Hidcote Manor Garden: The Invention of the Outdoor Room

There is a moment in every serious garden education when the student understands that a garden is not a collection of plants but a sequence of spaces. The man who made that lesson concrete was Lawrence Johnston, and the classroom was a hillside of fields at Hidcote Bartrim, near Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire. From 1907 to the 1940s, Johnston built there a suite of outdoor rooms: hedged enclosures with their own themes, moods, and palettes, joined by vistas and green doorways. The result is one of the best-known and most influential Arts and Crafts gardens in Britain. The claim of this article is larger than that. Johnston did not merely make a great garden. He invented the garden room as a discipline, architecture without a roof, and every considered garden designed since has been built in his shadow.

Johnston built architecture without a roof: walls of hornbeam, windows that frame the open countryside, and rooms with the discipline of interiors.

Johnston was born in Paris in 1871 to a rich American family living in France, was educated at Cambridge, took British nationality in 1900, and served with the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War. His mother, Gertrude Winthrop, bought the Hidcote Manor estate in 1907, and Johnston began almost at once to turn the fields around the house into a garden. He laid out the main walks and views by working outwards from the house, keeping the design as symmetrical as the ground allowed so that every prospect could be framed. What followed was a life’s work: by the 1920s he employed twelve full-time gardeners, and Frank Adams arrived from Windsor Castle in 1922 to act as head gardener. The garden reached its full maturity in the 1920s and 1930s, the decades that remain its glory years.

His building material was the hedge. Box, hornbeam, and yew stand in for walls; stone walls, brick piers, and clipped topiary do the rest; and through every partition runs a carefully framed view. Hidcote’s rooms have various characters and themes, achieved by the use of those green walls. Some are linked by vistas, some furnished with topiaries, some with ponds and fountains, and all planted with flowers in bedding schemes. Around them, beyond the clipped boundaries, lie views across the Vale of Evesham, deliberately borrowed and made part of the composition.

Walls of green, windows of view

Walk the garden today and the vocabulary reveals itself room by room. The Stilt Garden is the thesis made literal: pleached hornbeams raised on bare trunks form a colonnade of living columns, and through a gate at its end the eye is drawn to the distant Malvern Hills. It is a cloister with no roof and no walls but trees. The White Garden works the opposite trick: box clipped into birds stands at the corners of a sunken courtyard while white flowers and white roses soften the green, a room in which color is reduced to a single register so that form and light carry the whole effect. The Red Borders run in hot contrast up to a pair of brick gazebos, and the Long Walk forms the garden’s great north to south axis, a lawn corridor between tall hedges that organizes the whole sequence.

The names accumulate like the rooms of a house: the Bathing Pool Garden, the Theatre Lawn, the Pillar Garden, the Fuchsia Garden, the Maple Garden, the Old Garden, the Circle, and Mrs Winthrop’s Garden, named for the mother who bought the estate. Each has its own planting scheme and its own mood, and each is entered through a threshold that withholds the next view until the last moment. That choreography of concealment and reveal is the essence of the room idea: the garden is never seen whole, only in episodes, so that ten acres feel inexhaustible.

A plantsman with a painter’s eye

Johnston was a plantsman before he was a designer, and the distinction matters. He borrowed books from the RHS Lindley Library as early as 1905, went plant-hunting in the Alps with E. A. Bowles, co-sponsored expeditions to the Andes and to Burma, and traveled to South Africa and to Yunnan in search of new plants. He insisted on using only the best forms and on planting them thickly, and he used plants the way a painter uses pigment: for harmonies and contrasts. The bold plantings of his red borders, white garden, and cottage garden have become modern classics, much studied and copied, and his name survives in the plants the garden gave to horticulture: the narrow-leaved lavender Lavandula angustifolia ‘Hidcote’, Penstemon ‘Hidcote Pink’, and the hybrid Hypericum ‘Hidcote Gold’.

The Trust’s first garden

In 1948, Johnston entrusted Hidcote to the National Trust. The Trust had never before acquired a property for the importance of its garden alone, and Hidcote became its first garden-only acquisition: a milestone that effectively invented the category of the designed landscape as heritage. The garden is listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England’s Register of Parks and Gardens. After the war years the garden declined, as so many large gardens did, and in 1956 the Trust placed its care in the hands of the plantsman and gardens advisor Graham Stuart Thomas, whose restoration aimed to recover the original layout of the 1920s and 1930s while adopting the sustainable practices of each era. What visitors walk today is a living reconstruction of Johnston’s design at its height, maintained to exacting standards.

Why the room endures

Hidcote’s fame was slow to arrive and then total. The garden was known only to Johnston’s friends until Country Life’s architectural editor Avray Tipping published two articles on it in 1930, the first public account of the place. Opened for charity a few times a year, it became one of those gardens that everyone in the horticultural world knew about but almost no one had seen, and its importance assumed almost mythological proportions. Its reputation only grew under the National Trust, and the critical judgment has been unsparing in its praise: the Hidcote style became the very model of late twentieth century gardening, scaled down grandeur, introspective, thickly and opulently planted, arranged to engage the creative eye.

The imitation began early and has never stopped. Phyllis Reiss was so influenced by Hidcote that she and her husband bought Tintinhull House in Somerset in 1933 so that they could make their own gardens in the Hidcote manner. In 2007, Chris Beardshaw built a temporary garden at the Chelsea Flower Show that drew directly on Johnston’s Hidcote for the garden’s centenary. The style of the garden has been widely imitated because it solves the central problem of garden design: how to make a finite piece of ground feel infinite.

That is the lasting invention. Before Hidcote, the great English garden was a landscape to be surveyed; after it, the serious garden became a building to be entered. The room gave designers a unit of composition smaller than the estate and larger than the border, a way to organize planting, architecture, and view into episodes with beginnings, middles, and ends. Enclosure, threshold, vista, surprise: that vocabulary, worked out in box and hornbeam on a Cotswold hillside between 1907 and the 1940s, is still the grammar in which good gardens are written. Johnston never wrote a treatise and kept no journals. He did not need to. The rooms are the treatise, and a century of designers has been reading them.