Spetchley park gardens
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spetchley Park
Spetchley Park near Worcester has been in the continual ownership of the Berkeley family since 1606 and the current owners also live in Berkeley Castlein Gloucestershire. The landscape and deer park surrounding the House has altered little since then and the magnificent views seen today, across lakes and herds of red and fallow deer to the Worcestershire countryside and the Malvern Hills beyond are much as they would have been to Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians at the time of the Battle of Worcesterin 1651.
The original house was burned down on the eve of the Battle by disgruntled drunk Scottish Presbyterian Royalists – which was very bad luck as the Berkeleys were Royalist supporters too! All that is left now from the Tudor house is part of the moat. After the fire the Berkeleys had to convert the stables into living accommodation and when fortunes improved the present house, constructed of Bath stone in the Palladian style, was built in 1811.
Within the Park just outside Worcester and virtually hidden from view, is one of Spetchley’s best kept secrets, the beautiful 30-acre Spetchley Park Gardens. It was originally created (partly on the site of an older garden) towards the end of the nineteenth century by Rose Berkeley and her sister Ellen Wilmott – the celebrated gardener and horticulturalist who is perhaps best known for her penchant for secretly scattering Eryngium seeds in gardens she visited. Beautiful metallic blue flowers which appeared from the seeds, months, sometimes years, after her visit became known throughout the gardening world as ‘Miss Wilmott’s Ghosts’.
Today, the garden at Spetchley has a wonderful romantic atmosphere reminiscent of a bygone era. Indeed very little has changed since Ellen Wilmott’s day. It is a garden of contrasts; there are walled gardens, a melon yard with its original glasshouses, a horse pool, Victorian conservatory, a delightful fairy-tale-like ‘Root House’, statues, fountains, architectural follies, rose gardens, lakes and bridges, superb herbaceous borders and magnificent specimen trees.
A famous regular visitor to Spetchley was the composer Edward Elgar. He stayed at Spetchley many times, living in the Garden Cottage which you can see tucked away in the gardens. The pine trees nearby are called “Elgar’s Pines” and they inspired him to write many pieces but most famously the sound of the wind with the pine trees at Spetchley is mentioned in the Dream of Gerontius.
During WW2 Spetchley was earmarked to be used by Winston Churchill and the Cabinet in the event of London becoming too dangerous during the Blitz, or a successful invasion by the Germans and the subsequent loss of London. After the Battle of Britain and America entering the war, Spetchley was instead used by the USAAF 8th Air Force as a place of recuperation for its pilots – there was even a basketball court put up on the front lawn!
During this period, an American fighter ‘plane whose pilot was flying low in a display for his friends dramatically clipped the top of a cedar tree; happily both tree and ‘plane survived and the somewhat shorter tree can be enjoyed today.
