A dream fulfilled at last

The gardens of Mounton House, Chepstow, Monmouthshire Henry Avray Tipping’s masterwork, into which he poured his vast inheritance, would have gone the way of so many Edwardian gardens had it not been for its new owners, who had the brilliant idea of asking the designer Arne Maynard to bring it back to life. Helena Gerrish tells the story

- Helena Gerrish

WHEN Henry Avray Tipping, the influential COUNTRY LIFE Architectural Editor, created a new country house for himself at the end of the Edwardian era, he was determined that the surrounding gardens should not be a mere setting, but an equally important part of the project. Indeed, a significant section of the gardens pre-dated the idea of the house. Once Tipping had chosen the Chepstow area for his weekend escape from London, he initially restored Mathern Palace and lived there with his mother from 1897 until her death in 1911.

To give his guests a change from the rather dull levels along the Severn Estuary, he developed a water garden nearby in a dramatic limestone gorge, where the Mounton Brook emerged from the Welsh hills. It was quite a feat of engineering, involving the demolition of a number of ruined paper mills and cottages, the purchase of a miniature railway to cut a new channel for the stream and the conversion of the resultant spoil heaps into garden features. Two of the abandoned cottages were restored, one for a gardener and one, with a large living room and fireplace, for friends to enjoy a picnic.

In due course, the article ‘A water garden in the natural style’ appeared in COUNTRY LIFE (September 1, 1910), in which Tipping described the landscape work and paid particular attention to the plantings, having become by that time a knowledgeable plantsman under the influence of his friends William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. He used deciduous trees and tall perennials close to the gorge, lower plants on the rocky piles and lush, large-leaved species along the stream edge.