Welcome to the National Trust Gardens podcast. I'm Alan Power, the head gardener at Stourhead in Wiltshire. And this is the second of our three part series, bringing you the secrets behind one of Britain's most beautiful gardens. Today, I'm at Croome Park in Worcestershire, a wonderful 18th century landscape garden designed by Capability Brown and the Earl at the time decorated with 18th century garden features and a centrepiece, a beautiful
Palladian House. It's overlooked by the magnificent Malvern Hills in the distance. Today, I'm here to find out what makes this place so special. It may once have been a boggy marsh, but it's where one of the world's greatest landscape gardeners cut his teeth in the 18th century. Croome has had many uses over the last century, not just as a wonderful place to visit. The uses have been diverse and wide ranging. It was a secret wartime airbase at one stage. It's been
a boys school. It's been a Hare Krishna Institution and it was overlaid with intensive farmland for quite a long time. In the 18th century, this was the very first estate that was created in its entirety by the landscape gardener Capability Brown. But its recent history has left marks on the landscape. The National Trust have been working really hard to restore the gardens to their 18th century style since 1996.
I'm standing near the visitor centre at the northern end of the estate where we're sheltered from the wind and I'm meeting Katherine Alker, the head gardener at Croome. Now, Katherine, you've been here a while, haven't you?
Yes. Hi, Alan. I've been here just about 10 years now. It's changed enormously over the past few centuries and is still changing massively now. And what what we're doing here is restoring the vision of Capability Brown, along with the Sixth Earl of Coventry to transform what was quite an unproductive piece of land into a beautiful landscaped designed garden with beautiful pasture and yeah, a wonderful landscape.
Katherine today, I have the privilege of you taking me around your garden. And what I really want to try and get today is, is more inspiration from Capability Brown's kind of winter landscape work that he did.
Great! And we'll start off with a walk down the wilderness walk.
Katherine, we're standing looking at Brown's amazing work and this is what thrills me about 18th century landscape gardens. They're just stunning. They take your breath away when you emerge from a dark surrounded protected walk like we just have and you see a view like this across the English landscape. And although immediately it's not, it's not obvious the efforts that went into creating this landscape. It's- it's there in the detail.
For me as a gardener, I start looking at the efforts from history, the huge cedar trees that were planted strategically around the estate to guide your eyes to particular views. And then I'm looking down at the efforts that you're making nowadays as, as a garden team, I can see young ambitious trees planted and surrounded with tree guards. But the whole thing sits magnificently below the Malvern Hills in the distance. And we're lucky enough to catch a little bit of November sunshine today.
So what we can see is the shadow stretching across the landscape and it's looking absolutely amazing.
It's been a huge amount of work. But we're, we're really pleased with how everything's progressing and how the restoration is coming along. Standing here in 1996, what we would have seen is an arable crop. Nearly all of the park and trees had disappeared. Either due to Dutch Elm Disease because they were awful lot of elms across the parkland or simply because the farmer had wanted to get the most productivity from the land and- ploughed very close to the trees or remove them.
Now, the landscape was dressed quite- with a lot of detail, wasn't it In the 18th century? There was quite a plant collection at Croome.
It was an amazing plant collection. Yeah, the Sixth Earl of Coventry was really an obsessed man. He loved plants and spent an absolute fortune bringing in plants from across the globe. We've got lots of evidence in the archive, the plant bills and also a guidebook from 1824 that shows us that they were bringing in plants from the Far East, from the Americas from all across the globe really. And, and that was driven by the Earl's passion for planting.
And I know you're working really hard at the moment, aren't you planting trees? How many trees do you reckon you've planted in the 10 years you've been here?
We have certainly planted thousands, I would say easily over 10,000 trees. And then shrubs throughout the shrubberies, we've also done a huge amount of planting-
It must have been amazing for you. The first day you saw livestock wandering through the trees and the tree guards.
It's lovely and the cattle down on church hill, just add a beautiful sense of scale. The tenant farmers now got the right breeds of cattle, so they really look part of the 18th century landscape.
How on earth did he get it from being a boggy marsh to the magnificence of Croome.
When Brown arrived here, Croome Court, he was initially commissioned by the Sixth Earl to actually work on the court rather than just the landscape. So he would have seen a much smaller Croome Court, a brick building, but also sitting in quite an unproductive area of land. There was a church nearby to the court as well as a little hamlet of buildings and a few farm buildings.
But typical Brown, That wasn't quite right for him. So he, he expanded the court, put towers on the end and enveloped the building in the beautiful bath stone that we can see today. But also, he wanted a much more open view from the court across the landscape. So the church was demolished and the hamlet was moved about a mile away and then Brown himself redesigned the church and this is the church that we can see today.
And it was all about creating the kind of utopian effect on the landscape. Wasn't it making it that perfect picture?
That's right. And Brown, I think was he was at the start of his career when he worked at Croome. The Earl took a bit of a gamble on him and it certainly paid off and he became one of the country's most famous landscape designers.
So I'm meeting with Michael Smith, the general manager of Croome. Now, general managers for the National Trust do all sorts of stuff. They look after the conservation ambitions for the property, the finance for the property, the visitor experience at the property and every aspect of the management of the property. But we're standing outside a hut at Croome today Michael, can you just describe where we are?
Well, this hut- And there are many huts like this spread out across the landscape at Croome is part of RAF Defford which in the 1940s was an RAF base instrumental in the development of airborne radar systems. It was all top secret at the time and it's a quite phenomenal story.
It is, isn't it? Can you tell us a little bit more the kind of the RAF impact on the- on Croomes landscape here?
Yeah, there was colossal change at Croome in the 1940s and of course those wide open pastures that Brown had set out here in the 18th century were the ideal place to create an airbase. And Croome had three vast interlocking runways, and a village sprang up here which eventually accommodated almost 3000 service personnel.
So this sprang up over a very short time and here with over 200 aircraft on station, our British electronics experts were kitting out newly developed radar systems into each and every type of plane and then testing them, trialling them here. There was a whole amount of sort of counter propaganda that went out. The story about pilots eyesight being helped by eating carrots was an invention that came out of RAF Defford to throw our enemies off the trail of what was really happening here.
But through the efforts of the the young service people here, service men and service women, developments were made that were instrumental in securing the allied victory in World War Two.
And Michael this- this museum this ambulance shed, was nearly lost at one stage, wasn't it?
It was, we caught these buildings just the nick of time. And in the 1940s, they were thrown up in a great hurry as temporary structures, you know, they're half a brick thick. And when we took on the management of the state in 1996 we didn't really realize the significance of them and they were all boarded up in various states of decline, covered with brambles and scrub. But gradually as we got to meet the veterans of the air base, we
understood how important they were. We realized that there was another very important story to tell.
Has there been many more significant changes in the history of landscape at Croome?
There have and I think there's a tendency to see the 1940s developments here as an anomaly. But even after the 1940s, other communities have made the very most of what Croome has to offer, including devotees of Krishna. And in 1979 with funding help from George Harrison. Krishna devotees acquired Croome Court renamed it Caitanya College. And the natural landscape here has always been appealing in a draw to whoever has called Croome home.
It's fantastic, isn't it? And these people, all of these people were, were building what is the countryside around here now? You know, what is the heart of the countryside. It's such a beautiful place to come. It's been really fantastic.
Cheers Alan, Thanks.
Katherine, this is a bit better. down here, isn't it out of the wind? And we've captured, you know, a little bit of warm sunshine kind of on our backs, which is really nice this time of year. And we're in November, you and I as gardeners were saying goodbye to autumn colour and we're welcoming in the winter. And do you find this time of year particularly exciting at Croome?
There's still lots lots going on here. Part of Brown's design actually included an evergreen shrubbery. So at this time of year, it's actually the perfect place to be because you've still got flowering shrubs, scented shrubs and it was designed as a winter walk. So, somewhere to enjoy once the main summer planting had finished, really.
And the structure within those borders is quite amazing as well, isn't it? You get the berries, you get the foliage, you get the, the, the center of the foliage in places, but the way he structured the borders was quite. Fascinating as well.
That's right. It's quite a windy day and, what we've got at the back of the shrubbery is a line of evergreen trees, that would have protected from the prevailing winds so that the plants inside the shrubbery, the real interesting stuff, was protected. It had a little microclimate and it could flourish within that shrubbery even though it's quite exposed out in the Parkland. We've got plants that will give off scent in winter and early spring, and even some things that are very early flowering.
So, for example, Daphnes, which have not only beautiful little pink flowers but amazing scent as well and it just fills the shrubbery.
And it's nice, isn't it? Because it's predominantly evergreen plants through here. You're not reminded of the end of a season. You're not reminded that summer is gone and autumn's gone, you're, you're surrounded by plants that are constantly alive.
That's right. The Portuguese Laurel with beautiful glossy leaves- Hollies. There's one just over there with bright red berries. So loads still to keep us interested throughout the winter.
And the Rosemary is one that is really striking for me because, you know, I'm a bit of a touchy feely plant person. So I'll always- if I know there's a scent coming from it, I'll go and grab it and, you know, I carry that scent around for a while, but there's a few kind of non-standard shrubs in here, isn't there?
There are. Yeah, we've used Rosemary here. We know that they planted Rosemary in the shrubberies. And we also have some Sage which hasn't lasted quite so well in the harsh winters. I've got Jasmine for that, that spring flowering brightness of yellow colour throughout the winter. Guelder Rose with bright glossy red berries as well. We've also got a couple of Witch Hazels, the Hamamelis, which have the really, sort of spider like yellow flowers. And again, some of those have fantastic scent.
In the records, there were also hundreds of different Ericas, so hundreds of different heathers, we haven't quite got to the stage of replanting that particular section yet. We'll need to sort out the, the soil for that because they need Ericaceous compost. And even in the records, there's an example of them bringing in tons and tons of Ericaceous soil to plant those, those heathers in so-
They used to make it themselves didn't they? And I've read in a few archives in places how, you know, they would go to a local timber mill and they would use the, the sawdust from pine trees to kind of add to the- add to the soil along with some kind of charcoal and that kind of thing and cinders, to actually, you know, increase the acidity level in it. So it's- they were real kind of garden scientists but-
Chemistry in the garden.
Well, it's nice that variegated holly is really striking, isn't it? Because? And the birds haven't got to the berries yet. I'm sure they'll discover them over the next month or so as the temperatures drop, but they'll get in there.
Yeah. And we've also got Broom, lots of different pines as well. There were a huge number of pines in the archive records in the plant bills. So that gives us a nice bit of structure throughout the shrubbery as well.
Fantastic, isn't it? It is. It's a living library of stuff, isn't it? And back then they were just learning about plants as well all the time. It's amazing. The more I'm learning about Croome today, the more fascinating it gets. The depth of knowledge and the depth of history and the depth of nature conservation here is genuinely, you know, it's moving, you know, it's a wonderful thing to hear.
Well, it's been a delight to show you round.
I've left behind the evergreen shrubbery and I'm heading down towards the lake under this dry arch bridge to meet Hugh Warwick, the area ranger at Croome. Hi, Hugh, how are you doing? Yeah, good. Thank you. How are you? Yeah. Not too bad. Not too bad. So, your role here is area ranger. What does it involve?
The main focus for my work here is across the parkland and woodland. So I'm responsible for looking after those trying to maintain the good conservation work that we do and to do the restoration work as well to try to get this place back to how Brown first envisaged it.
So, parkland and woodland, you say, but actually we've just come under this dry arch bridge and the first thing I'm met with was this water.
Yes, we've got a mile and three quarter long artificial river here at Croome and then that's all well within the parkland. And we try our best to manage that.
And have you had to do any kind of silt management or anything like that with the lakes here.
Yeah, certainly when, when the National Trust took Croome on, in 1996 the full length of the river here was almost entirely silted up. You could walk across the river in quite a few places. That, in its own right was a really good thing, in many ways for, for loss of habitat, lots of wildlife using that, wading birds and so forth. So we knew that for the restoration, we had to restore it back to a river.
It had to have water flowing through it, but we also needed to to do it as sensitively as we can, so as not to just destroy this habitat. So what we did before we- we dredged the river out, we actually created two new wetland areas on the estate here. And those help to, to mitigate against the work we're doing. So we now have two really nice quiet wetland areas ideal for wading birds.
But it's amazing, isn't it? In, in your role? You must see it because you're really close to it. But the minute you add that water element to a garden, you- all of a sudden the diversity of insects, bird life, it completely changes, doesn't it?
Yeah, we have monitoring programs here. So we have volunteers who are trained to monitor and my assistant ranger has just recently been doing some water quality testing. You've got somewhere there that the larvae can grow and, and then that goes to- obviously you get the insects then and then that feeds the birds and the bats and the wildlife.
So we're leaving the dry arch bridge behind and in complete contrast to the enclosure of that bridge, we've just come out and there is this magnificent view. I can see two bridges. I can see what looks like an island but in true Brown fashion, I don't know whether it's an island until I get further around the pathways because it's still full of mystery. Although it's a big view. Do you have any winter migratory birds that come in and make use of this wonderful pond?
Well, we have had an Osprey passing through, believe it or not. Yeah, we've also had Hawfinches here. We have Fieldfare and Redwings. So, yeah, we get quite a few migratory species passing through and I think we've become a bit of a kind of a local haven for wildlife because we're a nice green space. There's, there's the wild flower meadows and so forth and as you say, the body of water and all the insects that that provides.
Well, Hugh, thanks a million.
My pleasure.
It's been a wonderful day at Croome today and I'm finishing my day in one of the most stunning views I've captured all day, standing at the rotunda, looking out over a glorious landscape with the river flowing in the distance. One of the people who is very close to Croome is with me now, Malcolm Walford, who has spent his life working and living on the estate at Croome for the last 68 years.
Good afternoon.
Malcolm. It's a pleasure to meet you. You've got quite a CV a Croome, haven't you?
Yes I have. I started in 1953 after five years at RAF Defford. Still semi employed by the Croome estate trustees. My job still entails me to be clerk of works. That was my position since 1986.
It's not just you is it? Your family's worked-
My grandparents have been on the estate since the 1800s. My father was, when he left school at 13. He went as second groom at Pirton Court, which is all part of the Coventry family. And my uncle Ern, was head groom and my Uncle Bob was head forester on the estate.
So we, we're standing by a spectacular view out into the countryside. And what's striking me, Malcolm is that it's really your home, isn't it?
It is my home. Yeah, it is my home and when it comes to flood, fire or whatever, I've always been there for Croome and that's been part of my job.
You obviously feel it's really important to kind of preserve and conserve Croome for the future-
It's got to be! You know, it's got to be preserved. What better place in Worcestershire is? You've got stood here looking at Croome River. Where hours and hours we've, we've gone to the end of the river when all the grounds here were ploughed up. You know, it's not always been grassland here. This was plowed up in the sixties and in front of the church. And it was part of our job when the farmer complained
the river was too high. We used to take the old van, the A35 Austin van down to the other end of the river and change what we call the flood board out.
Sounds a bit like my job. You know, I do bits of that at Stourhead. We have a dam we look after and there's Saturdays, Sundays, evenings, mornings that I'm out to check the levels. And you know what I love about working in historic environments is that there are some jobs that can never change. It's so it's so important, isn't it? To kind of capture memories and capture scenes and to share it and hand it on to the next generation-
Some wonderful here at Croome. But hopefully, I've, I've passed on a lot of information like I keep finding photographs for Katherine and one thing or another.
So and tell, tell me you mentioned you, it's 68 years in total, but five years of that was spent with the RAF. And how did your transition from the RAF onto the estate happen?
In a pub.
In a pub? Best place for everything to happen isn't it-
And my Uncle Bob came in one night because we'd already been informed, Defford was closing and my Uncle Bob come in there and the pub one night and we was talking and he said there's a labourer job going at Croome. And I wrote a letter and it went to Colonel Osbert Smith who was grandson of the ninth Earl. And he said, are you going to be strong enough for this job?
And the first day I started, I went home on the lunchtime and I said to my dad, I'm finishing tonight and I thought I can't do with this. He said you stick it and I did
And 63 years later-
Have been over Croome River on a lovely night
And you're still in love with the place?
Of course, I am. I always will be
Malcolm. It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you for listening to the National Trust Gardens podcast. If you've enjoyed this podcast, you can subscribe or follow on your podcast app for more. Next month, I'll be at another great garden for festive magic at Sissinghurst in Kent. So stay warm and enjoy exploring and we'll see you next time.
I'm Bettany Hughes. I've been visiting National Trust Properties all my life, but in this series of podcasts, I'm going beyond the delights of teas and topiary to reveal the surprising European roots of some of the most splendid sites in England. You can subscribe to my series by searching for Bettany Hughes's 10 places, Europe and us. On your podcast app.