I’ve just found a new favourite garden. Every so often, like most of us I suspect, I visit a garden and go…wow I could live here but maybe I’d just alter this, move that, add a few of this or thats and so on… but a couple of weeks ago I discovered somewhere that is well-nigh perfect. And I’m clearly not the only one who thinks that. The garden’s website proudly banner-headlines Philip Ziegler’s comment that “Melbourne Hall was, and mercifully is, one of the most exquisite of the smaller stately homes of England, while the formal gardens… are as close to perfection as any in the country…“.
The gardens at Melbourne Hall are probably the best surviving example of their period, classically formal in an Anglo-French Baroque mix. Of course, as Robin Lane Fox put it in a recent article “a hectare or so of enclosed garden is hardly Versailles in Derbyshire, but the use of space is extraordinarily interesting.” The layout while seemingly simple, is subtly complex, making it a precis of all that is best in the gardens of the time. And to make it more interesting still, the gardens have continued to evolve, adding touches of colour to the range of greens that otherwise dominate. So perhaps it’s not surprising that more than 20 garden features are Grade I listed including the intricate metalwork gazebo that I mentioned at the end of last week’s post on Treillage. So read on to find out more…
The Garden History Blog 
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