THERE have been gardens and pleasure grounds at Miserden in the Cotswolds for nearly four centuries. The 3,000-acre estate —including the handsome, late-17th-century gabled manor house that looks down over its own richly wooded parkland in the Golden Valley—has been in the family since 1913. It is now run by Nicholas Wills, who, after reading agriculture at Newcastle University and serving for a decade with the Coldstream Guards, took over from his father, Maj Tom Wills, in 2016.
‘Every aspect of the estate has been up for review,’ says Nicholas. As well as continuing to energise the farm and the mostly familyowned village of Miserden, he has had to think carefully about the direction of the garden. His long-term goal is to ‘create a lifetime plan of things I would like to do and to slowly implement it over my time here. I don’t want to ruin the atmosphere of the garden, but, at the same time, I feel it’s got to adapt and change’.
When his great-grandparents arrived here, they began laying out the 11-acre garden in the fashionable Arts-and-Crafts style of the day, creating outdoor rooms divided by stone steps and yew hedges and adding a glorious range of greenhouses to the extensive kitchen garden.
After a substantial house fire in 1919, Edwin Lutyens was invited to redesign the east wing, adding an elegant loggia with arched bays (based on the Villa Medici in Fiesole, near Florence in Tuscany), which leads out onto the spacious terrace.
Lutyens became a frequent visitor to Miserden, designing the village war memorial, among other elements, and it was almost definitely his idea to shape the now maturing 100-yard double hedge of yew so that it echoes the rounded openings of the loggia.
Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 18, 2019-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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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.
