What 330 Year Old Topiary Looks Like - This Garden Is CRAZY

Levens Hall is home to one of the most spectacular gardens in the country. Not only can you find the world's oldest topiary garden within its grounds, with some of the box and new pieces within it dating back to the 17th century, Britain's first ever garden ha ha can also be found here. With so much to discover, join us and Head Gardener Chris Crowder as we explore the entirety of this unique space. I'm Chris Crowder, I'm the Head Gardener at Levens Hall and I've been here for 37 years as Head Gardener now. It changed hands, the house, in the 1680s and the new owner, Colonel Graham, brought a French garden designer to lay out the gardens and those are the same gardens we walk around today. They're not a restoration, they're not a recreation, this is just a garden that has been put together then and has evolved through time. The garden here at Levens is about eight acres in extent and there actually is another couple of hundred acres of parkland, Deer Park with a river running through it and the entrance drive. The garden was laid out back in the 1690s. There was a huge craze at that time for topiary and we're looking at this particular area of the garden, what's ended up as the best, the oldest, the most extensive topiary garden in the world. This garden is over 300 years old and it's had a clip every year by myself and my predecessors for the past 330 it is now and it's getting a little fussy around the edges. It's all tightly clipped, sharp as anything over the winter and then it grows throughout the summer and we're set to getting it back in trim from September 1st every year. We work our way slowly around all these shapes. It takes a couple of months just to go through the main topiary area. So here in the topiary garden, the centre of it, these are box. The big ones are yew and we've got golden yew amongst them and there's over 100 different shapes and they're all quite a size now. Even these box pieces, they were planted in the 1820s so that makes them 200 years old, clipped every year. The topiary pieces, the big ones, the yew they're 330 this year. One or two have picked up names over the years. This one's Queen Elizabeth and the grouping around her are Maids of Honour in box. We've got a couple of pyramids, Top Hats, that one's a gardener's called Homer Simpson a few years ago and that seems to be a name that's stuck and there's one over there, Darth Vader, again a name that's stuck for our time but they they're all really old shapes that have got bigger and bigger and at 300 years old, well you think that's quite old for a tree, any tree that would be, but yew actually can live to a couple of thousand years old. One of the plants we're most after in the garden is the Tropiolum speciosum, the Scottish flame flower and it's cool enough and damp enough usually here to make it thrive. It's got little turquoise berries afterwards. The part of the topiary garden is about an acre, 100 different shapes with thousands of bedding plants underneath. We grow 15,000 bedding plants twice a year for this area. Beyond that we have orchard areas, we have double herbaceous borders, we have a bowling green, grey borders, we have wildflower borders for the bees and the pollinators. We also have a pool with a fountain, a formal area there with leech limes around it and lime tunnels. This area we've called Fountain Garden. The water lilies have gone amazingly well in the last five years in a way that they didn't for the first 20 or 30. The variety is Gladstoneana and it's a lovely one. Around the outside these are limes, so they're not the tropical fruit limes, these are the same tree as in the woods over there, the big lime trees, but here we've kept them trained as leafy screens and leafy tunnels. Pop out through this direction into our herb garden. Up the pyramids we've got golden hops and then around if you look in the borders we've got all the usual suspects for a herb garden. We've got all the mints, the thymes, the marjorams, the sages and everywhere around about we've got growing over the paths and indeed over the seats as the season goes on, the variegated nasturtiums. You can use the leaves of nasturtiums in salad, they're very nice and you can actually eat the flowers as well, they make a way in flower at the moment to the roses that come in and out. This is the apothecary's rose, that's why it's in the herb garden. It's the red rose of Lancaster, though we may find its colour not quite red, but in medieval times the colour red wasn't quite as set a thing as we have it as nowadays. Just flowers once in summer but it's covered with flowers. It's called the apothecary's rose because the petals used to be harvested and dried and it was grown in vast acreages in medieval times and exported to all the herbalists and apothecaries around. There's a bit of a cure for everything I suppose. Particularly at this time of year we see the rose garden is in full bloom, it's mid-summer. So here we've got the rose garden, these are David Austin's English roses, so they're old-fashioned look, old-fashioned fabulous scent to each rose, but there's a mixed planting and they're just about their peak at this time of the year. But it's also another interesting area because not only do we have some of the old Tokyo pieces here, but we have some of the new ones that I've planted in my time, that where I've seen space to add to the collection, I've done like every head gardener in their time. The other big highlight just for this month are the double herbaceous borders, pastel borders. We've got cranberries and cephalarias and big herbaceous plants down through there and then on to the red borders where we've got red roses, we've got cannas, strantias, all sorts through there as well. We call these the pastel borders, we've got double herbaceous borders here. These we plant up with a colour scheme of yellows, blues, whites, pinks, that sort of thing. These are cephalarias, cephalaria gigantea, the bees love it as you can see, that's a giant yellow scabious. The white flowers, the clouds are white at the back, they're cranberries, cordifolia. We've got a strantias, the viola cornuta doing very well at the bottom and hostas and stuff like that. And then we pop out onto our reds and purple borders. This is an extension of that main run through the garden, east and west and the roses are Rosa rugosa, Rosary dullahay. We've got persicarias here, cannas at the back. Those are acanitums, geraniums, stachys from Macranthur at the bottom. This main axis leads out across the harhar. This harhar was the first harhar in Britain and it caught on in a big way in the 1700s when everybody had landscape parks near the houses. The most rewarding aspect attending to the garden is that sense of history and continuity. Obviously I've been here a long time and I've been involved with growing plants and adding even to this historic display of topiary, but it's the sense of history in this garden. So we see ourselves just as part of that progression and moving forward it'll be somebody else's garden, but hopefully that continuity continues. I hope as the years progress the garden carries on in the same sense, in a way, in a sense of freedom that it has for the last 300 years, that sense of being able to enjoy the garden and plant what's right for the vision of people at the time. Because it does change over time, it changes over the decades, what we appreciate and what we see in the plants within this setting. So I hope there's that sense of freedom as well as continuity going forward. To find out more about Leavens Hall head over to the link in the description. Make sure to subscribe to Horticulture Magazine for more British garden talks. Thanks for watching!