Hidcote Manor Garden is a garden located on the outskirts of the small village of Hidcote Bartrim, near Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, England and owned by the National Trust.
Created by an American horticulturalist, Major Lawrence Johnston, it is often described as one of England's great "Arts and Crafts" gardens with its collection of rare trees, shrubs and herbaceous borders.
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Johnston's mother, Mrs Gertrude Winthrop, purchased the Hidcote Manor Estate in 1907. It was situated in a part of England with strong connections to the then-burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement and an Anglicized American artistic expatriate community centred nearby at Broadway.
Johnston soon became interested in turning the fields around the house into a garden. By 1910 he had begun to lay out the key features of the garden and by the 1920s had twelve full-time gardeners working for him.
The garden was acquired by the National Trust in 1947.
Johnston's influences in creating his influential garden include Alfred Parsons and Gertrude Jekyll, who were designing flower gardens of hardy plants contained within sequences of outdoor 'rooms'. The theme was in the air: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson's Sissinghurst was laid out as a sequence of such spaces without, it seems, direct connection with the reclusive and shy Major Johnston. In 2007 a garden designed by Chris Beardshaw that drew its inspiration from Johnson's Hidcote was constructed at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Johnston's care in selecting the best plants is reflected in the narrow-leaved lavender, Lavandula angustifolia 'Hidcote', in the Penstemon 'Hidcote Pink' and in the hybrid Hypericum 'Hidcote Gold', "universally acclaimed as the finest hardy St John's Wort", Alice Coats records.[1]
The garden takes the form of a series of outdoor "rooms" of various characters and themes, achieved by the creative use of box hedges, hornbeam and yew and stone walls. These rooms, such as the 'White Garden' and 'Fuchsia Garden' are linked together, some by imaginative vistas and furnished with topiaries. Some have ponds and fountains, and all are planted with flowers in bedding schemes. They surround the 17th century manor house, and there are a numerber of outhouses and a kitchen garden.
The estate is close to Kiftsgate Court Gardens, which is built on the edge of the Cotswolds escarpment overlooking the Vale of Evesham.