Lost, but not forgotten

The garden of Knowle House, East Sussex George Dillistone's original Arts-and-Crafts design has been lovingly restored and updated with contemporary planting, discovers George Plumptre

- George Plumptre

GARDEN restorations often reveal unexpected stories and surprises. This has certainly been the case for Mr and Mrs Mansfield at Knowle House, just outside a picturesque village in East Sussex, who acquired most of the house in 2017 and immediately began to learn about Knowle's complicated, but intriguing past. During their painstaking and exemplary work—in house and garden—they have found family stories that bring to life the past of their home.

Perhaps most relevant for this article, they discovered the involvement of a distinguished, but little-known garden designer and plants-man of the mid 20th century, George Dillistone. He is so little known, indeed, that he does not even feature in British Gardeners, a Biographical Dictionary, compiled by Miles Hadfield and others in 1980. This notwithstanding, in 1927, Dillistone was preferred to the renowned Gertrude Jekyll for the planting at Castle Drogo in Devon (built by Jekyll's regular partner, Edwin Lutyens). He also wrote one of the most popular gardening books of the interwar years, published in 1920, to which he gave the endearing title The Planning & Planting of Little Gardens.

Dillistone was commissioned to work at Knowle in the late 1920s by then owners Joseph and Gladys Benskin and it is with them that the story of the garden today really begins. Joseph's family-owned Benskins brewery; Gladys was the heiress of her father's fortune made in South America. Knowle came to her from her first husband, Raymond Hamilton-Grace, whose family had been at Knowle since 1833. Raymond was killed in action in 1915 and Gladys married Benskin in 1919.