Cloudehill Gardens - Olinda, Dandenong Ranges, Victoria Australia

The Gardens at Hanbury Hall

July, 2025

Above: The entrance to Hanbury Hall Gardens.

Hanbury Hall, not far from Droitwich and some ten miles north-east of Worcester, is in the glorious countryside of Worcestershire almost in the middle of England. The estate has been in the hands of the Vernon family from Tudor times, though Hanbury Hall, the building, dates from 1701. The surrounding gardens are the work of George London from 1705.

Now 1705 is a curious date in the history of the English garden. In that year those with the money were busily constructing gardens inspired by Versailles, Louis the 14th the Sun King’s garden. Versailles, as it was made by Le Notre between 1661 and 1700, caused a sensation. From the late 1600s, the royal familys and aristocracy throughout Europe were remaking their gardens in imitation of Versailles. The gardens of the Hapsburg Summer Palace near Vienna are a good example and another was Het Loo, made in the Netherlands from 1686 for Willem the Third and his wife, Mary.

Two years later Willem and Mary were invited onto the English throne after the Stuart king, James the Second, had been tipped out in what’s known as ‘Bloodless’ Revolution. Over the next few years, to ingratiate themselves with the new regime, many in the English countryside were thinking it might be useful to the family fortune to make William and Mary feel right at home. One excellent way to do this was to make a garden a bit like the one at Het Loo and it happened one of the families thinking along these lines was the Vernons of Hanbury Hall.

What makes the gardens of Hanbury Hall fascinating is that the first great wave of garden making in a distinctly English style was about to crash across the English countryside just six years later with the beginnings of Stowe, the first of the great 18th Century ‘Landscape Gardens’. Stowe (made for Lord Cobham between 1711 and 1751) is associated with three notable designers, Charles Bridgeman from 1711 to 30, William Kent from 1730 to 41 and finally the redoubtable Sir Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. Brown commenced work at Stowe in 1741 and carried on with the development of these seminal gardens to 1751. Brown then set up his own business and by the time he died, in 1783, he had designed and constructed some 270 more gardens. Most of these were in the very many acres. And also by 1783 other designers following in Brown’s footsteps had made another 2,000 similar gardens. The total area involved is thought to have exceeded half a million acres.

This might seem all a tad academic but, as Australians, I think we should be familiar with these figures. This staggering craze for garden making in the old country was still at its height at the time of first settlement in Australia, and of course, dispossession. So when (as Prof. Bill Gammage points out) Australia’s first settlers were speaking of the bush looking astonishingly like a ‘an English garden’ they all had a precise (and somewhat controversial) image in mind.

From 1720 to 1800 much of the wealth of England was poured into gardening. And as often making them involved the demolition of ancient Tudor gardens, frequently these gardens were controversial in the extreme. Their critics were wont to call them ‘parkland gardens’ and in those days ‘parkland’ was a term of abuse. Parks were where people kept deer, and these animals are forever killing trees with their antlers as they rub ‘velvet’ off. (Cloudehill has lost several trees to deer doing just this – darn it) Anyway, it was the similarity between these new-fangled ‘wild-looking’ gardens with a medieval deer park with debris and dead trees everywhere that made the term topical.

Here I recommend anyone wanting to follow up these arguments should get hold of Prof. Bill Gammage’s ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’.

So in the history of English gardens, Hanbury Hall is an anomaly. One of a handful of gardens made the first years of the 18th Century in that brief window before Lord Cobham and Bridgeman began work on Stowe. Once Hanbury Hall’s formal gardens were complete, the Vernons expanded their garden outwards, however, now following the principles laid down by the English Landscape School. By the mid-1800s Hanbury’s formal parterres were surrounded by flowing lawns and woodlands, naturalistic ponds and meadows. And indeed by the end of the century the formal gardens also had vanished under grass. For the next 200 years the Vernon’s tribute to Het Loo was nothing but a memory. However, in 1990 the English National Trust decided to reinstate the old parterres and this was not difficult as elaborate plans from 1705 still existed. So in 1995 Hanbury’s new/old gardens were thrown open to visitors and as you see they’re looking very spruce and anyone who has been to Het Loo will spot the resemblance.

The following are all photographs taken July of 2024.