Back to the future

The restoration in tandem of late-17thcentury Urchfont Manor, Wiltshire, and its gardens has resulted in an exceptional creation that unites the formal with the informal in a modern garden that nods to the past, finds George Plumptre

- George Plumptre

WITHIN a few years of buying Urchfont Manor in 2013, Chris Legg and Eleanor Jones, with the help of a friend, landscape architect Paul Gazerwitz, had given their home a new vista that unites house and garden, as well as evoking the formal Baroque of the house’s late-17th-century past. It is an inspired contemporary creation that is impressively in tune with the place’s historical zenith.

From 1946 to 2012, Urchfont Manor had been owned by Wiltshire County Council and used as an adult education center. Various parts of the 13 acres of gardens had been given over to different projects, but, with restricted funds, maintenance and development were minimal. Consequently, Urchfont’s new owners had a near-blank canvas from which to start.

Their aim was to balance historical integrity with the development of a new garden. Continuity would be kept by preserving the garden’s bones, such as the walled garden and the fine trees beyond the open lawn to the south and east. Work began on the rectangular walled kitchen garden.

The architecture on this side of the house is engagingly uneven and this is picked up in the new garden, which is neat and formal, but appropriately domestic in scale. The kitchen garden has been laid out afresh, with 16 rectangular patches divided by narrow gravel paths and with a square of four greengages in the center. Crops are rotated and, every year, one bed celebrates an unusual plant, such as borlotti beans or root ginger. Elsewhere are nurtured asparagus and strawberry beds and a fruit cage with raspberries and gooseberries.