Newt tales

HAVE you seen The Newt?' It was the question everyone asked me back in the summer of 2019. Friends said that I would like it.

- Charles Quest-Ritson

The Newt turned out to be a reincarnation of Hadspen House in Somerset, where Penelope Hobhouse used to live. It was not easy to get my head round the changes to the garden and, actually, the thing I liked most was the farm shop. But my visit was just before covid was invented, so I went back there earlier this year-this time, with three of my grandsons, who wanted to see the reconstructed Roman Villa.

Hadspen and I go back many years. The relics of Penelope's garden are still the best features. After she moved to nearby Tintinhull-which she resurrected with amazing energy and sensibility the walled garden at Hadspen was leased as a nursery to a rather fey Canadian couple called Nori and Sandra Pope. They transformed it into a living essay on the use of colour in the garden and wrote a classic book about their art. I don't think they made a lot of money from their nursery, but their borders were universally admired; Hadspen once again became the sort of place to which one took visitors who wanted to see the best of English gardening.

But when the Popes retired to Canada in 2005, Penelope's son, Niall Hobhouse, ploughed up the walled garden, wavered about re-letting it to tenants and, in 2013, sold the whole 850-acre estate.