Harold Peto and his Garden at Iford Manor.

By Jane Balfour
Hampshire Gardens Trust – Autumn 1997

Iford Manor, near Bradford-on-Avon, has one of the most delightful Italian-stvle gardens in England. It was the home of Harold Ainsworth Peto, and the gardens were his creation. Peto was born in 1854 and died in 1933, an exact contemporary of Gertrude Jekyll, who was a great admirer of his work. Unlike Jekyll, who is so familiar to us through her writings, he is less well known and only wrote one book, The Boke of Iford, a description of his home. However, he has left us a wonderful legacy in the Italian gardens that he created in England in the early years of this century; first and foremost at Iford Manor, but also Buscot Park Water Garden in Oxfordshire, the gardens at Wayford Manor in Somerset and Heale House near Salisbury, the pergola at West Dean, near Chichester, and also Ilnacullin in Ireland.

He was an architect, collector and connoisseur, born the eighth of 14 children of Sir Samuel Morton Peto. His father rose from being a small builder to become a Victorian millionaire through his building of, for instance, the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Column. In 1846 he built Somerleyton Hall on the Suffolk coast. Here Harold was brought Up for the first ten years of his life, until his father lost his fortune and sold up. However, his mother's resources enabled him to be educated at Harrow. Then, after experience with a building firm in Lowestoft, he qualified as an architect and in 1876 went into partnership with Ernest George. In the 1880s their practice was one of the most fashionable and Lutyens was a pupil with them for a year.

Throughout his life Peto's architecture was rooted in admiration of Renaissance Italy, where he travelled extensively, as well as elsewhere, and he also developed a growing interest in the link between house and garden.

In the 1890s, fed up with London, he parted company with Ernest George, with the proviso that he did not practice architecture in the UK for the next 15 years. He turned his attention to interior and garden design here and abroad. In I899 he found Iford Manor, an Elizabethan house with an 18th-century classical facade, nestling lilac a jewel in the valleyof the River Frome; built of honey-coloured stone and resting on the river bank, with the garden rising in a series of terraces to one side and behind it, to a steeply wooded hillside. It was here that he created his finest Italian garden and to which he brought his fantastic collection of classical and Renaissance artifacts, placing them so sensitively around the house and garden. It became a most successful marriage of formal structure and natural planting. His treatise on it - The Boke of Iford is written in the manner of a medieval manuscript.

When Harold Peto arrived there were the remnants of an Elizabethan terrace high above the house. Here, in the late 1700s, Dean Gaisford of Christchurch, Oxford, used to pace up and down composing his sermons. However, age had caught up with the garden; 1,200 trees were removed, laurels Cut away and Peto created a series of stone terraces each with its own pavilion or patio incorporating architectural fragments as symbols and transporters of the mind.

Planted with cypresses and junipers and softened by planting sympathetically placed as to textures, form and colour, one enters through a wrought-iron gate at the side of the house to a small court, to one side an Italian loggia with 18^th century balconies above, on the other a pool; water from springs high in the woods descend the garden so one is never far from the sound of it.

A succession of stairways form a vista up to an oval pool and thence to the Great Terrace, past 18th-century vases from Church House, Richmond, an ancient conservatory replacing an earlier chapel and with classical treasures at all corners.

The Great Terrace itself is edged in scone columns like a cathedral nave. At the north-west end there is a semi-circular stone seat, such as those seen in the paintings of Alma Taddema, creating the apse and gazing at a Byzantine wellhead of AD 500. On either side are small enclosures, like side chapels, one containing topiary emblems of the Chigi family to whom the present owners are related. Above, against the side of the hill rests a stone loggia - the Casita flanked by tall columns of pink marble from Verona.

Treasures and plants chosen to complement the architectural form line the Great Terrace, the south-east view closed by an 1 8th-century tea house moved here from the kitchen garden below the road and the small balustrade rescued from the river. There is an abundance of green foliage - cypress, juniper, yew, phillyrea and acanthus. To one side one can discover the Japanese garden, or ascend the hillside to the memorial column erected in 1916 in honour of Edward VII.

However, one's visit must end with the Cloisters. Built in 1914 in Romanesque style from the local Westwood stone, but decorated with antique fragments, they house treasures beyond belief, be they wrought-iron gates from Verona of 1350, a column of the green marble used for the pilasters in St. Peter's, Rome, which came from the columns of the Roman Baths of Diocletian, or the Istrian stone Virgin and Child above the gate. Inside the small square open court, surrounded by twin Pavonazzo marble columns from the south of France, is housed a splendid well-head from a convent in Aquilegia, on which the marks of the rope over hundreds of years can still be seen.

The Cloisters not only play an important part in physically closing the garden at the eastern end, but do so spiritually as well, turning inward, unlike the Casita - a remembrance of his love of Granada - and contain a small chapel dedicated in 1916 to the Glory of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Around the treasures I have described nestles a garden of incredible charm, largely relying on shades of green, and form and texture; wonderfully tendet1 by the Cartwright-Hignett family and their gardener - a deeply spiritual place. Avray Tipping described it in 1907 as a haunt of ancient peace and this was so inscribed in the Cloisters.