Last updated at 13:28, Monday, 26 January 2009

Tim Longville heads for Bassenthwaite and the beautiful garden at Mirehouse, where the poet Tennyson was among the great literary figures to visit in Victorian times

Mire House, mature trees and shrubs line the drive

Mirehouse, near Keswick, is both typical and special. In many ways, it is a typical ancient manor house with an equally typical ancient garden, both of which have developed gradually over centuries and retain traces of the changing styles and tastes of many generations. On the other hand, it is a very special place, both because of its situation and because of its intimate connections with many major literary figures of the 19th century.
Tucked in close to the eastern shore of Bassenthwaite, the house has fine views of Wythop and Barf across the lake to the south, and the shelter of the estate’s own fells, Ullock Pike and Dodd (now leased to the Forestry Commission), looming dramatically behind it. There was a farmstead here at least as early as the 16th century but it was in the mid-17th that the Earl of Derby began the present house, as a place to stay when he visited his Cumbrian estates. Eventually he sold the Mirehouse estate to his agent and it remained with the agent’s descendants and relatives until the last of them, Thomas Story, left it in 1802 to John Spedding of Armathwaite Hall. Speddings have owned and lived at Mirehouse ever since, the latest John – John Fryer-Spedding – and his wife Clare being the ‘current incumbents’.
It was that first John Spedding who began the estate’s literary connections. William Wordsworth was his friend from their schooldays together in Hawskead, while when Robert Southey lived at Greta Hall he became an even closer friend. In the next generation, John’s sons, Tom and James, had similar friendships with many of the most famous mid-Victorian writers. James, for example, belonged to the circle which included Alfred Tennyson (who dedicated a poem to him), Arthur Hallam (the inspiration for Tennyson’s In Memoriam), and Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. In fact, Fitzgerald’s own friendship with Tennyson began here at Mirehouse.
At about the same time, Tom Spedding’s dear friend, Thomas Carlyle, with characteristic emphasis summed up the reactions of many of his famous contemporaries when they visited the Speddings. “Mirehouse was beautiful,” he wrote, “and so were the ways of it.”
That is still true – and it is as true of the Mirehouse garden as it is of the house or its situation. There is no overall design to the 20 acres or so of garden-ground, which, like the house, have developed and changed piecemeal over the generations. But it is precisely that relaxed and largely informal atmosphere which gives them their charm.
John Fryer-Spedding inherited Mirehouse in 1961 from his distant cousin, Blanche, who had owned Mirehouse for more than 70 years. When he took over, he found that “during all that time she had never changed anything unless she had to – which had many benefits but some downsides”.
There were certainly downsides to cope with in the garden. For instance, the flowering shrubs which line the main drive had grown so huge they’d met and formed a canopy overhead. As a result, they were almost completely hiding the ancient Scots pines behind them. So John had to institute a considerable programme of pruning and replanting. Young pines and oaks have been planted to eventually replace the ancient 18th century pines (which are beginning to show their age), while nowadays the drive’s fine specimens of early hybrid rhododendrons, such as ‘Grenadier’ and ‘Vienna’, have been reduced to a reasonable size and given space in which to perform at their best. When I visited, the foliage of ‘Vienna’ was almost invisible under the profusion of its pale yellow flowers and John commented approvingly: “You could hardly get any more flowers on it.” Several imposing specimens of the large-leaved species rhododendron, R. falconeri, were just
as impressive.
Similar renewals, simplifications and adaptations have been carried out in many other areas. Below the front of the house, for example, is a series of terraces, created to support the extra weight of the rooms Tom Spedding added in 1851, ‘to hog the view’, as his descendant said with a smile. When that descendant inherited in 1961, those terraces were still studded with elaborate flower-beds. Such beds may have made sense when there were Victorian quantities of gardeners to maintain them. Nowadays, though, Mirehouse has, in its owner’s words, “one full-time gardener, two part-timers – and me”. So the beds were quietly abolished and the terraces largely laid to grass.

The two acres of late 18th century walled garden have also been simplified, though here, after much trial and error, a solution has been found which is realistic in terms of labour levels yet visually quite complex. When John arrived, the walled garden still had huge traditional flower and vegetable borders. “Full of bindweed. Impossible to keep up,” is his crisp summary. “First we tried devoting the garden to growing vegetables on a commercial scale. That was disastrous. Hardly anyone bought them. Then we tried growing a commercial crop of Christmas trees, which was almost equally disastrous, since their roots blocked the drains.”
Finally, in the mid-1990s, he and Clare arrived at the present simplified but stylish arrangement. The original pattern of paths has been retained but instead of labour- intensive vegetables and herbaceous borders, the garden is devoted to plants attractive to bees. It is also devoted to the bees themselves, whose hives in the bottom corner are announced by a line in Latin – the first line of Virgil’s fourth Georgic – carved into a substantial piece of slate. Translated, it means “First find a suitable site for your bees”. Now, that original grid of paths is lined with avenues of bee-friendly shrubs and trees, such as Buddleia globosa, Eucryphia glutinosa, and ceanothus. John points out that ceanothus is “a fine June-gap flower for bees” since June is a time when few other nectar-rich plants are flowering.
Meanwhile, the outer sections of the walled garden contain a variety of relatively small-scale and low-maintenance visual and horticultural ‘bonbons’. One section has become a small orchard, full of old Cumbrian varieties. Another contains a miniature heather ‘path-maze’, which John describes as “not to get lost in but for meditation”. It’s also, he adds ruefully, a great attraction for children, not to mention occasional adults, who try to jump across the heather ‘lines’ but often land in them instead, with dire results for the heather if not for the humans.
And at the top of the garden, there is, as a climax: “My folly. Well, every garden should have one, don’t you think?” John’s folly is a circle of standing stones (“mostly old stone gateposts from around the estate”) with a circular table in its centre (whose top was once the larder butter-stone). The whole folly represents the Knights of the Round Table. Why? Because it was at Mirehouse that Tennyson wrote much of his Morte d’Arthur. (‘Tennyson’s Shed’, let into one wall of the garden, contains a copy of a drawing of a gloomy-looking Tennyson, sitting in that same shed, “waiting for the rain to cease”.)
This ‘Revised Version’ of the walled garden is clearly in a modern style and taste, which future generations will no doubt consider distinctively early 21st century. So is the wild flower meadow in front the house. So is the woodland between house and lake, where the canopy has been thinned to encourage bluebells to colonise ever more and more ground. “I’m particularly keen on the plants of the forest floor,” is John’s enthusiastic comment, before pointing out that the thinnings weren’t wasted. The gubbins, to use his word, have been deliberately piled against the fence, to make habitats for wild life.
The evolution of John’s own taste over four decades, though, can be seen most clearly in the beck-side walk known as Lovers’ Lane. He began here by adding rhododendrons and even eucalypts to the existing ornamental planting. “I visited Australia for its bicentenenary, fell in love with the gum-trees, and planted lots of those species which were supposed to be frost- hardy. Fortunately, since I now think it was a mistake, most of them proved not to be and have since died.” By the time of my own visit, he was much more interested in pointing out the native flora of the understorey – and the natural music of the beck: “As you move along it, it makes quite different sounds at different points.”
These are all examples of the process of continuous change characteristic of places such as Mirehouse. But there is also in the garden a fine example of the equal importance of re-connecting to the past. In the 19th century, Mirehouse had distinguished links with literature. Now, in the 21st, the rear wall of the splendid rose-wreathed Victorian colonnade, one of the few formal elements in an essentially informal garden, has become home to large printed versions of the prize-winning entries in the Mirehouse Poetry Competition, instituted by John and Clare in 2004. And, like their Victorian predecessors, these contemporary writers unsurprisingly unite in celebrating the remarkable beauties of this remarkable corner of Cumbria.

First published at 11:51, Monday, 26 January 2009
Published by http://www.cumbrialife.co.uk