Kellie Castle, Pittenweem, Fife
IN AN ARTICLE ABOUT A SCOTTISH HOUSE for Country Life, Lawrence Weaver remarked that “the English architectural critic, on crossing the Tweed, travels into what is almost a foreign land.”1 Nevertheless, Scotland was home to one of the most distinguished of all the Arts and Crafts architects, Robert Stodart Lorimer (1864–1929), whose houses and gardens were founded on a centuries-old tradition of Scots tower houses and their walled gardens. As with Edwin Lutyens, Lorimer’s architecture was championed in the pages of Country Life, and both architects shared a passion for materials and a romantic vision of a garden.2 With the exception of four of Lorimer’s houses in England, for which Gertrude Jekyll designed the gardens, the architect laid out the gardens for his commissions.3
In Scotland, attitudes toward domestic architecture were significantly different from those in England. Whereas the English house centered on the horizontality of the hall, in Scotland it was the verticality of the tower. Most of the significant castles in Scotland owe their origins to the late seventeenth century, from which Lorimer derived his own style. Garden traditions were also different from those in England, mainly because of the absence of the eighteenth-century landscape movement that obliterated many older English gardens. Because Scotland’s climate is varied—milder on the West Coast, which benefits from the Gulf Stream, and windy and damp on the East Coast, which faces the North Sea—Scottish gardens relied on enclosure walls and hedges for windbreaks. Kitchen gardens (with stoves inside the walls to help ripen fruit in a short growing season), topiary, and splendid examples of garden architecture were hallmarks of these gardens.
Gardening arts blossomed in Scotland in the seventeenth century, but little survives prior to that period that is the equal of England’s Hampton Court. Edzell Castle, perhaps the most romantic ruin in Scotland today, has one of the earliest extant gardens. Located near Forfar, on the East Coast, it was once a wealthy Scots laird’s house built in the early sixteenth century. The garden, dating from 1604, consists of a walled courtyard of approximately a half-acre, with a two-story summerhouse in one corner. Unusual rectangular recesses hollowed out in the walls are thought to resemble a heraldic fess chequé relating to the Lindsay family’s coat of arms. These recesses provide pockets for plants, and circular openings in the walls provide nesting areas for birds. Jekyll and Weaver commented that this was a device “worthy of adoption in modern walled gardens.”4 The magnificent enclosure walls also have bas-relief sculptural panels representing the planetary deities, the liberal arts, and cardinal virtues. In all, this paradise garden played a significant role in how Lorimer configured his gardens.
Lorimer was born in Edinburgh and educated at Edinburgh University (where his father was a law professor). After training with an architect in Edinburgh, Lorimer worked in G. F. Bodley’s London office for several years before returning home to establish his own practice. While in London, he discovered the Morris circle and was soon swept up in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Like Ernest Gimson and other craftsman-architects, Lorimer experimented with the allied arts, such as plasterwork and embroidery, and designed baronial-style furniture that was made by local craftsmen.
As his biographer Christopher Hussey noted, Lorimer had an extraordinary grasp of detail, a craftsman’s approach to architecture, and a deep understanding of Scottish traditional architecture. “He had a rare faculty of renewing the original character of an old building and yet changing it with his own personality,” Hussey observed.5 Until the 1920s, Lorimer designed a large number of Scottish country houses with outstanding decorative interiors executed locally.
Lorimer applied Reginald Blomfield’s call for formalism to the heritage of Scottish gardens, with its traditional layout, furnishings, and garden architecture freely modeled after the layout at Edzell Castle. Lorimer thought that a garden should be “in tune with the house . . . a sort of sanctuary . . . to wander in, to cherish, to dream through undisturbed . . . a little pleasaunce of the soul, by whose wicket the world can be shut.”6 His ideal garden was a walled enclosure, with “little gardens within the garden, the ‘month’s garden,’ the herb garden, the yew alley . . . the kitchen garden [with] great intersecting walks of shaven grass, . . . borders of brightest flowers backed by low espaliers hanging with shining apples.”7 Lorimer’s romantic vision is strikingly similar to William Morris’s at Red House.
Lorimer’s first foray into garden design came during his adolescent years at Kellie Castle, near Fife, where his family spent their summers. In 1878, Lorimer’s father rescued the desolate seventeenth-century tower house, then a roofless ruin in the middle of a turnip field. To celebrate the successful remodeling of the house, a Latin inscription was added over the entrance door that translates, “This mansion snatched from rooks and owls is dedicated to honest repose from labour.” When the Lorimer family arrived, only the bare outlines of the one-acre garden still existed; it was seriously overgrown and the walls were crumbling. “The garden [was] still encircled by a tumbledown wall,” wrote Robert’s youngest sister, Louise, “a wilderness of neglected gooseberry bushes, gnarled apple trees, and old world roses, which struggled through the weeds, summer after summer, with a sweet persistence.”8 The Lorimers set out to refurbish the garden, rebuilding walls and dividing the space into compartments, with a long grass walk and a circular center for an astrolabe with a ship on top. “It converted that part, overloaded with gooseberry bushes, into an orderly and stately place.”9 Robert designed two new enclosures, including a small garden enclosed by yew hedges with topiaries and a small garden house in the northeast corner of the garth, which took on the age and appearance of the castle with the use of old slates from a farm building.
It was Louise Lorimer, Robert’s mother, who was the most actively involved with the garden, planting and maintaining it for many years. Gertrude Jekyll’s account of Kellie Castle in Some English Gardens leaves no doubt that it was an exemplary garden of roses and companion plantings. “How the flowers grow in these northern gardens,” she exclaimed. “Here they must needs [sic] grow tall to be in scale with the high box edging [and] this is just the garden for the larger plants, [especially] single Hollyhocks in big free groups, and double Hollyhocks too.”10 Beginning in the early 1990s, the garden, now a property of the National Trust for Scotland, has been cultivated organically, with dozens of varieties of vegetables in addition to the garden flowers.11
One of the reasons Lorimer returned to Scotland in 1892 was that he had received his first commission to restore a ruinous late-sixteenth-century castle near Leuchars, in Fife, on the East Coast.12 Earlshall had been purchased the previous year by Robert Mackenzie, a family friend whose interest in the Arts and Crafts Movement led him to the young architect. Lorimer completely rehabilitated the dilapidated castle, adding ornate interiors with paneling carved with Morris-inspired floral patterns. He also added a two-story tool house adorned with carved stone monkeys on the roof in one corner of the garden enclosure as well as a new gate lodge.
Part of Lorimer’s charge was to create a garden that echoed the antiquity of the tower house. Little remained in the original enclosure, which was used for grazing livestock and surrounded by fourteen acres of parkland—a Robinsonian wild garden—that provided the ideal prelude to the garden he envisioned within the walls. “The natural park comes up to the walls of the house on the one side,” Lorimer wrote, “on the other you stroll out into the garden enclosed. . . . an intentional and deliberate piece of careful design, a place that is garnished and nurtured with the tenderest care [and that] marries with the demesne that lies beyond.”13 The new gateway in the wall includes the inscription: “Here shall ye see no enemy but winter and rough weather.”
A bird’s-eye view of the garden shows the garden enclosed. Along the entry drive and the long grass ride that runs parallel to the west boundary wall of the enclosure, Lorimer planted a double allée of pleached lime trees. For the enclosure itself, he divided the space into five compartments, each defined by clipped holly or yew hedges. The northern section was allocated to a four-square fruit and vegetable garden, with espaliered fruit trees on the walls, wide grass walks in the center, and a line of lime trees on the eastern boundary. The southern section was divided into an orchard and bowling green or croquet lawn. A cross-axial grass walk leading to a semicircular stone arbor in the eastern wall was enclosed by high arched hedges, with ten battlemented yew alcoves filled with roses, azaleas, and fuchsias.
The main feature of the garden is the extraordinary topiary pleasaunce, positioned between the vegetable garden and the yew walk. Planted in four diagonal crosses, it was designed to be viewed from the house. To give the topiary garden a well-established appearance, Lorimer specified yews from an abandoned Edinburgh garden that were then clipped into cake stands, birds, and other traditional topiary forms.14 The fanciful garden exuded the old-world appearance of a seventeenth-century Scottish garden, providing a worthy complement to the old house. Thus, in his first commission, Lorimer brought the tradition of old Scottish gardens back to life, and in so doing had invented a style that made his name. Earlshall represents the most enchanting, and successful, of his gardens, encapsulating all that he valued in the concept of house and garden enclosed.
Wales, separated from England by the River Severn and a boundary line meandering from Chepstow to Chester, abounds in historic parks and gardens, although most are well-kept secrets. Bodnant, Powis Castle, Erddig, and Plas Newydd are some of the better known gardens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but hidden among the hills and vales are some remarkable examples from the Arts and Crafts era.15 In addition to Charles Edward Mallows’s Craig-y-Parc and Thomas Mawson’s Dyffryn near Cardiff, there are several by the architectural writer and editor H. Avray Tipping in Monmouthshire and the visionary architect Clough Williams-Ellis in North Wales.
Henry Avray Tipping (1855–1933) adopted Wales for his country homes. A man of independent means with a first in modern history from Oxford, Tipping was a connoisseur of architecture and antiques. He was also a passionate and knowledgeable gardener, having been given his first garden when he was seven years old. Most unusually for a historian, he was the author of a book about practical gardening, based on his newspaper columns. Tipping’s reputation rests primarily on hundreds of definitive articles he wrote about houses for Country Life, beginning around 1907. Christopher Hussey observed that “Tipping brought to the writing of the articles an historical knowledge and an insistence on accuracy that gave them a new authoritativeness.”16 In addition to setting a standard for Country Life, Tipping compiled numerous books, including the multivolume In English Homes, English Homes, Gardens Old and New (with John Leyland), and one of his most popular publications, English Gardens.
Tipping’s obsession with architecture and gardens played out in a succession of country homes, each of which reflected his unerring eye for design and his ability to capture a mood. When queried about the excessive costs incurred for one of them, he retorted, “You see, I do not care to keep race-horses or dancing ladies. I prefer to spend my money on walls.”17 Although he maintained a London residence, like Country Life editor Edward Hudson, who also had a succession of homes, Tipping yearned for the country, where he could immerse himself in architectural minutiae and gardens.
Tipping’s first major home in Wales was Mathern Palace, a medieval residence in ruinous condition that had once belonged to the Bishops of Llandaff. He bought Mathern in 1894, and after carefully restoring it commented that despite the grandeur of its name, his only aim had been to create “a quiet home where the simple life may be led.”18 Unlike an architect, Tipping used a light hand in the restoration, repairing what could be saved without interfering with “the patina of age.”19 The flat site and the old farmyard enclosures provided an ideal setting for a new garden to complement the picturesque old house. Within the ancient walls he laid out a series of enclosures, with a bowling green, yew hedges, grass walks, and topiaries clipped into forms of foxes, cocks, and pheasants. “Topiary work is rather like a drink,” he wrote. “Against it there are ardent prohibitionists such as William Robinson [and] outbursts of intoxicated license.” He recommended the middle course of “moderate indulgence.”20 On the more sloping portion of the site, Tipping created informal rock and water gardens. In all, it was an enchanting garden, reflecting a distillation of the theories of Robinson and Jekyll.
Tipping soon became restless for another challenge, which he found nearby at Mounton House, where he began developing a naturalistic woodland garden in the steep valley and limestone gorge around 1900. A young Chepstow architect, Eric Carwardine Francis (1887–1976), a pupil of Guy Dawber and assistant to Detmar Blow, designed the house perched high on the cliff, with views of the Bristol Channel and the Mendip Hills. Together they created formal terraces around the house rivaling those at Deanery Garden in ingenuity and visual appeal. Near the house he made a long bowling green, and in another area, a reflecting pool and pergola with massive piers smothered with climbing roses and wisteria. There were more elaborate plantings in the surrounding paved gardens. To the west of the house lay the precipitous descent into the stream garden below.21
In 1922, Francis designed High Glanau on a site chosen for its spectacular views over Gwent. “The lie of the land,” Tipping wrote, “happily suggested a dovetailing instead of a rigid boundary between the wild and the formal.”22 His design enabled the viewer to look down from the house and its formal terraces to a lily pool at the bottom of the steps or out at the view. “There is nothing really wild at Glanau,” Tipping wrote. “There are woodlands . . . more or less left to native vegetation, more or less swept and garnished. It is gardening, but with nature kept in the forefront of set purpose.”23
Luscious double herbaceous borders (or ribbon parterres), which have recently been restored by the present owners, connect the simple, low gabled house with a shelter that leads to a greenhouse beyond the wall. A second axis leads from the stone terrace, down several flights of steps, to the octagonal lily pool. The house and garden today, which look very much like the Country Life photographs of the 1920s, is a fine testament to Tipping’s garden planning skills.
Wyndcliffe Court in Monmouthshire, built by Francis in 1922 for Charles Clay, is another example of a Tipping garden that remains largely unchanged today. The modest house, sited on a bluff overlooking the Severn estuary, is complemented by gardens that represent the impeccable planning principles of the Arts and Crafts tradition.24 The terraces, bowling green, topiary, and sunken water garden dip deeply into Tipping’s favorite vocabulary. In the topiary terrace just below the house, a semicircular pool tucked beneath the wall is reminiscent of those designed by Lutyens for Hestercombe and Deanery Garden. The bowling green on the next level down features spirals of hand-clipped yew topiaries, and a few steps below is Tipping’s sunken garden, with a central pool and surrounding borders that take a cue from the pool at Hampton Court. A nicely detailed two-story summerhouse in the far corner of the sunken garden draws the eye to the distant landscape. Wyndcliffe Court is remarkable for its cozy, domestic scale, encapsulating Tipping’s vision of house and garden totally dovetailed.
Clough Williams-Ellis (1883–1978) was one of the last great architects to take up the cause of the Arts and Crafts Movement. An artist by nature, he had a lifelong curiosity about architecture and boundless energy. After Trinity College in Cambridge, he trained briefly at the Architectural Association in London in 1902, but his family was skeptical of his choice of career, for architecture was thought of “as a gentlemanly hobby for the well-to-do [and] little better than plumbing as a career.”25 In particular, he was fascinated by rural cottages and old-time building methods. Like many Arts and Crafts architects, he had a fondness for regional materials, in particular the rough stone of his homeland in Wales.26 In the Arts and Crafts tradition, he produced many beautiful watercolor perspectives and renderings for his projects, although many were lost in a fire in 1951.27
In 1906 he set up an office in London, where he designed model cottages and small residences in various architectural styles and remodeled old houses; after World War I, he branched out into other areas, including village design. In addition to architecture, Williams-Ellis had a lifelong passion for land conservation and preservation of the rural environment in Wales, where his family had their roots. In a curious book entitled England and the Octopus (1928), he wrote about urban sprawl (the octopus) encroaching on the rural countryside.28 During his long lifetime, he developed many important friendships among architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright, who visited Williams-Ellis in 1956 on his only visit to his ancestral country.
Some of his better known residential projects include a remodeling of Llangoed Hall in Powys (now a country house hotel) and Oare House in Wiltshire, for which he designed some delightful garden benches that are illustrated in Jekyll and Hussey’s Garden Ornament, with the comment, “they are strong and simple, yet full of amusing life,” which sums up Williams-Ellis’s approach to architecture.29 In 1937, he restored Cornwell village in Oxfordshire for an American client, Mrs. Anthony Gillson, who gave him carte blanche in the nine-acre garden at Cornwell Manor as well. With the exception of his own home in Wales, this is probably one of his most complete surviving gardens. He linked the village and the old manor house with a watercourse that meanders through the village and becomes more formalized in the house grounds, widening into several pools and a long canal. He also extended the view of the house from the public road through a line of trees in the park opposite. On the terrace near the house, a small garden with clipped Portuguese laurels and a fiddler statue in the center add a note of formality in contrast to the rock and bog gardens surrounding the lower watercourse.
Williams-Ellis’s most lasting contribution, where all of his diverse ideas coalesced, was the creation of Portmeirion, a model village built on the coast of Snowdonia between 1926 and 1976. Plas Brondanw, Williams-Ellis’s home nearby, has one of the best-preserved Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain, one that reinforces the critical relationship of house, garden, and surrounding landscape. As Hussey noted, “[It] is at Brondanw, much better than at Portmeirion, its fantastic off-shoot, that we can see the original fundamental Clough.”30 When he was twenty-five years old, and in his “antiquarian phase,” Williams-Ellis received Plas Brondanw as a gift from his family. The gray stone house, dating from the seventeenth century, had long been abandoned. Over the next decades, he poured his energy and income into rehabilitating the old house and creating a garden on the steeply falling ground. Beginning in 1908, he used the local bluish-purple stone to build walls and terraces around the house and added a gate lodge and orangery around 1914. Plas Brondanw was substantially rebuilt in 1951 after a fire destroyed the home and most of Williams-Ellis’s records.
The garden is ingenious for its control in providing vistas to the Snowdonia mountain range, notably Cnicht peak. Two main axes, a walkway to the northeast that terminates in the belvedere roundel overlooking Cnicht, and the other to the Apollo belvedere overlooking the quarry pool, are lined with green hedges or topiary, with little emphasis on flowers that would detract from the panoramic views. The flower garden, filled primarily with blue hydrangeas and blue-green hostas, is hidden behind the hedged compartments. A cross-axis in the yew garden looks to a carefully framed view of Moel Hebog in the distance. Delicate iron gates and stair railings are painted a special blue-green that sizzles against the green lawn. An oblong fountain pool with a statue of a fireboy by sculptor Gertrude Knoblock, benches, clipped topiaries, arched hedges, Italian cypresses, and statuary accentuate the strongly architectural layout.31 Like the homes of other proponents of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Williams-Ellis’s Plas Brondanw provides the best expression of his individuality.
