Gardens Are Like People– Most Don't Age Well

When I was 18 and waiting to go up to the Varsity (as my grandmother called it), I hitchhiked out to Italy in search of all those new excitements that young men hope to experience. Culture, mainly, in my case—the girls were unassailable in those days. It was my first solo trip abroad and I fell deeply in love with Baroque churches, olive landscapes and classical gardens.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

I had a lightbulb moment when I visited Isola Bella, the garden island in Lake Maggiore tiered like a Spanish galleon. I sprinted up to the topmost terrace and looked down at the formal garden below. It had four box-edged parterres with a pool at the centre, a design that art historians call a ‘quincunx’. But the whole garden was framed by four vast yew-trees, still clipped to their original conical shape and now quite out of scale. What had begun as neat dwarf bushes had grown inexorably. Gardeners had pruned them year by year since 1680, but never quite hard enough. I stared and pondered. Those yews were magnificent—I was impressed by their longevity—but I realised in a flash that they were a living lesson in the importance of keeping a garden under control, in scale with the original vision.

This lesson was reinforced in about 1990, when Sir Roy Strong lobbied, very successfully, for the wholesale restoration of William III’s Privy Garden at Hampton Court. This required the vast old yew trees that had stood for nearly 300 years to be removed, so that the entire site could return to its original designs and plantings. The outcome was a triumph and I wondered whether the princely owners of Isola Bella would follow Sir Roy’s example. They didn’t.