Is Gravetye Manor the most beautiful garden in England?

“Without mentioning the most disgusting examples of tree mutilation in England, it is clear that much of the beauty of our gardens is lost by the foolish and ignorant practice of trimming trees into unnatural shapes,” wrote the Victorian gardener William Robinson in Gravetye Manor: Twenty Years of Work Around the Old Manor (1911). Robinson’s combative words are contained in the introduction to his book, an account of the decades he spent creating the garden at the Elizabethan home of Gravetye Manor in Sussex, England. Rizzoli recently published a facsimile of the book, along with stunning contemporary photographs.

Born in Ireland in 1838, Robinson was just nine years old when the Great Famine struck, and began working as a garden boy before he was a teenager. Over the following decades, he worked in the gardens at Regent’s Park, travelled the world to study botanicals and published more than 70 books. When offered a knighthood in 1934, he politely declined: “I feel that I must go out of life as I entered it, and I shall therefore decline with renewed gratitude,” he said.

After his death in 1935 at the age of 96, Robinson fell into relative obscurity. But during his lifetime, he changed the whole idea of ​​what a garden could be. “There are two styles,” Robinson wrote, “one rigid, mechanical, fond of walls or bricks, or perhaps gravel… and also fond of spraying water in an immoderate degree.” The other, he wrote, develops “with true humility and proper desire… accepting nature as a guide.” This second philosophy—based on conservation, plant ecology, and native beauty—may seem more of a product of the 21st century than the 19th, but it is Robinson’s vision that contains the seeds of the wild gardening movement itself.

No matter how close to nature a garden is, it still requires a certain amount of maintenance. During World War II, Gravetye (pronounced grave-tie)—and the garden fell into disrepair. In 1958, the house was converted into a hotel, but as that era ended, the gardens fell into disrepair. Robinson’s vision was revived in 2010, with new owners and a new head gardener, Tom Coward (who, he says, spent several years working on Paul McCartney’s grounds during his long career). When he took on the job, Coward was faced with a landscape overgrown with deep-rooted perennial weeds, decaying infrastructure and a voracious deer population. The new owners also wanted Gravetye to remain a hotel. (A Michelin-starred restaurant has since opened, with many of the ingredients sourced directly from the garden.) But that, too, presented challenges: “Because the hotel never closes,” says Coward, “we always have to look our best.”

More than a decade after Coward began work at Gravetye, the gardens are at their peak, their lush cacophony captured in photographs published with Robinson’s text—which is not just a historical artifact but a living guide to the possibilities of the garden, presented in a stunningly vivid way. “What we have been doing,” says Coward, “is developing it and applying the principles of William Robinson, but without being dogmatic.” The garden, Coward notes, was constantly changing, even during Robinson’s lifetime—only when a visiting artist noticed that a stiff hedge was creating an unpleasant formality in one section did he replace it with roses and clematis. When Robinson began his life’s work—and the only garden he actually built and designed for himself—he was shy about introducing any bright hues. “The simple form and color of the house were so beautiful that everything had to be done in relation to them,” he wrote in an early passage.

In late spring, when we talk to Coward, alliums are nodding their purple heads and lacy white wisteria is dripping from the pergola. But, somewhat surprisingly, it is February that Coward likes best. In summer, he says, “you are just completely overwhelmed; it is the most wonderful time, but you can’t enjoy it.” In the first months of a mild British spring, when snowdrops and daffodils appear, “anything is possible.”