The Garden History Blog

These days there’s only one famous Mrs Richmond – my friend the media star Advolly – but I hate to tell her she has, or at least had, a rival!

Who was this other Mrs Richmond ?

Advolly is very up-to-date. She has a splendid website, appears on Gardeners’ World and Gardeners’ Question Time, and does podcasts.  She’s even started writing for the on-line platform Scribehound.  But as a plant and garden historian  she also does that more traditional thing and writes articles and has just published a book: A Short History of Flowers.   The other Mrs R was equally modern in her own day as a gardening columnist for The Queen magazine, a contributor to other gardening magazines and author of a popular book, but despite all that she remains a very sketchy figure…

Water lily  “Mrs Richmond” growing in Mrs Richmond’s pond – photo courtesy of Advolly

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A little way along the Thames from Marble Hill which I wrote about last week is  perhaps the most important of those 18th century riverside sites:  the last remaining part of the villa, grotto and garden built on the banks of the Thames  by the poet Alexander Pope in the 1720s.

Although the house itself was demolished less than a hundred years later, and the garden has long been built over,  somehow the grotto survived, although it has lost most of its decoration and its view. (and yes grottos can have views!).  Although listed as Grade 2* it was also listed as  Heritage at Risk,  but now supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund the grotto is now slowly being conserved by the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust.

Pope’s villa from The Prospect of the River Thames at Twickenham by Peter Hillmans, c1724-30, Richmond Borough Art Collection, Orleans House Gallery

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Marble Hill, poster design for London Transport by Robert Micklewright, 1977

A few days ago I visited two Georgian gardens on the banks of the Thames. One of them was Marble Hill, and  the other Pope’s Grotto which I’ll write about next week.

Marble Hill  is the last complete survivor of the elegant villas  that bordered the Thames between Richmond and Hampton Court.  The gardens were not quite so lucky as the house and the grounds have been a rather bland public park for over 120 years. But things are changing and  thanks to English Heritage the highlights of the 18thc gardens are in the last stages of restoration and recreation. It is another of their very successful projects that has seen life breathed back into, amongst many others,  Brodsworth, Wrest Park, Belsay Bolsover and Eltham Palace [all of which I’ve written about here].

While the newly recreated  gardens  at Marble Hill may not be immediately amongst the most spectacular they are going to offer an authentic insight into what the early/mid-Georgian garden was like and we should all be very grateful to the English Heritage  garden team for their flair, determination and attention to detail.

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A few days ago I visited a garden I’d known about for years, but because it’s only open two afternoons a year I’d never managed to visit.    I’d seen images of its ponds and cascades, its red Japanese-style bridges and its flaming autumnal colours and so, undeterred by the heavy rain, I set off from north London to the far-flung south-western corner of the capital and the last remaining part of what  used to be Coombe Wood Nursery, part of the Veitch horticultural empire.

It’s often thought to include the first Japanese garden in Britain. Even though that is disputed, what remains still maintains something of the illusion of Japan today. Continue reading →