Shear brilliance
So fine is this topiary collection, one might think it dates back to the 18th century, yet it has been created over the past 20 years by a former antique dealer with little interest in gardening, reveals Todd Longstaffe-gowan
IT is remarkable these days to come across an extraordinary garden that has not been splashed across the pages of the garden press. Even more so when it rises like a luxuriant oasis on the otherwise flat, watery and largely treeless landscape of the fens of South Holland in Lincolnshire. The nine-acre pleasure grounds of Cressy Hall, nestled in a dense woodland plantation on the north-eastern skirts of the village of Gosberton, have miraculously remained a well-kept secret. Although it is full of surprises, with lime allées and eye-catchers, the garden’s crowning glory is its display of geometric topiaries.
It was not always thus. When Michael Hill and his wife, artist Janey Hill, acquired the property in 1990, its late-georgian house sat isolated amid the open fields of the fenlands.
Cressy Hall is an unusually refined house for the area, with its fine brickwork and flanking pavilions, but the grounds were, in the Hills’ own words, in ‘poor condition’ and ‘quite boring’, and the views over the encompassing arable fields and dykes ‘unremarkable’. The early-medieval and 17th-century houses that preceded the present dwelling, however, appear to have had quite ambitious ornamental gardens, of which traces survived, including ancient earthworks, the remains of a medieval moat, a late-17th-century water garden, a stretch of decayed garden wall and a ha-ha. These relict features would provide the Hills with a useful framework.
He has always liked topiary, but Mr Hill is, by his own admission, neither a gardener, nor terribly interested in horticulture. His achievements at Cressy, however, reveal that he is an imaginative designer, an accomplished topiarian and a patient improver.
Born in Fiji and educated in England, he exudes, like his topiary charges, a whiff of exoticism in this quiet and very rural corner. Mr Hill began his working life as an antique dealer, but later switched to producing and selling high-quality reproduction Victorian cast-iron garden furniture. Indeed, one of the incentives to reform the family’s Gosberton garden was to press it into service as a showpiece where he could display his productions. Things did not, however, go according to plan; despite successful exhibitions at the Chelsea Flower Show and the extension of invitations to potential and existing customers to visit his premises, only very few ever