A garden restored

At his home at Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, Robert Stayner Holford created one of the finest gardens of the Victorian era. Following a major restoration, this little-known gem is once again turning heads, finds Natasha Goodfellow

- Natasha Goodfellow

AMONGST the celebrated country seats in the west of England Westonbirt... takes rank with such places as Chatsworth and Trentham.’ So wrote William Goldring, assistant editor of The Garden in the issue of February 20, 1886, of the estate that, by then, had been owned by Robert Stayner Holford, one of the richest men in Britain, for nearly 50 years. In 3,500 words, Goldring sets out his reasoning, admiring the garden’s harmonious design with its many ‘vistas, glades and nooks’, marvelling at the lake, the rockery and the formal Italian garden and waxing lyrical over the 30-plus glasshouses filled with a profusion of orchids, azaleas, amaryllis and winter pelargoniums.

But his greatest admiration was reserved for the trees—Holford’s passion and a collecting area into which he funnelled quite as much money as his famous collection of Old Masters and medieval manuscripts. Goldring lauds their Picturesque positioning, influenced by artist and landscape designer William Sawrey Gilpin. He praises the mix of deciduous and evergreen species and declares the Japanese maples ‘the glory of the place, from the bursting of the buds till the leaves drop in autumn dyed with the most glowing hues’. The garden collection alone is, he writes ‘one of the richest in the kingdom… Any new introduction in the way of a tree or a shrub at all likely to be hardy finds its way here’.