Glorious Gardens from Above episode 12 – Staffordshire: Christine Walkden floats over the landlocked Midlands county of Staffordshire.
At Biddulph Grange she takes to the water to help remove some unwelcome guests and meets Helen, the ‘heart of the garden‘. At Shugborough Hall she rallies the troops for a spot of tree hugging and we discover how the area’s proud industrial heritage shaped the county’s landscape.
Glorious Gardens from Above episode 12 – Staffordshire
Biddulph Grange
Biddulph Grange is a National Trust landscaped garden, in Biddulph near Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England. It is separate from Biddulph Grange Country Park.
“Behind a gloomy Victorian shrubbery there’s a gloomy Victorian mansion, but behind that lurks one of the most extraordinary gardens in Britain…it contains whole continents, including China and Ancient Egypt – not to mention Italian terraces and a Scottish glen.”
The “rhododendrons and azaleas are spectacular in late spring, but the pinetum and the evergreen topiary provide year-round interest. It’s a fantastic garden for children, with its tunnels and rockeries, and there is a children’s quiz trail.”
The true brilliance of Biddulph Grange “lies in the way that Cooke and Bateman hid the different areas of the garden from each other, using heaps of rocks and thickly planted shrubberies’ the design locks together as tightly as a jigsaw or a cross-section of the brain.” It contains “a series of Italianate terraces, connected by steps and enclosing small flower gardens’ at the bottom, long, buttressed hedges enclose a dahlia walk,” In the Egyptian part of the garden, “Two sphinxes guard the mastaba-like entrance to a tunnel, whose darkness is an invitation to explore. Deep inside is a bloody chamber (lit by a hidden window of red-coloured glass) in which squats the half-spooky, half-comic figure of the Ape of Thoth.”
Shugborough Hall
Shugborough Hall is a stately home near Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England.
The hall is situated on the edge of Cannock Chase, about 4 miles (6.4 km) east of Stafford. The estate was owned by the Bishops of Lichfield until the Dissolution of the Monasteries, upon which it passed through several hands before being purchased in 1624 by William Anson, a local lawyer and ancestor of the Earls of Lichfield.
