Woolbeding Gardens

Ms Formerly Aldgate's gold National Trust membership card came up trumps again yesterday: my time off and hers rarely coincide, but it did and so we took ourselves off to Woolbeding, not all that far away just to the west of Midhurst. Woolbeding has been in NT membership since the 1950s but has only been opened to the public since 2011. It was given to the Trust without any endowment and so was promptly let, eventually to Sir Simon Sainsbury who remained resident from 1972 until his death in 2006. He and his partner Stewart Grimshaw not only restored the house but also created a garden with two distinct elements, a range of formal hedge- and wall-lined 'rooms' ranging between the house and the old parish church of All Hallows, and, separated from the formal gardens by fields, a tree-shrouded dell scattered with follies and organised around a lake.

Not at all a Gothic Garden, but certainly a Rococo one, this latter bit includes a Ruined Abbey, Chinese Bridge, Hermit's Hut, Gothic Summerhouse, and a River God whose pouring urn feeds the lake. It's a mere two decades old, but gives a very clear idea of what those 18th-century garden-makers were aiming at (I imagine). 

The Tulip Temple commemorates a 100-foot tulip tree, the tallest in Europe, which came down in the Great Storm of 1987 and missed the house by two feet.

You can't simply waltz up to this little world (or indeed engage in any other kind of dance), but must park in Midhurst and then be whisked along lanes and over bridges in a NT minibus. The service is very frequent but if you have to wait any time you can do so on a bench overlooking the beautiful pool and channels of water in the entrance yard; when we went we had every meterological circumstance from bright sun to hail.