Dewstow Gardens, Caldicot

Dewstow is one of those gardens. Close enough that we felt we should have visited before. And lost and found - how we all love that story! Amazing that a garden can be made, flourish, be lost and found all within around 100 years.  How could we have resisted? But we didn't go till last week and guess that without Tim Smit’s ‘Heligan type’ hype some impetus must have been needed.

The impetus came in the form of meeting up with fellow garden designers some of whom did and didn’t know each other. I should add that Lesley and I were very familiar with the extravagant Victorian and Edwardian rockwork, by the Pulham family, of which this is a very splendid example. The others were not. You have the picture.

It would be fair to say that we were hooked from the start. The suggested route took us along a winding path, sympathetically planted.  An overland rock garden was a brief if bland interlude....... before a darker turn...... into a subterranean maze of passages and caves lit by apertures overhead  ......streams and pools.......stairs and balustrades. OTT or what! But strangely fascinating.

Now I will let you into a secret : garden designers, when they get together, shriek and exclaim and warble and no one listens to any one else. It is true! And therein lay my salvation. I found my attention drawn by one route and turned to find I was alone. There was a kind of Tom Sawyer moment. You know. When he is lost in the caves. Panic set in.

And only the flute-like warblings of my fellow designers drew me forward, after following one or two false echoings, to join them. It is that much of a labyrinth! But what is all this? What is it about, as a garden? Hooked as we were, there is quite a lot of passage way to the amount of gardnery space.

 

What was the idea of it? Henry Oakley, its originator, was a passionate horticulturalist and ferns were his ‘plant passion’. These protected, subterranean rooms with skylights above and water flowing through were the perfect growing space. And its style? Well, ferns and rockeries were two of the passions and fashions of the time. And all the drama? The Victorians were OTT in many aspects of their lives.  It seems OTT to us now, but there you go! A chacun son gout and all that jazz!

We emerged blinking into the sunlight beside a croquet lawn and the main house. Thank God!  Things don't get much more normal than a croquet lawn and a prissy Victorian villa. Getting your bearings, you discover that you have been led about over a comparatively small area and have also been quite shallowly underground. Hence the ambient temperature when down there.

So far so good! All this has been above the drive, which crosses the map horizontally, and to the left of the house:

And then turning the corner round what is really rather a modest house for this scale of landscape you discover that it all begins again. A tunnel leads almost directly from the house, down and to the right of the map. Now, as a group, we felt that enough was enough. There is a lot to be said for knowing when to stop! Truth to tell, the second tunnel system is shorter and the room it reveals

the so called alligator pit, is in many ways the most successful since it underplays its hand. Bizarrely you then emerge, to have the choice of a Giverney type bridge or a formal little enclosure which is at odds here with the romantic, picturesque feel of the landscape.

If all this feels a little like a tour, I aplogize, but there is in this garden a fundamental feng shui problem set up by all this travel. For what follows is yet another  maze like system, this time overland, of paths, streams and pools and rockwork and waterfalls and little follies, the complexity of which you perceive from the map above. It is difficult to feel any great love for all of this. Its attenuated scale and winding fussiness typifies the Pulhams and the period.

The fountain in the lake is a horrid suburban touch  and the dovecote almost made some members of the group wet themselves!

What happened here? What was the design process? Sometimes the designer is the one that calls the shots, sometimes the client. We just don't know. Did designer/landscaper and client egg each other on and, in the hothouse drama that was Victorian England, just run amok for a few years?

And so it is that we come back to Henry Oakley, the owner. There is about the guy an essential mystery. Google his name and you have a photo of a train. He was a railway director. The wealthy son of a merchant, he was a bachelor and ‘a disciplinarian.’ What does that mean? Are we talking bondage?! And none of this excess was for show, like the other big Pulhamite landscapes we know. Reportedly very few people knew it was here. Oakley was something of a recluse.

So it seems a very private passion - a fantasy almost. And they can get seriously out of hand. Well one did here! Certainly he was a collector and the landscape provides the perfect layout for the obsessive plantsman.There is much about the form of the garden which still seems unclear. There is talk of greenhouses. Only one of these structures survives, albeit converted into a barn. But there were others, stuffed with tropical flora.

His other passion apart from horticulture was shire horses. Curious then that another Victorian, William Bentinck Scott, the Duke of Portland, was considered 'the best judge of horseflesh in England'. And at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire he constructed many miles of tunnels, actually making Oakley seem quite conservative! Bentick Scott was also a recluse, hence the tunnels – he could arrive and depart unseen. Was this what the tunnels were about?

A way of proceeding from greenhouse to greenhouse and around your estate largely unseen and 'Indiana Jones' like? Or at least protected from lousy Welsh weather? Who knows?

It comes as something of a relief to discover that there was also some time, apart from horticulture and shirehorses that is,  for other matters. The solicitor, who inherited on Oakley’s death in 1940, turns out to have been his illegitimate son. Though who the mother was we never learn. Hopefully there was some fun and some love. Maybe they chased each other along the passageways. And had clandestine assignations in one or other of the follies! The son, on his divorce, sold the property and the landscape became redundant and got filled in until the current owners chanced across tell tale signs. They have heroically and one suspects quite naively resurrected it, in all its awful excesses.

Would that they had not found quite so much. For the end result of this curious story is a garden to which you cannot warm. We none of us did. There is no logic to it, for us now. And it remains a curiosity rather than a successful, well constructed space. So much effort and  time spent looking inward and down below ground when the glory of the site is its estuarine views:

It is however a splendid record of the Pulham’s work, whatever you make of that. And a testament to the tenacity of the current owners in revealing it and sharing it. Of the sharing and the maintenance it is difficult not to think that Oakley would have approved the honest if incomplete attempt at restoration. And some rather fussy and rather incongrous planting. There is not enough massing or sympathy to location employed about the planting generally. Who knows what he would have made of the placards of animals here and there which are no doubt an idea of how to keep kids amused?

However, the welcome we received was warm and homely.

R