It may look sublime in its late-autumn finery, but for self-confessed perfectionist Arabella Lennox-Boyd there is always work to be done at Gresgarth Hall in Lancashire for “no garden is set in aspic”
WORDS STEFAN BUCZACKI PHOTOGRAPHS KAT WEATHERILL
Anyone who can say, almost as a throw-away remark “We now have about a hundred magnolias” is self-evidently a garden owner with a profound knowledge of trees, and, also self-evidently, has the space in which to grow them. That owner is a woman whose name has, for me, long been a byword for garden design skills of the highest, almost peerless, quality. She is Arabella Lennox-Boyd and it is a special joy for me to return, after a gap of several years, to her garden, Gresgarth Hall, in Caton, near Lancaster.
We spend a quite magical afternoon together, walking the many paths at Gresgarth Hall, admiring the extraordinary diversity and quality of its planting, discussing the challenges such a remarkable garden presents, and comparing ideas about resolving the horticultural questions that individual plants pose.
When Arabella and her husband, the former Conservative MP and government minister Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, bought Gresgarth some 40 years ago, they found themselves with a striking house in an unashamedly Gothic style dating from around 1810, together with 12 acres in a valley through which flows Artle Beck, a tributary of the River Lune. This was land that had once been gardened and landscaped and bore some noble old trees – magnificent Cryptomeria japonica among others – but before the Lennox-Boyds’ arrival, neglect had replaced horticulture.
The Gresgarth site is geologically complex and its soils are variable with an average pH between 6 and 7 but more acidic pockets where rhododendrons thrive and some areas of truly thick and unyielding clay. It is reliably moist thanks to the numerous underlying natural springs. But so much of the place – not least the wet north-west climate – was alien to Arabella’s Italian heritage. She was unfamiliar with Lancashire Gothic, and her own English gardening experience had previously been confined to London. Gresgarth was to be a long learning curve.
Did she have a masterplan? The answer is no, the plan came much later, and she explains that she had turned her skills first to the terrace adjoining the house, which she widened and filled with containers that on my visit are redolent with late-season colour and fragrance. This is where her Italian influence is at its most s
