Country House Gardens 1550-1660
Documentary and physical evidence of designed landscapes is more abundant from the mid C16. In the years after 1550 gardens began to change and Italian Renaissance ideas began to be introduced at the grandest castles and palaces. These aristocratic gardens might contain terraces, obelisks, fountains, grottos, statuary, gazebos, banqueting houses and water gardens. Parterres – flat terraces laid out with flower beds and decorative patterns in regular formation – developed in the C17 from simpler Tudor knot gardens. Gardens were seen as a buffer between the house and the wilder landscape beyond, essential to provide an orderly setting to the house and often planned at the same time.
One highly important development, from around the mid C16, was the imparkment of land around great houses to give privacy and a pleasing setting whereas medieval deer parks had generally been located in marginal landscapes away from the house.
The gardens of more modest country houses in the C16 and earlier C17 probably differed little from those of the preceding century, being contained within one or more walled compartments around a house, and with elaboration confined to straight gravel paths, knots, topiary, and clipped hedges. Garden buildings, such as small banqueting houses, might be placed against the sides of the enclosure. Forecourts partially enclosed by stone walls were employed in Tudor England to dignify the main approach to a mansion and may be considered as garden compartments. There were also garden courts enclosed by buildings.
A garden treatise of 1629 by John Parkinson entitled ‘Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris’ is the first substantial book on English gardening, dealing both with garden layout and with planting. It refers not only to flower gardens but also to kitchen gardens and orchards and describes suitable plants for these three types of gardens.
The Reformation led to the suppression of religious houses in the 1530s and this caused an upheaval in patterns of landholding throughout England, not least on the Isle of Wight. Powerful new families such as the Worsleys, the Mills and the Flemings became landowners although some old-established Island families such as the Oglanders continued to be influential. However, there were still no residential aristocratic families on the Island.
The Island was a somewhat dangerous place to live in the C16, with foreign invasion continuing to be a real threat but the building of forts by Tudor monarchs and the defeat of the Spanish Armada gradually contributed to a feeling of greater confidence exemplified in physical form by the stone manor houses which form such a distinctive feature of the island’s historic landscape at the present day. These began to be built in the C16 but most of the surviving examples are of C17 date.
The majority of the Island’s Tudor and Jacobean manor houses were not great ‘country houses’ but were relatively modest in size although a few, such as Appuldurcombe, Northcourt and Knighton Gorges, were very substantial buildings. Most manor houses on the Island would not have had elaborate formal gardens influenced by Renaissance ideas in the C16 and early C17. However, more modest pleasure gardens probably existed at many manor houses although there is evidence at only a few sites.
The largest house on the Island in the Tudor period was at Appuldurcombe near Wroxall in the south-east of the Island, close to the South Wight Downland. This house was built by the Worsley family on the site of a former Benedictine priory and was visited by Henry VIII in 1538.
The C16 house at Appuldurcombe was replaced by a Baroque mansion (LB I) in the early C18 but an engraving of the Tudor house made in 1720 survives. This engraving depicts a courtyard enclosed by stone walls in front of (or behind) the house and probably represents a garden area. Another walled enclosure is shown on the left side of the house and contains a bowling green and a building set on a raised mound, possibly a dovecote.
The earliest evidence for a possible deer park at Appuldurcombe is a reference to a deer lodge in 1557. A deer park is specifically mentioned in the will of Sir Thomas Worsley (1603) but it has been suggested that this was at Old Park, St Lawrence, in the Undercliff (i.e. the park shown on John Speed’s 1611 map). However, the 1557 reference to a deer lodge does seem to indicate that the deer park mentioned in Sir Thomas Worsley’s will was at Appuldurcombe although it is unclear whether the surviving late C18 park wall at Appuldurcombe (NHL II) incorporates any elements of a possible earlier deer park wall.
Northcourt manor house in Shorwell (LB II) was built in c.1615 by Sir John Leigh and is ‘the grandest surviving C16 - C17 house on the Island’. The grounds (NHL II) have garden terraces and a mount which may be contemporary with the house. Mounts were popular in the Tudor period but were still being built in the early C17.
The terraces and mount at Northcourt probably constitute the most important surviving evidence of an Isle of Wight garden predating 1750.
The influential Island family of the Oglanders lived at Nunwell (LB II*, NHL II) which is in the East Wight just to the north of the East Wight Chalk Ridge and close to the small town of Brading. Sir John Oglander (1585-1655) appears to have been particularly interested in gardening. His notebooks provide details of the grounds at Nunwell, including references to a warren, gardens, orchards, hop gardens and a bowling green. The gardens included a ‘parlour garden’ and an ‘upper garden’.
Several of the features mentioned in Sir John’s notebooks are shown on a map of Nunwell dating from 1748. This depicts a garden landscape in which ornamental and functional features are intermingled in a manner which had started to become unfashionable on the mainland by the mid C18 but which is typical of many country house gardens from 1550-1660.
There is no sense of overall design in the garden layout shown on the 1748 map; service buildings are located close to the house on its north side and the main gardens are located to one side of the house rather than in front of it. On the other hand, by 1748 the east wing of the house had been rebuilt to face the garden. Moreover, the map shows a regular avenue of trees labelled ‘the Prospect’ aligned on the courtyard in front of the south wing of the house. This avenue may have been planted in the early C18 rather than being a C17 garden feature.
The main gardens are shown on the 1748 map as two areas of regular plots lying to the east of the house, possibly corresponding to the ‘parlour’ and ‘upper’ gardens in Sir John’s account. These gardens faced south (whereas the present main formal garden at Nunwell faces east), were at least partly enclosed and included ornamental features such a ‘terrace’ and ‘parterres’ as well as plots which may have grown produce for the table. The garden area which was further away from the house is shown as being flanked by orchards on its north and south sides. Two further enclosures planted with trees or shrubs in regular rows are shown to the north of the service buildings and it is tempting to equate these with the hop gardens mentioned by Sir John Oglander.
The designed landscape shown to the south of the two formal garden areas on the 1748 map has a less enclosed character than that of the formal gardens. An area of scattered trees is shown beyond the garden area nearest to the house. The formal avenue of ‘The Prospect’ separates this area of scattered trees from a sub-triangular block of woodland with rounded corners which is identified on the map as ‘The Warren’. Beyond the warren an open allée or walk is defined by a single line of trees at a 45% angle to ‘The Prospect’. This may be an early C18 feature as has been suggested for ‘The Prospect’. The allée leads to a large sub-rectangular fishpond with a regular plantation of trees beyond. (An entry in Sir John Oglander’s diary indicates that he regarded a fishpond as being an essential garden feature.)
No traces of the formal gardens or orchards shown on the 1748 map remain within the pleasure gardens around the house at Nunwell but the fishpond, the wooded area of the warren and a remnant of ‘The Prospect’ survive in separate ownership although within the registered park (NHL II).
The present landscape park at Nunwell is located to the east of the house and has old trees with lichens suggesting a parkland environment of considerable age (Basford 1989, 17). However, the site of the present house was only occupied by the Oglander family from the 1530s. We know that in the C17 Sir John Oglander’s ‘warren’ was located to the south-west of the house rather than to the east but we also have his statement that ‘of a rude chase I have now made [Nunwell] a fit place for any gentleman’. This reference to a ‘chase’ implies that land around Nunwell may have been used as a hunting ground in the C16. Notwithstanding this rather vague reference, the 1748 map suggests that the area beyond the formal gardens and orchards to the east of Nunwell House was occupied by cultivated fields in the early C18 although it is shown as parkland on an estate map of 1773.
Knighton Gorges near Newchurch was once one of the Island’s most imposing mansions. It originated in the medieval period and was added to in later centuries before being demolished in the 1820s.
Earthworks mark the site of the demolished manor house and to the west are stone and brick walls with associated internal perimeter banks enclosing two walled gardens. The walls are listed Grade II and the garden itself is on the Local List.
Although some parts of the surviving garden walls may be of C18 or C19 date, the internal banks could date from an earlier period and may be interpreted as raised walks giving views into and out of the garden.
In the upper garden the perimeter banks enclose an area with a sunken north-south path. This upper garden is referred to by an early C20 writer as a bowling green but may have been a ‘boulingrin’ in the French sense as recorded by the writer Dezaillier D’Argenville (1709), meaning not a place where bowls were played but ‘certain sinkings and slopings of turf’. A brick-vaulted alcove within the earthen bank beside the east wall may have been a shelter from which to view the garden.
Stone forecourt walls survive in front of the late C16 manor house of Wolverton, at Shorwell (LB I) and at the early C17 Yaverland Manor (LB I).
At Wolverton manor house the NE wall of the C17 forecourt gives access to a former garden area which has a brick wall of C18 date along its NW side (LB II). There is no surviving wall along the SE side of the former garden but an earth bank in this position may originally have been constructed behind an enclosing wall to give views into and out of the garden as at Knighton Gorges. The entrance into the partially-walled garden from the forecourt appears contemporary with the C17 wall, suggesting that the garden existed by this date. Furthermore, windows in the house overlook the garden, providing further evidence that it existed when the house was built.
Adjoining the northern part of the walled garden at Wolverton is a 0.13ha (0.31 acre) rectangular moated platform (SM). This may be the site of an earlier house, which the present manor replaced but it could possibly be the site of a medieval or post-medieval garden. On the 1864 Ordnance Survey map the area inside the moat is shown planted as an informal orchard and it is now informal woodland.
Garden walls (LB II) at Arreton Manor are associated with the house built by Humphrey Bennett in 1637-9. They date from the early C17, or earlier, with a substantial early C17 dovecote (LBII) at the southeast corner. Dovecotes were often associated with high-status residences and their grounds from the Middle Ages onwards.
A disused and roofless rectangular stone dovecote (LB II) at Shalcombe Manor is of possible C16 date.
At Billingham, in Shorwell Parish, Andrew Goter (or Gother) bought a messuage (i.e. a property) with two gardens, two orchards and other land in 1647 and built a house which was extended in the C18 (LB II*).
The L shaped walled garden which now encloses the house on the west and north sides may possibly date from the C17 and is definitely indicated on the 1769 Andrews map. A raised terrace walk along the inside of the west wall, designed to overlook the rest of the walled garden, is shown on the 1862-4 25” OS map but may well be of earlier date. At the SE corner of the walled garden is a small gazebo (LB II with garden wall), rebuilt in the C20 but thought to be C18 and possibly once one of a pair.
The 1793 OS drawing shows woodland bisected by an approach drive to the west of the house, parkland to the north of the walled garden and orchards to the east of it. The framework of all these compartments still survives within the grounds of Billingham Manor and represents a historically significant survival.
Shanklin Manor was owned by Sir Edward Denys, Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, in the early C17. A stone-built summerhouse or gazebo in the grounds of the manor house, possibly of C17 origin with later alterations, has adjoining east and north walls (LB II). A walled garden is known to have existed by 1769 when it was depicted on John Andrews map.
Documentary and physical evidence of designed landscapes is more abundant from the mid C16. In the years after 1550 gardens began to change and Italian Renaissance ideas began to be introduced at the grandest castles and palaces. These aristocratic gardens might contain terraces, obelisks, fountains, grottos, statuary, gazebos, banqueting houses and water gardens. Parterres – flat terraces laid out with flower beds and decorative patterns in regular formation – developed in the C17 from simpler Tudor knot gardens. Gardens were seen as a buffer between the house and the wilder landscape beyond, essential to provide an orderly setting to the house and often planned at the same time.
One highly important development, from around the mid C16, was the imparkment of land around great houses to give privacy and a pleasing setting whereas medieval deer parks had generally been located in marginal landscapes away from the house.
The gardens of more modest country houses in the C16 and earlier C17 probably differed little from those of the preceding century, being contained within one or more walled compartments around a house, and with elaboration confined to straight gravel paths, knots, topiary, and clipped hedges. Garden buildings, such as small banqueting houses, might be placed against the sides of the enclosure. Forecourts partially enclosed by stone walls were employed in Tudor England to dignify the main approach to a mansion and may be considered as garden compartments. There were also garden courts enclosed by buildings.
A garden treatise of 1629 by John Parkinson entitled ‘Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris’ is the first substantial book on English gardening, dealing both with garden layout and with planting. It refers not only to flower gardens but also to kitchen gardens and orchards and describes suitable plants for these three types of gardens.
The Reformation led to the suppression of religious houses in the 1530s and this caused an upheaval in patterns of landholding throughout England, not least on the Isle of Wight. Powerful new families such as the Worsleys, the Mills and the Flemings became landowners although some old-established Island families such as the Oglanders continued to be influential. However, there were still no residential aristocratic families on the Island.
The Island was a somewhat dangerous place to live in the C16, with foreign invasion continuing to be a real threat but the building of forts by Tudor monarchs and the defeat of the Spanish Armada gradually contributed to a feeling of greater confidence exemplified in physical form by the stone manor houses which form such a distinctive feature of the island’s historic landscape at the present day. These began to be built in the C16 but most of the surviving examples are of C17 date.
The majority of the Island’s Tudor and Jacobean manor houses were not great ‘country houses’ but were relatively modest in size although a few, such as Appuldurcombe, Northcourt and Knighton Gorges, were very substantial buildings. Most manor houses on the Island would not have had elaborate formal gardens influenced by Renaissance ideas in the C16 and early C17. However, more modest pleasure gardens probably existed at many manor houses although there is evidence at only a few sites.
The largest house on the Island in the Tudor period was at Appuldurcombe near Wroxall in the south-east of the Island, close to the South Wight Downland. This house was built by the Worsley family on the site of a former Benedictine priory and was visited by Henry VIII in 1538.
The C16 house at Appuldurcombe was replaced by a Baroque mansion (LB I) in the early C18 but an engraving of the Tudor house made in 1720 survives. This engraving depicts a courtyard enclosed by stone walls in front of (or behind) the house and probably represents a garden area. Another walled enclosure is shown on the left side of the house and contains a bowling green and a building set on a raised mound, possibly a dovecote.
The earliest evidence for a possible deer park at Appuldurcombe is a reference to a deer lodge in 1557. A deer park is specifically mentioned in the will of Sir Thomas Worsley (1603) but it has been suggested that this was at Old Park, St Lawrence, in the Undercliff (i.e. the park shown on John Speed’s 1611 map). However, the 1557 reference to a deer lodge does seem to indicate that the deer park mentioned in Sir Thomas Worsley’s will was at Appuldurcombe although it is unclear whether the surviving late C18 park wall at Appuldurcombe (NHL II) incorporates any elements of a possible earlier deer park wall.
Northcourt manor house in Shorwell (LB II) was built in c.1615 by Sir John Leigh and is ‘the grandest surviving C16 - C17 house on the Island’. The grounds (NHL II) have garden terraces and a mount which may be contemporary with the house. Mounts were popular in the Tudor period but were still being built in the early C17.
The terraces and mount at Northcourt probably constitute the most important surviving evidence of an Isle of Wight garden predating 1750.
The influential Island family of the Oglanders lived at Nunwell (LB II*, NHL II) which is in the East Wight just to the north of the East Wight Chalk Ridge and close to the small town of Brading. Sir John Oglander (1585-1655) appears to have been particularly interested in gardening. His notebooks provide details of the grounds at Nunwell, including references to a warren, gardens, orchards, hop gardens and a bowling green. The gardens included a ‘parlour garden’ and an ‘upper garden’.
Several of the features mentioned in Sir John’s notebooks are shown on a map of Nunwell dating from 1748. This depicts a garden landscape in which ornamental and functional features are intermingled in a manner which had started to become unfashionable on the mainland by the mid C18 but which is typical of many country house gardens from 1550-1660.
There is no sense of overall design in the garden layout shown on the 1748 map; service buildings are located close to the house on its north side and the main gardens are located to one side of the house rather than in front of it. On the other hand, by 1748 the east wing of the house had been rebuilt to face the garden. Moreover, the map shows a regular avenue of trees labelled ‘the Prospect’ aligned on the courtyard in front of the south wing of the house. This avenue may have been planted in the early C18 rather than being a C17 garden feature.
The main gardens are shown on the 1748 map as two areas of regular plots lying to the east of the house, possibly corresponding to the ‘parlour’ and ‘upper’ gardens in Sir John’s account. These gardens faced south (whereas the present main formal garden at Nunwell faces east), were at least partly enclosed and included ornamental features such a ‘terrace’ and ‘parterres’ as well as plots which may have grown produce for the table. The garden area which was further away from the house is shown as being flanked by orchards on its north and south sides. Two further enclosures planted with trees or shrubs in regular rows are shown to the north of the service buildings and it is tempting to equate these with the hop gardens mentioned by Sir John Oglander.
The designed landscape shown to the south of the two formal garden areas on the 1748 map has a less enclosed character than that of the formal gardens. An area of scattered trees is shown beyond the garden area nearest to the house. The formal avenue of ‘The Prospect’ separates this area of scattered trees from a sub-triangular block of woodland with rounded corners which is identified on the map as ‘The Warren’. Beyond the warren an open allée or walk is defined by a single line of trees at a 45% angle to ‘The Prospect’. This may be an early C18 feature as has been suggested for ‘The Prospect’. The allée leads to a large sub-rectangular fishpond with a regular plantation of trees beyond. (An entry in Sir John Oglander’s diary indicates that he regarded a fishpond as being an essential garden feature.)
No traces of the formal gardens or orchards shown on the 1748 map remain within the pleasure gardens around the house at Nunwell but the fishpond, the wooded area of the warren and a remnant of ‘The Prospect’ survive in separate ownership although within the registered park (NHL II).
The present landscape park at Nunwell is located to the east of the house and has old trees with lichens suggesting a parkland environment of considerable age (Basford 1989, 17). However, the site of the present house was only occupied by the Oglander family from the 1530s. We know that in the C17 Sir John Oglander’s ‘warren’ was located to the south-west of the house rather than to the east but we also have his statement that ‘of a rude chase I have now made [Nunwell] a fit place for any gentleman’. This reference to a ‘chase’ implies that land around Nunwell may have been used as a hunting ground in the C16. Notwithstanding this rather vague reference, the 1748 map suggests that the area beyond the formal gardens and orchards to the east of Nunwell House was occupied by cultivated fields in the early C18 although it is shown as parkland on an estate map of 1773.
Knighton Gorges near Newchurch was once one of the Island’s most imposing mansions. It originated in the medieval period and was added to in later centuries before being demolished in the 1820s.
Earthworks mark the site of the demolished manor house and to the west are stone and brick walls with associated internal perimeter banks enclosing two walled gardens. The walls are listed Grade II and the garden itself is on the Local List.
Although some parts of the surviving garden walls may be of C18 or C19 date, the internal banks could date from an earlier period and may be interpreted as raised walks giving views into and out of the garden.
In the upper garden the perimeter banks enclose an area with a sunken north-south path. This upper garden is referred to by an early C20 writer as a bowling green but may have been a ‘boulingrin’ in the French sense as recorded by the writer Dezaillier D’Argenville (1709), meaning not a place where bowls were played but ‘certain sinkings and slopings of turf’. A brick-vaulted alcove within the earthen bank beside the east wall may have been a shelter from which to view the garden.
Stone forecourt walls survive in front of the late C16 manor house of Wolverton, at Shorwell (LB I) and at the early C17 Yaverland Manor (LB I).
At Wolverton manor house the NE wall of the C17 forecourt gives access to a former garden area which has a brick wall of C18 date along its NW side (LB II). There is no surviving wall along the SE side of the former garden but an earth bank in this position may originally have been constructed behind an enclosing wall to give views into and out of the garden as at Knighton Gorges. The entrance into the partially-walled garden from the forecourt appears contemporary with the C17 wall, suggesting that the garden existed by this date. Furthermore, windows in the house overlook the garden, providing further evidence that it existed when the house was built.
Adjoining the northern part of the walled garden at Wolverton is a 0.13ha (0.31 acre) rectangular moated platform (SM). This may be the site of an earlier house, which the present manor replaced but it could possibly be the site of a medieval or post-medieval garden. On the 1864 Ordnance Survey map the area inside the moat is shown planted as an informal orchard and it is now informal woodland.
Garden walls (LB II) at Arreton Manor are associated with the house built by Humphrey Bennett in 1637-9. They date from the early C17, or earlier, with a substantial early C17 dovecote (LBII) at the southeast corner. Dovecotes were often associated with high-status residences and their grounds from the Middle Ages onwards.
A disused and roofless rectangular stone dovecote (LB II) at Shalcombe Manor is of possible C16 date.
At Billingham, in Shorwell Parish, Andrew Goter (or Gother) bought a messuage (i.e. a property) with two gardens, two orchards and other land in 1647 and built a house which was extended in the C18 (LB II*).
The L shaped walled garden which now encloses the house on the west and north sides may possibly date from the C17 and is definitely indicated on the 1769 Andrews map. A raised terrace walk along the inside of the west wall, designed to overlook the rest of the walled garden, is shown on the 1862-4 25” OS map but may well be of earlier date. At the SE corner of the walled garden is a small gazebo (LB II with garden wall), rebuilt in the C20 but thought to be C18 and possibly once one of a pair.
The 1793 OS drawing shows woodland bisected by an approach drive to the west of the house, parkland to the north of the walled garden and orchards to the east of it. The framework of all these compartments still survives within the grounds of Billingham Manor and represents a historically significant survival.
Shanklin Manor was owned by Sir Edward Denys, Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, in the early C17. A stone-built summerhouse or gazebo in the grounds of the manor house, possibly of C17 origin with later alterations, has adjoining east and north walls (LB II). A walled garden is known to have existed by 1769 when it was depicted on John Andrews map.