Cadhay clears away the cobwebs
GARDENS TO VISIT IN DEVON
for a visit to remember by Vivienne Lewis
Everything is bursting into bloom in June, a fantastic time of year to visit gardens, and you are spoilt for choice in Devon. Here we highlight a pick of the best for you to discover – one of the gardens is open during the late Spring Bank Holiday weekend at the end of May, but if you can’t manage to get to it by then, Durcombe Water welcomes visitors by appointment through the summer.
We do our best to ensure that details are correct at time of going to press, but we advise readers to check before making a journey. Gardens open for the National Gardens Scheme can be seen on their website:
www.ngs.org.uk
Cadhay
When Dave Armstrong began working in 2002 on the renovation of the interior of Cadhay, near Ottery St. Mary, little did he think that in a few years he would be leading guided tours around a pristine, tranquil garden, a garden that he had brought back from a near ruin.
Today, looking at the Elizabethan manor’s garden, with its peaceful lake overhung by trees, the fine borders, clipped topiary, old walls and paths, it seems impossible that so much work can have been achieved in so little time. You’d think it had always been looking as good.
ADBLK123_02 Ilminster 170x25:ADBLK123_02 Ilminster 170x25 19/02/2010 16:02 Page 1 “There wasn’t time,” he said. So
But Dave has one regret: he didn’t take any ‘before’ photos when he started work on the garden, after doing the inside work in the house for about a year.
Cadhay, most of it built in the 1540s and owned by the William- Powlett family since 1935, has retained all of the charm of an ancient country manor house still in private hands
he ploughed on, drastically pruning vastly overgrown shrubs, including an almost horizontal cotinus which lifted itself two feet out of the lake after being cut back, repairing the tops of walls and rebuilding the stone edging walls of the lake.
In the kitchen garden the walls were submerged under ivy “with stems as thick as your wrist”, he says, and the glasshouse was derelict. The ivy was cut away, the glasshouse completely renovated to such a standard that he now calls it “the engine house” of the garden.
Cadhay, most of it built in the 1540s and owned by the William-Powlett family since 1935, has retained all of the charm of an ancient country manor house still in private hands. But it has been sensitively renovated by the man who inherited in 2002, Rupert Thistlethwaite, a furniture maker.
The writer Simon Jenkins gives the house three stars in his book, England’s Thousand Best Houses, and calls the courtyard the “pride of the house”, with its statues of Henry VIII and his three offspring, Elizabeth, Edward and Mary.
“Called the Court of Sovereigns, it is one of the treasures of Devon”, he states.
Now Cadhay is in demand as a wedding venue and for up- market holiday accommodation both in the house and in the converted stables and coach house. Guests can wander in the lovely grounds, and many of the plants grown in the garden are from seeds sent back from grateful guests from different parts of the world. Dave has had help in
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Agent of The National Farmers Union Mutual Insurance Society Limited. Country Gardener We do right by you 15
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