Glorious Gardens from Above episode 10 – Gloucestershire: Christine Walkden is in the air above two glorious Gloucestershire gardens.
At Hidcote Manor Garden she cuts an underperforming shrub down to size and meets Sue, for whom the garden is an inspiration. At Kiftsgate Court Gardens she tackles an enormous rambling rose. We discover the arts and crafts heritage of the Cotswolds.
Glorious Gardens from Above episode 10 – Gloucestershire
Hidcote Manor Garden
Hidcote Manor Garden is a garden in the United Kingdom, located at the village of Hidcote Bartrim, near Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. It is one of the best-known and most influential Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain, with its linked “rooms” of hedges, rare trees, shrubs and herbaceous borders. Created by Lawrence Johnston, it is owned by the National Trust and is open to the public.
The Americans, Lawrence Johnston and his mother, settled in Britain about 1900, and Lawrence immediately became a British citizen and fought in the British army during the Boer war. In 1907 Johnston’s mother, Mrs Gertrude Winthrop (she had re-married), purchased the Hidcote Manor Estate. It was situated in a part of Britain with strong connections to the then-burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement and an Anglicized American artistic expatriate community centred nearby at Broadway, Worcestershire.
Johnston soon became interested in turning the fields around the house into a garden. By 1910 he had begun to lay out the key features of the garden, and by the 1920s he had twelve full-time gardeners working for him.
After World War II Johnston spent most of his time at Jardin Serre de la Madone, his garden in the south of France; and in 1947 he entrusted Hidcote to the National Trust. The style of the garden has been widely imitated. In 2007 a temporary garden designed by Chris Beardshaw that drew inspiration from Johnson’s Hidcote was constructed at the Chelsea Flower Show in London.
Kiftsgate Court Gardens
Kiftsgate Court Gardens is situated above the village of Mickleton in the county of Gloucestershire, England, in the far north of the county close to the county border with both Worcestershire and Warwickshire.
The gardens, famed for its roses, are the creation of three generations of women gardeners. Started by Heather Muir in the 1920s, continued by Diany Binny from 1950 and now looked after by Anne Chambers and her husband. Kiftsgate Court is now the home of the Chambers family.
Cotswolds
The Cotswolds are an area in south central and south west England comprising the Cotswold Hills, a range of rolling hills that rise from the meadows of the upper Thames to an escarpment, known as the Cotswold Edge, above the Severn Valley and Evesham Vale. The area is defined by the bedrock of Jurassic limestone that creates a type of grassland habitat rare in the UK and that is quarried for the golden-coloured Cotswold stone. It contains unique features derived from the use of this mineral; the predominantly rural landscape contains stone-built villages, historical towns and stately homes and gardens.
