The Secret Garden (From Ealing Times)

The Secret Garden

10:28am Friday 22nd March 2002

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ERIC Throssell turned detective when he fell in love with Hartwell House garden.

An architect who had always specialised in historic buildings, Eric was thinking of retiring 15 years ago but took on one last project restoring this grand house. He fell in love with it and now devotes his time to searching out the secrets of its garden.

You'll find him prowling around the flower beds, searching through archives and looking at 18th century works of art in the hunt for clues.

Hartwell House at Stone, south of Aylesbury, has an illustrious history former residents include William the Conqueror's son, Richard Hampden, Sir Thomas Lee and the exiled French King Louis XVIII with his court. But it was in very poor shape when Eric began working on a planning brief for its new owner, Historic House Hotels, to turn it into a top class hotel.

The hotel opened in 1989 but Eric is still delving into its history and designing a renovation of the gardens.

The present dilapidated house stood on the site of a much older one which was pulled down in the mid 18th-century.

There are surprisingly few records of how the earlier house and garden had looked. There are six paintings dating from 1738, but these show such a stunningly elaborate garden landscape that everyone assumed they were the product of imagination. Or were they?

As he began exploring the grounds Eric came across relics of that earlier age. "We discovered old stones overgrown with ivy and didn't have a clue where they came from. And I thought: hang on, let's look at those old pictures again.

"I gradually uncovered clues to the early landscape gardens here which were unique. They were designed and laid out by James Gibbs, I think, who worked at Stowe and elsewhere.

"I began turning over the edging stones to the shrubberies and to my amazement found they were carved."

As Eric began to survey the house and estate, he was amazed at the accuracy of the pictures.

Painted by the Spanish artist Balthasar Nebot, they portray a spectacular formal landscape. Near the house is a green architecture of huge topiary hedges in elaborate designs and arcades, along with classical stone temples and statues of gods and goddesses.

They show a wide formal lake in a formal oblong shape, known as a canal. This has now been rediscovered and they hope to start an archaeological excavation across the canal this year.

Eric says: "My hunch is, when the old house was pulled down, the canal was infilled with building material. We found some carved stone in a shrubbery nearby which could indicate it was being carried over to the canal.

"We're still making new discoveries in the grounds. Little bits of the jigsaw keep falling into place all the time."

Eric is currently restoring a series of triumphal arches carved on the side of a road bridge at the edge of the grounds, with help from Historic House Hotels' own stonemason. They hope to complete the project by the end of the year. They have been able to draw up the designs based on surviving pieces of coping stones.

There are also plans to restore parts of the garden, though it will never match its glorious past when an army of gardeners created a unique display of topiary.

Eric continues to come every other day to his little workshop tucked away behind a shrubbery in the garden, and he's also writing an architectural history of the house. He adds: "I'm having the best time of my life.

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