Painswick Rococo Garden
The churchyard in the village is slowly turning white; there are snowdrops creeping in a white carpet across the graveyard. A promising start has been followed by some unseasonably warm weather and every single one seems to be flowering it socks off in a crescendo.
With such delicate beauty on my doorstep, why did I spend the day driving an hour and a half north? The honest answer is because Britt Willoughby suggested lunch in Painswick.
If you are a Jilly Cooper afficionado, you know that Painswick gets an honourable mention in a number of her novels, and it’s one of a few places that keeps its true name in her novels. (Applying the same principle, I do intend to do my Christmas shopping in Cheltenham every year.) You win some kudos from me if you can name the pub that Rupert takes Cameron, but not Taggie, on Taggie’s birthday. I am always sad it doesn’t actually exist so I can go there.
In order to justify such reckless decadence (a pub lunch) on a weekday, I dress this up as a favour to you – the trip is to learn about and experience a truly unique garden so I can tell you about it. I cannot lie to you though, it was just a very lovely day out.
The garden in question is Painswick Rococo Garden. I find it really hard not to put a ‘the’ on the beginning, but it seems there isn’t one. I cannot promise to get this right every single time. It appears I am more attached to articles than I might think.
The visit was elevated immeasurably by having a personal tour guide for the day. Britt introduced me to Marion, a trustee of this famous historic garden, who accompanied us round the paths adding stories of plants, people, and places.
We started with the meaning of rococo. My mother is completing an Open University degree more complaining and heel-dragging then I’m sure I ever gave her trouble with when I was doing my homework at school.
Apparently, ‘rococo’ as a concept and an idea was something that she had covered, but when I asked her about it, she was uncharacteristically unforthcoming. Unenlightened, therefore, when I finally arrived at the lookout point at which you first survey the incredible shape and form of the garden, I asked Marion what it meant.
She spoke of curling, ornate and organic forms, of glimpses and surprises, of the senses manipulated and indulged. From its inception, its design, and its execution, this garden is about sensuality and pleasure. One of the snippets she shared – which was not on the visitors’ board - was that when they were renovating the Red House, a receipt was found for a pleasure couch.
It was at this point that I started to realise why my mother had not been as talkative on the matter as one might expect. We don’t have that sort of relationship.
The word ‘rococo’ describes a period of art that was fashionable in Europe in the 1700s, characterised by ornamental decoration, the use of pastel colours and asymmetry.
In England, the 1700s were a time of joie de vivre among the upper middle classes. They loved to show off their wealth by indulging in the flamboyant and the frivolous, and their gardens became an elaborate playroom where they would entertain and party.
The garden as a whole hints and teases at elaborate playfulness. It sits in its own bowl, its back to an escarpment. The far end, through which we could glimpse the wider landscape, is wooded with majestic beech trees. A traditional garden would open up the sightlines, and borrow the landscape. But the rococo garden adheres to the principles of seduction, and it knows that a teasing glimpse through a lattice of soft branches, is worth far more than a brazen full frontal.
I have written before about the relationship between order and chaos in a garden, the endless negotiation of the human hand versus the entropy of the wild. It is not a coincidence that my taste runs to the order and symmetrical, particularly in kitchen gardens. At the very most, a billowing meadow with a neat path cut through it. I like structure, because that is what I crave in my life. (As in, I don’t have it, so I crave it). Painswick Rococo Garden is therefore very challenging garden for me. I can still remember the first time I saw it. In true rococo style, you don’t see it until you are above it; it is not there, and then suddenly it is there.
It was so different and so unusual and so unlike anything else I had ever seen, that I gasped out loud.
Around the garden, there are some alleys, some walkways, and some sightlines that bring strength to the garden, but everything else is determinedly asymmetrical. The Red House, a challengingly wonky edifice that looks like the builders downed tools half way through, was a favourite of mine for the etched windows.
Dilectus meus mihi, et ego illi, qui pascitur inter lilia
I confess that my Latin was sufficiently rusty that I had to look up this quote when I got home. It is from Song of Solomon, and says:
My beloved is mine, and I am his:
he feedeth among the lilies.
The second line means that the beloved is a gardener, which bodes terribly well for romance in my book. However, the quote goes on:
Till the day break, and the shadows retire.
Return: my beloved, be like a roe,
or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him,
and found him not.
More heart-breaking than decadent, I would say.
I managed to translate more (as in, nearly half) of the other window: ‘flores apparuerunt in terra nostra, vox turturis audita est in terra nostra’. I got that flowers have appeared in our land, but the second part of the quote stumped me. Unsuprisingly, as vox turturis is the voice of a turtle. I truly have no idea why it is being heard in our land, but Mrs Cassidy, my petrifyingly effective Latin teacher at school, simply never thought to mention turtles.
Song of Solomon again though. Mrs Cassidy didn’t mention this either, but it seems to be described as ‘an erotic poem’, so maybe not suitable for schoolchildren.
Bang in keeping with rococo though.
The kitchen garden, which I can only describe as sort of triangular without actually being it, stretches along the base of the bowl, like a dancefloor in a nightclub, bordered by mossy banks and held in a circlet of woodland. The beds, lined by espaliered fruit trees that impressed even me, were piled with mounds of rich mulch. The heart of the garden was still slumbering under its compost duvet, which was fine, because we were there for something else entirely. I was worried we’d left it too late for the best of the snowdrops (and there were the odd one or two that had clearly bloomed and gone) but they were dazzling.
Dazzling and everywhere. Up the banks and sprawling across the lawn, almost into the lake, with only a band of bulrushes seeming to stop them tumbling into the water. They encroached so closely to the hoggin paths that there were miniature versions clustering in close to our feet. (At least I think they were normal snowdrops growing in compacted conditions; if there is a tiny, miniature snowdrop variety. Please let me know because I adored them.)
There were carpets of them. Had I been an eccentric member of the aristocracy in 1700’s, I would happily have thrown myself amongst them and picnicked with wild abandon. I defy anyone to do anything else on a carpet of snowdrops in the chilly middle of February.
I think there are few flowers that do so well far away and close to, both en masse and in detail. Bluebells maybe? Crocuses? We spent our time alternating between standing back and admiring the sweeps of snowdrops, interrupted only by the fresh and unfurling fronds of firms and the odd early narcissi, and bending down to inspect a particularly glorious specimen. It is only by getting in close that one can appreciate the subtle, intricate differences in each flower. Although I kept seeing ones that seemed uniquely beautiful in silhouette and turning it over and finding that the underneath showed that it was a boring old Flore Pleno.
A sidenote on hellebores. Whilst it was wonderful that our visit coincided with the first flush of them, and I do adore hellebores and I won’t generally hear a word against them, but it is simply no fun to try and appreciate them in their home environment. It is like sitting behind someone in the cinema in a big hat; all you ever get is the back of their heads. The only way to appreciate hellebores in the garden context would be to lie on a low flat trolley and have someone wheel you around. Cut them and risk the wilt, then put them in bottles along a high shelf. If you must, be like Petersham and float them in a bowl.
Of course, being a garden in the rococo style, one can view the snowdrops and their setting from a range of different viewpoints, including climbing the stone slippery steep stairs up to the pigeon house.
The theme of surprise and subverted expectations carries through here; the building has eight windows on the outside and only four within. We stood under the tall, conical roof and talked about how much effort it must have been to make something so beautiful just to house pigeons. There is something about the point where utility and beauty meet that I really wanted to bring home with me. I mean, there is quite a lot about the Cotswolds that I wanted to bring home with me, but I thought about this the most.
I am certainly not suggesting that I am going to be introducing sensuality during my revamp of my potting shed, but it did remind me that I had been meaning to invest some time in making it a truly beautiful space to inhabit, and I came away with inspiration. Painswick Rococo Garden elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. It represents such dedication and expertise to the art and the science of beauty. Not a stiff, formal beauty, but a fun, elaborate, excitable, unique sort of beauty.
This sort of thing does not come terribly naturally to me, but I can’t help thinking I am just too sensible sometimes, and just maybe I need a touch more fun in my life.
So perfectly appropriate for Valentine’s Day.
