Lawrence Johnston and Hidcote Garden

Robin Lane Fox writes about the American genius behind a remarkable garden in the English Cotswolds

Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, while sixty-odd years ago there was only one, Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949 Hidcote attracted a mere 600 visitors and took all of £30 during its first public season. Nowadays, Hidcote is famous worldwide as a masterpiece of design and planting, attracting 150,000 visitors and raising nearly £1 million from entrance tickets annually.

Hidcote Garden was the creation of an American in Britain, the shy Major Lawrence Johnston, who came to live on the site in 1907 with his widowed mother, Gertrude Winthrop. In some respects Winthrop feared her son’s talents for expensive landscape gardening and never allowed him full access to the family’s funds. Nonetheless, with her inspiration and guidance Johnston started his design in 1908 and brought it to a peak in the early 1930s when he was in his 60s. He may rightly be ranked at this time beside Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, creators of Sissinghurst, his garden’s only surviving equal.

In the last years of his life, Johnston placed faith in his head gardener Nancy Lindsay. Lindsay was undoubtedly a skilled plantswoman but she had many other talents as well, including one for taking offence, and he was ill-suited to dealing with her impassioned views. When the National Trust subsequently acquired the garden from Johnston, none of his crucial garden diaries could be found, and some speculated that Lindsay had burned them to hurt her employer.

Whatever their actual fate, Trust gardener Graham Thomas was tasked with reviving Hidcote, and he had to manage without these crucial documents. Thomas knew that for the gardens to be a commercial success he needed to extend those areas that were of most interest to the general public, so he introduced new plants and a Mediterranean Bank where Johnston had had nothing of the sort, while retaining the existing superb structure of avenues and evergreen rooms. As a result, since 1949, the visiting public has innocently been admiring Thomas’s flower plantings, not Johnston’s own.

When the important designer Russell Page had visited Hidcote in 1934 he had hailed the half-hardy plants in the summer house as one of the highlights. But Thomas later got rid of them and pulled the house down, fearing such relatively colourless exhibits would not capture the public’s imagination. Then, in 2002, Johnston’s old diaries and notebooks resurfaced. The present head gardener had started to give lectures about Hidcote’s lost early designs, during which he appealed for memories from his audience. A few months later an envelope arrived. There was no letter inside, only Johnston’s personal diaries from the 1920s and 30s. The sender may be unknown but the importance of these documents to Hidcote is certain, for they contain invaluable notes regarding the selection of plants and, even better still, detailed sketches by Johnston himself showing how the different parts of the garden are related and how those relationships evolve over the seasons.

These documents are a rarity in other ways too, for they never dwell on the issues so typically addressed in diaries -- relationships, loves and longings. These are far more interesting, for they represent a classic social history of an English country house during the inter-war years. On page after page Johnston describes the layout of the plants and gardens, interspersed, for example, with that day’s guests. The famous novelist Edith Wharton is recorded as coming for lunch, beside a recipe for poison to kill garden weeds. It is this mix of glamour and the everyday that makes the diaries of such peculiar fascination. At their heart, though, these are useful documents containing, for example, lengthy lists of those who might one day be of service around the estate, including local stone masons and glaziers, or repairers of broken china from as far away as France.

The discovery of the diaries has offered Hidcote a new direction for the years ahead. Inspired by them, an anonymous American has given the gardens £1.6 million. This is a remarkable chance, which the Trust has gladly seized upon to allow for crucial repair work on paths and the famous pool, together with the reconstruction of the old summer house. However, the real implications of the discoveries made from the diaries are more problematic, for now the Trust must take its collection of plants up one notch. We now possess information about the very plants that most appealed to Johnston in the garden’s golden years. Today, these may not be easy to source, nor so appealing to contemporary tastes.

’But isn’t it all so long ago?’ a non-gardening academic recently asked me. On the contrary, Hidcote is still with us, a living legacy. It includes the greatest central vista in British gardening, the design I regard as the greatest in British art in the past century. It was the work of an American genius building an un-American garden of his own. I do not believe the fashionable guess nowadays that Johnston was informed by books on contemporary design by Britain’s Thomas Mawson, an altogether less innovative mind. This is not least because there is so much in the garden to remind us how Johnston had travelled widely in Europe, which Mawson had not. It is Johnston’s own origins, the events of his life, and his individual design flair that contribute to making Hidcote so unique.