Tea at Trianon: The Cressy Hall Topiary

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, March 31, 2022

The Cressy Hall Topiary

From Country Life:

It is remarkable these days to come across an extraordinary garden that has not been splashed across the pages of the garden press. Even more so when it rises like a luxuriant oasis on the otherwise flat, watery and largely treeless landscape of the fens of South Holland in Lincolnshire.
The nine-acre pleasure grounds of Cressy Hall, nestled in a dense woodland plantation on the north-eastern skirts of the village of Gosberton, have miraculously remained a well-kept secret. Although it is full of surprises, with lime allées and eye-catchers, the garden’s crowning glory is its display of geometric topiaries.

It was not always thus. When Michael Hill and his wife, artist Janey Hill, acquired the property in 1990, its late-Georgian house sat isolated amid the open fields of the fenlands. Cressy Hall is an unusually refined house for the area, with its fine brickwork and flanking pavilions, but the grounds were, in the Hills’ own words, in ‘poor condition’ and ‘quite boring’, and the views over the encompassing arable fields and dykes ‘unremarkable’.

The early-medieval and 17th-century houses that preceded the present dwelling, however, appear to have had quite ambitious ornamental gardens, of which traces survived, including ancient earthworks, the remains of a medieval moat, a late-17th-century water garden, a stretch of decayed garden wall and a ha-ha. These relict features would provide the Hills with a useful framework.

He has always liked topiary, but Mr Hill is, by his own admission, neither a gardener, nor terribly interested in horticulture. His achievements at Cressy, however, reveal that he is an imaginative designer, an accomplished topiarian and a patient improver. (Read more.)