Nymans

Given that Nymans in Sussex provided so much interest when I went there last week, I'm puzzled that I've got no recollection of hearing about it before. It was moderately busy though only at certain points, the grounds extensive enough to swallow up most visitors so that I could walk some stretches without seeing anyone at all. Nymans is not a Gothic Garden, because its follies and arrangements are not intended to produce a shuddersome thrill, but it does include ruins which was the draw as far as I was concerned. However those ruins are not what they seem. 

The gardens are formed into an eclectic sequence of landscapes, a rose garden, a walled garden, a sunken garden with an Italianate loggia and a Byzantine wellhead, and avenues of hedge leading to herms and statues. They are varied, and amusing.

At the centre of the gardens sits the house of Nymans. When German-born banker Ludwig Messel bought it in 1890 it was an unremarkable early-19th-century structure which he transformed into a weird mock-Tudor mansion with a colossal tower on one side. In due course Ludwig's son Leonard took over. Leonard's wife Maud really didn't want to move to darkest Surrey from London. She was an artistic soul. This is Maud, pinched from the National Trust guidebook to Nymans. Just look at that dress. Imagine the colours.

Maud refused to move unless the house was rebuilt around her own fantasies as a medieval manor. She got her way, and what we have now is an astonishingly convincing pastiche of a building which has grown over a long time. Maud and Leonard's daughter Anne - eventually Lady Rosse and mother of Lord Snowdon - stayed on at Nymans as 'Garden Director' after it passed to the National Trust in 1953 until her death in 1992: that's her in the amazing portrait below. It's no surprise that the house is packed with miscellaneous bits and pieces that are of all periods and none, just like a proper lived-in manor and a bit like an analogue of the gardens where you will even find a Roman altar-stone if you keep your eyes open.

Ah, the ruins. These were not an intentional part of the composition. In the bitter winter of 1947 the staff got into the habit of defrosting the pipes in the morning with blowtorches, and lo and behold one February dawn a fire broke out burning down one wing. That's the ruin.