We reap what he sowed

Trespassing into an overgrown garden set botanical illustrator Miles Hadfield on a quest for horticultural conservation. Today, many of our most magnificent grounds owe their survival to his efforts, finds Katherine Cole

- Katherine Cole

IT was an otherwise ordinary day in 1962 when, following a tip-off from a local newspaper article, botanical illustrator and writer Miles Hadfield found himself beside a main road, peering through delicate, iron-grilled clairvoyé set into an old brick wall. Stone pineapples topped the supporting columns. It was, he later noted, ‘an unusual lay-by’. Entering and passing through the rampant willow herb, he could see ‘distorted yews’ and ‘a gem of a pavilion’. Together with Gilbert Harrison of the National Trust, Hadfield had just broken into the derelict gardens of Westbury Court in Gloucestershire.

The Victorian house had been demolished, as were so many others in the 1950s, but the garden was a rare surviving example of the Dutch style dating from about 1700. Thanks to the two men’s illicit entry, by 1969 the Trust had purchased the site and restoration was underway. As the Conservation Plan of 2004 notes, Westbury Court was ‘the first attempt at a scholarly restoration of a garden in this country. It was a pioneering project’.

Hadfield was called upon to advise on the historically accurate planting of the garden. The files hint at disagreements in this area, but, eventually, an academic approach insisting upon the use of plants of the period, rather than more modern and colourful varieties, was agreed upon and, in 1974, Hadfield could write that Westbury Court ‘has, thanks to the Trust, become once more a garden of delight’.