Borde Hill in Sussex has been in the same family for generations, and they are still moving with the times, says
Ciar Byrne
Glorious gardens
When the Stephenson Clarke family were looking to design a new logo for the Borde Hill Estate in West Sussex, one plant from their vast collection stood out. The rare Emmenopterys henryi, a deciduous tree from temperate parts of China and Vietnam that was brought to England by the plant collector George Forrest, was planted by their ancestor Colonel Stephenson Robert Clarke in 1928.
The species can live for a thousand years, and might not flower in cultivation until it is nearly 100. The colonel, who died in 1948, never got to see it in bloom, as it flowered for the first time in 2011. Since then it has flowered three more times.
The small but distinctive white flowers now feature in the new logo which heralds a change of guard at Borde Hill. Last summer Jay Goddard (née Stephenson Clarke), the great-great-granddaughter of the garden’s creator, moved with her husband and two young sons from London into the Elizabethan mansion at the heart of the estate, where she grew up.
Jay and her brother Harry are the latest generation to take stewardship of this important garden, and they have exciting plans. Their mother, Eleni Stephenson Clarke, who has overseen the garden with her husband Andrewjohn for the past 35 years, has moved to a nearby farmhouse, but will be on hand to offer advice and take beautiful photographs for their social media accounts.
Thanks to the vision of Colonel Clarke, Borde Hill is home to one of the largest private collections of ‘champion’ trees – the tallest or widest specimens of the species in the UK – boasting more than 70 of them. The great horticulturist Sir Harold Hillier described him as ‘the greatest amateur all-rounder in the gardening world of the 20th century’.
Born in 1862 into a family that owned one of the oldest shipping lines in the country and the largest fleet of coal rail wagons, Clarke bought Borde Hill – just eight acres of land – when he was 31. He would later buy up more than 20,000 acres of surrounding farms and woodland.
He was an enthusiastic backer of the leading plant collectors of the day, including George Forrest, Ernest Wilson and Frank Kingdon-Ward, and set about
