Elegant topiary and ordered formality underpin the aesthetic in the garden of Georgian Fittleworth House in West Sussex. But also at play is a wilder, looser flavour, encouraged by head gardener Mark Saunders in a bid to boost the land’s rich biodiversity
WORDS MAX CRISFIELD PHOTOGRAPHS ANNA OMIOTEK-TOTT
At first glance, Fittleworth House might appear to be quite a traditional sort of garden. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that it has been quietly shrugging off convention under the care of its head gardener, Mark Saunders, for the past quarter of a century.
The grand Georgian manor house – home to the Braham family for the past 60 years – is set on three acres of West Sussex downland. Built in the 1720s from locally quarried stone, it gazes through a curtain of wisteria across a tightly clipped croquet lawn, out and down over a gentle eastward-sloping sward to the distant walled gardens below. The house and lawns are overlooked on the outer fringes by two towering sentinels – a glorious 100-foot-tall cedar of Lebanon on the southern slope, and an equally statuesque holm oak on the opposite bank. These stately specimens were planted in the 1740s when the house and gardens were in the first flush of youth. Today they remain an integral part of the garden’s signature aesthetic, an artful blend of ordered formality and a wilder, looser English romanticism.
For Mark, there is a constant negotiation taking place between these two polarities – what he sees as the ‘needs of man’ and the ‘needs of nature’. “It’s a balancing act,” he says. “We have formal and wild areas, and we are always having to re-evaluate how we garden along those lines.”
The garden’s most emphatic formal statement is the circular fountain garden, which sits at the base of a short flight of stone steps flanked by matching stoneware urns and conical yew forms. Here, symmetrical beds of mixed herbaceous planting and nascent yew and box topiary (the pittosporums and euonymus were lost to last year’s harsh winter) encircle a brick-edged pond. Above the water is a striking Corten steel globe, originally designed as a firepit but repurposed here as a decorative centrepiece.
Beneath the fountain garden, is a razor-sharp yew hedge with a narrow, arched entrance leading to the walled vegetable garden beyond. Step through the arch and the precision-tooled lines give way to a gnarly, lichen-covered tunnel of crisscrossing apple boughs, like two weatherworn hands gripped in a gesture of supplication.
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