Mention Stoke-on-Trent to someone and it doesn’t normally conjur up an image of a green and pleasant land. But maybe it should! Last month the European Garden Heritage Network bestowed one of its greatest honours on the famous gardens at Staffordshire’s Trentham Estate and Gardens, by presenting it with the 2010 European Award for Garden Restoration.
Already widely recognised nation-wide as one of the finest gardens in the British Isles, Trentham’s dramatic transformation “from zero to hero” was led by renowned garden designers and Chelsea gold-medal winners Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Oudolf who, along with Trentham Gardens Manager Michael Walker have reinvented the derelict 30-acre historic gardens on the banks of the river Trent which are centred on a vast Victorian Italianate parterre. The revitalisation of the Italianate grandeur with a stylish modern interpretation has created one of the largest examples of contemporary naturalistic perennial planting in Europe.
Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Oudolf, however, were simply the latest in a long line of renowned landscape designers and architects to be associated with the Estate and Gardens, once one of the Dukes of Sutherland’s Estates, who transformed it from a medieval monastery to grand country estate over decades of ownership from 1540 to 1979.
Lancelot “Capability” Brown created the Lake and Parklands in 1760 – 1780 and the Trentham’s famous Italian Gardens were designed in the 1830’s by Sir Charles Barry – the architect of the Houses of Parliament, at the same time as he extensively remodelled Trentham Hall in the Italianate style.
The restored gardens at Trentham balance the grand formality of Barry’s parterre terraces with more contemporary planting informed by ecological principles. The dramatic contrast between the new planting and Barry’s formal framework is particularly strong in high summer, when the living material of the planting seems to burst through the constraining geometry of the beds. Piet Oudolf designed two flanking borders in the Italian garden and the magnificent perennial meadow along the banks of the river.
Located at the edge of Stoke-on-Trent in England, Trentham boasts a long and colourful history. Once a pleasure ground of royals and nobles; Edward, Prince of Wales visited in 1897, Benjamin Disraeli called it ‘Brentham’ in his novel Lothair, and the Shah of Persia was one of the countless guests to stay in the Hall. The Hall was demolished in 1911 and the Estate was transformed by the Sutherlands into a leisure park from the 1920’s. Through the first two thirds of the 20th century it became very well known as the “playground of the Potteries”, during which time the name ‘Trentham Gardens’ became so famous. The Estate fell into serious decline thought he 1970′ and 80’s until purchased by property and regeneration specialists St Modwen in 1996.
The latest chapter in the estate’s history has now been written by St Modwen, who took over the dilapidated and overgrown Estate with a vision to recreate it as one of the UK’s top leisure and tourist destinations and after extensive consultation and design started the transformation in 2003.
The new-look gardens have already matured into some of the finest in Britain, and were recently named by Alan Titchmarsh as one of the nation’s “must-see gardens”.
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