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WORDS AMBRA EDWARDS PHOTOGRAPHS LUCY SHERGOLD
Appearing at first glance to be the quintessential English garden, Steeple Manor in Dorset’s Purbeck Hills is a rare early work by one of Britain’s most innovative Modernists, the pioneering Brenda Colvin, and is filled with her clever flourishes
This is definitely not a garden for the faint-hearted,” declares David Woodhams with a rueful laugh. The soil here is stodgy Wealden clay; it’s waterlogged in winter and sets like concrete in summer. Salt-laden winds roar in over the hill from the sea, then, trapped by the cradling hills, cause chaos, snapping branches and uprooting newly planted trees. It’s a frost pocket in winter and all year round a smorgasbord for marauding hordes of squirrels, rabbits and deer. Nonetheless, David has been the gardener in charge at Steeple Manor in Dorset for over 30 years, and he clearly has a deep affection for his difficult charge.
Over the decades he has planted a choice collection of trees and shrubs – acacias, tulip trees, tree ferns, eucryphias – while carefully maintaining the historic framework of the garden. For the past 12 years he has been working with the current owner, Christopher Langham, to introduce a more sustainable, more naturalistic style of planting. While there have certainly been changes – simplifying areas of the garden, replacing what he considered an overload of pink with purples in flower and foliage colour and introducing movement with bamboos and grasses – the bones of the garden remain untouched. The first impression is of a quintessential English manor garden: seemingly a garden of rooms in the Arts & Crafts tradition, overflowing with fulsome planting, timeless and lyrical. But Steeple Manor, it soon turns out, is a good deal more clever and complex than that.
The garden was laid out in 1923-4 by a young Brenda Colvin. Colvin (1897-1981) is best remembered today for her pioneering work as a landscape architect in post-war Britain. She was an innovator in so many ways: a founder member in 1929 of the Institute of Landscape Architects (now known as The Landscape Institute) and eager to distinguish their work from that of garden designers. She served on its council for 47 consecutive years and, in 1951, was voted president, the first woman to lead any British environmental profession. She sited factories and reservoirs, created settings both for New Towns and for the new redbrick universities and found ways of blending quarries and power stations into their surrounding landscape. Decades ahea
