A garden the ‘Downton Abbey’ crowd would drool over

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/a-garden-the-downton-crowd-would-drool-over/2016/03/21/51a95b72-ec72-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html

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For all its mouth-watering sets, costumes and repartee, the highfalutin soap known as “Downton Abbey” followed a well-worn path in the theater of the English country house.

The recurring plotline boiled down to this: The high life of the Edwardian age is dealt a mortal blow by World War I and its aftermath. Before the Great War, these estates were replete with staff to sustain not just the lives of the owners but the life of the estate itself. Folk in service were plentiful, and you needed lots of them. Staff to light your fires, to brush your hair, to milk your Jersey cow. After the war, the cow had to learn to milk itself.

If the creators of “Downton” really wanted to track the end of the party, they might have done more to focus on the garden, because nowhere was the exit from paradise more evident than through the garden, particularly the walled and glass-covered fruit and veggie garden that kept the titled owners sated year-round. An estate in Cornwall named Heligan had 20 gardeners before the first war, eight during it and in time none at all. The same names once playfully inscribed on the garden privy wall reappeared on the local war memorial.

By the 1970s, these walled gardens could be found across the British Isles either abandoned or half-gardened amid a landscape of crumbling masonry and rotten greenhouses. There wasn’t so much an air of decay as the merest whiff of what once was. Some have been demolished, some converted to other use, some restored to a degree, and others persist in ruin.

Unexpectedly, and delightfully, comes the revelation that one such private garden — Eythrope — has been brought back to the highest standards and for a quarter-century has been humming along at a level that the voluptuary King Edward VII himself would have recognized and approved.

It is perhaps no surprise that Eythrope (pronounced EE-thrup) is the country abode of a Rothschild, namely Lord Jacob Rothschild and his wife, Serena. Such a restoration requires deep pockets but also a deep appreciation of the old horticultural ways needed to replicate what once was.

The back story: Eythrope is a satellite property of the greatest surviving Rothschild house in England: Waddesdon Manor, a chateau-style palace built in the 19th century by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild. His sister Alice ran Waddesdon, but as a respite and amusement she built Eythrope, set in a mere 60 acres compared with Waddesdon’s original 2,700 acres. The Rothschilds gave the larger property to the National Trust in the 1950s but have actively funded and directed its subsequent restoration.

Jacob Rothschild inherited Eythrope in 1988 and soon after turned to a friend, the landscape designer and garden writer Mary Keen, to effect the restoration of the garden and park, particularly the four-acre walled production garden that had fallen into decay. As important as the physical restoration, Keen said, was the recruitment of a head gardener to run the show, and Keen lined up such a person in Sue Dickinson. This three-way collaboration is chronicled in a new book, “Paradise and Plenty.”

Keen, herself titled and known in the States as Lady Mary, appeared at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, Pa., last week for a book signing and talk in front of a duly impressed audience.

The images of Eythrope (by photographer Tom Hatton) are a reminder that the edibles we Americans blithely grow outdoors must be raised in expensive greenhouses in Britain. I’m talking about such staples as tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and melons, along with peaches and grapes. If you are going to build and staff greenhouses, it follows that you should do it with high craft. This is what makes these production gardens so interesting. Even when you take into account the challenges of growing heat-loving plants in cool England, the techniques employed seem to go far beyond what might be necessary. It is that gap that distinguishes the ordinary from the sublime.

The starkest example might be in one of the cool greenhouses where cherry trees are grown in clay pots. They are tricked into blooming a little early by closing the greenhouse vents in March. There are no bees in the house, so each blossom is tickled by a gardener using a rabbit’s tail on a stick. This happens every day at noon, and the house is then doused to raise the humidity levels needed for successful fertilization.

The terra-cotta pots, as beautiful as they are, seem small for their mature trees, but the gardeners have taken this into account. Each year, they form collars of manure and soil gathered from molehills. The collars are built up, carefully, to form a sort of doughnut atop the pot, and this keeps the trees fed with each watering. This bizarre practice yields the desired results.

The harvest begins in May and lasts until mid-July, and in a good year, each tree will produce as much as 10 pounds of dessert cherries. The fruit “goes indoors to be beautifully arranged on Meissen or silver plates,” Keen writes. “In the best tradition of Miss Alice, baskets of cherries in season are sent as presents to friends.”

Longwood itself has a similar array of fruit and vegetable houses on display, and Keen sees obvious parallels between the horticultural contributions of the du Pont clan in the Delaware Valley and those of the Rothschilds in Britain and Europe.

Back in England, the garden at Heligan has been brought back to much of its former glory, as has the walled garden at a college named West Dean. But these places are for public consumption. Eythrope fits the rarer mold of a working production garden for the owners.

Keen is amused that some people have assailed the book for focusing on production methods rather than displaying an assemblage of pretty pictures, but the garden is about a process rather than an object. Its beauty flows from its function. “We felt that the book should not be a vanity project,” she said.

It is also a record of something that may not last forever, as history has demonstrated. Dickinson retired recently, and Jacob Rothschild will be 80 this year. Whether his heirs will want to carry on with something so costly remains to be seen. The head gardener oversees eight other gardeners — not the 53 Miss Alice once had at Waddesdon — but an impressive horticultural staff for our times.

“I think it’s pretty unique,” Keen said. “It’s about growing ordinary things extraordinarily well.”

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