Broughton Grange
Beset by the dog days of August
22 August 2023
By: James Lennox
It is a truth universally acknowledged that any fool can make a garden look good in June. Dear Reader, I am just such a fool and I have first-hand experience.
The trick is to keep the show on the road for more than just one month of the year. Two options present themselves: either deploy skilful successional planting to make the same area fresh and interesting for as long as humanly possible (some of the very best borders manage to keep popping from May to September without breaking a sweat), or bounce the focus around the garden, highlighting different areas in different months.
At Broughton Grange, all involved seem happy to let June burst out all over and then spend the rest of the year basking in the Instagram glow of that one glorious month. And it does indeed photograph well, perhaps too well, as there’s a definite disconnect between my experience of the garden and what a talented photographer manages to produce. Don’t get me wrong: there are clearly good things going on here, they’re just not happening in August.
Let’s start, as visitors are encouraged to do, with the Walled Garden. Designed by Tom Stuart-Smith and now around 20 years old, this is the section of Broughton Grange that garners the most column inches, on the whole generous and gushingly complimentary.
There’s talk of it being a brave step forwards, breaking away from the stultifying, lingering effect of the Arts and Crafts tradition in the English garden. A new style of planting (heavy on currently fashionable perennials and grasses) meets topiary and formal hard landscaping.
References have even been made to the clipped Irish yews evoking the Rückenfigur, the loner seen from behind gazing into the landscape beyond. Think Caspar David Friedrich but substitute gothic mountains and ravines for rolling Oxfordshire acres. (No, I’m not convinced either.)
There’s no denying the Walled Garden is a clever exercise in deconstructing a tradition. Two walls instead of four; views out into the landscape; fruit and veg relegated to one end of the top terrace (a conceit too far, perhaps, in an already crowded corner); a severe square pool instead of the conventional round dipping pond; steps between the three levels emphasising that this isn’t designed as a space for gardeners to push barrow loads of produce around: all conspire to create a slightly disorienting feel, as if the world has been turned on its side, if not quite upside down. (Contributing to the unsettling effect is the decision to label all the plants, a boon to the reviewer, but jarring in an essentially private garden filled with naturalistic planting.)
On the top terrace, the columnar yews stand either side of a channel of water, crossed on a stepping stone along a narrow serpentine path. Again, a literal twist on a theme. Unfortunately, come August, the Mediterranean-style planting that flows beautifully in June photos now looks like a bleached brown mess, a collapsed souffle of geranium and campanula seedheads. Yes, the insects, etc., but when you’ve got an 80 acre wildflower meadow-cum-arboretum right next door, perhaps the secateurs should be judiciously put into action.
The middle terrace struck me as more successful, the pool providing an essential breathing space in an otherwise densely planted (some might say, overplanted) garden. Late season colour is provided by Echinacea ‘White Swan’ and ‘Magnus’, Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’ and ‘Rubinzwerg’, Eupatorium maculatum, Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ and Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’, among others. Setting the flowers off nicely are drifts of grasses, such as Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ and Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Transparent’. All good stuff.
Which is more than can be said for the bottom terrace. A postmodern take on Victorian carpet bedding, low hedging (originally box, now euonymus) is set out in a swirling pattern to replicate the cell structure of oak and beech leaves: science on show bringing new life to the parterre tradition. Bright and cheery tender annuals and decorative vegetables (purple millet a winner) certainly catch the eye.
So do the gaping holes and the rampant weeds. Updating a tradition, even poking fun at one, can be a worthy endeavour. If only Victorian standards of maintenance had been upheld. Rather than filling me with confidence for the future, I was left with a nostalgic longing for the days when, as soon as flowers started going over and were whipped out, any gaps in parterres and borders would have been filled tout de suite.
Perhaps, again, all efforts are directed towards that June rush. Perhaps the gardeners are allowed to take their foot off the pedal later in the summer when the owner heads off to the Alps. Perhaps they were simply distracted by the need to mow the lawns and clip the extensive hedges. Perhaps I was just irritated by the simultaneous use of every noise-producing machine at the staff’s disposal on the one day of the week when the garden is open to the public. Perhaps I should just get over my long-held conviction that borders and hedges happen to look better without bindweed straggling through them.
What of the rest of the garden? Well, there are good reasons why less ink has been spilled in the gardening press on the areas beyond the Walled Garden. There are signs that the garden was developed in stages, lacking in coherence, flow and inspiration. The Long Borders were gappy; annual tobacco plants were doing all the heavy lifting in the Rose Garden (another June highlight, no doubt); and no attempt had been made either to incorporate the swimming pool and tennis court into the wider garden landscape, or hide them from view.
The new Fountain Garden is problematic to say the least. It’s an attempt to create a vista all the way from the entrance to the Walled Garden in one direction and from the house in another, and to serve as a rond-point leading to other sections. Unfortunately, the fountain has just been placed directly onto grass, thus diminishing its presence somewhat and, as the ground naturally slopes downwards, levelling that slope results in one side of the fountain hanging above a new, even steeper embankment.
It all looks somewhat unbalanced, whereas the new planting around the fountain is plain unhinged. Monkey puzzles (Araucaria araucana) underplanted with heathers in Oxfordshire, anyone?
Which just leaves the Woodland and the Arboretum. The former is a success story, gently spilling down the slope, with new Japanese maples to complement the more established planting, winding paths and some quirky sculptures.
The nascent Arboretum, a vast expanse best appreciated from the Walled Garden, has huge potential. Trees are grouped in threes, presumably to increase the impact in the shorter term before thinning. Everything from crab apples to dawn redwoods seems to have found a place, a comprehensive collection, if a little early to judge the success of the layout. Wildflowers are allowed to run riot beneath, again at their best in June. I just worry that, in places, the grass and flowers might be encroaching a little too lustily on the smaller trees. And last summer’s prolonged drought can’t have been helpful either in giving the newcomers a welcome start.
As it should, the Walled Garden grabs all the attention, but, in my view, could be so much better for longer with a slightly different management approach. Is there too much going on in a relatively small space? Could more restraint be exercised? Is it perhaps a demonstration of the exuberance of youth on the designer’s part?
The remainder of the garden is the very definition of a mixed bag. There are happy incidents, but the whole fails to hang together convincingly. Would I visit again? Possibly, but only in June, as I must surely be missing something of the magic of the Walled Garden that so many have raved about. But, as our country cousins in the swamps of Louisiana would say, in the month of August, the juice just ain’t worth the squeeze.
More information here: https://www.broughtongrange.com/
