Chilworth Manor: An English Jewel

Hello, my name is John McRae-Brown. I'm the Head Gardener here at Chilworth Manor. On behalf of everyone here, I'd like to welcome you to what would have been our 12th year of opening for the NGS. Sadly, of course, we can't have visitors here, but we do hope that you enjoy our virtual tour and get some sense of the wonderful space and the tranquility of the gardens. Now, Chilworth Manor has been in one form or another in existence for nearly a thousand years now. We know that because it's originally recorded in the Doomsday Book as belonging to a Saxon gentleman by the name of Alwyn. Subsequently, of course, over the centuries there've been many other occupiers of the house, but there are a few notables that are worth mentioning. One is the cell of Augustinian monks who lived here from the 12th century onwards and had a cell or a monastery on the site, and the original stupons that belonged to the monastery are still in existence in the garden to this day. In the 17th century, the property was owned by a Randall family who managed the gunpowder mills on the Tillingbourne River below us in the valley, and it is they who built the wonderful front part of the house in the 1650s. In the 1720s, the property was acquired by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough, who some of you may know from the Oscar-winning film The Favourite, and she built the Queen Anne style rear part of the house that you will see festooned with wonderful wisteria floribunda. She's also largely responsible for the development of the spectacular terraced wall garden to the rear of the house. One of the great things about working in the garden has been the fact that it's developed over the years quite organically, which is to say that it's never really been laid out as according to any design plan or any kind of planting plan. However, the one exception to that is the Japanese garden behind me, which was introduced as a way to bring a different focal point, a different kind of structure and different type of planting into the garden. And as you can see, it's planted with a variety of very brightly coloured azaleas, with aces on the lawn, with roundly clipped enchianthus that produce their beautiful little white bell-shaped flowers in late spring and early summer, all topped off by a magnificent cloud-pruned white pine, Japanese white pine, which is I believe over 100 years old. Interestingly, the garden is built right next to what was one of the original monastic stew ponds from the 13th century, and the Japanese garden is quite nicely linked into the pond by these wonderful granite stepping stones. We're blessed in this garden also for having inherited a great woodland planting, both within the garden and in the field outside, and indeed up on the top of the ridge of the North Downs behind us. Of the various wonderful trees we have in the garden, one of the most notable is the redwood just on my left here. It's the coastal redwood, the Sequoia sempervirens, which was introduced to the country in about 1850, 1855, and ours has been variously dated to about 150 to 170 years old, which makes it one of the first seedlings to get planted here. It's a magnificent height of 40 metres, and I'm reliably informed that one of the biggest trees in the country is only at 47 metres, so we are a contender for one of the biggest in the country. Probably the most notable occupant of Chilworth Manor in recent history certainly, and for us the most resonant, was Lady Daphne Heald and her husband Sir Lionel, who lived here from 1946 until her death in 2004, just a couple of months short of her 100th birthday. As many of you will probably know, Lady Heald was the chairwoman of the National Garden for nearly 30 years, and amongst the great many charitable works that she did, she obviously opened the gardens. Now a focal point when she opened the gardens was this wonderful and dramatic herbaceous border behind me, three metres deep, that started here beneath the southern wall of the wall garden, around the corner, past the magnificent sprawling Judas tree, which is now full of beautiful flower, and up about three quarters of the length of the wall garden, 30-40 metres to the top, jam-packed with perennial planting. Now we've kept a section of her border in her memory and is now affectionately known as Lady Heald's border. Some of the planting within the border is original from the time, but we've obviously added to it and tried to recreate something of the spirit of the planting that Lady Heald would have had here. We've introduced some box topiary to give it a good structure in the winter when everything dies down. As you can see, there's a kind of eruption of alliums going on behind me, but we have a wonderful mixed planting of brightly coloured peonies, of phlox, of alchemilla mollus, of hellebore, of heuchera, all backed by the wonderful Wisteria floribunda draping the walls behind me. So here we are in the magnificent terraced wall garden that was developed by the Duchess of Marlborough in the early part of the 18th century. Of all the places in the garden, this is the real jewel of the crown in Chilworth Manor, but it's also the place where perhaps most of the intensive focus of planting and structure has taken place. Originally, many of the borders and the margins of the lawns were planted with very old decaying apple trees and pear trees, and a lot was overgrown. The impetus here was really to kind of open up the garden as much as possible to see more of its structure, more of the walls, and in an endeavour to do that, a lot of the fruit trees were taken out, either because they were too old or because they were then transplanted to an orchard area or down to the woodland garden itself. We introduced back into the garden smaller scale fruit trees, the quinces on either side. We've done a lot of planting work with box in the beds to give it a great structure in the winter. In fact, when everything dies down in the winter and the beds are cleared out, it has almost an Italianate feel with the box balls and the fastidious hue in the background as well, and it really shows off the structure of the garden magnificently. Thank you so much for taking part in this virtual tour, and hope to see you when it's possible to open the garden again. A recent addition to Chilworth Manor is the vineyard, established in 2013. To help raise money for the NGS charities at this difficult time, the vineyard and a matching donor will give £7 to the NGS for every bottle of our 2019 rosé sold to NGS supporters. For more details please see the NGS website.