From Folly to Fishpond… and back

When Cambridgeshire Gardens Trust invited us to help in researching and recording gardens of Huntingdonshire we immediately became aware of our folly in undertaking such an enormous task. The Trust collates information not only for garden historians, but also to assist in conservation, protection of the environment and planning issues such as road building and housing development. While gardening books may be second only to cookery books as Christmas presents, our parents’ gardens are disappearing as fast, ironically, as home cooking, with the extensive grounds of nineteenth century villas being converted to executive cul-de-sacs and manicured ‘front’ gardens being laid to gravel and tarmac for car standing. Working, therefore, on the basis that the most recent history is the most easily lost, our Huntingdon NADFAS Garden History Group decided to look at significant gardens of any size and period.

Home and Garden inspired by the 1922 Ideal Home Exhibition.
Photo courtesy of the Owner.

Our selection of gardens may be guided by their association with well known people, such as the ownership of the Manor House at Fenstanton with Capability Brown or a garden at Hemingford Grey with the children’s writer, Lucy Boston. In some gardens we have been able to find a particularly interesting conjunction of architecture and garden: in one instance a house built to a design from the 1922 Ideal Home Exhibition, with vestiges of its contemporary garden and ten acres of arboretum and woodland, currently being lovingly restored. We study specific kinds of gardens such as cemeteries, municipal and institutional gardens, and use historical maps to detect the evolution of landscape features such as avenues of trees of former boundaries and water features. The narrow-necked ‘ponds’ issuing onto the River Ouse sent us rifling through the records of Ramsey Abbey for evidence of fish husbandry. But our most exciting resources are the ledgers of a local nursery of world wide repute, Wood and Ingram, which traded continuously from 1741 to 1950.

Members of the Huntingdon DFAS Garden History Group with the ledgers of
the Wood and Ingram Nursery (1741-1950)
and the fruit of the Maclura pomifera “Osage Orange”
rescued from our trip to the Cambridge Botanic Garden, December 2005.

The accounts indicate not only spending patterns and fashions in particular plants, such as hedging in periods of enclosure, most vigorously in our area from 1761-1801, but also the origins of particular specimens. In the rectory garden of one local village grows an ‘Huntingdon Elm’ ulmus x ‘Vegeta’ sold by Wood and Ingram and listed by them as a stock plant. They had obtained this particular hybrid as seed from the Earl of Sandwich, gathered in near-by Hinchingbrooke Park. John Ingram also gave a specimen to J.C. Loudon (the garden encyclopaedist) in 1836. On top of all this is the chance to network ! Our group enjoys many study days and outings to neighbouring Botanic Gardens, Cambridge Colleges and documented historic gardens such as Lyveden New Bield and Childerley Hall. So even if you don’t have a major undocumented historic garden waiting to be ‘unearthed’, take up the challenge. You may find that a local contemporary garden, like that of the architect Peter Foster O.B.E. with its Greek Temples and Classical colonnades designed and constructed by himself, will reveal your own folly well worth pursuing.

One of the many temples designed by Peter Foster O.B.E.
who delights in the creation of follies. This example from 1955
uses six Doric columns rescued from a Regency shop front
in near-by St Ives. Photo courtesy of Peter Foster OBE.

Judith Christie
Huntingdon Decorative and Fine Arts Society