THE GOOD LIFE
At their Hampshire estate Cadland, the Drummond family have established a thriving kitchen garden. By Charlotte Brook
On the shores of the Solent, beside the ancient New Forest, Cadland is a haven of flora and fauna, nurtured by the Drummond family since 1772. Charlotte Brook meets the current mistress of the heavenly pastoral estate
When we speak, Fiona Drummond has just come in from the garden. There is earth under her fingernails, and her long brown hair is glamorously windswept. ‘The peach blossom has just come into the most perfect flower – a spray of intense, almost fake-looking pink,’ she says. ‘The trees are in the old greenhouses we’re restoring – along with the original 18th-century grapevines, white peaches and citrus-trees. There is this extraordinary stillness in there – if anything is wrong, that’s where I go.’
Under the watch of Fiona and her husband Aldred Drummond, a conservationist and property developer, these glasshouses are Hampshire’s longest, and among the most prolific. They are the jewels in the crown of Cadland, the estate bought by the Drummond family in 1772. Capability Brown was commissioned to create pleasure gardens, comprising a circular walk and several ‘belvederes’ offering spectacular vistas out to sea. The manor – which eventually grew to encompass 47 bedrooms and a stable block designed by John Soane – was acquired under the Defence of the Realm Act and demolished after World War II to make way for an oil refinery. But Brown’s landscape remains, along with a handsome summer house facing the sea, originally built, as Fiona puts it, as ‘a small, octagonal, Victorian beach hut’, albeit one with 11 bedrooms, which is now the family home.
Cadland’s 2,500 acres sit on the southernmost edge of England, metres from the shore of the shimmering Solent, and are flanked on the north side by the New Forest, where ponies and cows roam freely. With shingle beach, heathland, mud flats, salt-water marshes, ancient woodland and herbaceous borders, it’s a unique corner of Britain, home to windsurfers and woodsmen, peonies and porpoises.
At its heart is a series of walled gardens, which were barren shingle when Aldred and Fiona arrived as newlyweds 13 years ago. The pair have brought energy, imagination and an environmental focus to the task of running and revitalising Cadland. Fiona’s peripatetic childhood spent ‘pitching my tent in the Wadi Rum desert, travelling through India, moving to Egypt’ due to her father’s job as a director of Shell, along with her experience as an entrepreneur, running her childrenswear company Mini-la-mode, more than equipped her for the project, while Aldred, she tells me, is never without a penknife, builds campfires at the drop of a hat, and can identify any rare-breed British bird from a mile away.
Despite Fiona having no horticultural training, there are now bed upon resplendent bed of brassicas, berries and blooms. ‘I’m from a family who always make something from nothing – I’ve just been having a go and learning on the job, mostly from the amazing head gardener, Pete, who has been here for 30 years,’ Fiona says. ‘He can recognise every specimen. He’s my tutor – and is very patient!’
Evidently, they make a dream team: by high summer, the Cadland borders run riot with towers of sweet peas, cream roses, salmon-pink pom-pom chrysanthemums and dinner-plate dahlias the size of cabbages. ‘Because of my
upbringing abroad, I think I approach the garden in a slightly un-english way,’ Fiona reflects. ‘Although my style is broadly very soft, with an easy-on-the-eye palette, I also love tropical colours. I used to go looking for arum lilies in Indian markets with my mum – and I love gladioli, which are, or at least, were, very much not what a self-respecting Englishwoman should be growing.’
What started as a single vegetable patch has grown into a complete potager that fully feeds the family. In summer, lettuces, courgettes, gooseberries, blueberries, redcurrants and raspberries abound – in her first year, Fiona, with her mother and grandmother, planted so many strawberries that they then had what she calls ‘a galactic glut’ and had to spend the summer making coulis, jams and compotes galore. The family promptly set up a mini shop on-site where locals could buy these surplus preserves.
‘There’s no waste,’ Fiona says. ‘If the beetroot just keeps growing, we’ll have apple and beetroot soup for three days running. Luckily, the kids are now used to that.’ When the three Drummond children aren’t snacking on fistfuls of fresh peas, assisting with slug management or picking flowers, they’re building hen houses out of spare wood, keeping an eye on the duck-egg count, taking Popcorn the Shetland for a splash in the waves or scavenging for ‘treasure’ – be it plastic litter to tidy up or a washed-up sea anemone for a home-schooling biology lesson.
Indeed, it was the essence of the Drummond family’s lockdown summer last year – days spent swimming, tending to the bees, cooking Solent trout for supper on the beach – that Fiona is bringing to a wider audience this summer, with the opening of their first pop-up hotel, a mile from the house. Here, you can sleep under the stars in beautifully appointed yurts pitched in a clifftop wildflower meadow, from where a wooden staircase cuts straight down through the oak-trees to the sea at Calshot Beach. There will be sailing, cycling, ‘conservation kayaking’ trips down the creek, shell-seeking, tree-climbing…
‘In the evening, you can go twitching with a wicker basket, a pair of binoculars and a cocktail, and order something fresh and delicious, made with local ingredients, from the restaurant,’ Fiona says. ‘I don’t think it’s relevant to have this place, and the knowledge of how to grow, live and eat well, happily and sustainably, and not share it.’ www.cadland.co.uk