Docwra’s Manor starts with a big advantage. The house is beautiful and it would be difficult to spoil its instant charm even with the most vulgar planting. The visitor is won over immediately by the small ‘terribly English’ formal front garden before entering  down the short gravel drive between a barn and  side of the house.  Again instant architectural and  horticultural appeal with old wooden and brick barns, shrubs and roses tumbling about everywhere. And instant warmth towards the owner too. Like Rousham an honesty box and no formality. A smiling gardener and a  “make yourself welcome and enjoy the place”. And that’s not difficult to do, after all as  Tom Stuart-Smith said, Docwra’s Manor is “an exceptionally good old-fashioned garden”.

I first visited about ten years ago, and was reminded of it  when I read  the recent [May 15th 2026]  Times obituary of its co-creator Faith Raven.  So I  decided to take the train up to Shepreth  in Cambridgeshire to see it again.

As usual the photos are my own unless otherwise acknowledged

Docwra’s Manor is a garden for plant lovers, made by plant lovers and maintained by plant lovers. Like Topsy it has “just growed”, and although it would untrue to say it’s not designed, it is true that design very much plays second fiddle to planting.   Visiting  that first time was an eye opener, although for anyone who thinks that gardens should be manicured to perfection or organised around a rigid pre-formed plan, it would probably be something of a shock –  but mainly out of conventional complacency  and perhaps into reassessing their philosophy of gardening. That all helps explain in part at least the relaxed indeed rather higgledy-piggledy feel of the site which stretches over one hectare [c2.5 acres].

The house is L-shaped and a great mix of dates.  The main part is late 17thc but it’s thought its origins may have been in a building dating from 15thc  agricultural revival that eventually followed the Black Death.  One owner for a short time in the 16th century was named Docwra and the name is supposed to have stuck  although the Ordnance Survey, right up until at least the 1960s referred to  it as Docuraies Manor.

It was acquired in 1743 by Joseph Woodham, whose surviving ledgers and journal are in Cambridgeshire Archives. The front facade of the house, [which is only two bricks deep]  and the impressive gates, wall and piers probably date from his time there. However the side [kitchen] wing seen in the first photo is 16thc and formerly a barn,  while the rear addition is early C18.  There were further alterations in the 19th and 20th centuries  too.

Docwra’s was a working farmhouse until 1919 when ownership of the house and land was split. While the land, with the various barns, was let out as smallholdings the house became a normal residential property and changed hands several times before being bought  in 1954,  together with an acre and a half of ground, by John and Faith Raven for £6,000.

If the name Raven rings a bell you shouldn’t be surprised.  It might even make you wonder  as I did, if  the love and skill of gardening and plants runs in families because there are at least three generations of the Raven family who are well known gardeners or botanists. One of the botanical history books that I’ve relied on ever since working on my PhD was  Canon Professor Charles Raven’s 1947  English naturalists from Neckham to Ray: a study of the making if the modern world.

 [For more on him see his lengthy Wikipedia entry , Ian Randall’s 2015 short article “Charles Raven: Theologian, Naturalist, and a bit of a Rebel” or his on-line lecture about him for the Faraday Institute, or his biography Charles Raven : naturalist, historian, theologian by F.W.Dillistone, 1975]

John Raven was his son and later a fellow in classics at Kings College, Cambridge, about 8 miles away from Docwra’s.  However he was also a  passionate ‘amateur’ botanist and in beginning in 1930 he and his father, assisted by other family members began to paint the entire British flora. This was an idea formalised in 1942 when John proposed  “a little collection of essays & illustrations” to his father, “even if there is not the remotest prospect of [their] being published until long after the war”. They gradually built up a remarkable collection of 3860 watercolours representing 2109 species. Plans for publication languished until long after both their deaths but a selection of 136 of them were finally published the Royal Boatnic Garden Edinburgh in 2012.

In  1956 John Raven co-authored  Mountain Flowers  with  Max Walter curator of the university  herbarium. He combined “work” and his love of plants in the four Grey Lectures he gave at Cambridge in 1976 in which he reappraised  long-accepted identifications of ancient names for modern plants. These lectures were eventually published as Plants and Plant Lore in Ancient Greece. in 2000 with photographs by Faith and a commentary by WT Stearns. Unfortunately it’s not available on-line.

While John was clearly born into a love of plants Faith was definitely not: “I was rather conspicuously not interested in plants.” She had an older sister and “my mother thought we should have an interest each… But that my sister should do botany, and I should do geology. Well, I wasn’t interested in geology, but because my sister was interested in botany, it became a non-interest of mine.”  That all changed on marriage when she “became a keen horticulturalist” but still not a botanist.  “I’m now very keen on growing wild plants in my garden but I am not interested in looking them up in a book.”

Her parents  were Owen and Emmeline Hugh Smith, from a wealthy banking family,  who had a house in Mayfair with a roof garden. They also had property in Rutland and  in 1930 bought the Ardtornish estate, with its extensive gardens “on a rocky promontory in north-west Argyll.”   She was to inherit it from them in 1967.  Like Sir Gyles Isham in last week’s post about Lamport she was determined to ensure the estate’s continuity so immediately put the ownership into trust. She divided her time between there and Docwra’s  keeping a watchful eye on both gardens although she never claimed to be much of a hands-on gardener herself. However according to the Times obituary she did enjoy pruning and planned the development of the garden carefully, keeping a card index recording every single plant.

The couple were to have five children, including Sarah who has become a well-known and commercially successful garden entrepreneur and designer, through SarahRaven.com and Perch Hill Farm.

When the Ravens acquired Docwra’s Manor in 1954  its gardens contained little of any great importance apart from some specimen trees. The couple  started with  on the basis of  developing the garden by working outwards from the house,  and using plants which were gifted as wedding presents. They gradually expanded the cultivated ground as their plant collections grew and as they acquired  adjoining barns and yards and incorporated them into the plan.   Of course, as with all gardeners, that was a rapid and continuing story.  Faith Raven said she had “magpie acquisitiveness” getting new plants from family and friends , as well as buying from nurseries or finding things on overseas trips.  That the couple “preferred species to hybrids and the old fashioned to modern novelties” is evident as you progress around the garden.

Some of this was spelled out in A Botanist’s Garden (1971) written by John as a record of his and Faith’s  plant-hunting mainly in the eastern Mediterranean. It talks of the plants ‘we ourselves collected, occasionally in Britain but almost always from abroad, in their natural stations’.

Rather than resorting to illicit measures  “such as gum-boots or sponge bags, to snuggle the loot through the customs”, they did it properly getting licences but “even with one we never dig up a plant unless it was locally abundant’.   Many of these plants can be found at Docwra’s. Unfortunately the book is now out of print and not available on-line. Hoeveer  It was clearly appreciated by Christopher Lloyd who quoted it whenever he wanted to be particularly cutting as for example citing Raven’s dislike of Bergenia:  ”Goodness knows why but the insufferably coarse genus … is apparently coming back into favour.”

 

As you might expect from what I’ve said so far Docwra’s is very informal. The guide leaflet is clear:  “there is no special route to follow. Visitors can wander round at leisure probe into corners and choose plant associations suitable to their own conditions.” So that’s what I’ll do beginning at the gravelled Front  Drive between a climber-covered  barn and the climber-covered house.

Turning right past the end of the house a narrow path leads between almost overgrown roses and shrubs and emerges onto a wide uncluttered lawn. This is  edged on the left side with a winding walk through a collection of convoluted box and other trees, some cloud-pruned or clipped hard,  and on the other by trees and shrubs half-hiding the perimeter wall.

This  leads in turn to a wilder area of long grass with roses and specimen trees and hidden corners.

The right hand side of the lawn has the rear of the house and in the far corner a secluded little dome-topped temple behind which is the Temple garden that hugs the outside wall.

The biggest surprise here is an enrmous and much-pruned mulberry with huge twisted limbs that criss-cross each other and lie all over the ground.

At the end of the path through the Temple Garden there is another very narrow opening [Docwra’s seems to specialise in these!] into the formal garden in front of the house which is stuffed with billowing white roses.

 

Crossing in front of the house another narrow exit leads back to the Front Drive. Almost directly opposite the is the Kitchen Lawn which leads to another very narrow gap in a curved beech hedge to emerge into a jumbled profusion of plants some of which overflow the paths.

This is the Walled Garden which Faith Raven called”a cottage garden with a lot of self-sown plants”. It certainly has that look and feel particularly in the most ‘heavily planted’ section. where plants “are jumbled together without segregation by size or form.”  At the times of the year I’ve been   its been a riot of pale colours with touches of stronger shades in accent plants.   All very informal, with self seeding encouraged although there are still touches of formality with some clipped yews and other evergreens as contrast.

 

 

 

It’s really from there that the complexity of the layout begins to be visible. Because the garden was once a farmyard – or rather  several small farmyards there are lots of walls and buildings which divide up the space. These have largely been used as the basis for the separate gardens. I hesitate to use the term garden rooms which I’ve never really liked, but at Docwra’s it feels appropriate because many of the spaces are completely separated by walls or hedges with the narrowest of openings.

Another smaller garden runs behind the neighbouring cottages and leads into an orchard. The valley of the river Cam was home for a long time to commercial fruit growing although this is now greatly diminished. Perhaps its not surprising that  eventually in the late 1980s Faith Raven, with her then new gardener David Aitchison decided to turn the old vegetable garden into a new orchard which would reflect the area’s tradition choosing cultivars and methods of  cultivation from the 18th to the 20th centuries. These were underplanted with spring bulbs  and other plants such as primroses lady’s smock and spotted orchids which have naturalised and spread.  There is a detailed account of the orchard, its planting, maintenance and cultivars written last year by Jonathan Spain

Beyond that are some allotments and an old tennis court, looking sad and crying out for some attention – If it were mine I’d be looking at breaking up the asphalt and doing some hardcore gardening.

More narrow paths lead through thickly planted beds in the Paved Garden before returning down the edge of the Walled Garden past two small greenhouses which are stuffed with succulents and more tender plants as well as being used for propagation.

A doorway leads into and through through barn which is also home to the gardeners, who clearly have an artistic streak.

leads to the Gravel Courtyard  which is surrounded by other former farm buildings

On the opposite side a gate in the wall leads into the last section of the garden: a small but delightful Paved Courtyard which has rustic former farm buildings on two sides. They and the little garden with its formal pond would suit me as a retirement project!

From there it’s back to the Front Drive …and perhaps a decision to go round it all again – which is what I did on my second visit.I suspect you will too.

John Raven died in 1980 aged only 65 and a group of friends contributed to a collection of essays to commemorate his life which was published the following year.

Faith Raven died in March this year aged 95, with her obituary appearing  in the Times.There is a lengthy interview with her from 2016 by Professor Alan Macfarlane on YouTube.

For once there are not many places to look for further information, although Patrick Taylor’s Gardens of Britain & Ireland [2003] does have a good description.  Otherwise since the garden’s website and guide are very short on history the best thing to do is go and see for yourself!