YDGS visit to Stourhead & Westcroft Garden
- Phil Goddard
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
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STOURHEAD
Stourhead is an 18th‑century Palladian house and world‑famous landscape garden near Mere, Wiltshire, created and refined by successive generations of the Hoare banking family. In 1717–20 Henry Hoare I purchased the Stourton estate, demolished the medieval manor, and commissioned one of England’s earliest neo‑Palladian villas from architect Colen Campbell; the house was largely complete by 1725.
His son, Henry Hoare the second otherwise known as Henry the Magnificent, shaped the estate’s celebrated English
garden from the 1740s. Working with architect Henry Flitcroft, he dammed the River Stour to form the lake and set classical buildings such as the Temple of Flora, the Pantheon, the Palladian Bridge, and later the Temple of Apollo, into orchestrated vistas inspired by his Grand Tour and painters like Claude Lorrain. The garden quickly gained fame as a living "work of art".
Richard Colt Hoare, Henry II’s grandson, inherited in 1783 and continued planting on a grand scale, edited the garden’s features to suit changing tastes, and expanded the house with spaces for books and art. The estate weathered 19th‑century agricultural downturns; a catastrophic fire in 1902 gutted the central block, which was then faithfully restored. In 1946, after family losses in the World Wars, Stourhead house and garden were given to the National Trust, which has cared for them since.
WESTCROFT GARDEN
Westcroft Garden near Salisbury in Wiltshire, is one of the best-known gardens in the National Garden Scheme for winter and early spring, particularly if you enjoy snowdrops.
The garden covers about two-thirds of an acre on chalk soil in Boscombe Village, northeast of Salisbury. It's owned by Lyn Miles, an enthusiastic galanthophile, a snowdrop collector to you and me and contains well over 500 named varieties of snowdrops, making it a destination for snowdrop enthusiasts.
Some of its highlights include:
Extensive drifts and collections of snowdrops in January and February.
Brick and flint walls, rustic arches, terraces and a pond that give the garden strong winter structure.
Large displays of hellebores and pulmonarias in early spring.
Old apple trees clothed in rambling roses in June.
Herbaceous borders with salvias, asters and ornamental grasses through summer and autumn.
A deliberately wildlife-friendly style, with areas left natural for birds, bees, butterflies and amphibians.
One of the things visitors often remember is the hospitality. Lyn is well known for serving home-made teas, cakes and, during the snowdrop season, soup, alongside selling propagated snowdrops, plants and homemade preserves.
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