Perfect Symmetry

After seven decades caring for the gardens of Bramdean House, Victoria Wakefield has refined her autumn planting to breathtaking effect

- Jodie Jones

At the western edge of the pretty Hampshire village that shares its name, Bramdean House has had several centuries to settle into the farmland that rolls away from it on all sides. Built in the 18th century and extended in the 19th, by the mid 20th century, when Victoria Wakefield’s parents bought the house, it was suffering from the lack of labour that came with the Second World War.

‘There were the remnants of a good Edwardian garden, but it was all terribly rundown,’ says Victoria. ‘My mother did an excellent job with not much help, but we were plagued by troublesome weeds.’

After Victoria married, in 1973, she took up residence in the house with her husband and son, and assumed full responsibility for the garden. ‘I had been deeply devoted to the garden since childhood. My sister and I were given little patches of our own to cultivate and my grandmother, who was very keen on wildflowers, was always most encouraging,’ she says.

Consequently, Victoria had no hesitation about where to start. ‘The predominant feature of the gardens has always been the double herbaceous borders that run gently uphill away from the house, but they were in such a state that the only sensible course of action was to dig them up and start again.’

The resultant mirror borders have become a renowned feature of Bramdean, drawing the admiration of the visitors to the gardens when they open as part of the National Garden Scheme.