of Iford. For many, it is their favourite part of the entire site.
Peto’s Oriental garden has, for nearly 40 years, been tweaked and improved by John Hignett, who came here in 1979 after he married Elizabeth Cartwright, who, in 1965, bought Iford from Peto’s nephew Michael Peto. One of Mr Hignett’s notable achievements was finding water in a nearby spring and channelling it into the Japanese garden, where it falls over rocks into the pool. He continues to live at Iford and has done much to rescue and save Peto’s original masterpiece.
It seems fitting, therefore, that we are part of the Sakura Project and are planting 33 cherries (11 each of Prunus ‘Tai-haku’, Prunus ‘Beni-yutaka’ and Prunus x yedoensis) just beyond the Japanese garden, where the boughs of an existing great white cherry reach out into the orchard and are studded with blossom throughout April and May.
Next week Nasturtiums
The woods were intended to offer farreaching views