The National Trust holds many of our greatest historic houses and gardens but I often think its greatest holding is not those but the many less well-known, less grand and yet more typical small country houses and estates.

I stopped off at one of them on my recent rainy and windswept visit to Bournemouth and despite the miserable dreary weather came away positive that this really is where the Trust’s great strength lies. Places like Hinton Ampner   may not be as well known as Stowe or Stourhead, and you may never have heard of Ralph Dutton but he and the house and garden he saved and re-invented are just as important to our national heritage, albeit in different ways.

 

As usual the images are my own unless otherwise acknowledged

There’s been a manor house near the church at Hinton Ampner since at least 1310. The estate was  owned by St Swithun’s Priory in Winchester but after the Dissolution it passed to the Dean and Chapter of Winchester Cathedral who leased it out. At the end of Elizabeth I’s reign the tenant  was Sir Thomas Stewkeley, and he and then his successors, the Stawell family, occupied the property for the next 200 years before the house was demolished in 1793 and a new lodge built nearby. It passed though the female line to the Dutton family in 1820 before  in 1863 John Dutton purchased the freehold of “the neat mansion in a finely wooded park of 40 acres” from the Dean and Chapter. He then embarked on making  significant changes to the house by calling in a local builder to Gothicise it.

John died in 1884 and the house passed first to his son Ralph who died only two years later, and then to his younger brother Henry. Henry was keen on horses dogs and shooting but little interest in the house or garden.  He and his wife Blanche had a family of  three girls and a boy, another Ralph, who was born in 1898  and who was eventually to create the gardens and house at Hinton Ampner as seen today.

The family were wealthy and had even wealthier connections, so in the season Blanche would take a house in London and take the children, giving Ralph his great love of the city to balance his love of rural Hampshire. Ralph was schooled at Eton where he formed life-long friendships – Sacheverell Sitwell, Christopher Hussey, and Anthony Eden amongst others – and thence to Oxford to study modern languages, where his circle included Chips Channon, Edward Sackville-West  and Lord David Cecil. Like so many others he left without taking a degree and then supplemented his academic studies with a more practical course at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. Afterwards, in the words of his biographer John Holden, he “had no need to work and no interest in a career but he was not prone to indolence.” So he set off to travel the world crossing North America and then the Pacific to Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Aden before returning through the Suez Canal to Europe.

Back in Hampshire Ralph began to oversee changes to the garden but it was really only after his father died on New Year’s Day 1935 that things really started to develop.  Not only did he inherit the estate but also  around £200,000, probably equivalent to around £10 million today.

So Ralph was now rich but he was also earning his own money by writing.  His first book The English Country House came out later that year and  was well received. As a well travelled, well read successful author with a sophisticated life in London and a group of close friends who shared his interest and enthusiasm., he now turned his attention to transforming Hinton, and establishing himself in London in a house in Chapel Street just off Belgrave Square.

One of the great assets of Hinton is its location on the top of a ridge which commands a prospect across a broad green valley, farms and woodlands to the slopes of the Downs beyond. The top of the ridge, where the house, kitchen garden and nearby Church stand, is comparatively level, but to the east to the south the land slopes considerably, making possible a series of terraces and separate gardens.

The four years before the outbreak of war  saw the creation of  the Sunken Garden and 180m Long Walk which runs from one side of the garden to the other, with focal points at either end,  as well as the Dell, the Philadelphus Walk, the Magnolia Garden, and the Temple. These features were linked together seamlessly with belts of shrubs to  create a unified whole.  On the wider estate Ralph  planted lots of trees and separated the formal gardens from the park by digging ha-has.

Not all of his innovations were successful. The Dell, for example, turned out to be a frost pocket and unsuitable for the half-hardy plants he planned to fill it with.

While the garden improvements were going on Ralph demolished what he called the Victorian “monstrosity” that was his father ‘s house, but retaining the Georgian core and building a neo-Georgian shell around it.  The fact that elsewhere Georgian country houses were being demolished rather than restored meant was that he was able to go round acquire fixtures and fittings of astonishing quality from them.

He was very keen on long vistas, always endeavouring to enhance the views from the house  by buying up parcels of land within sight to prevent unsightly developments and he even added a small window at the right height so that he could see out over the park while he was seated on the lavatory.

In 1936, Ralph made his first radio broadcast about the country house. And the following year did a follow-up book on The English Garden in which he claims to be “not a very knowledgeable plantsman” although he did seem to know a lot about the history of gardens.  He set out his philosophy, treating the garden like an artist’s canvas-allowing no ‘dull or wasted areas’. The garden was to flow, “leading visitors from point to point, and vistas, long or short, come here and there into view.”

 

Ralph’s longer term plans were abruptly halted by the outbreak of war when the house was requisitioned for  Portsmouth High School for Girls. Driven out of his home and with his sight already too poor for active service he went to work for the Foreign Office in London and abroad probably because of his language skills. He returned  when he could but the gardens were largely abandoned.

After the war, Ralph wrote of “gazing out onto the chaos of what had once been a well kept garden”. The grass was overgrown, the terraces weed infested and the ground churned up by children’s feet. As his biographer, says the problem was not easy to fix because there was no machinery and even if there had been there was no petrol. Luckily he found two elderly men who were good with scythes and “during the long summer evenings they spent many hours rhythmically mowing the rough herbage until the terrace was once again some semblance of a lawn.”

Around this time, he also added statues to the gardens and turned his father’s old croquet lawn into the Lily Pool. The gardens were soon open to the public again for charities like the National Gardens Scheme.

A sign of how successful the recovery had been can be seen in the 1947 Country Life article by his old friend  Christopher Hussey although it  concentrates on the interiors and had no real mention of the garden. That was to come ten years later.

Ralph kept up a steady stream of publications, amongst them The English Interior in 1948, Wessex in 1950,  The Age of Wren 1951,  London Homes 1952  The Victorian Home 1954 as well as several books on France. They were all well  received by the critics apart from Evelyn Waugh who condemned Dutton’s writing  as “trite and patronising”.

At the same time he began to serve in many public roles, being appointed Sheriff of Hampshire, a trustee of the Wallace Collection,  joining  the committee of what is now the Art Fund and  the National Trust Historic Buildings Committee.

By 1957 the restoration of the gardens was completed and  Country Life was back again. A lengthy laudatory article by  Lanning Roper describes Hinton Ampner’s gardens in detail and describes them as  having “an established look of timelessness”.

Roper concluded that  they were “low-keyed in colour, depending on trees and shrubs, topiary and lawns, and on walls and architectural features rather than on brilliant colour borders and parterre effects. It is, in fact, a well-designed modern garden, the dignified formality of which is a pleasant antidote to the numerous woodland gardens and over-sized cottage gardens which have become so prevalent in post-war Britain.”

Then tragedy struck when fire gutted almost the whole house in 1960. Worse still, it was not insured. But while devastated and dismayed Dutton was not daunted. Five or six farms and several other properties were sold to pay for the restoration.  He took the opportunity to rebuild in a much lighter and airy Georgian style, using Trenwith Wills, the original architect,  who had transformed the house in the 1930s, with one commentator noting  that “Mr Dutton will remain the last dilettante to realise such a fantasy.”

Work was finally finished in 1963.  Adrian Tinniswood the historian of country houses believes  it is “a stunningly beautiful piece of neo-Regency inside and out, and remains one of the greatest of all post war country houses.”

Ralph’s book Hinton Ampner, a Hampshire Manor   on the history of the garden and park was published in 1968.  It details the origins of his design ideas, his garden philosophy and how these influenced his creation.  His final book Hampshire appeared in 1970, although in 1982 he did contribute a chapter on Hinton Ampner to The Englishman’s Garden.

In 1972 Hinton was visited by the Queen who wrote a letter of thanks afterwards saying “it was such a pleasure to pay you a visit last week and I greatly enjoyed seeing the lovely garden and your beautiful house so full of treasures – one does not often see a garden so well placed with sudden exquisite views to thrill one and my own garden looked a positive jungle after your Green walks and splendid clumps of shrubs and roses! With thanks for your kindness and hospitality. I am, your sincerely, Elizabeth R.”

In 1982 the death of his cousin meant he inherited the title of Baron Sherborne, but not a penny of the estimated £6million estate. Being unmarried with no immediate heirs he approached the National Trust to see if they would accept the house and the 1650 acre estate  after his death. Graham Thomas, the Trust’s head of Gardens and Chris Brickell, Director of Wisley, came to assess the garden’s quality. They reported in glowing terms: “It is the whole thing, house, garden and landscape which makes it so good” and recommended acceptance. It was just in time because not long afterwards, in April 1985,  Ralph Dutton died following a fall down the main staircase.  He is buried in the church where he worshipped.

Despite his  care and maintenance of house and grounds, parts of the estate needed work and the National Trust initially decided to open the gardens but let the house  with the kitchen garden becoming private space where a tennis court and swimming pool were installed.  However following the grants form of 1987 about 10% of the trees in the parkland were blown down and its was decided this would be a good opportunity to begin a major garden renovation programme which last five years between 1989-1994. Much of the garden was gradually replanted by National Trust teams, using planting schemes that used many of the plant varieties favoured by Ralph and sticking to his preferred subdued pastel colours – to replicate the gardens he himself had so carefully created. Some of these 1990s  schemes are now showing their age  and are again due for renewal.

The kitchen garden was reclaimed and  re-opened to visitors in 2006. It’s currently undergoing a complete rethink   as part of  the Hinton Ampner Reimagined project which aims to build a more vibrant, accessible and sustainable estate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the really nice features of the kitchen garden project is what’s called the garden information room. It’s in one of the outbuildings and contains not only the usual series of basic information panels, but a large book about the history of the site  and an interactive display offering more detail, as well as comments on the plans for the future.

Congratulations to whoever thought of it because it’s  an idea that I’m sure would be welcomed by visitors to other  sites too.

 

 

The gardens at Hinton Ampner remain close to Ralph Dutton’s original design – obviously partly because of the emphasis on trees and shrubs rather than herbaceous planting. They are also part of  a tradition of compartmentalised gardens designed by a dedicated and knowledgeable owner, in the same way as Hidcote, Sissinghurst, or Munstead Wood.  Overall the design of Hinton adds up to what Tim Richardson calls a combination of “simplicity and modesty of tone with an uncompromising architectural attitude.”

They reflect Dutton’s  own comment: “I have learnt during the past years what above all I want from a garden: this is tranquility” and that, despite the wind, the rain and the closure of many parts of the garden because of the appalling conditions, is exactly what the visitor feels today.

For more information I’d obviously recommend Dutton’s own book on the house, and if you want to know more about the man himself then John Holden’s recent biography is an easy and informative read. There are also lots more photographs of the house and gardens from the 1930s-1950s on the website of Alresford Museum.