Sense and sensibilities

Knoyle Place, East Knoyle, Wiltshire The home of the Comtesse de La Morinière | The more you look, says Charles Quest-Ritson, the more there is to admire in this magnificent garden, which has been subtly and beautifully enhanced in recent decades

- Charles Quest-Ritson

THE village of East Knoyle sits on a slope of greens and above the Blackmore Vale near Shaftesbury. Its villagers are proud of its most famous inhabitant, Sir Christopher Wren, whose father was the rector of the parish when the future architect of St Paul’s was born in 1632. Attached to the Georgian façade of the elegant rectory that we see today is an older building and it is there that Christopher lived as a child, although a fire shortly before his birth that destroyed part of the building meant he was actually born in a nearby cottage. When he was eight, his father, by then Dean of Windsor, moved his family to join him in Berkshire.

The rectory was sold off by the Salisbury Diocese in 1935 and, in due course, became known as Knoyle Place. In 1992, it was bought by Comte and Comtesse Hervé Le Bault de La Morinière and, together, they developed a magnificent garden until Hervé died prematurely last December. The de La Morinières have always given credit, however, to their predecessors, notably Sir Guy Fison, who owned the house until 1964, and Sir John Eden (later Lord Eden of Winton), who was MP for West Bournemouth and a nephew of Sir Anthony Eden. Eden was a keen dendrologist and many of the finer trees in the garden, especially in the woodland, date from his ownership. It was he who planted the immensely tall double cherry (Prunus avium  ‘Plena’) on the edge of the woodland garden, whereas the Fisons planted the stately row of magnolias and many of the rhododendrons on the hillside behind the house.