A BLOSSOMING FAMILY TREE
For the past century, three generations of women have made Gloucestershire’s Kiftsgate Court Gardens a site of verdant beauty.
How three generations of women shaped an English Eden in Gloucestershire
It is really lovely, Kiftsgate – a dream of a garden,’ wrote Vita Sackvillewest to its creator Heather Muir, in 1956. Praise indeed from one of the 20th century’s most influential horticulturalists. Celebrating its centenary this year, Kiftsgate is a landscape of rare invention, with bold planting schemes and dramatic changes of pace and aspect. There is also a wonderful sense of continuity: it has been in the same family for a century, with Heather, her daughter Diany Binny and now her granddaughter Anne Chambers gardening in turn.
Heather and her husband Jack Muir, who were second cousins, came from a Glasgow family that had made a fortune in tea trading. They bought Kiftsgate Court in 1919, attracted by its position on the Cotswold escarpment, looking towards Bredon Hill and the Malverns, and by the opportunity to make a garden from scratch.
Despite having no training, Heather was an intuitive plantswoman with an eye for colour. She spent large sums
on rare plants, introduced structural yew hedging to protect tender specimens, and replaced lawn with beds of hardy perennials, roses and floriferous shrubs in shades of lilac and blue. As she worked, new discoveries poured in from plant-hunters in the Far East and elsewhere; with her nextdoor neighbour, Lawrence Johnston – the owner and designer of Hidcote – she made joint orders of unusual peonies from Japan that took six months to arrive by ship.
Heather was no slave to fashion: in her Yellow Border, for instance, she daringly combined sulphurous yellows with bronze foliage plants, blue delphiniums, and red and gold acers. Her pure White Sunk Garden, planted with Rosa ‘Pax’ and fragrant philadelphus, pre-dated Sackville-west’s at Sissinghurst by 20 years. Most significantly, Heather terraced the sheer 100-foot banks that drop theatrically away
from the elevated plateau on which the house stands. Influenced by winters spent on the French Riviera, she planted the dry slopes beneath the Monterey pines with drought-loving flowering shrubs – many of which are still there.
Perhaps Heather’s greatest legacy to Kiftsgate, however, came from a happy accident. In 1938, she bought a creamy-white flower variety, mistakenly believing it to be a rambling moschata rose. It was correctly identified and officially named Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’ in 1951 by the rose expert Graham Stuart Thomas, a National Trust advisor and close friend of the family. Now famous, this vigorous rose soars up into a 60-foot beech, and is believed to be the largest of its kind in England.
The wartime diaries of Diany Binny, the second of the Muirs’ three daughters, indicate a burgeoning interest in the garden. But it wasn’t until 1954, when her mother began to struggle with its maintenance, that Diany decided to leave London for Kiftsgate. Money became an issue after she separated from her husband in 1974. Diany moved to the front lodge, and even contemplated removing Kiftsgate’s roof, writing: ‘How exciting to have a grand ruin complete with a Palladian portico… the Kiftsgate rose would seize its chance to overpower all around and make it the ramparts of a Sleeping Beauty Palace.’
Working in the flower beds was a source of solace for Diany after her acrimonious divorce. ‘I spend many happy and contented hours gardening on my own,’ she wrote, ‘stopping now and then to relax with a cigarella.’ Self-taught and rejecting conventional manuals, she filled notebooks with ideas for projects such as the half-moon swimming pool that she created below the house, which is as decorative as it is functional. She transformed the plateau from an ‘unpromising situation of a dirty grass slope facing north’ by filling it with grey-leafed plants that thrived in the drought of 1976, and commissioned statues from the sculptor Simon Verity, including a seated woman fashioned from gravestones.
Diany’s elder daughter, Anne Chambers, now lives and gardens at Kiftsgate with her husband Johnny, moving there full-time in 1988 to work closely with her mother. ‘Mummy was a great help,’ recalls Anne. ‘She taught me to prune, but was never possessive, although it must have been quite hard for her sometimes.’
There were occasional clashes. The new residents introduced tulips, which Diany despised; when her daughter wasn’t looking, she would cut off the flowers. On the other hand, Anne has always taken a particular interest in tending the white beds, which had been one of her mother’s favourite projects.
One significant recent innovation has been Anne’s decision to turn her grandmother’s yew-enclosed lawn-tennis court into an architectural pond, with a swaying sculpture of 24 gilded bronze philodendron leaves at one end. She has also used the spoil from the pool to make the Mound, a modern belvedere rimmed by an informal hedge of white and pinky-purple rugosa roses. From there an avenue of tulip-trees, planted in 2007, leads to a 20-foot-high stainlesssteel Islamic-style sculpture.
Today, with the help of two full-time gardeners, the Chambers constantly seek out unusual species, which they plant carefully, respecting Kiftsgate’s long history. The family has had to become much more businesslike: the garden is now open for six months of the year, has a tearoom and sells home-grown plants, including the eponymous rose, all of which provide important income. The grounds evolve with the season: in high summer, once the bluebells that carpet the woods have been and gone, fragrant roses overwhelm the Four Squares and the borders, while the slopes of the Banks are resinous with the pines and vegetation of the Mediterranean. Later, asters, sedums and astilbes will give autumn colour.
The Chambers’ two sons and daughter are now in their thirties, the age by which their mother and grandmother had taken on this fertile ground. Robert, the eldest, has begun planting a border along the drive, which suggests that the fourth-generation custodian may be a man rather than a woman. He, or whoever else inherits the Kiftsgate mantle, will have the privilege and challenge of sustaining and enhancing one of England’s most dynamic gardens. ‘Kiftsgate Court Gardens: Three Generations of Women Gardeners’ by Vanessa Berridge (£40, Merrell Publishers) is out now; the gardens (www.kiftsgate.co.uk) are open up to five days a week until 30 September.