Julian and Isabel Bannerman's unique garden design
style, mixing 'ancient' architecture and romantic,
fragrant blooms, has led to commissions around the
world... including the British Memorial Garden in New York
for victims of 9/11. By Stephen Lacey
Garden designers by appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales
the Bannermans may be, but anyone expecting tweedy
formality at Hanham Court is way off the mark. In spite of
being right at the eastern edge of the Bristol suburbs,
the huge barn and other stone outbuildings are still in
their unconverted state, the yards littered with
architectural salvage. Pass through the entrance gate
tower, and you are in a laidback world of art and history,
children and dogs, scruffy clothes and meals consumed
alfresco with eclectic chat and lots of cigarettes.
'Garden designers who don't get their hands dirty amaze
me,' Julian says, just in from the deepest reaches of the
25-acre site. When it comes to planting and building -
unusually, the Bannermans undertake architecture as well
as garden design - he and his wife Isabel are a hands-on
team. 'Look at my hands, they're just like a mole's.'
Plot in the city:
the site of the British Memorial Garden in New York for
the victims of 9/11
They bought Hanham Court - part medieval, part Tudor,
with a 14th-century church - in 1994. 'We had restored a
baroque house in Chippenham, and were set to buy one in
Malmesbury which looked as if Richard III had just left.
But we lost it, and with Isabel pregnant and with nowhere
to go, a friend said we should come and see this. The
house was a wreck, but riddled with history, and the
landscape was a joy, with limestone downland full of
wildflowers, meeting a ridge of acid sandstone extending
from Wales.'
The formal part of the garden, on a level bastion between
the folds of hillside, he describes as 'like an aircraft
carrier, with the lawn as the landing strip', and is
constantly being changed and improved. Obelisks of yew now
punctuate and organise the flanking borders, and between
them is a panoply of shrub roses in infinite variety.
'We've always had the rose bug,' Isabel says, emerging
from preparing pizzas for their sons. 'And I suppose one
of our planting principles is to put a lot of the same
thing in the same place.' In some areas, delphiniums are
massed as spiky accompaniments to the roses; in others, it
is peonies partnered with Regale lilies. 'We saw that
partnership at Vaux-le-Vicomte [near Paris], and have used
it in a few projects recently.'
Bannerman gardens are unashamedly romantic, with oozing
scents part of the repertoire. 'Scent is the main operator
of life,' Julian says, as he shows me their placement of
fragrant shrubs such as wintersweet at path junctions, and
evergreen daphnes at the foot of climbing roses to hide
their bare stems. Isabel introduces me to Philadelphus
mexicanus, which I had never seen before. The starry white
flowers with a crimson blotch deliver a potent fruit
cocktail fragrance. 'It is a lot hardier than the books
say,' she adds.
But the real signature of a Bannerman design is the
architectural flights of fancy. Here, a giant treehouse
looms behind a gravel terrace, simply scattered with
euphorbia, lilac-flowered Iris pallida and box balls. A
chunky oak gateway, in the style of Inigo Jones, stands
silhouetted against the valley. And the swimming-pool is
framed in a courtyard of lime-mortar walls, built as a
medieval ruin, with 'crumbling' surfaces invaded by plants
and studded with Gothic windows and other decorative stone
fragments. They created a similar vision of a ruined abbey
for The Daily Telegraph at the 1994 Chelsea Flower Show.
Later that afternoon they took me to see the hilltop
garden they are making for John Robinson, the owner of
Jigsaw, and his wife Belle, where the scale of 'ancient'
wall building is on such an epic scale that a sort of
magical Oxford college is being conjured up, complete with
cloisters.
Isabel read history at Edinburgh University, and it was
here she met Julian who, after art school at the Ruskin in
Oxford, had gravitated north to work in an art gallery.
'It was owned by Ricky Demarco, one of the founders of the
Fringe,' Julian says. 'One of my jobs was to organise
exhibitions in Europe connecting art with exploration and
landscape. At the same time, I was getting to know artists
like Ian Hamilton Finlay, who were making connections
between modern and ancient art. It was a revelation to me
that the two could work together; there is no division
between new and old.'
With a shared passion for architecture, they settled in
the West Country in the early 1980s. Julian was already
interested in gardens, thanks to his mother, but Isabel
says she was 'bludgeoned into horticulture by Julian', and
packed off to Lackham Agricultural College near Lacock.
The idea was to design gardens and garden buildings.
'Slowly we started getting work,' Julian says. 'And the
leap came in 1990, when Jacob Rothschild asked us to
design a water garden and grotto beside the Dairy at
Waddesdon Manor. We ended up building the Dairy too - a
mix of modern and high Victorian - and it won Civic Trust
and Europa Nostra awards.'
After that, Sir Paul Getty commissioned them to build a
tunnel around his house at Wormsley in Buckinghamshire.
'It's a sort of Beckfordian structure [William Beckford's
18th-century Gothic fantasy at Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire,
is one of the Bannermans' inspirations] and absolutely
huge - you could drive a bus through it.' Their other
projects have included gardens in Mustique and at Houghton
Hall in Norfolk, for the Marquess of Cholmondeley.
'Rambling Rector'
foams over the Gothic window in the courtyard wall, while
along the path, another white rose, 'Aberic Barbier', is
grown among lilies and peonies
The invitation to compete for the job of designing the
British Memorial Garden in New York came in autumn 2002.
'It is Camilla Hellman, an Englishwoman who lives in New
York, whose brainchild this is,' Julian says. 'She decided
there should be a memorial for the 67 British victims of
the September 11 attack, and she ran with the idea, and
fought for it. I mean, New York does not just hand out its
green spaces.'
I had the chance to meet this remarkable woman on the site
of the embryo garden last autumn. 'I lost a friend in the
tragedy,' she told me. 'And like everyone else was very
shocked by the reality of the dust, the sights and the
smells. I realised how vulnerable we all are and how we
need places where we feel safe. So, I approached the St
George's Society in New York, and the British Consul
General, who were very supportive of the idea of a garden.
The Parks Department invited me to walk the city to see if
I could find somewhere suitable. And when I came to
Hanover Square, it seemed to have the right feeling.'
Just off Wall Street, this small patch of public space
does indeed seem peculiarly homely. Not only does it have
old, low-rise buildings around it, and a quirky triangular
shape disconnected from the American grid pattern, but it
is also at the heart of the City's original British
settlement. It was in sore need of revitalising, having
declined into a drab '1970s cement park with benches'.
With the support of the bereaved families, a campaign to
raise the $6.75 million for the garden began, with the
design awarded to the Bannermans. 'Their garden was
traditional but fun and unpredictable. And Julian and
Isabel are very good at enthusing the parks people in New
York.'
The planting is now in progress and the park should be
open to the public by the end of May. 'We want people to
enjoy the park while we are finishing the project, which
involves completing the memorial fence line and installing
the 14 bollards which have those inspirational shields
that represent leading transatlantic institutions such as
the City of London,' Hellman says.'
It is to be a garden of embracing, sinuous lines. 'We
wanted to make something sensuous, but simple and
permanent, so that ruled out a giant herbaceous border,'
Julian says. 'Then we thought, what could be more British
than yew topiaries? You see them in churchyards, villages,
grand gardens and small gardens, and they mix solemnity
and cheerfulness, especially when they grow out of shape,
which I love.' While the yews are growing, their final
shapes will be indicated by the metal armatures encasing
them, which Julian would like to be 'a luscious scarlet,
like yew berries'.
The yews are being linked by box hedges, water rill and
seating. 'We were told we had to have 220ft of running
seating and lots of paving, because like all New York
squares it is used mainly for sitting and eating lunch. We
wondered how we could make this interesting, and seeing
that the shape of the square was a bit like a Middle Ages
map of Britain, we came up with the idea of asking the
sculptor Simon Verity to carve the names of all the
British counties and dependencies on a ribbon of stone
right around the garden. We thought that would have a lot
of resonances for visitors, who will have connections with
many of those names.'
Julian asked his client, the Prince of Wales, to become
patron of the garden, and the prince and the Duchess of
Cornwall dedicated the garden's centre stone in November
2005.
It was through their mutual friend, the writer Candida
Lycett Green, that he and Isabel were first introduced to
the prince, and over the years their fantastical
architectural flourishes at Highgrove have included a
gilded heron alighting on a Victorian column, a wall
eccentrically packed with masonry bric-a-brac, and, most
celebrated of all, the Stumpery garden, comprising weird
and wonderful temples, carved seats and soaring mounds of
contorted tree roots.
'We haven't made our own stumpery yet,' Julian says as he
leads me down into the ideal spot, a wooded dell below
their garden bastion, already flaunting stands of giant
white Himalayan lilies and a small forest of tree ferns.
Here they have been adding to the sheets of naturalised
bulbs, as well as restoring a pair of medieval ponds.
I wondered how they divided the work and the
decision-making in their projects. 'Oh, there is no real
division,' Isabel says. 'We argue a lot and annoy each
other, but we are equally interested and involved in
everything. Really, we have been together so long now that
we think the same.'
Hanham Court, Hanham Priors, Bristol, is open for the
National Gardens Scheme on Saturday, June 16, 2-6pm (bannermandesign.com)
