Lutyens and Jekyll: The Perfect Partnership of Garden Design and Architecture

In July 1892, Teddy married Constance Mary Vesey (1854-1951), widow of Capt. the Hon. Eustace Vesey of the 9th Lancers. Two years later the young couple moved from St. Giles, Dorset, to take up residence at Hestercombe and continued the programme of domestic and agricultural improvements begun by the 1st Viscount twenty years earlier. Although confronted by ‘a very bad house architecturally’, Lutyens believed ‘the gardens might be lovely’ and presented his terms: ‘I want £10,000 to start my garden on. He [E.W.B. Portman] talks of £1000!! So today will prove - what strength her [Constance Portman’s] influence is. She is for the £10000!!’

On returning to his office at 29 Bloomsbury Square, London, the following day, Lutyens set about transferring his ideas for the exciting new project onto paper. The result was the Formal Garden; a clever arrangement of interconnecting garden rooms carefully terraced into the south-facing slope below the Victorian terrace and embellished by locally quarried stone.

On 11 October 1902 (p.276), the editors of the Gardener’s Chronicle announced the arrival of a new Head Gardener at Hestercombe in their 'Gardening Appointments’:

MR A. (ALBERT) HUBBARD, late Foreman at Blenheim Palace Gardens, as Head Gardener to the Hon. E. W. B. Portman, Hestercombe, Taunton, and entered upon his duties on the 1st inst.

Accompanied by his family, 36-year-old Albert Hubbard arrived in Taunton on the 1st of October 1902 and by all accounts settled well into his new post. However, his greatest challenge at Hestercombe, the planting of a new flower garden by Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens, was not to arise for another two years.

When Miss Jekyll designed the planting scheme for the Hestercombe Formal Garden she made two copies of each border plan, retaining one and sending the second (on oiled paper) to E.W.B. Portman’s Head Gardener, Mr. A. Hubbard. To this day her original planting plans for thirteen of the Formal Garden’s seventeen component areas survive. The exceptions are the Rotunda Terrace, Rose Garden, Pergola, and West Walk.

One of the first large scale garden conservation projects in the country, the five-year restoration of the Formal Garden, was undertaken 1973-77 by Somerset County Council with full Fire Brigade support (they were resident at Hestercombe 1954-2006) and in partnership the Somerset College of Agriculture and Horticulture at Cannington (replanting) and the Crown Estate Commissioners (stonework & pergola repair). The project was prefaced by three years of detailed research which located, amongst other documents, some of Gertrude Jekyll’s original planting plans which had been removed for safekeeping from a potting shed at Hestercombe by the last Portman Head Gardener, Andy Thomas.

Many of the plants that Gertrude Jekyll specified for her garden commissions came from her own nursery at Munstead Wood, Godalming, Surrey, which by 1890 comprised over 300 hardy plants for the border, shrubbery and rock-garden. In March and April of 1905, Jekyll sent along the remainder of the plants for the Great Plat, East & West Rills and Grey Walk at Hestercombe.

Head Gardener, Albert Hubbard, who worked closely with Lutyens that summer – ‘Did such a lot of work today arranging planting-etc’ (Edwin Lutyens to Lady Emily, 31st July 1905) – also had to contend with the usual rural challenges. In Lutyens’ words: ‘No rat has been seen - but the rabbits are hard at it Eating the fig trees - which must be stopped.’ The Canal, Pergola, Orangery borders and East & South Walks were not planted by Hubbard and his team until February of 1907, followed in March by the just completed Dutch Garden.

At the time of his death on 27th April 1911, aged 54, E.W.B. Portman employed over sixty people on the Hestercombe estate, including at least eleven gardeners, most of whom were young and unmarried. Henry Britton (28), Charles York (26), Charles Jones (25), Frank Juson (22), John Wadham (19) and Charles Dyer (19) were housed in the Gardener's Lodge, later the Bothy, a simple five-room structure situated alongside the walled kitchen garden that is still in situ to the south of the Formal Garden (albeit with a modern extension).

‘Garden Lads’ Jack Roy (17) and James Cording (15) lived with their families in nearby Upper Cheddon, Albert Shaw (31) occupied a ‘tied house’ (estate cottage) opposite the Cheddon Fitzpaine village church, and William Tucker (22) lived at Park Gate with his uncle, Henry Tucker (39), the caretaker of the Reading Room. The Head Gardener, Mr. Albert Hubbard resided in the more comfortable six-room Gardener’s Cottage (c. 1896), now ‘Kirklands’, located below the Formal Garden and just east of the walled Kitchen Garden on what was then known as Hestercombe Road.

By early December 1904, Albert Hubbard’s foreman, Mr. Cook, had received plant material for the North Plat Wall & Border of the Formal Garden. The following spring Hubbard received a letter from Miss Jekyll, asking him if he still wanted calla lilies (Zantedeschia aetheopica) for the Rills and also indicating which plants – mainly shrubs - she could not supply from her Munstead Wood Nursery. As a consequence, Hubbard was forced to canvass various nurseries for the likes of Buddleja globosa (Dutch Garden), Clematis 'Jackmanii' (Grey Walk), Gladiolus brenchlyensis & ‘Childsii’ (Plat Inner Beds), Lilium candidum (West Rill, Orangery), Magnolia grandiflora ‘Exmouth’ (East Walk, South Walk), and Ceanothus ‘Gloire de Versailles’ (East Walk, South Walk, West Rill). In all over 30 shrubs and perennials had to be found, possibly from such well-established local suppliers as Veitch of Exeter (est. c.1808) and Kelways of Langport (est. 1851).

Albert Hubbard and his staff were also asked to grow quantities of the annuals Miss Jekyll insisted on for edging, colour and fill, for example the Ageratum mexicanum and Trachelium caeruleum that would eventually adorn the Dutch Garden.

Among the most noteworthy features of the Formal Garden at Hestercombe is the 225-foot-long [68.2 m] pergola that spans the Garden’s southern boundary. Reminiscent of the wood and stone version that Lutyens designed for Ernest Blackburn at Little Thakeham, Sussex, in 1902, the structure is fashioned from 20 sets of alternately round and square stone piers linked together by substantial oak beams (on the ground waiting to be installed in this image) that are in turn overlaid with oak stringers.

In 1907, the Pergola was richly planted by Jekyll who employed rambler and cluster roses, occasionally interspersed with jasmines, vines, and woodbines, thus ensuring that beauty and utility were partnered with ‘presence and solidity’. The ‘solidity’ was not intended to be absolute, however. The gaps between the well planted piers lend a semi-transparent quality to the Garden boundary, admitting fine views of the Somerset countryside and adding to the apparent extent of this highly ordered space.