Spring-fed genius

The garden at Selehurst, West Sussex The home of Mr and Mrs Michael Prideaux The streams that trickle through this woodland valley in the Sussex Weald have enabled the planting of thousands of different trees and flowering shrubs

- Charles Quest-Ritson

MICHAEL and Sue Prideaux bought Selehurst from Robin Loder in 1976. It had been built by Mr Loder’s great-grandfather William Egerton Hubbard in 1889 as part of the Leonardslee estate at Lower Beeding, now famous for the rhododendrons bred by Sir Edmund Loder, Hubbard’s son-in-law.

Selehurst is now an outstanding garden in its own right. The house itself is no architectural gem: its glory lies not in its design, but in its situation on the edge of the Sussex Weald, surrounded by springs, overlooking a meadow that slopes very gently down towards oak woodland in the middle distance. The property is splendidly open to the south-west, so that the eye is then drawn 10 miles further to Chanctonbury Ring on the distant blue escarpment of the South Downs. ‘A garden should have a view,’ Mrs Prideaux’s mother had declared when they were househunting 50 years ago.

The house was fairly run down when the Prideaux took up occupation. Moreover, the garden around the house had all but disappeared after the neglect that began with the Second World War. But the property came with some 80 acres, which encouraged the Prideaux to design and plant their garden on an expansive scale. Their understanding of the history, values and unique quali- ties of Selehurst came quickly. They noted that the soil was sandy, with innumerable small springs that trickled out from the underlying clay, a geological formation that has been the making of the garden. Fine plantings were already in place, too—trees and shrubs planted over some 100 years by Hubbards and Loders—including several massive Eucalyptus gunnii that dated to the 1880s. One is now the tallest in Sussex at more than 100ft high.