Digging for History

Tyntesfield, the National Trust’s flagship acquisition near Bristol, attracts 600-800 people a day, all keen to see its High Victorian architecture and decoration. Today’s visitors walk up to the house through the gardens which, like the house, are undergoing their own costly and thorough restoration. The magnificent carpet bedding on the terrace is much admired and the Kitchen Garden, with its espaliered fruit trees, seems to exert a particular fascination.

The National Trust has been doing this sort of thoughtful conservation, based on research into the individual sites and the horticultural traditions of the days in which they were first laid out, ever since the 1950s; yet it is the sad and extraordinary fact that Britain’s historic gardens, unlike her listed buildings, are still not properly protected. Indeed, they were not even categorized in any formal way until the 1980s, when Dr Christopher Thacker, one of the founders of the Garden History Society, went round the country on his own, like a latter-day Arthur Young, recording for English Heritage the gardens that he personally considered important.