The gardens of Shute House: Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe's erudite, timeless masterpiece
For even the most committed, taking over a garden created by an iconic designer can swiftly move one from delight at inheriting a piece of living history to feeling as if they are a hostage to fortune. Gardens are necessarily dynamic, determined by the weather, time, money and energy, and embarking upon restoration is not for the faint-hearted or poorly resourced. Shute House in Dorset, owned by John and Suzy Lewis, is one such garden. But whereas the restoration of most historic gardens is based on research, in this case the designer was still alive. The question was, would he want to return to finish what he started?
Shute House is arguably the best example of work by the late landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, a towering figure of twentieth-century design, who had over 100 projects to his name, including the John F Kennedy memorial in Runnymede. Jellicoe designed the garden at Shute House in the late Sixties for Captain Michael and Lady Anne Tree. He was then at the height of his reputation: architect, author, a founding member of the Landscape Institute, advancing a belief that a person's surroundings can profoundly influence their mood and behaviour. The garden became a place of pilgrimage for every young landscape architect, but by the Nineties, when the house was sold, it was in desperate need of care.
In 1993, new owners John and Suzy asked Geoffrey to consider the garden once again. The couple have good credentials. Suzy's late mother was Esther Merton, a brilliant gardener who created The Old Rectory at Burghfield, so Suzy knew a thing or two about plants. John is the former chair of The Wallace Collection, with a lifelong interest in art and design. Geoffrey was tempted out of retirement and the result is his masterpiece: a serene, well-proportioned space that draws on history, philosophy, psychology and art without being enslaved to any of them. It is also the final design he oversaw. He died after completing the work in 1996, aged 95.
Jellicoe's preoccupation with landscape history, from the neoclassical to postmodern, gave him a clear understanding of what makes the elements of an English garden. Although trained as an architect, he wanted to free landscape from the constraints of formal architecture, anchoring it instead to the people who would use it. Shute House is primarily a private garden, a place of quiet reflection and tranquillity, but laced with theatrical delight in the form of its most famous feature - the rill.
The narrow formal channel of flowing water surrounded by high, clipped yew hedges recalls enclosed gardens of Persia, or Moorish designs like the Alhambra in Granada, but has an eccentricity that is quintessentially English. A diversion of the River Nadder, the water is channelled into a series of canals, pools and waterfalls. Each waterfall has a series of copper chambers of varying dimensions, the moving water emitting different notes in the musical scale. 'The conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner once sat here at the top of the rill and arched his eyebrows when I said they were in a descending scale,' recalls Suzy. 'I didn't dare argue.'
The water cascades into octagonal, square and hexagonal pools, each one with a bubbling fountain in the centre. All of them had to be painstakingly restored. The effect was worth it, says Suzy. 'Geoffrey had his final dinner at the top of the rill, then a car took him back to his London flat, which he'd vowed never to leave until he died. This was the last sight of the outside world he wanted to have, and to hear the sound of water.'
A backbone of formal hedging of yew and beech echoes other gardens, such as Rousham in Oxfordshire, designed by William Kent in the eighteenth century and regarded as one of the finest gardens of its type in England. Shute House shares its deliberately restricted colour palette, and the elements of water, stone and evergreen planting. A formal lake, with black swans that follow Suzy as she walks, contrasts with the informality of willow, fern and wisteria bordering the water. Each glassy surface acts as a mirror to the sky, so on still days you are not sure if what you are experiencing is real or a reflection in the water.
As you might expect from a couple who are linked with the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association and are patrons of the Henry Moore Foundation, the garden is also an outside gallery. A weathered stone wild boar rests on its haunches in the woodland, and a wickedly grinning Pan haunts the most shadowy part of the garden, surrounded by dark plants like Geranium phaeum 'Black Widow'. Classical busts of stern-faced Achilles, Neptune and Zeus are framed within beech hedging, contrasting with more recent additions like the 10-metre-high folly of a naked, athletic Hermes erected in the garden in 2010, which caused a few raised eyebrows in the quiet lanes of the village. But the genius of Shute House is that it marries together the classical and the contemporary, adding a playfulness to a garden that has serious history, but is never dry.
Sabina Rüber1/7An arch with a beech hedge leads to the lake.
Sabina Rüber2/7The tranquil, formal lake at the Shute House gardens is bordered by ferns and wisteria. Black swans inhabit the waters here, with clipped yew hedges giving structure and a sense of enclosure from the rest of the garden.
Sabina Rüber3/7Classical busts of stern-faced Achilles, Neptune and Zeus are framed within beech hedging.
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Sabina Rüber6/7A backbone of formal hedging of yew and beech echoes other gardens, such as Rousham in Oxfordshire, designed by William Kent in the eighteenth century and regarded as one of the finest gardens of its type in England.
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