Glorious restored gardens show history in living colour

Next it was back to Tylney, for an idyllic picnic lunch in the pair of restored Italianate gazebos, with Pimms in hand and views over the park and boating lakes. This was a leap backwards in time, from Edwardian garden glory days to the 18th century and a small country mansion, West Green House. Its garden has an equally fractured history, having been saved from ruin by garden magician Marylyn Abbott after an IRA bomb blast. I visited this garden three years ago to report on the garden opera season, and on returning I was amazed to see further development Abbott clearly isnt one to let the grass grow beneath her feet.

The Quinlan Terry follies, the light installations and the potager are now all surrounded with a new streamlined bosky walk, taking you off to pastures new with ribbons of blue Iris sibirica and ferny glades. It was Schultz who connected the various gardens within the grounds he was commissioned to make alterations to the faade of the house, and to redesign the grounds in the early 1900s and each of these gardens has its own story to tell, its own journey from glory to dereliction and back.

Such journeys, and how garden owners decide to travel along them, were examined by Dominic Cole, chairman of the National Trusts Advisory Panel and the Garden History Society, in the talk he gave us over a glass of champagne back at Tylney Hall. As a landscape architect he has developed the Eden Project and Heligan with Tim Smit; designed the grounds at Lowther Castle, the Horniman Museum and Magdalen College; worked on Trentham with Piet Oudolf and Tom Stuart-Smith, and had a hand in one of my favourite spots in London the Roof Garden on Queen Elizabeth Hall.

He has also created gardens from almost everything, including china clay craters, chicken sheds, Christmas tree plantations and local authority tenure.

Dominic believes that although these days we have labour-saving machinery, this cannot compensate entirely for the dramatic decrease in manpower (the Tylney workforce, for instance, has gone from 50 to five). So we need to be pragmatic in our restorations, aiming to capture the spirit of the past rather than recreate its every detail. The discussion carried on over dinner gardeners always make interesting table companions.

When I awoke the next morning, I looked out from my four-poster on the gallery of the Jekyll suite in a converted orangery over her Water Gardens, and wondered whether Jekyll would have agreed with Coles notion that modern gardeners should try to capture the spirit of former times.

Either way, in transforming gardens from the tortuous bedding patterns of the Victorian era to her own light, subtle and billowy style, she has influenced many of todays gardeners.

*Tylney Hall Hotel, near Hook in Hampshire, is planning further Garden Appreciation Weekends; for more information visit tylneyhall.com or call 01256 764881. The Manor House at Upton Grey is open on weekdays; see gertrudejekyllgarden.co.uk. For information about West Green Houses opera season and garden, see westgreenhouse.co.uk.

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Glorious restored gardens show history in living colour