A real pleasure

In the hands of English Heritage, the care and restoration of the striking mid-19th-century garden of Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire, is producing truly impressive results, writes Tiffany Daneff

- Tiffany Daneff

THE first thing that seizes the attention of the visitor to the 15 acres of gardens at Brodsworth Hall near Doncaster is the population of individual topiary pieces that line up along the left-hand side of the drive. Domes, pillars and mounds of a mixed selection of evergreens are clipped into an entertaining crowd of varied heights and girths against the calm dark backdrop of the seemingly endless yew boundary hedge. It is a scene you might expect to find in an Italian garden.

This impression is confirmed as one approaches the main south front of the house, an imposing white ashlar limestone building in the Italianate style of the mid-1860s. House and grounds are a perfect complement of Italianate green architecture and are linked by formal terraces with three staircases decorated by marble urns and recumbent—probably Italian—greyhounds acquired by the Italian sculptor Chevalier G. M. Casentini.

If this all feels rather unlikely in Yorkshire, that is because it reflects the taste of one man, Charles Sabine Augustus Thellusson, who came into an extraordinary inheritance in 1858 and devoted much of it to creating the hall and its gardens in his own personal style.

‘Today, he would be an oligarch,’ says Michael Klemperer, senior gardens advisor for the North and Midlands regions at English Heritage (EH), which now looks after house and gardens. ‘The money he received from the will was £700,000, which, with interest, equates to £140 million today.’ With the cash came the estate that had belonged to his great-grandfather Peter Thellusson, a Swiss financier, who had moved to London in 1760 and built up a fortune as a merchant and banker.