Ahead of our Lost Gardens of London exhibition opening this autumn, we’re asking people to share their favourite city gardens lost to time. First up, our former Retail Manager, now a garden designer, Elef Fitsiolos looks into the story of a long-lost garden once in Deptford:
By Elef Fitsiolos
I often find myself looking for more hidden green spaces in and around the capital. My Curious London off-the-beaten-track guide consists of a dozen of these often-overlooked havens. Having worked at the Garden Museum and through my course on Garden Design, one name kept creeping up. John Evelyn and his long-lost garden in Deptford.
Sayes Court had been from the first an interesting property, a house to have been built by the de Sayes c.1404.
On the 6th of February 1652, when Evelyn resides at Sayes Court, he completed an agreement to purchase the property for £3.500. He extended the garden and orchard from 2 ½ acres to about 10 acres land of unfenced 100 acres stretched to New Cross. Evelyn himself had always been an enthusiast for the new fashions in gardens and parks of the continent.
Image taken from Evelyn Papers, Vol. CCCCLXI A.
Originally published/produced in England, circa 1653-1654. From the British Library Archive.
He started with a blank canvas, drawing up a scheme in which reality and fantasy played off each other. The initial subdivisions at Sayes Court may also have had something from Jardin des Plantes in Paris- as shown in Abraham Bosse’s engravings – certainly in Evelyn’s print collection. The soil needed enrichment with mixes of lime, loam, and cow dung manure. Different machines were also needed in an English Garden, and by September ‘the plott’ was finished. Planting commenced on 17th January 1653 followed on 19th of February by the orchard with 300 fruit trees. His designs for his Oval Garden were mostly inspired by Morin’s Garden in Paris which he visited twice according to his Diary and had asked his father-in-law Richard Browne to convert French measurements to English. Evelyn gathered plants from different sources, some of them locally from Greenwich but some of them from the continent that needed special tending in Surrey. The interventions were an Oval Grove at the South of the garden and another at the North and between them there was an elevated terrace walk edged by a Holly hedge on one side and a Berberis on the other. The Grove contained around 500 varieties of fruit trees, many recommended by John Parkinson in 1629, that produced fruit during the English Summer and some that lasted through the Winter months.
At the center was his ‘Morin’ or ‘Dial’ garden an immense oval parterre. Adjacent to the house on the west was a walled garden “of choice flowers, and simples”, that is, medicinal herbs, laid out in formal beds surrounding a large fountain, an aviary and the transparent beehive which was admired by Charles II and Samuel Pepys. He planted a lilac hedge, set up a laboratory with pillared portico and an oval garden with box hedges and promenades. He planted French walnuts and a variety of native trees. Sayes Court came to its own standards for English gardens, leaving behind the Tudor and Jacobean fashions for a new open space of enjoyment.
The reconstruction shows two Ovals with a rectangle marked with Cypresses, the inner oval set as a parterre and the outer in grass with a raised mound and a ‘Dial’ right in the center. Outside the larger Oval are groves and a ‘wilderness’ with evergreen for birds, private walks, and cabinets. The Grove to the North, looked very much like those Evelyn has seen in France and of course in Italy. It had a Baroque bosquet feel to it, but going through it provided viewing surprises and planting. It was divided into eight, with walks from each corner and side with a central mound surrounded by Laurel. Beneath the canopy of around five hundred trees, it had a richness of form, and some walks had the ‘spider’s claws’ effect as Evelyn called it. Dead-end alleys twisted into little cabinets with French walnut trees at each center. He often said: ‘My Dial Garden is now compleate as it can be 6 foote high at which pitch I determine to hedge it some years the better to fortifie it, Pine, Fir and Laurel doe best of all other with me’.
In the kitchen garden, every wall was smothered with fruit trees, apricot, peach, and nectarine. In the fountain garden there are more fruit and nut trees: pear, cherry, quince, walnut, and medlar. Even the island was planted with melons, artichokes, cabbages, and beets. Espaliered trees around the walls of the old Morin Garden and the various sections filled by dwarf pears, standard apples, damsons, and cherries. Violets grew under the gooseberries and borders with strawberries. The vegetable garden was edged by chervil and the flower garden by clipped cotton lavender. The new Bowling green recalls the shape of the Tuileries he saw and sketched for his ‘Elysium Britannicum’. The crescent moon-like shape was adored with two lines of trees are nothing new in the seventeenth century European garden design. It was twice the size of the previous Oval; and the banqueting hall was still at its centre which faced the original walk and the moated ornamental island. A drawbridge over the moat gave access to the island which was planted with a hedge of fruit trees, a summer house, and a Mulberry tree at the eastern end.
In the Garden at Deptford Evelyn’s spirits revived and in the early weeks of bereavement (Evelyn’s son Richard died in 1658) the Sayes Court Garden help to heal the Evelyn’s. Is the same year when Evelyn records a bad storm. In Spring 1664, Evelyn planted more elms in the Homefield and the West Field. The same year Elmes were also planted by His Majesty in Greenwich Park. In 1671 is when he discovers the infamous wood carver Grinlling Gibbons at work in a cottage near Sayes Court.
The Winter of 1685-6 when the Thames was frozen, Evelyn had to rethink the garden layout. The plan of the late 1690’s shows what has changed, and the Oval Garden had to be eliminated entirely and extend the Grove. The Royal Society asked Evelyn to present a paper about the state of Deptford Garden. The losses of the effects of the extreme cold included the rosemary hedges, most of the Cypresses – especially those kept in pyramids- and even the well-protected ‘exotics’ such as sedum and aloe. Evelyn had concerns about the cork trees and cedars, but the Ilex and scarlet Oak had survived. Among his bulbs, most tulips and narcissi were lost, anemones rotted, and tuberoses were saved by the continual fired chimney. Sadly, his tortoise was also dead after having survived many severe winters. Even as late as the 1690’s he was still trading from Flanders, ‘roots of the Royal Parrot Tulips and roots of Ranunculoes’. Evelyn’s last visit to Sayes Court was probably on the 10th of February 1704 to see the storm damage of the previous November.
40 years of tending and revising the garden, Evelyn noted that dressing and keeping an Eden necessarily required that it be kept continually cultivated.
For Evelyn his garden was always ‘The Mistress I serve and cultivate.’ For his wife Mary was ‘His business and delight’.
Now over three hundred years later, only a portion of the original park exists. A development plan will bring the opportunity to reclaim this land for the public, and create an enhanced green space, play areas and an experimental 21st Century Garden.
I am wondering what Evelyn would think of this, and would the new space capture Evelyn’s “spirit of place” ?