After opening our garden to the public for twenty years we have at last produced a small illustrated souvenir booklet that can be bought for a fiver. The house is a little more than a hundred years old, and having occupied it for about a fifth of that time, we are well placed to record its garden’s development, especially as its early years were still within the recall of several elderly locals when we arrived.
Bryan’s Ground is named after the field on which it stands – disappointing news for visitors who fancy it might be a Monty Python outpost. The truth is livelier: the eponymous Bryan – one Bryan de Scrob (spelt variously) – was a Marcher lord who, reputedly, stomped along this part of England’s border with Wales in the 12th century and whose name is linked to several other places within a pernach’s thrust of our main gate.
BG, to use our shorthand, was built in the Arts and Crafts style between 1911 and 1913 for two spinster sisters, Elizabeth and Mary Durning Holt, daughters of Robert Durning Holt, a Liverpool cotton broker and that city’s first lord mayor who, in 1865, married Lawrencina (Lallie) Potter. One of Lallie’s younger sisters, Beatrice, married Sidney Webb (later Lord Passfield) in 1892 and together, eight years earlier, they had co-founded the Fabian Society with George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells; they were also co-founders of the London School of Economics a decade later and creators in 1913 of the weekly New Statesman magazine. Not surprisingly, leading political and cultural figures of the day came to BG, including George Bernard Shaw and David Lloyd George (prime minister in the 1916-22 coalition), friends of the Webbs who frequently rented a fishing cottage along the river or took rooms at the Radnorshire Arms in our local town, Presteigne.
BG’s architect graced it with a three-acre formal garden comprising several of the period’s signature components: a Lutyensesque ‘sunken garden’ with circular pond (GBS is known to have admired the water lilies), nascent yew and box topiary, a rose pergola, an orchard and the obligatory country-house tennis court. The three-quarter-acre kitchen garden provided copious fruit and veg and a large greenhouse cosseted bright young bedding plants for summer displays. We have since further divided up the garden, creating twenty different colour-themed ‘rooms’, added follies and installed seven more ponds.
At midnight on 31 December 1999 the adjoining four-acre donkey paddock was the setting for our celebratory bonfire; on the following afternoon, after raking over the cold ashes, I planted the first sapling (Acer davidii) of a new arboretum, home now to more than a thousand ornamental trees and shrubs. We call it Cricket Wood, commemorating June days in the 1950s when it was mown for the annual village cricket match.
The garden and Cricket Wood are on level ground, which means that while time passes at a terrifying rate, we can still propel ourselves around with great ease. A decent yearly rainfall keeps our rich loam sufficiently moist, while its acidity (around 6.5 pH) ensures optimum fertility for the kind of plants we favour. Best of all, it keeps blue hydrangeas blue.
Our physical powers may be waning but our creative energies remain robust. Any slacking is soon remedied by reference to our garden motto carved in slate on the kitchen garden wall: ‘In delay there lies no plenty’, as true today as it was for Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night fool.
Bryan’s Ground, Stapleton (near Presteigne), Herefordshire LD8 2LP, is open in 2016 on Sunday and Monday afternoons until 15th August.
