BUILT by a young Edwin Lutyens for garden designer Gertrude Jekyll in 1896-97, Munstead Wood at Busbridge, near Godalming in the Surrey Hills AONB, was the first of more than 100 major collaborations between Lutyens and Jekyll that have graced the pages of COUNTRY LIFE since the magazine's founder, Edward Hudson, visited in 1899.
For sale for the first time in more than 50 years at a guide price of $5.25 million through Knight Frank, Grade I-listed Munstead Wood, with its trademark long roofs, dormers, tall ornamental chimneys, and 'Surrey-style' Arts and-Crafts interior, is widely regarded as one of Lutyens's most important country houses. Its just over 11 acres of gardens, originally laid out by Jekyll and restored in the 1990s, are independently listed Grade I in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The sale is being handled by Tim Harriss of Knight Frank's Guildford office (01483 617910) and Julia Meadowcroft of the firm's country department (020-7861 5390).
Historically, the site occupied by Munstead Wood was part of the former open common of Munstead Heath, a typical south Surrey landscape described by Jekyll as 'this country with its great tracts of wood and heathland, beautiful wild ground and soil of bright yellow sand and rock'. In 1878, she moved with her mother to their newly built Munstead House at Busbridge and, four years later, in 1882, acquired the roughly 15 acres of Munstead Wood that lay across the road.
The transformation from pine woods and rough heathland to famous woodland garden took place over many years, during which Jekyll allowed felled woodland to grow, as well as thinning the young trees create areas of different varieties, each with its own under-plantings of flowers and shrubs. The resulting woodland garden was viewed via a series of long walks. Later, the woods would merge gradually into lawns near the house, with seasonal gardens flowering in succession through the year.
この記事は Country Life UK の July 20, 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の July 20, 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.