Building on history: The gardens at Benington Lordship, Stevenage, Hertfordshire

Kathryn Bradley-Hole describes how to take on a renowned garden and make it work for a new generation

- Kathryn Bradley-Hole

IT lies well within the commuter belt, yet Benington Lordship sits in lovely country, seemingly deeply rural and timeless. The estate is very old indeed, traceable back to Saxon times. Today, an 18thcentury brick house and its gardens occupy the site of what had been a classic Norman motte-and-bailey castle. In a rather special way, traces of that fortification erupt here and there, as the pared-down remains of stout, flint walls set above a deep, dry moat, lying immediately east and south of the house.

Down the centuries, Benington Lordship was occupied by various well-connected families through periods of expanding and declining fortune. In the early 1830s, during one of its expansive phases, the substantial house was enhanced with the addition of faux-medieval follies, an early work by the famous Pulham Brothers, whose rockwork and patented composite fake stone launched a family business that achieved enormous popularity throughout the Victorian period. The work at Benington (COUNTRY LIFE, February 13, 2019) emphasises—and picturesquely enhances—the estate’s connections with its former Norman grandeur.

It all provides a romantic backdrop for the gardens, the present form of which was laid out as long ago as 1905, by one Arthur Bott, a Staffordshire engineer who bought the property after a career building railways in India. His wife, Lilian, is credited with its refinements of planting in the Edwardian taste and her watercolours of various garden views, painted in the 1920s, show topiarised hedging, an elegant iron gateway leading to the walled garden and a spring border lit up by the clustered, orange bells of crown imperial fritillaries. Since those days, the gardens have enjoyed continued renown; they were among the first to open for the National Garden Scheme in 1927 and several generations of Botts have been involved.