Lytes Cary - The Gardens

The Gardens

All trace of Henry Lyte's garden has disappeared. Records show that his son Thomas kept a very well-stocked orchard, which included in 1618 "Apples, 3 skore severall sorts. pears and Wardens (a type of pear), 44 sorts. Plummes, 15 divers kynds. Grapes, 3 severall sortes. Cherries, 1. Walnuts, 3. Peaches, 1." By the Victorian period the garden had run to seed, and so the Jenners had to start from scratch on their arrival in 1907. They had the gardens designed and constructed to include a series of hedged and walled "rooms" with topiary, specimen trees, a pool, statuary, croquet lawn, walkways, an Elizabethan orchard, and a herbal border that includes plants described in the Lytes Herbal.

The gardens were constructed in a series of 'rooms', which are separated from each other by high, neatly clipped box and yew hedges. The gardens were influenced by the Arts and Crafts style popular at the time. The Jenners had a garden staff of four.

In 1965 Graham Stuart Thomas, the National Trust's first Gardens Adviser designed the Main Border. From 1955-1997 the Trust's tenants at the Manor, Biddy and Jeremy Chittenden, transformed the garden, and Biddy rethought and replanted the main border in 1996, using new plants but following Stuart Thomas's colour scheme.

The gardens are listed as Grade II on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, Reference GD2152