Danesbury Fernery

Researching and Restoring the Danesbury Victorian Fernery

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Report of the BPS Visit – Saturday 20th July 2019

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The Danesbury volunteers welcomed our visitors from the East Anglia Group of the British Pteridological (Fern) Society led by Peter Blake.

As reported on 2nd July 2019 this was a return of the Autumn 2018 visit to Norwich which was hosted by Peter Blake and his colleagues.

A group of 12 members enjoyed being shown around the Danesbury Fernery. Peter Blake and Nick Lodge had seen the Fernery on 15th March 2018 and were very impressed with progress since then. As our BPS lead member responsible for the visit, Andrew welcomed the visitors to the site: Colin presented our ferns, Sarah presented the herbaceous beds, and Jenny presented the North Wild Flower Bank.

We were glad to receive many helpful comments and words of advice from the BPS members as they moved around the Fernery.

The Friends of the Danesbury Fernery (FODF) are benefiting in many ways from our association with the BPS East Anglian Regional Group who are very generous in their advice, their offering of plants, and personal donations.

After the visit we all enjoyed the splendid hospitality of lunch at Sarah’s house organised with the help of Hilary and Harry Ward and Anne and Andrew Beattie and others.

The Plantation – Norwich

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The following Report is written by Colin Adlam.

A group of us who visited the BPS East Anglia Group Indoor meeting in Norwich on 27th October 2018, took the opportunity to visit The Plantation in Norwich, which was very close to the BPS EA meeting place.  We believed there was a rustic bridge at The Plantation, and as the Danesbury Fernery is missing  one, thought we would take a look!

Priorities, and a cup of coffee.

The rain had held off all morning and our visit included a nice coffee stop on the way to Norwich at The Courtyard Restaurant. This was in the stable block of the one-time residence of Maharajah Duleep Singh the last Maharajah of the Sikh Empire, later sold by his executors to the Guinness family.

It’s a nice stopping place, and as we left, we heard they had opened a dedicated café. Oh well, next time!

The Plantation – our visit

“The garden was the creation of a local man, Henry Trevor (1819-1897), a successful and prosperous upholsterer and cabinet maker. In 1856 he took a long lease on a disused chalk quarry just  outside the city walls”. 

A 5 minute walk round the corner from Peter and Nick’s house we found The Plantation Garden approached through a driveway to The Plantation House.

The house is undergoing repairs possibly the result of sinkholes relating to chalk quarrying side-tunnels from the Plantation Garden site!. A gated entrance takes you to a reception area with a gazebo structure with information displays, and close to a greenhouse for The Plantation Garden Preservation Trust (PGPT).

Behind the gazebo you find two entrances to the main garden, one over the rustic bridge and one underneath. The planting was already interesting, with ferns, palms, bedding and shrubs a plenty.

The Bridge – too far?

We all had a look at the bridge from both above and below, but I think the consensus was disappointment. With a fairly wide span the bridge was, probably necessarily, quite heavily constructed of structural timber and steel. The only rustic element seemed to be the criss-cross decorative spars of the hand-rail. Hopefully we can come up with a more rustic feel for our much smaller bridge when time and funds allow that project to proceed.

 

Moving into the garden proper we were all mightily impressed. My description won’t do it justice so I recommend looking at their website 360 degree panorama.

The garden is a mix of formal lawns and beds with fanciful structures all around, in an approximation of a rectangle. The main end wall and the fountain centre grabbed our attention straight away. The fountain is a tall and fanciful gothic folly of three tiers in a circular pond.

The side wall, incidentally separating the garden from the house, climbs the quarry edge and is surmounted by a balustrade. As you get closer you realise the wall is no simple brick, stone or flint construction but is instead made up of what can only be described as Victorian building and church salvage. All very cleverly re-built to create patterns, alcoves and niches.

At the far end is the similarly fantastical wall with stairs and slopes up the face with even more elaborate decoration than the garden wall. You climb up three sets of stairs joined by three slopes before the final steps bring you to the rustic Summerhouse. There was once a path at this level back to The Plantation House, but sadly closed off currently and looking overgrown. I am sure the PGPT members have it in mind to open this up one day. More pictures can be found at: http://www.tournorfolk.co.uk/norwichplantationgarden.html

With time approaching the start of the BPS EA meeting we retreated, cajoling Sarah away from plants to identify, and wandered the short distance back to Nick and Peter’s house.

See the Report of the BPS East Anglia Group meeting.

 

Dewstow Hidden Gardens and Grottoes – Caerwent, Monmouthshire

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Dewstow House, near Caerwent, is not far from Chepstow in Monmouthshire, and one of the incredible things about this garden is that it was only discovered in 2000, after lying buried for nearly sixty years.1  

Anybody who has attended one of Claude Hitching’s Pulham Legacy Presentations will recall that he declares that Dewstow is the ‘jewel’ of all the sites he has ever looked at, and a quick glance at his wonderful book demonstrates that there cannot be many sites that he and Val Christman (descendant of the Pulham family) have not visited.

 

My wife and I visited Dewstow in July 2017 on our way from Hertfordshire to visit our son and his family who live in Cheltenham. A quick glance at any map will show that this was a considerable diversion, and it is worth noting that this is not an easy site to find and the location advice given on the website should be carefully studied before setting out.

I took some photos while we were there, and I have included just a few with this report. But aficionados are recommended to go to the Dewstow website to get a proper impression of just what this site has to offer visitors, not just on their first visit, but also on (irresistible) subsequent visits.

Driving to Dewstow down the M4 on a busy Friday is not to be recommended. We arrived mid-afternoon and had only two hours, which was just enough time, but in all truth nothing like enough time, to see everything that we should have looked for.

The astonishing Grade 1 listed garden has been found to be one of the most significant examples of Pulham’s landscape gardens.

While there are many examples of the Pulhams’ work in stately homes in the UK, Dewstow is unique in its scale and subterranean focus. 2

Because we were a little late we benefited from  a personal welcome from the proprietor John Harris and his staff in their Tea Room.  I explained our interest in Pulhamite and presented John with our Danesbury Fernery Leaflet, and explained how the Friends of Danesbury were recovering the Danesbury Fernery from underneath 24″ builders spoil. John showed us the Dewstow video which showed how their site was buried under tens of thousands of tons of soil, excavated and developed into the jewel that Claude Hitching rightly describes it. The scale of their enterprise is staggering.

But putting aside contrasts of scale, it was when my wife and I declared plaintively that at Danesbury we had no water on our site, John Harris proudly declared that Dewstow did not have water either! At the time we were gaping at a large, surface level, Lily Pond, having just passed a duck pond, a Waterfall and a subterranean set of underground tunnels with water channels, koi carp, caves, grottoes and ferneries.

John Harris went on to explain in his gentle way, that the Dewstow site was half way up a hill, miles away from the River Severn and with no natural springs to feed it. He explained that the Lily Pond was at the bottom of the run of their water features, and the rain water filled Lily Pond was pumped all the way back to the top where it started on its underground journey.

Even though I immediately dreamed of the opportunities for us to pump water around the Danesbury Fernery, I stopped short of a Lily Pond – we just do not have the space at Danesbury!

The ground level at Dewstow is indeed spectacular as their leaflet proclaims, but it is when we started to explore the subterranean network of (Pulham) rock gardens, water features and ornamental areas that our breath was taken away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Putting aside the magic of subterranean Pulhamite caves and grottoes and water features, the gardens were in full spring colour and it was quite easy to imagine how we might develop the gardens at Danesbury, even though on a vastly smaller scale. The team of gardeners at Dewstow had planted ferns, rock plants and perennials in herbaceous borders among Pulhamite stones and tufa rock (or so it seemed to me). There is no reason why we should not try to emulate that approach at Danesbury as we move forward.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We will visit Dewstow again, even though my son might wonder how it is that the journey from Hertfordshire to his home at Cheltenham seems to be taking us many hours longer that it used to.

1 Rock Landscapes, The Pulham Legacy, Claude Hitching, p.162

2 Dewstow Visitors Leaflet