The garden of Pusey House, Oxfordshire The home of Mr and Mrs Richard Perlhagen
In the care of its new owners, major renovations and a programme of tree planting have all enhanced the simple beauty of this garden, set in its 18th-century landscape, writes George Plumptre
WHEN Pusey House came to the market in 2010, the selling agent called it ‘one of England’s most beautiful houses’. Even allowing for the well-known enthusiasm of estate agents, if you stand on the broad terrace admiring the house’s sublimely elegant mid18th-century stone façade, then turn to the view south across tree-framed lawns and lake to the far ridge of the Berkshire Downs, it is hard not to agree. It would seem that the elegance of the house has always been the inspiration for its setting; from the original 18th-century landscape to the garden that was substantially created by Michael and Nicolette Hornby after they purchased Pusey in 1935, as well as the garden that has been rejuvenated since 2015 by the present owners, Richard and Triinu Perlhagen.
Pusey’s history is reputed to stretch back more than 1,000 years to the reign of Canute, who, so a charming story suggests, awarded the Pusey family the land east of Faringdon in the Vale of White Horse. The King was in the area when a Pusey boy warned him of an ambush. Canute rewarded him by giving the boy a horn and saying he owned all the land over which, when he blew the horn, it could be heard.
In the early 18th century, the direct Pusey family line ended, but successive owners inherited by marriage and changed their names accordingly. In 1746, the first, John Allen Pusey, commissioned the architect John Sanderson to build a new house. Sanderson had already designed the magnificent Palladian Kirtlington Park, a few miles north of Oxford; at nearby Pusey, the style was more subdued Palladianism, soon to be set in a suitably Arcadian landscape with a new lake crossed by a fashionable Chinese wooden bridge and trees that would mature to frame the views. Generations of occupants must have been impressed by the beauty and history of their home, not least the most distinguished, the leading light of the 19th-century Oxford Movement, Edward Bouverie Pusey, of whom Geoffrey Faber wrote in his 1933 Oxford Apostles: ‘Standing where manor house had followed manor house for a thousand years, looking over water and trees and the miles of Pusey land to the unchanging outline of the downs, house and church and tiny village keeping company together as they had done for centuries— all this spoke to the boy of a permanent, immutable yet gracious and living order.’
Successive descendants and associates came to an end w
