Painting the landscape

This rare example of an 18th-century Anglo-French Baroque garden has not only been sensitively restored, but wonderful new plantings have greatly added to its wilder parts

- Non Morris

YOU could, perhaps, be in France. An elegant grey-pink façade and a fleet of white-painted garden furniture look down over gracious sloping lawns studded with perfectly spaced topiary and early-18th-century urns. The lawns lead down steadily beyond the fine Jan van Nost Mercury and arrive at the Great Basin, a generous spreading pool with its shimmering reflections of cloud-pruned yew and a celebrated wrought-iron arbour, The Birdcage.

The gardens at Melbourne Hall, with their tree-lined allées, carefully framed vistas and cleverly positioned ponds and fountains, are regarded as the best surviving example of the early-18th-century Anglo-French Baroque style, a rare chance to see a surviving garden of this period, when designs were directly influenced by formal French gardens, such as Versailles. Melbourne is uplifting, too, because, as well as restoring and respecting the historical importance of the gardens, which have been in the family for 500 years, Ralph and Marie-Claire Kerr have added their own deeply personal signature with extensive planting of exquisite specimen trees and a wonderful painterly approach to the gentler, wilder parts of the garden away from the grandeur of this main axis. Vital to the transformation has been Lady Ralph’s vision and attention to detail. As a distinguished portrait painter, her tireless passion for the possibilities of colour and form has led directly to the magical atmosphere of the garden today.