ALAN POWER: Welcome to the new National Trust podcast series.
I'm Alan Power Head Gardener at Stourhead and somebody who's
very passionate about everything outdoors.
In this series, we'll be exploring the Trust's amazing
spaces delving into the stories and characters that make each
place so special. We'll be traveling all around the country
from hilltop to seaside.
We'll tread sandy paths and the polished wooden floors of
country homes. Not to mention some spectacular gardens.
We delight in bird song, sublime views and exceptionally good
cream teas. So join me on this journey and immerse yourself in
the wonders of the National Trust.
Today, I'm in Buckinghamshire to explore a garden that has been
described as a work of art.
250 acres of sculpted landscape replete with ornamental lakes,
temples and monuments.
Its beauty has attracted visitors and inspired writers
and artists for over 300 years.
Of course, I'm in Stowe.
A garden shaped by the hands and imaginations of some of
history's finest gardeners.
The gardens were designed to be a paradise on earth, a purpose
that they serve to this day, but the garden is also ripe with
political history and hidden meaning and in this episode,
I'll be soaking in the beauty of this magnificent Georgian
splendour as well as digging into the past to understand the
people and the politics that have given Stowe its distinct
character.
I'm on my way to meet Hannah Richards. She's a gardener on
the team here at Stowe and she's promised to show me around the
garden.
It's just starting to spit rain at Stowe today, so we've just
taken shelter in the temple of Venus in one of the arches which
frames a magnificent view across a lake and I can just see a
feature in the distance glimpsing out from behind the
trees.
I can understand why you want to work here. Hannah, how long have
you been a gardener here?
HANNAH RICHARDS: I've been here for three years now just over,
still learning and still living it.
It's beautiful settings and it's such a nice place for a bit of
escapism. So, on the most basic level, it's really enjoyable.
But then when you start to delve a little bit deeper and you
start to get into some of the stories of the people and the
events that have happened here, it adds a whole new layer of
meaning to everything.
ALAN POWER: Who was the family that lived here originally?
HANNAH RICHARDS: So we started off in the 1500 with the Temple
family. It was Peter Temple who the only way to describe him
really was like a del boy on horseback,
A bit of a'wheeler dealer' he came from his sheep farming
background in Witney and then he was offered the chance to take
on a lease at Stowe, which he absolutely snapped their hand
off.
Not only was it a gorgeous setting, but also you had
Buckingham where they had two MPs elected by about 13 voters.
So he was keen to, to gain power and he knew that this would be
his way into it.
So they went from humble beginnings to being one of the
most famous and influential families in the country.
They had quite literally more money than they knew what to do
with.
They were definitely trendsetters of the time and
they wanted to sort of start moving away from formal
parterres and straight lines and move towards the landscape
movement, which was softening everything it was using ha-has
to create that borrowed landscape.
ALAN POWER: Could you describe for me what a ha-ha looks like
on the landscape?
HANNAH RICHARDS: If it's doing its job, it will look like
nothing in the landscape.
And the easiest way to explain it is it's a sunken wall. So
rather than using fencing or, or walls to keep cattle out, it was
dug into the ground with quite a steep bank on the other side.
And this way, the the cattle can't come into the gardens. But
when you're waking up and having your breakfast in your manor
house, you can look out and see for miles and miles because
there's no broken view.
ALAN POWER: Hannah, they sound like a brilliantly successful,
determined kind of, almost ruthless family and what they
wanted to do.
And their wealth, as you said was, you know, they could hardly
count the money they had, but actually they went bankrupt,
didn't they? How on earth did that happen?
HANNAH RICHARDS: I think possibly they got a bit too used
to the finer taste in life.
They were very power hungry and they wanted as many royal visits
as they could and famous visits.
But they couldn't let one of these go past without installing
a new statue in the garden or a new monument in their honour.
And then before they knew it, they were in just huge amounts
of debt.
ALAN POWER: So the Temple-Grenville family went
from rags to riches and then to ruin in a couple of centuries.
All that was but a blip in the timeline of Stowe's magnificent
ancient trees. I'm on my way now to see such a tree.
I'm stood beneath what is a magnificent oak tree. It's- it's
in and around 700 years old, but it's got a massive massive trunk
to it. But actually the canopy of the tree is quite small. It's
been pollarded in the past.
So that means all the heavy limbs would have been reduced
and reduced right back to the main stem and this young growth
has been allowed to come.
But what really draws my eye is the, is the trunk.
It's gnarly it's old. And from my point of view, being a bit of
a tree anorak myself. You know, it's full of character. It's got
a real ancient character to it.
But as you kind of wander around the tree, you can see right into
the heart of the tree and the heartwood is, is pretty much
gone. And there's a skeletal structure holding this tree up.
And I'm standing here next to this tree with Anna Tolfree.
ANNA TOLFREE: I don't know why, but I always referred to her as
a she and I think about what she's seen in her lifetime, what
she's experienced, you know what she's seen come and go.
She would have seen all the cattle walking past a market
that tenant farmers would have been taking in.
ALAN POWER: You can almost see the shepherd, sheltering under
the tree, you know, and having a rest and grazing their animals
as they walk past. But for me as well, trees like this trees as
ancient as this give magnificent punctuation marks on the
landscape.
ANNA TOLFREE: I have heard stories that when somebody
actually did come and have a look at this oak tree, they
looked inside and they were face to face with a fox who was
hiding right in the centre and they didn't move for a few
minutes.
They were, I don't know who was more scared the fox or the
person and they came out in the end. It just, it's great that
she is still sheltering people.
ALAN POWER: And when you look at this tree, what is it? You know,
I don't want to use the word say to you. But what does it mean to
you when you look at a tree of this age?
ANNA TOLFREE: It encompasses what the Trust is all about.
It's looking after what we have and making sure that everyone
has the opportunity to see this sort of thing.
ALAN POWER: We've heard about magnificent ancient trees.
Hannah. And we're now standing in, what you've told me is the
site of an abandoned village.
And while I look around here, I can see really nice kind of wild
grasses dips and furrows in the landscape. But to be honest to
the untrained eye, there's no sign of a village here. So
what's the story around this corner of Stowe.
HANNAH RICHARDS: The dip of trees behind it is, is actually
the, the lines of the road and Lamport Village, which is the
abandoned village is the name of where we're standing now.
ALAN POWER: What would the village of looks like?
HANNAH RICHARDS: Now, the first record we have of Lamport is
actually from 1086 in the Domesday Book. It was a really,
really interesting village because they had quite a diverse
range of tradesmen here.
And we know that there were three fields, all of which
joined together to create a triangular green in the middle
of the village. And from where we're standing, it's really
difficult to see that.
But if you could see an aerial shot of it. You can still to
this day see the dips in the land and you can see the the
trodden pathways of where these farmers would have walked to and
from work.
And you can still see the green in the middle, which would have
been the, the sort of common where people would have
congregated.
We know that it was quite a thriving village in the 1600s.
But then we start to face the problems of the Temple-Grenville
family wanting to build themselves a palace with the
magnificent gardens to go with it.
And they wanted to use a land where Lamport was standing to
create a deer park. Sir Peter Temple was definitely one of
the, the, the nastier members of the family shall we say?
He knew exactly what he wanted and he knew how he was going to
get it.
Yeah, there's so many stories of the residents of Lamport sort of
fighting with the Temple-Grenville's gamekeepers.
We know that there were many, many, many incidents involving
sort of swords and long pike staves and poor gamekeepers
getting injured.
We know from the paperwork that there were lots and lots of
incidents of these, midnight shenanigans where they would
cross the boundaries and have their little fisty cuffs before
they came back.
And it was all because they were fighting over Lamport.
So that's how we know that Lamport started to suffer.
ALAN POWER: And where, where do the residents of the abandoned
village end up going then?
HANNAH RICHARDS: There are records of some of them moving
into other villages in the parish. But I think a lot of
them just actually disappeared off elsewhere into the country.
ALAN POWER: While the poor villagers of Lamport were ousted
from their homes. The Temple-Grenville family had
their way and the garden was a huge success
In the 1700s, Stowe brought visitors from far and wide and
people came to enjoy the stunning landscape and to be
awed by the magnificent temples and the settings.
But over the years, you know, through falling trees and
weathering and deterioration, statues were lost and the shape
I suppose and the story of the landscape was lost to nature a
bit.
Now, the National Trust have been very, very busy over the
last 20 years, if not more restoring the landscape.
And I'm standing here at Stowe today with the assistant head
gardener at Stowe, Paul Stefanovic, and Paul, You've
been involved pretty much since day one of the restoration,
haven't you?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: Absolutely. I've been here from the first
day that National Trust took over from Stowe School. Yes.
Amazing time. I can remember very well at the time we started
the week working for Stowe School and then we ended the
week working for the National Trust and it's just been full on
restoration work ever since.
ALAN POWER: It's amazing to think, isn't it in that time
that you, you probably started a restoration thinking that you'd
finish it at some stage, but you're far from it, aren't you?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: When we first-
Trust first took over, it was a 20 year restoration project and
that was to restore the temples, to re estate, the paths, the
statues, the Park land, reinstate the lot in 20 years.
And, I've been here now for nearly 32 years and I'm still
doing restoration work. So it's just full on and it's totally
ongoing.
ALAN POWER: And it's really interesting thinking about
restoration work in a garden like this because I think
sometimes you think, ok, there's a defined restoration plan.
But I know as you tip toe your way through the garden, whether
it's on foot or in a tractor, you'll come across things like
statue pedestals that you might not have known were there, don't
you?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I can give you a
really good example of that.
There was an area where we was actually planting some shrubs
and one of their volunteers suddenly put his spade in and
all of a sudden he shouted out and he hit an enormous stone and
he dug down to try and remove the stone.
And we actually uncovered a statue base literally about
three or four inches under the ground.
And it was on a manicured piece of grass, but the statue was
laid and we excavated it and uncovered it and it was a full,
fully intact statue base.
I mean, the good thing here about Stowe is that we got lots
of information. We got lots of maps, we got guidebooks from a
very early stage.
So, I mean, I use those when I do my restoration work and when
you've been doing it for quite a while, you actually get a feel
for things.
So when I'm looking for pathways or statue bases, you know, you
look for tell-tale signs, you look for trees, you look for
stumps that were possibly there, you know, and you get a feel for
how things were then, even though you can't see them now.
ALAN POWER: We're standing in a part of the garden at the
moment, Paul, that's to me, brand new.
And we have the dancing fawn who's kind of a slightly hunched
over muscular figure with pointy ears and a tiny little tail
coming out of his back, but it's pristine, isn't it?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: It is absolutely pristine.
ALAN POWER: This is new. Were you, did you, were you involved?
Were you here when they discovered the foundations of
this part of the garden?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: It was me that discovered all these
foundations! So first of all, obviously, we have to clear the
trees away through just to find the pathways and then to find
this area here of the dancing fawns, I had my excavator in
here and again, by getting the maps out, we knew roughly where
they were the statue bases.
ALAN POWER: Your job sounds like a bit of a combination of
gardening, archaeology, construction digging, you know,
and research as well.
Putting that jigsaw all back together again and the statues
that we see, you know, are they, are they cast concrete statues
or are they re carved statues? It's hard to tell from here
whether they're?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: I Mean, we've got some, some, we've got some
stone ones here. These ones are actually made of lead. The
smaller ones are made of lead and these are the new coloured
ones you got here.
ALAN POWER: They're painted in proper human dress, aren't they?
You know, the, the dresses the jackets the men are wearing, you
know, they're all painted properly.
PAUL STEFANOVIC: They're all painted properly. And all in the
pastel colours, but given the colour to it, I think it's just
added a little dimension to like the sort of the lime wash on the
stone here. These have been recently lime washed. So that's
why they look really sort of new and fresh.
These two statues that you see here, they actually came from a
garden in Buckingham and when we got them back to the estate,
they, they were very old, they were very warm and they were
covered in lichens. They had moss over them and these have
been, lime washed just recently just to sort of tie it all in
together.
ALAN POWER: Paul, you said these two statues behind came from
Buckingham, which is just down the road from Stowe. How on
earth did they end up down there?
PAUL STEFANOVIC: Totally no idea.
It was one of their volunteers said she had these two statues
in her garden and she kindly donated them back to Stowe. So
she was very kind of her to donate them back. So they took
pride of place in this circle.
ALAN POWER: I'm going to catch up with Hannah again to learn
about some of the other statues and temples that Richard Temple
also known as Lord Cobham had instated in his garden.
Hannah, you can't miss as you wandered through the garden at
Stowe, as we've just done the number of statues that you catch
glimpses of through the trees and they all maintain a high
level of significance in the story of this place, don't they?
HANNAH RICHARDS: Yeah, they, they all have a reason for being
there and a story to tell and where we are now in the Elysian
fields. This is without a doubt, the most political part of the
garden.
Lord Cobham was a prominent politician and he aligned
himself with the, the Whig Party back in the day and he very much
used the gardens and especially the statuary in the garden to
show his political beliefs.
ALAN POWER: And Hannah who were the Whig Party. What were they
all about back in the 18th century?
HANNAH RICHARDS: The easiest way to say it really is. They were
sort of rivals of the Tories.
ALAN POWER: Conham was- Cobham was designing his garden here at
Stowe and how did he fit in with the Whig party?
HANNAH RICHARDS: So he was a very high profile member.
But as Walpole, who was the British Prime Minister and
Cobham fell out, he actually split off and joined some other
high profile members of, of the Whig party and they sort of
fractioned off and started a new patriot opposition based at
Stowe.
ALAN POWER: And we're looking across a sloping landscape, you
know, dressed with some young trees, you know, and some older
trees.
But what we see is the, the swathe of grass that runs into
the distance broken by this lake that runs through the middle and
the temple of the worthy in the distance is kind of a, a semi
circle, isn't it?
HANNAH RICHARDS: Yes. So the design of that is you have the
16 British worthies and these 16 worthies have been picked
because they show the right characteristics that men needed
to have.
The left hand side is the thinkers, shall we say? It's,
it's the eight people that Cobham thought were really,
really, really great for their thinking.
Then as you look across to the right hand side, it's the eight
people who were famous for their doing.
So you've got people of brain power and people of action in
the doers. There's one person in there who really, his name
wasn't known, no one knew who he was. But Cobham and Walpole fell
out largely over the excise bill in 1733. And this John Bernard
who sits on the corner of it.
The reason he's in there is because he voted with Cobham
against Walpole in the excise bill.
So for Cobham to put him in there saying this, this merchant
deserves a place in there when Walpole doesn't it? It's just
such a, a great way to say. Yeah. No, I've, I've had enough
of you. You, you don't deserve a place in my garden.
We also have the, the 17th Secret worthy that not many
people know about. And it's in the form of a poem and it talks
about this Señor Fido who was a great husband and a great hunter
and warrior. And you think, oh gosh, who is this person?
And then when you get to the bottom, you realize actually it
was Cobham's pet Greyhound. So even the dog made it in there.
ALAN POWER: And Walpole didn't!
The view is quite spectacular from the Temple Of Virtue, but
it has significance in other terms as well, doesn't it?
HANNAH RICHARDS: Yeah. So it's very cleverly designed as you
stand here and you look down at it, you'll notice that it feels
really light.
So it's meant to represent a place where the gods pick these
people who can be immortalized and spend the rest of time in
this gorgeous setting.
So the fact that this landscape is so open and just glorious. It
shows that these people belonged here. This Whig government
belonged in such a paradise. Whereas Walpole who's hidden
away under the under the yew trees and his broken down
temple. He had no place here.
ALAN POWER: We've been on an amazing journey today we've met
and heard about a 700 year old tree that's witnessed enormous
change at Stowe.
I've walked through and hopefully described an abandoned
village in the landscape.
We've heard about the complex Whig associations with the
family at Stowe.
We've learned about the, the passion, the success, the
fortune, it costs to create a landscape like this, but also
about the characters throughout history who are almost
determined and a little bit mean to the locals in moving villages
out of the way just to achieve their dream.
And if you want to find out more information about Stowe, you can
visit their website at nationaltrust.org.uk/stowe
For our next full episode, I'll be in Mount Stewart in Northern
Ireland, discovering the wonderful gardens there.
That episode will be available in a couple of weeks, but don't
worry, there will be a mini episode available next week.
We'll be going behind the scenes with one of the rangers, Isabel
Thompson to learn more about the conservation and ecology in
Stowe's Grecian Valley.
To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe on itunes or
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We're @nationaltrust. You can also email us at
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Until next time from me, Alan Power and all the team here at
Stowe. Goodbye.