A manor house at the edge of a stone village, its garden laid out as a sequence of hedged and walled rooms with a long border, a plat, a pergola and walks out into the fields; a plausible place modelled on Hidcote and on the gardens of Lutyens and Jekyll, not a survey of any.
Around 1890 English gardeners turned against the bedding of the Victorian park and the open lawns of the landscape park alike. William Robinson asked for hardy plants allowed to grow as they would; Reginald Blomfield, an architect, asked for the garden to be designed with the house and in its lines, divided by walls and hedges. Gertrude Jekyll, a painter before her eyes failed, joined the two: her borders were planted in drifts of colour graded from cool to hot and back, inside the walls and on the terraces that Edwin Lutyens built for her, at Hestercombe, Deanery Garden and many more.
At Hidcote in Gloucestershire, from 1907, Lawrence Johnston made the garden into a sequence of rooms: hedged enclosures opening one into the next on axes, each with its own character, a white garden with topiary birds, a pool garden, a long walk between hornbeams, a stilt garden, and a wild garden along a stream. Here the house stands on a terrace above a sunk plat with rills and a double border, rooms of yew lie to the east, the stilt garden and the white garden beyond, and a long walk runs south between hornbeams to a gate on the fields.
The kitchen garden and orchard are walled and hedged next to the house, a stream garden in the old style of Robinson runs below them, and the village, with its stone cottages, church and the manor’s barn, lies along the lane to the north. The flowers in the cottage gardens were the ones the garden makers had learnt from.