Hello and welcome to Hanbury Hall gardens.
This was the home of the Vernon family who built the house on the site you see behind me,
and also created the wonderful fashionable gardens at the same time.
So originally house and gardens built together.
It has been in the care of the National Trust since the 1950s.
I'm stood in the Sunken Parterre here at Hanbury Hall which is part of the formal gardens here
designed by George London. The planting style of the day was all about control and order.
Control of nature, order of the plants. So this is why we've got the little hedges around the parterre,
because, again, nothing should be as of nature. So the hedges, you don't find those in nature.
You don't find plants on a rhythmic planting scale. So around, behind me probably you can see
there's marigolds on a rhythmic sort of pattern. There's white alyssum in here as well,
all on a rhythm and a pattern. So it's important to see the individual plant as an individual.
So you look at the whole plant in the round not as a great clump, which again in nature you generally
find clumps of things. So individual plants, bare soil. How often do you see that in nature, very rare.
You try it in your own garden. Have some bare soil, weeds invade within seconds it seems.
George London was a pre-eminent gardener of his day. He and his partner Henry Wise designed plenty of these sort
of very formal gardens all over the country. Which is to say there's only about four perhaps restored
gardens you'll see around today. So this is a very unique example of his style of gardening.
He was very close to the king or queen at the time, so a royal gardener. And he owned probably the biggest
nursery at the time as well. So design gardens, and then you could supply the plants to fill them.
There are no existing George London gardens from the original period.
They're all swept away all over the country. Little elements exist at other places but ours here at Hanbury
is probably the most faithful recreation of one of his gardens I know about anyway.
So we started looking at plans of the garden that were laid out when the house was being built by 1701,
and we also realised that George London was a really important garden designer
and nothing of his work survived today really. So we thought can we marry those two ideas up together.
At the end of the day we looked at these plans and they were so complete.
The plans of the garden shown around 1730 that we said, right, we want to restore the garden as best we could.
So in 1993 thanks to the bequest we started work on the Sunken Parterre,
the fruit garden, and the wilderness. And then subsequently we've gone on to do
the vegetable garden, the formal vegetable garden, the grove, the bowling green
with other bequests as time went on, and the gardens have grown.
So the main focus of the garden restoration was a year, and then
subsequently we've done other little bits and added on over that time.
And with these plans we had on record, the Dougharty plans of the garden, we also have to do some
archaeology to see if these plans were actually ever carried out, because nothing existed on the
on the site at that time, when we started anyway. So we looked below the ground.
We dug about 14 trenches in the Sunken Parterre area which was all lawn.
Everything you see behind me today was just lawn when we started the work.
So there were no features to see but we did find enough to prove the gardens were here.
And the basic layout on the plans looked very accurate and it turned out to be.
We've restored all the buildings and features we can of the original garden apart from two pavilions.
And I'm stood in the middle of one of those pavilions. The other one is
behind me up beyond the grove. So these are one-storey pavilions where you went inside,
up some stairs, and you had a viewing platform at the top. You looked down upon the gardens.
So you saw some of those aerial views that everyone loves.
Thank you for coming around the formal gardens here at Hanbury Hall.
We've got parklands and many more parts of the garden but we can only maintain these things and
develop the gardens with your support. So thank you very much for your help.