Famous English gardens visit: Topiary Garden at Levens Hall

Famous English gardens visit: Topiary Garden at Levens Hall

There is more to Levens Hall than its lauded ancient topiary garden, but that's still a wonderful place to start if you want to visit one of the famous English gardens.

Topiary Garden at Levens Hall is famous English gardens

A wedding cake with five toppling layers, a towering Welsh hat, an eccentric judge's wig, an open umbrella, an abstract lion, a lollipop, a cup without a handle and a saucer. These are some of the larger shapes in the topiary garden at Levens Hall in Cumbria, but at their feet are droves of lesser yet equally complex forms, standing about like the pieces in an obscure board game. As if this were not entertainment enough, the box-lined parterres between the topiary are packed with a succession of flowers throughout the year.

Here, the performance always begins with tulips, planted in magnificent blocks of single colours to create maximum impact. And summer could see some beds blazing with lemon-yellow snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus "Liberty Classic Yellow') and others with the deep purple flowers of Verbena rigida. 

Topiary Garden at Levens Hall

How topiary garden started

Levens Hall is especially famous for its topiary garden, but that is just one element in the wonderful garden, which was created in 1694 by Guillaume Beaumont lor Colonel James Grahme. Beyond the Topiary Garden, Beaumont took his proportions from the domestic scale of the mellow Elizabethan house. 

Levens Hall Topiary Garden plants

Nothing is very large, but the garden seems to unfold in an endless patchwork of vistas, rooms and less easily defined spaces, each with its own distinctive and individual atmosphere. First come the orchards: four handkerchief-sized grids of apples, quinces, medlars and plums, neatly divided by paths and punctuated at the centre by a circular space. Beaumont repealed this arrangement of quadrants around a circle again and again throughout the garden. The old fruit trees in the orchards are beautifully pruned, and in spring sheets of pillar-box red 'Apeldoorn' tulips surround the mossy trunks.

Topiary Garden at Levens Hall is one of the most famous English gardens 

Levens Hall garden is a good place for trees and hedges. Everywhere you look they are trained with an

attention that is almost Japanese in its intensity. If you visit Levens in autumn, you'll find head gardener Chris Crowder pruning the topiary, a job that keeps him and the other three gardeners on his team busy for a couple of months each year. Chris will often be found towering over the garden on a cherry picker, sculpting the generous contours of the topiary with electric clippers. But the topiary isn't the only thing that needs pruning at this time of year. The 300-year-old beech hedge at the centre of the garden must also be trimmed to a lustrous smoothness. The tracery of twigs inside it is as impressive as the fan vaulting of a cathedral.

There are only four full-time staff to manage the English garden's eight acres, and Chris takes a pragmatic and highly successful approach to the planting. In the double herbaceous borders, divided by a velvet ribbon of grass, he repeats the same plant combinations again and again, creating a rhythm and making each border

reflect the other. In mid-June, there are explosions afCrarnbe cordifolia teamed up with plants that include white Geranium phaeum, indigo delphiniums, white viola, slug-resistant Hosta sxeboldiana, day lilies, phlox and catmint.

Topiary Garden at Levens Hall

Chris keeps the colour going in the garden with annuals and tender perennials that he propagates in the impressive modern greenhouse. 'But I try to empty the glasshouse by the end of June,' he says, 'and then I let it bake for a month or two to purify it.' He calls his system 'gardening for maximum sensual impact and effect', and there can be no doubt that it works, both here and in the other impressive garden borders.

A plan made in 1750 still hangs in the great hall of the house. Compare it to the existing garden, where intimate rooms are divided by ancient hedges and tree-lined walks, and you realise Levens Hall is that rare and precious thing: a near-perfect surviving 17th-century garden.

 Levens' Hall garden survival history

Why do some of our historic gardens survive and others perish? Levens' Hall survival is no mystery, for the house has been sold only twice in its 900-year history: once in 1562; and again in 1689. And as those sales were in the family, they had virtually no impact on the garden.

More recently, we have the Bagor family to thank for the survival of this precious place. When Robin Bagol inherited Levens, he was only seven years old. When he finally moved into the house in 1946, it had been let for years and lived in during the Second World War by an order of nuns evacuated from Roehampton.

Although the topiary was clipped, the rest of the garden had been neglected or used to grow vegetables. Others were demolishing big houses at that time, but not the Bagots. They moved in with their small daughter

and baby, Hal. They took the family paintings and furniture out of storage and set about restoring the neglected house and garden, which were soon open to the public.

Hal and Susan Bagot look over at Levens in the mid-1970s. In 1986, they appointed Chris as head gardener. Traditionally, head gardeners work for 30 years at Levens Hall, and it looks as though Chris will be no exception. And why would he move on? Chris explains that the Bagots give him a wonderful degree

of freedom in the garden, on one condition: 'There must be no orange flowers or dahlias.'

Topiary Garden at Levens Hall in the spring

In 1994, the Bagots asked Chris lo design the Fountain Garden to mark the tercentenary of Beaumont's creation. Chris looked to the garden's 18th-century plan for inspiration, and found that, once again, Beaumont had used a circle and four cross axes in the original layout for this area. A fountain now fills the circular space at the centre of the new design, and the axes are made from tunnels of the red-twigged lime (Tilia platyphyllos). Chris describes this green space as 'a resting place, a momentary respite from the intense experience of the garden'.

Levens Hall topiary garden may be an important, historic garden, but thanks to the Bagot family and Chris, it's also an exciting and dynamic place, beautifully maintained and full of new ideas.

Levens Hall, topiary garden, Famous English gardens visit

Levens Hall, Kendal, Cumbria LA80PD The garden

is open 1 April to 11 Oct, Sun to Thurs, 10am-5pm.

Tel +44 (0)1539 560321. www.levenshall.co.uk

Topiary tips from Levens Hall 

URN THEIR KEEP

Levens has many paths, archways and tunnels that frame enticing vistas. The eye is often drawn To the far

end of these views by an object such as an urn, some of which are 19th-century originals.

GARDEN CHALLENGES

FLOODS: There is increasingly regular winter flooding at Levens, but, on the bright side, this supplies a fresh layer of enriching silt.

BLIGHT: Devastation from box blight has prompted a rethink of the garden with alternative plants.

BLOCK BY BLOCK

Head gardener Chris Crowder plants in single-colour blocks to create maximum impact

in the garden. He chooses his plants carefully, making sure they perform well for as

long as possible The purple Verbena rigida can be grown as a perennial, but Chris uses

it in the parterres like a bedding plant, and it produces a pretty, purple haze of

flowers from June to mid-October.

TOPIARY & PLANTING TIPS FROM HEAD GARDENER CHRIS

• To get a straight edge when you trim hedges, lay down a line out to the side of the
hedge and pull tight This gives you a straight reference to work to, without it being so
close that it's in danger of being pushed out of line by twigs or cut by the shears.

• Keep clippers or shears sharp and wet. Dip them in a bucket of water or use a hand
mister regularly to keep them running with water. This prevents the build up of gummy
green sap on the blade surfaces, and ensures the blades stay shiny, sharp and free moving.

• Reflect on the 'Rule of Rs' To plant for effect, reduce the colour palette. Reign back on
species used. Repeat plantings to give rhythm and regularity down borders. Reflect mirror
image plantings across pathways where possible.

• Mix annuals and tender perennials into borders for greater impact later into the season.

ALSO IN THE AREA

Chris recommends these nearby places if you're visiting:

• GARDEN Lowther Castle is being restored and makes for a fascinating visit.

Penrith, Cumbria CM0 2HG. Tel:+44 (0)1931 712192. vvww.lowthercastle.org

• PLACE TO STAY Barn Close B&B is Alasiair Sawday's recommended. Beetham

LA7 7ALTel: +44 (0)1539 563191. www.nwbirds.co.uk/bclndex.htm

• PLACE TO EAT The Strickland Arms, Sizergh, near Kendal, Cumbria LA8 8DZ.

Tel: +44(0)1539 561010. wwvv.ainscoughs.co.uk/Strickland-Arms

PHOTOGRAPHS ALEX RAMSAY WORDS HELENA ATTLEE