Filled with smart topiary, classic statuary and fragrant parterres, the garden at The Old Rectory in Surrey is Trudie and Tony Procter’s love letter to Italy, its style and influence inspired by the likes of Harold Peto’s Iford Manor and Villa Cetinale in Tuscany
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS NICOLA STOCKEN
As temperatures tumble, daylight dwindles and the sun sinks lower in the sky, the shadows cast by towering topiary lengthen, magnifying their silent presence within the austere wintry landscape surrounding The Old Rectory in Bletchingley. “Each shape is different and looks fantastic outlined in snow or frost – every year I feel as if I’m rediscovering them for the first time,” says Trudie Procter from the Italianate garden that she and her husband, Tony, have created in Surrey.
Gazing up at these great giants silhouetted against an opalescent sky that promises more snow to come, it is near impossible to visualise the knee-high bushes of yesteryear. “I could never have envisaged how those baby yews would turn out,” admits Trudie, “and today, as their outlines loom high above me, I marvel at them.” The garden is spectacular in every season, but all the more so in a midwinter freeze.
It is more than three decades since the Procters bought the former Georgian rectory in Surrey, inheriting the dilemma of what to do with a neglected, four-acre garden on undernourished, sandy soil. “We’d never owned a large garden before and suddenly we were faced with vast, unkempt open spaces,” Trudie recalls. “Fortunately, when I was a child, my mother used to take us round stately homes and Italian gardens, so I had some ideas.” Trips to Levens Hall in Cumbria influenced the creation of the topiary, while a visit to Sissinghurst was pivotal in inspiring the hedges that divide the south-facing garden, creating a formal structure.
From the outset, there was no hard and fast plan. “The garden was added to year on year, evolving naturally – it was a case of constantly looking at other gardens and thinking, ‘that would work in ours’,” says Trudie. They began by laying out a series of box parterres filled with lavender and roses, interspersed with stone statuary and the fledgling yew topiary that Tony planted in straight lines. “We followed a classical style that fuses perfectly with our house. You see it in the long-established gardens of period propert
