Garden Visits – Topiary Garden at Levens Hall

An historic and world famous topiary garden, Levens Hall in Cumbria offers the opportunity to see real living history in its carefully trained trees, shrubs and hedges.

In last week’s gardening blog, we answered some of the regular questions we hear about pruning, specifically autumn pruning. At Levens Hall they have a lot of specialist pruning to be doing over the autumn and winter. It is one of my favourite gardens.

Originally laid out in the late seventeenth century, the formal topiary and parterre gardens were then the height of fashion. The garden design was done by Guillaume Beaumont, a student of Andre le Notre who designed the gardens at Versailles for Louis XIV (the Sun King). Beaumont had previously been employed by James II of England, and helped create the Wilderness Garden at Hampton Court Palace.

The formal topiary garden and parterre at Levens Hall are influenced as much by the seventeenth century Dutch garden style of formal yet intimate spaces as by the geometric and flamboyant expansive gardens designed by le Notre. And the gardens at Levens do have an intimate, homely feel engendered by the division of the garden into smaller areas or garden rooms. These pre-date the garden rooms such as the White Garden at Sissinghurst, which Vita Sackville–West purposefully designed so the separate areas were planted with different flowers and shrubs.

One of the things I find fascinating about the development of gardens and garden design is how it reflects the changes in our social and cultural history. When Beaumont was laying out Levens Hall gardens for Colonel James Grahme he was making a garden for his patron to look at from the house, particularly from the first floor windows. One would also stroll around the gardens, admiring the formal shapes of the topiary and the regular planting of the box hedges in the parterre.

Box hedges; now there’s another story. If you visit Levens today, you’ll see fewer box hedges than you would have done five years ago. Like many gardens around the country, the garden has suffered from Box blight. This is a fungal infection affecting and killing Buxus species; made worse by the very wet conditions we had in 2012 and early 2013. Alternative planting that they’re trying out at Levens are the Japanese holly (Ilex crenata); and Teuchrium x lucidrys, (wall germander)/ Teuchrium is a plant which was historically used in Elizabethan knot gardens, before the introduction of box from Holland during the seventeenth century. Both are small leaved evergreen shrubs, suitable for the close clipping that is needed for a low hedging.

As well as the topiary garden, the gardens at Leven Hall include a rose garden. In high summer this is a deliciously scented area; planted with repeat flowering ‘English‘ roses. Then there’s an orchard; herb garden; vegetable garden; willow maze; traditional herbaceous borders. And there’s the ‘seventeenth century garden’ which is a recent topiary and parterre planting, where you can enjoy a pot of tea and rest your feet.

It is wonderful that the 300 year old topiary garden has survived. It’s partly accidental as the house was a ‘holiday home’ for much of this time so money wasn’t spent on redesigning and redeveloping the gardens. But more recently, this labour intensive garden has survived because it’s historical importance was recognised and because it has owners and gardeners who love it.

If you visit Levens Hall during September, you will probably see the gardeners hard at work pruning the topiary, a four–six month gardening task. A pruning job to keep Edward Scissorhands busy for years, the Levens gardeners clip some of the shapes by hand, but also use petrol hedge clippers, and need towers to reach the taller topiary shapes such as the Great Umbrellas.

Definitely a garden to inspire you to add some topiary – on a smaller level! – to your own garden; or to ask someone to design it for you…