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Click here to view the DCLA Summer 2018 Newsletter.. https://mailchi.mp/24e962b314d1/dcla-summer-news-2018

At Great Ambrook, in Devon, Stephanie Berry and Kim Chapman have undertaken to restore a long-forgotten Italian-themed garden imbued with the hedonistic mood of the early 1900s

Dreaming of a garden makeover? Maybe you’re after more space to socialise, an area to grow fruit and vegetables, or a complete revamp to add value to your home?

Whatever your goal, there are a number of areas to consider.

We’ve gathered top tips from experts – including gardener and author Bob Flowerdew, Gardens Trust president Dominic Cole, Society of Garden Designers (SGD) chair Philippa O’Brien and Houzz.co.uk editor Victoria Harrison – to help you plan improvements to make the most of your outdoor space.

http://www.barclays.co.uk/journal/planning-a-garden-makeover

Read the full article on the Horticulture Week Website… http://www.hortweek.com/dominic-cole-commissioned-twycross-zoo-revamp/landscape/article/1421505

We are pleased to be working on more projects at HAMPSTEAD HEATH.

Thank you for all the work this year, and look forward to working with you soon.

Revisiting a North London Garden Dominic designed and built twenty five years ago.

Dominic Cole OBE, Working With Historic Landscapes

A previously overgrown and gloomy entrance to Hamspstead Heath from Swains Lane has been opened up by removing overgrown shurbbery. Tired metal railings have been replaced with rural timber fencing.

The greatest of British Bulldogs, Wnston Churchill, created a country home for his family at Chartwell House. He extended the lakes built the kitchen garden wall and relaxed in his famous site in his famous Turnbull & Asser velvet siren suits for casual / pinstriped for more formal entertaining.

DCLA are working with Caroe Architecture (CAR) and the National Trust to unlock the evolution of the garden from its C15th, and earlier, form to the present.

Dominic grew up on the Tring High Street above the GP surgery where his father was in practise. Winter afternoons often saw us visiting Tring museum or tobogganing down slopes in Tring Park. I later learnt that the museum was a birthday present from his father to Lionel Rothchild whose interest in the family banking business never took off but his fascination for natural history was unbounded. He visited Buckingham Palace in a carriage drawn by Zebras and populated the park with Cassiowaries and Wallabies.

The snow clad slopes contain clues as to their earlier incarnation as a formal designed landscape by Charles Bridgeman.

Today the landscape is overgrown but its Bridgemanic history is guiding Herts Garden Trust to help the woodland Trust reveal some of its greatness.

Dominic Cole has prepared historic overlay maps to help understand how the designed landscape can be read.

St Michaels Church (www.saintmichaelsbrighton.org) is a Grade 1* building in the Clifton conservation area of Brighton. For a local parish church it packs a mighty punch in its roll call of prominent artist and architects who worked on its interior.

Dominic Cole gave the Friends and Annual lecture to some 80 people: talking across a range of landscape projects and landscapes visited.

The IHBC (www.ihbc.org.uk) is a leading resource for professionals and local Arts officers etc. working in the Historic Environment. The theme of this years conference was landscape and included talks by landscape Architects and historians. Dominic talked about the work he has been doing for the National Trust and their response to the impacts of HS2 on National Trust properties.

‘Kings Cross lands’ and the Regents Quarter run around the north & east sides of the two great terminals of Kings Cross & St Pancras (Saint Pancras was a Roman citizen who converted to Christianity and was beheaded for his faith in c.300)

Big Developers are seen as the evil opposition but Argent & P&O Development, have transformed the area. Particularly in the last 5-10 years as the new building sprung up, so too great areas of new public open spaces have been revealed.

The intertwining mix of the historic canal, historic road routes & a new overlay of linked open spaces have resulted in a high quality area that is a new destination for locals.

On the 17^th June 2015 Dominic Cole offered a landscape walk in the heart of London.

The River Thames runs at the southern – most route of its topographic past: it once issued into the north- sea towards the wash in East Anglia. One of its previous meanders took it underneath what is now Trafalgar Square where, during excavations to set out the current layout by Charles Barry, the old river bed revealed fossilised elephant, rhinoceros and crocodile bones.

Between Charing Cross and Blackfriars the north dank of the river became the desirable place for prominent families to build their London homes: York House, Essex House, The Savoy Palace and a supposed Roman Well.

The desirability of developing as close as possible to the Palace of Westminster and the City put a premium on land and gradually the river was encroached on – today it is about half its natural width.

The walk showed how the Strand lies 2-3 stories above the river at high water – a difference that is encapsulated within streets and buildings along this stretch of the Thames.

Removal of a Significant Post War Landscape from the English Heritage Register

Dominic Cole, GHS chairman

The Commonwealth Institute building in Holland Park, off Kensington High Street, London, is considered by English Heritage to be the second most important modern building in London after the Festival Hall. It is being refurbished to house the Design Museum, so that the creation in 1962 by architects Johnson-Marshall and partners is saved. In contrast the modernist landscape designed by the renowned Landscape Architect, Sylvia Crowe (one of the founding members of the Landscape Institute) has already completely disappeared.

It is shocking that one of only a handful of post war designed landscapes that have been recently added to the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens has gone.

Modernist landscape design did not take off in Britain and exponents such as Christopher Tunnard would leave England to work in America where his designs were valued.This makes examples such as Sylvia Crowe’s design for the entrance to The Commonwealth Institute so special and rare. She used some of the language found at the Festival of Britain, broad simple plains of surface material, structures appearing to float, elegantly thin railings, water to reflect sky and provide the subtlest of sounds, along with the spectacular array of flags advertising the coming together of the Commonwealth Nations that could be seen from way along Kensington High Street. This was a destination that enchanted children, perhaps with the kind of pull that now draws them to Disney. Along with Battersea Park and its tree walkway this was a ‘must see’ site in London; after exhausting The Tower, Madame Tussauds and Hampton Court.The approach, directly from the high street, was delineated by slight stepped changes in level so that it was clearly part of the Institute site but was open and welcoming, and thrilling to walk across water to reach the entrance.

The refurbishment of the building is being overseen by architects Allies and Morrison, who oversaw the refurbishment of the Festival Hall and its outdoor terraces.The new landscape will be designed by Dutch landscape architects West 8.

The Garden History Society was not consulted about the removal of the Registered Landscape by local planning authority, Kensington and Chelsea so we must assume that English Heritage failed to flag up just how important this design was.

Could it be put back? Technically, yes: by analysing the surviving pictures, plans, etc. it would be possible to ‘re-create’ the Crowe design, but to what end? It has lost its context and the open front, to the High Street has been given over to a new block of flats as part of the refurbishment. Even if put back it would not be with the original materials and we are likely to impose some values from today’s perspective that would mean it would not be Sylvia Crowe’s garden. I feel similarly towards the Frederic Gibberd garden at Harlow NewTown, also now removed from the Register.The developer of this prime site in central Harlow paid to move the garden out of the way. It survives as an embarrassed, truncated remnant, dislocated from its intended carefully designed site.

Thankfully, so far, one of the other stars from this period, Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Water Garden at Hemel Hempstead survives intact and is now the subject of a very sensitive refurbishment, part funded by the HLF; however a watchful eye is needed here to protect the setting of the Water Garden from encroachment by proposed new buildings that threaten to leave the garden in a canyon.

At the Commonwealth Institute site the refurbished building, Design Museum, new flats and design by West 8 will result in a very vibrant and enjoyable place which I am sure I will visit and admire, but I cannot forgive the loss of a unique and bold piece of twentieth century landscape design and regret the lack of respect and understanding demonstrated by the limp Local Planning Authority and English Heritage.

English Heritage have recently consulted the Garden History Society on the likely deletion of Sylvia Crowe’s Commonwealth Institute Garden. from the EH Register of (important) designed landscapes in England and Wales, what a pity they waited until it had already gone!

Note from the editor

This article was triggered not so much by the destruction of the garden, which had been on the cards at least since EH’s correspondence with the planners at the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea in 2009, but more by EH’s recent letter to the GHS asking for our opinion on the ‘decision to remove it from the Register some years after its destruction.

The article first appeared in London Landscapes, the newsletter of the London Parks and Gardens Trust. The correspondence has been posted on our website, for your interest.

Refining the urban jungle

Park Village East, Regent’s Park, London NW1

A calm oasis of green in the environs of Nash’s Regent’s Park belies its proximity to the city, finds Vanessa Berridge

Photographs by Marianne Majerus

AFTER John Nash laid out Regent Street and the grand terraces beside Regent’s Park, he created one of London’s first suburban villages a mile further north. The villas there, built between 1823 and 1834, are all different and never in line with their neighbours. Detached and semi-detached, symmetrical and asymmetrical in their design, they are a beguiling mixture of Classical and Gothic, each with its own private garden.

Behind a turreted semi-detached villa lies one such garden: step through a wirework arch covered with dark-blue clematis and you walk into a different world. Traffic noise is deadened by tall trees and the only sound is the crunch of gravel beneath your feet and the splashing of water down stepped ponds.

That is the delight of London gardens: you’re never sure what to expect—and Eveline Carn’s garden is more surprising than many. The immediate impression is of a deep woodland dell, a boundary-less sea of green. With its tree ferns, palms and agaves, it could be in a lush Cornish valley, rather than near a busy London thoroughfare. A swing hangs from the branches of a massive London plane at the heart of the garden and, round its fringes, are a soaring green beech, a turkey oak with ridged bark, a multi-stemmed bay and a vivid-green Acer palmatum.

Gravel and stone terraces are connected by sets of wooden and stone steps and punctuated by stone balls and box roundels. Clipped hedges of yew form a green framework for ponds, terraces and several sitting areas. Crisp and formal near the house, the planting becomes more relaxed further away.

Eveline and Nick Carn moved here in October 1996, when their son was nearly four and just before the birth of their daughter. Preoccupied with looking after small children, Mrs Carn did little at first with the garden, but, by 2000, she realised its potential was being wasted.

She contacted Dominic Cole, who had worked on the Eden Project. ‘Dominic is a great plantsman as well as a landscape architect and he put together an interesting palette of plants that have stood the test of time,’ says Mrs Carn. Many of the plants are structural, such as Cordyline australis and Mahonia x media Charity around the middle pond and the emphatic great white cherry (Prunus Tai Haku) by the gate; others, such as Ceratostigma willmottianum, add accents of colour.

In proportion with the house, Mr Cole created a series of much wider terraces, using stone and gravel. He aligned the family room on the lower-ground floor with a blue balustraded, Spanish-style landing, which he covered withAkebia quinata, Pyracantha Golden Dome, Clematis Jackmanii and golden hop (Humulus lupulus Aureus). He made a pond opposite the kitchen, which reflects light back into what is a rather dark room and, reciprocally, the southwest-facing, cream-coloured house bounces afternoon light into the garden.

Guarding the steps from the stone }terrace by the house are a pair of firmly clipped box pyramids and two magnificent marble lions, brought back by Mr Carn as a present from Hong Kong. Each weighing 1,1001b, they had to be rolled into position on metal pipes. `I had been to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where the lions face out over the plain, so these look into the garden rather than back at the house,’ he explains.

The bottom half of the garden was originally the extension of the canal below Camden Lock. Damaged by bombing, it was filled in after the Second World War, when most of the trees were planted. Ironically,’ says Mrs Carn, It’s not moist, but dry shade that’s tough to garden.’ The canal has, however, left a legacy of walls, one of them lining the lower gravel terrace, on which stands a Trachycarpus fortunei. Against the wall, a lion spouts water into a lead bowl, framed by arches of Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris. A further wall lies beyond the almost invisible wire fence of the garden and extends it visually.

Mrs Carn has become a passionate gardener, who has now taken horticultural and garden-design courses at Capel Manor. These have helped her build on the foundation laid by Mr Cole, adding architectural plants such as the water marginal mare’s tail (Equisetum hyemale), an invasive plant restrained in a square green container. Her `pride and joy’ is an Agave americana in a large terracotta pot on the middle gravel terrace. `I love its colours and shapes and the way it unfolds on such a big scale,’ she says. `I was brought up in Africa and it reminds me of the plants on my mother’s veranda.’

The bottom third was originally left as a play area for the children. Before Mrs Carn first opened for the National Gardens Scheme in 2010, she took this part in hand, planting mature yew hedging for structure and setting a Lutyens bench between a tree fern (Dicksonia antarctica) and a blush-pink stemmedRhus typhina. The gaps between the paving stones beneath are filled with a tapestry of ajuga, heuchera, creepingJenny (Lysimachia nummularia Aurea), wild strawberries and Muehlenbeckia complexa.

Beyond, half-hidden, she’s sown a wildflower meadow as a holdingoperation while she decides what to do in this especially shady spot.

Beneath the bay, Acer palmatum and Lonicera nitida Baggesen’s Gold a raised side bed, Mrs Carn has recently planted ferns, arum lilies, box, euphorbia, phormium and the Japanese grass Hakonechloa macra Aureola to provide contrast to the strong architectural shape of the other plants. The white-tipped grass, Melica altissima Alba, a Chelsea-inspired idea, is dribbled through for softness and movement.

This cool, elegant garden balances the formal and the informal, the big picture and the tiny detail. Mrs Carn may claim she only knew about roses and lavender when she started, but she’s now clearly a plantswoman with a keen eye for structure, texture and foliage contrast.

Visit to Lowther Castle, August 2014, to see how the landscape is getting on – https://dominiccole.net/project/lowther-castle/

Paths and Lawns Installed

View from Prospect Terrace

Countess Garden

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenstovisit/10681541/Trentham-the-garden-makeover-of-the-decade.html