Roy Strong, the man for all seasons

The Laskett in Herefordshire, formerly home to the historians Roy Strong and Julia Trevelyan Oman, and site of one of the most famous English gardens of the 20th century, is now up for sale. The gardening charity Perennial, whose prime aim is to help working gardeners in illness or old age, managed the site from 2021 after it was gifted by Strong. Unfortunately, they failed to attract enough visitors to cover the costs of maintenance. They have announced that there is no alternative but to look for a new owner for the site. If no solution is found, the garden will be broken up.

The crisis comes at a time when Strong, who has now outlived his wife by more than 20 years, reaches 90 – an age at which most famous people don’t enjoy the celebrity they once did. Millennials may not know that for decades he was a household name, dazzling as a young director of the National Portrait Gallery, a man of fashion, the darling of London drawing rooms, a fiercely independent commentator who set out to slay philistinism and promote beauty wherever he found it.

Like many successful figures of that era, he went to a grammar school and it was that which enabled him to escape the dinginess of his North London upbringing. He developed a passion for the ceremony and iconography of Elizabeth I’s court – a niche subject, one might have thought, in the Swinging Sixties, but he nevertheless became a symbol of his age, who mixed with both royalty and rock stars. In 1971 he married – or, as he liked to put it, eloped with – Julia, and two years later they acquired The Laskett, just as the Sinking Seventies started to turn sour. It was to be a refuge from the gloom of London, where strikes and hyperinflation could be forgotten in a private arcadia they would create, perhaps little realising that it would become the largest formal English garden since the Second World War.

It became a place of enchantment – that was inevitable, given the couple behind it. At every step there was something to delight the eye, eagerly pointed out to visitors in extravagant terms, the Strongs being no strangers to hyperbole. While Julia valued the sense of secrecy conferred by the trees that grew ever taller on the periphery, Roy gloried in publicity. Leaving the directorship of the V&A after a bruising time in 1987, he allowed himself to appear – for a large and very necessary fee – as the face of the as-yet-uncompleted Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands. The TV advertisements were hilarious.

Both of them had an advanced sense of their role as observers of their time. For Julia, this was part of the verismo of her sets for ballets such as the Nutcracker, in production at the Royal Opera House for, incredibly, over 40 years. She recorded everything – on one occasion snapping the lunch table in our ordinary London terraced house, because she never knew when it might be a handy visual reference. She hoarded ephemera, the bus tickets that other people would have thrown away. It was to some extent a folie à deux, since every Christmas they sat down to paste theatre programmes, photographs and snips of rosemary into scrapbooks that form a visual diary of their lives.

Famously, Roy kept an actual diary that has now run to several weighty volumes. This is supplemented by his occasional writing, equally well catalogued, as well as the astonishing number of his often erudite, always insightful books – over 70 when I looked in the London Library catalogue. But when checking facts for this article, the most popular search line that Google suggested was: ‘Is Sir Roy Strong still alive?’

To which the answer is, Yes, with an abundance of vim and vigour. More importantly for The Laskett, he can look forward to a time, probably around the mid-century, when this scholar, diarist and uomo universale is returned to prominence by future historians. Then the garden will be studied not just for its horticultural qualities but, as Roy and Julia intended, a great repository of memory: the outward and visible sign of a lifetime’s – two lifetimes’ – self-documentation. Horace Walpole’s correspondence runs to 48 volumes in the Yale University Press edition. Today his letters, written with half an eye on posterity, are an invaluable commentary on the 18th century. In 30 years, time the same will be said of Roy and Julia in relation to their era. The Laskett is their Strawberry Hill.

According to Roy’s book The Laskett, written not long after Julia’s death in 2003, they did not intend to make anything so prodigious when they set out. They had, next to the house, a field that was let to a local farmer. Their first thought was to enclose it with trees around the perimeter. They could not then help themselves – they expelled the farmer’s cows and started to divide the land into geometrical parcels. Avenues sprung up in the mind’s eye. They started as barely visible lines of saplings, planted with what seemed to Roy a horrifying disregard for exactitude by the part-time gardeners who did the heavy lifting.

Black poplar seemed a romantic choice of tree, having become something of a rarity, but proved seriously impractical due to the determined suckers it produces, which can pierce tarmac. Yew, they were assured by the doyen of grand gardening Lanning Roper, did not take the age to grow that most people assumed – and so it proved. In a few years they had become hedges, dividing the Field (as it continued to be called) into compartments in the manner of Hidcote, the early 20th-century garden in Gloucestershire. Box was also used; The Laskett must have been one of the country’s worst sufferers from box blight when it arrived in the 1990s.

Edwardian gardens had a nostalgic glamour. Italian gardens were in vogue from the 1890s, and the Strongs looked at them, too, particularly the Villa Lante and the Bosco Sacro at Bomzaro. They also learnt from gardening friends, such as Cecil Beaton, John and Myfanwy Piper, and Rosemary Verey. ‘Remember, it is a very vulgar thing to buy plants’, he was told by the Dowager Lady Radnor, whom he had met through his exhibition on ‘The Destruction of the Country House’: presumably Lady Radnor either grew her own or swapped with friends. Mercifully, for those who did not have her resources, plants were one of the few things that remained cheap.

The result combined drifts of snowdrops and swags of roses with walks lined with topiary, aligned on urns and obelisks. This was counter-cultural in the 1970s, when the aim of most garden owners was to save labour. The Strongs found it as difficult to employ staff as anyone else but saved the situation by doing much of the work themselves. Roy’s weekends would be spent behind a rotavator or laying paving flags – ‘navvying’, as he called it. His labours were rewarded when The Laskett was called the largest formal garden created in Britain since the Second World War. Some of the gloss was rubbed from this compliment by the Queen’s waspish dressmaker Hardy Amies when he made fun of the mismatch between grand idea and scant resources: ‘Mr Pooter goes to Versailles’, was his phrase.

Amies, however, missed the point. The Laskett did not aspire to be a projection of power by a monarch in a long wig. Instead it was content to be a place of floriferous make-believe, an intensely personal idyll for the enjoyment of friends. The use of statuary made from Haddonstone – a kind of composite – instead of real stone was part of the charm. Touched by Roy and Julia’s magic wand, the antlers of a deer sparkled with gilding, or an urn found itself jauntily painted in colours – yellow and blue – that might have come from Stockholm. If a column could be purchased at Homebase, why not? Roy had the eye to make it work. After all, visitors to Strawberry Hill or Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford did not expect to see a palace. The ingenuity of the owner’s imagination was part of the game. Besides, in a damp county moss soon plays its part, and artificial stone becomes difficult to distinguish from the real thing.

The style of this garden is only part of the story. What made it so exceptional, not just to the age of its creation but in the long history of gardening, was the owners’ almost Proustian devotion to memory. This can be seen in the plants themselves. Lady Radnor would have been glad to know that Julia had not had to buy a quince tree: her father, knowing that quinces were essential to her happiness, had a couple of saplings shipped down as soon as they moved in. They were suckers from the quince that grew in Sir Charles Oman’s somewhat dismal garden in Oxford. Rosemary came from Julia’s childhood garden in Putney. When her mother died, she tore a great bough from the original bush to place on the coffin, and a limb from The Laskett rosemary would play a similar role at her own. Putney also furnished poppies, orange daylilies and the rose Albertine. ‘Memory is a sacred attribute of any garden’, wrote Roy in The Laskett.

It is not only carried by plants. In the 18th century, gentlemen developed their landscape parks as gardens of ideas, full of follies that evoked sentiments or places. The Strongs took this further. They made their garden into a kind of autobiography. It began with the Hilliard Garden, named after the 16th-century miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard on whom Roy published a book in 1975. Knots in the parterre contain the initials R and J. The Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977 brought forth a Jubilee Garden. (There is a patriotic subtext to The Laskett, which has a prominent statue of Britannia.). Then, as the garden developed according to the income brought in, a series of gardens were named after the windfalls that paid for them. They include the Shakespeare Garden, after Roy was awarded the lucrative Shakespeare Prize by a foundation in Hamburg, and Covent Garden, a tribute to one of Julia’s commissions from the Opera House, near the Ashton Arbor, remembering the choreographer Frederick Ashton.

Allusions are, as here, usually reinforced by objects. Some take the form of spolia. A lion from the House of Commons came ultimately from Charles Oman, who had snaffled them during a restoration campaign of 1933. Sir Charles also acquired a tall pinnacle from his Oxford College, All Souls, not, as it might be thought medieval, but the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor, who designed a quad and library in the style of the existing buildings. Other memorials have been specially created, among them the Muff Parade, a garden room possibly stalked by the shade of the Reverend Wenceslas Muff, a beloved cat. The V&A Museum Temple celebrates Roy’s years as director of that museum, with a disk of three profiles – Victoria, Albert and Roy – attached to a wall.

Julia’s special place was always the Christmas Orchard, formed in 1974 to contain trees bearing the evocatively named old varieties of apple that she loved. After her death, Roy created the Julia Walk, which wanders through wildflowers and past a mulberry tree. This was not the only change that he made. Once he had begun to recover from his grief, he set about remaking the garden, in the belief that gardens should not be allowed to stagnate. Trees planted in the 1970s had grown too tall; they were blocking light, denying views, generating melancholy. In a Shiva-like act of creative destruction, he had them cut down. Light flooded in, the mood became Mediterranean. A colonnade, a grotto (Roy’s present to himself on his 80th birthday) and a viewing platform known as the Belvedere, from which it is possible to appreciate the geometry of the whole scheme, arose over the next 15 years. But in 2019, he fell heavily in the basement of the house, hurt his thigh and nearly died; it was time for this most creative of men to move onto a different challenge – downsizing.

It was brave and imaginative of Perennial to answer the call and, as it seemed then, save The Laskett in 2021. But their business plan assumed that 10,000 visitors would come every year; the actual number has been reported as 3,000. For the time being at least, the gates of The Laskett have closed. To some it may seem inevitable – even to be welcomed – that The Laskett is returned to a field. Most gardens do not recognisably survive the lifetimes of the people who have created them. They have always been symbols of mutability. One of the problems for would-be restorers is to know which period to return them to – particularly, as in the case of The Laskett, they have changed so dramatically over the period of their original owners. Plants are themselves changeable, in that they start as winsome seedlings before becoming, all too often, overbearing thugs. The Laskett, though, has the advantage of being a garden of hedges, topiary and monuments, as well as transient plants; they are bones that can last. A degree of maintenance is needed but the Strongs never employed a large staff. Perennial has been able to call on the services of 26 volunteers. That is a social boon in itself.

Recently, the National Trust bought Gertrude Jekyll’s Munstead Wood outside Godalming, a garden that presents a similar challenge – there is nowhere to put a car park. Equally, though, it is too small and delicate to absorb large numbers of visitors. Other approaches are being considered, although they are admittedly reliant on fund-raising. It may be too soon for the National Trust to review its previous rejection of The Laskett, however mistaken that may have been. Can one hope that another owner might come to its rescue? The Landmark Trust perhaps, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund? We can only hope. From one season to the next, it is what all gardeners do. Hope.