Bledlow Manor Gardens

The Manor House

Having written recently about the gardens at the Manor House Bledlow it was pleasant on this Bank Holiday weekend to head back to Bledlow to see the gardens for the first time in a number of years. Bledlow’s main residence is Bledlow Manor, the family home of Lord Carrington who opens its wonderful grounds and sculpture garden for charity. Opposite the manor is an impressive old Church and beside it the Lyde Garden which is a sunken aquatic garden fed by 14 springs. Lord Carrington generously created this garden from an old quarry and he maintains this lovely enclave and keeps it open to the public at his own expense.

(http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/04/chiltern-spring.html )


Entrance to The Lyde

Bledlow consists of Bledlow Ridge on the top of the escarpment and then a half mile below the village of Bledlow clumped around the Manor House and Church.

"Bledlow is the most western of the villages which stand on the northern spur of the Chilterns, and one of the most attractive. It is charmingly placed just above the low-lying meadows which stretch across the Thame Valley to Haddenham. A large, straggling village shaded by elms; behind it rises Wain Hill, some of it all woodland, the rest bare down."
[Buckinghamshire, by E. S. Roscoe]

Opposite the church and The Lyde is Bledlow Manor, dating from the 17th century and early 18th century. It has been the family home of the Carringtons since 1800, the present owner being Lord Carrington, the former Conservative cabinet minister. The garden, which can normally be glimpsed only from the outside, is described in the Good Gardens Guide as "an elegant English garden of exceptional quality". The garden is open by written appointment from May to September, and occasionally for charity. The large yet tranquil garden has been in development since 1969. The garden was designed by Robert Adam and contains many individual areas including an impressive vegetable garden. There are long herbaceous borders and, to the east of the house a sculpture garden.


Manor Entrance Front


Patricia Volk "New Renaissance" 1993


Marino Colonna "Primitive Form" 2005

The setting at the manor is exceptional; it is built in an airy position on top of the ridge but has a heightened sense of enclosure from the wonderful mature trees surrounding the house and gardens. Beautifully planted and well maintained, it has all been made on thin chalk soil since 1969. There are four parts: first, the garden 'proper' round the house, enclosed by hedges of beech, hornbeam or yew. Best is the armillary garden, an exercise in topiary with the sphere at its centre, surrounded by four cubes of yew, smaller hedges and labels of box. Next comes the walled garden with a gazebo in the centre whose eight trellised posts are planted with rambling roses. The central grass walk is lined with apple trees trained as spheres around a wire globe: they rise from parterre boxes of teucrium, each planted with a different herb - sage, chives, Greek oregano and so on. The third part of the garden is quite different - 2½ acres of sculpture garden, started in 1991 and already remarkably mature. The land has been contoured to maximise the movement of the surface, and give contrasts of height and depth. Its fluid modern design is a great foil to the formal gardens around the house. The presiding spirit is a life-size gorilla by Michael Cooper.


Michael Cooper "Gorilla" 1993


John Robinson "Immortality" 1992


Peter Randall Page "3 Fruits"

The fourth part of the garden is different again - four acres of water garden, started in 1979 on the site of three old watercress beds. The 14 springs which issue from its sides are the headwaters of the River Lyde, a tributary of the Thames. The steep valley sides are thickly planted with shrubs and herbaceous plants. A wooden walkway, Japanese in style, takes you round the edge of the lakes at the bottom. The muddy banks are planted with candelabra primroses, gunneras, hostas and astilbes. Unlike the rest of the garden, this part is open daily (and free) from dawn to dusk.


Alistair Lambert 1991


Terence Coventry "Avian Form" 1999


William Pye "Coracle" 2001

Peter Carrington was wandering about unobtrusively and indeed when I was getting a cup of tea came up beside me and “asked” if he could steal a biscuit. Shame on him, as a Lord of the Realm he should at least have “stolen” a slice of ginger cake containing a sinful amount of golden syrup! What I can tell you is he looks very well for a man of 89 years going on 90, no doubt helped by the wonderful fresh vegetables and fruit produced in the working kitchen garden. As part of the fundraising efforts for charity teas were being sold, there was a selection of plants from the gardens and also Bledlow Manor honey and beeswax products. Lord Carrington was born in London on the 6th June 1919 and has had a long and distinguished career. He was Secretary of State for Defence 1970 – 4, Foreign Secretary 1979 – 82; Baron (succeeded to title) in 1938. An ancestor, Robert Smith, had been banker and adviser to the younger Pitt at the end of the eighteenth century and was given a peerage. The story is that he complained to William Pitt that he could not keep him company when he rode his horse in Rotten Row in Hyde Park, London as it was restricted to nobles and on that basis he was elevated “upstairs” to the Lords.




Spurge Euphorbia "Lambrook Gold"

Peter Carrington has achieved much in different fields — the military, diplomacy, in government. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and inherited his title in 1938. Because of service in the 1939 – 45 war he did not enter the House of Lords until 1945. He was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards and served throughout World War II. He took part in the campaign in France and the Low Countries, reaching the rank of major and being awarded the Military Cross (MC). He ended up as a tank commander and I remember him being asked what his biggest regret was and he replied “Not getting a clear shot at Himmler.” In 1945 his column was approaching Hamburg and Himmler’s convoy crossed in front of him but they could not swing their turrets around quickly enough to shoot him. I’m sure his biggest regret was actually his comrades who never made it back but, like many of his generation, he is too much of a stoic to say so.






Grain store in grounds raised on tapered "stilts" to keep the grain dry and vermin out

At the end of World War II Carrington chose to return to the family's country seat at Bledlow near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, to take a leadership role in reforming British farming practices and to occupy his seat in the House of Lords. His natural instinct for leadership not only led him into positions with the County Council, but also caused him to be made an opposition whip in the House of Lords during the two post-war Labour governments. When the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Carrington became a parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. He was, at age 32, one of the youngest members of the government. British farm production was increasingly considered a key task for the government, which was faced with severe balance of payments problems. In 1951 he led the British delegation to the sixth conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. He also served as chairman of the Hill Farming Advisory Committee for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland and was a member of the working party on agricultural education set up by the ministry in 1952. He also served a relatively brief stint as parliamentary secretary to the minister of defence after October 1954; he was notable in that position for downgrading traditional shipbuilding in favour of modern electronic naval weaponry. But he made little apparent progress in that regard.


Plans for the Kitchen Garden




Owen Turville 1997 "Vertummus Mural (Archimbaldo)"




The Kitchen Garden

Among his early posts were High Commissioner in Australia, First Lord of the Admiralty (1959 – 63), and leader of the House of Lords (1964 – 70). Carrington became a close friend and political ally of Ted Heath. When the latter formed his government in 1970 Carrington was made Secretary of State for Defence, to which post he added the party chairmanship in 1972 and, briefly, the newly created Energy Department at the time of the energy crisis in early 1974. Carrington was blamed by some Conservatives who thought that the election campaign in February 1974 had been badly managed. The election was forced by the coal miners' strike against the government's statutory pay policy, at a time of acute energy shortage. Carrington was one of those who favoured an early election, earlier than the one that was eventually called.




Garden Sculptures

In Opposition between 1974 and 1979 he had an uneasy relationship with the new party leader, Margaret Thatcher. She respected his experience, contacts, and tactical advice. But he stood for a different kind of conservatism from hers — he was more internationalist and more pro-European abroad and more conciliatory at home. Appointed Foreign Secretary in 1979 he played a key role in the passage to independence of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and in maintaining reasonable relations with the EC; the latter were dominated at the time by Mrs Thatcher's strident insistence on eliminating a good part of Britain's net deficit with the Community.
The work of the Foreign Office on a scheme for the leaseback of the Falkland Islands to Argentina was one among many signals which led the military regime in Argentina to think that Britain would acquiesce in its seizure of the islands. When Argentina did so, opinion in Britain regarded the event as a national humiliation and, following party criticisms, Carrington resigned as Foreign Secretary. This was a step that Mrs Thatcher much regretted. But he was offended by the criticism and his resignation probably helped Mrs Thatcher. Subsequent official inquiries into events leading to the war cleared the Foreign Office and Carrington of any blame in the matter.


Lord Carrington as Chancellor of the Garter Knights at Windsor

After leaving government Carrington continued to play a public role. He was Secretary-General of NATO (1984 – 8), and chaired the peace conference on Yugoslavia (1991 – 2). Carrington represented the aristocracy's tradition of public service. He was regarded as a politician with a sense of proportion, one who was a good diplomat because he respected other points of view and also had a sense of the limits of what politics could achieve.
He published his memoirs, Reflect on Things Past, in 1988.



On this fine day at Bledlow you see a different Peter Carrington. A courteous gentleman who is greatly respected in Buckinghamshire (even by lefties like me) as a person who cares about the area, the countryside and is a good neighbour. It may seem strange that somebody like him opens up his house but he is on a personal level genuinely unpretentious and cares about his community, indeed as a “One Nation” Tory his politics is an extension of his caring for the community. There is no sense that he hides away or cares unduly about security, indeed on a previous occasion when I asked him about this he said he had had a sculpture stolen from the garden the previous weekend! And it is instructive that this wealthy man spends his money on developing the Manor and Farm and encouraging artists with the sculpture pieces he has commissioned over the years. Indeed his feel for this is evident in the sitting of the works where the sculptures act as a foil to the planting and don’t overwhelm. The gardens at Bledlow Manor are worth visiting for their beauty and their ability to delight and are obviously a labour of love for Lord Carrington. We can be grateful that he is happy to share them with us for charity. For this Tory there most definitely is a Society!

For details of gardens open for charity;

The National Gardens Scheme

www.ngs.org.uk