Venture through a small gate in the ancient stone wall surrounding the gardens at Levens Hall, near Kendal, in Cumbria, and it feels as if you are entering a world Lewis Carroll and Dr Seuss might have conjured. Filled with teetering wedding cakes, giant mushroom umbrellas, corkscrew spirals, Bauhaus birds and lopsided lollipops, the topiary garden dating to 1694 is a sight “not seen anywhere else”, Chris Crowder, the head gardener, says. “It’s a satisfying place to stand in the summer, hearing the visitors ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, because it’s quite a contrast to the surrounding landscape.”
Levens Hall, a grade I listed Elizabethan mansion built around a 13th-century defensive pele tower, is in the custodial hands of Richard Bagot, 43, whose family have been here for five centuries. The Hall is also home to the oldest topiary in the world. Many of the hundred or so intriguingly clipped yew, box and beech hedges are in the same shapes that were dreamt up by the 17th-century royal gardener Guillaume Beaumont, who was commissioned by Bagot’s ancestor Colonel James Grahme, a keeper of King James II’s privy purse, to bring the newly hot European craze of topiary to the Lake District.
The garden remains so popular that Bagot came up with the idea of World Topiary Day during lockdown in 2020. Celebrated on May 12, it draws international interest, attracting those eager to learn about the social history embedded within the ancient walls. “We’re just carrying on the tradition, maintaining the shapes somebody set out hundreds of years ago while adding new trees and shapes every year,” Crowder says.
More than 35,000 flowers are planted annually, among and underneath the topiary, from double daisies and pansies in the spring to sways of purple, blue and yellow blooms in the summer. “I think of the topiaries as sculptures and these beds as colourful plinths for them to sit on,” says Crowder, who has been in charge of the gardens since 1986 and is only the 10th gardener in the Hall’s history.
Each topiary has developed its own personality over the years. “Gravity has taken over so they’re not quite as they started out, but that’s nice because every shape is its own unique thing,” Crowder says. “Here they are like characters peopling the garden. We’ve even given them nicknames — Queen Elizabeth and her maids of honour, Judge’s Wig, Homer Simpson and Darth Vader — and because they are evergreens they have a great presence all year round.”
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These living sculptures are only one part of a ten-acre garden that is open to the public from March to October. There are bee, vegetable and herbaceous borders, an orchard and a nuttery, a fragrant rose garden, and a fountain garden bordered with pleached limes that were planted by Bagot’s parents, Susie and Hal, to mark the Hall’s tercentenary in 1994. Since Bagot took the reins ten years ago he has opened an upmarket restaurant and bakery — “I wanted to bring better food to this corner of Cumbria” — and he has visions of rewilding some areas “with rare breeds of wildflowers so that it’s not just green ryegrass, encouraging more butterflies and creepy crawlies”, he says.
He and his fiancée, Chloe, have a collective brood of seven children (from previous marriages and one newborn) who play hide and seek between the trees, munch apples picked from the orchard and kick about a football on the croquet lawn, just as he did as a child. “I’m never complacent about how lucky we are to have a garden like this,” he says. “Our bedroom overlooks the topiary, so when we wake up in the morning we just stare at it rather a lot in wonder.”
What Crowder loves is that “it’s a living place”, he says. “It has been somebody’s personal garden since the 1690s, never ripped away and something else planted on top of it. It’s that continuity of having been gardened for centuries — not just made once or recreated — that makes it an evolving, moving, changing garden, cared for with a lot of love and joy.”
levenshall.co.uk
