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

- Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

Cressy Hall, Gosberton, Lincolnshire The home of Michael and Janey Hill

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.