I’m in the grounds of the Hampton Court Palace, summer solstice 2024. I would usually be in the Avebury stone circle but the (garden) show must go on.
I’m about to start the build on my first ever show garden for the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. To create a temporary spirit of place in the grounds of one of our most revered palaces.
My temporary garden at Hampton Court Palace has a climate-forward message, in a distinctly 2024 shift away from Tudor favourites, like fantastical beasts on colourful wooden poles (see below), fussy topiary, viewing mounds and clipped lawn.
The Tudor garden style was very more is more, with no Farrow and Ball/Georgian paint chart yet to choose from.
Still, there’s nothing as boring as good taste, which Henry VIII possibly said. These poles may well suit a maximalist dragon-fan today.
This, the third post for Gathering Garden Ghosts is a garden rich in spirit of place, and possibly, famously, spirits themselves.
To be chosen as a garden designer to build a garden here at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival, and build a garden on these grounds, a garden that will exist for a week and then within a day be removed and never seen again, is a special honour and a privilege.
I am making every effort to feel the history and sense of place as I dig the soil and present what I have promised in my entry - sustainable, beautiful, infinitely recyclable and climate-crisis resilient.
The gardens for the show are in the deer park enclosed by Cardinal Wolsey, who I adore despite not being Catholic, after Hilary Mantel’s efforts with Wolf Hall, and where Henry VIII doubtless hunted. A much more likely prospect than him considering his multi-coloured gardens poles to be tacky.
They straddle the Longford River, a canal really, commissioned by King Charles I. A Carolingian canal, as no-one calls it.
The thing with royal palaces is that the spirit of place has been honed and layered over generations and hundreds or thousands of years of reverence.
Imbued with a sense of devotion and awe more so that your local municipal planting - although who’s to say spirit doesn’t dwell on the roundabout outside Tesco Metro - they were designed to be revered, and we continue to do so, treating these gardens as almost magisterial themselves. With so much history here now, it seems right, much more so than the fawning at court of five-hundred years ago.
Visitors who come to Hampton Court Palace to experience spirit mainly head to the so-called Haunted Gallery, where our Queen Catherine Howard apparently ran along screaming for forgiveness from her husband Henry VIII. There is also the ghost of poor Jane Seymour, who died after childbirth, supposedly seen on the Silverstick Stairs.
As mine is an outdoor life, I am here to feel the spirit not of these exceptionally famous royals, but of the place and the garden.
Because of the preservation work on the Tudor garden by the river Thames, it’s easy to visualise these most famous royals parading and whispering on the paths of the Privy Garden. This garden is restored to William III’s 1702 glory, with metal screen built by Jean Tijou near the river end away from the palace. The privy would have been much more garish in Henry’s day, and here in baroque splendour is more palatable to us now.
The scale and direction of the fountain and the long water direct you to consider this a place of importance, that you ought to pay attention to. It mattered so greatly to William III and Mary II (1689-1702) who had their gardener, Daniel Marotthe, create the Great Fountain Garden on the East Front to complement their elegant new baroque palace.
Historic gardens often lack original plants beyond trees, of course, because plants pass on. But over near the children’s Magic Garden and the tilt yard (which, imagine it, positively clangs with the clash of jousting sticks on the quintain) there is the Great Vine, the longest in the world, planted by the renowned landscaper designer, Lancelot Capability Brown. It really is quite something to be planting into the same earth that he worked.
I rush through the palace sometimes when I am making my way from the car park to the show site. I dash across the courtyards, down side corridors, through the kitchens if I have to, but I prefer the way of William III, and out to the Longford River to cross out of the Christopher Wren buildings to the Ditton Gate.
I am not allowed to take my steel cap boots off because this is a work site. But I am here from very early morning on the site, and on solstice I am doing my usual deep breathing and soaking in the sun to connect to this place.
My particular square of this place, 5m x 5m, will haunt me, in a companionable way for a long time, and I’m glad of it. It has taught me much.
The deer park when it’s not thronging with show visitors and the hubbub of the construction teams is quiet and peaceful in the early morning light.
I pause out in the park as the sun eases away to the west to look to Garrick’s temple to William Shakespeare and try to connect the day to the history of the place. It’s a long old walk out to here on the river, half way better Hampton Wick and Hampton bright near the front of the palace, but worth it if you can for the pure stillness, the scent of the drying summer grass and the gold of the setting sun. This, is a place.
Take a garden history tour of Hampton Court Palace
Stay at The Mitre, opposite the entrance. Or of course, in London, perhaps at the Artist Residence, which is under an hour by train.
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