There can be few garden designers who have a longer relationship with a particular garden than Tania Compton has with Fonthill House in Wiltshire, for it goes back half a century before she was born: her grandparents first set eyes on each other there. ‘They were the lucky recipients of a blind date set up by [the then owners] Hugh and Lady Mary Morrison,’ she explains, ‘and met over tea on the south lawn.’ We are talking on that same south lawn today, with its tremendous views to distant Win Green and the Dorset downs. The outlook may be the same, over the titanic stone bastions that support the garden on its steep hillside, but if her grandparents were to turn around, they would be astonished to see the change behind them.
The Fonthill they knew was an enormous, many-gabled mansion with, at its centre, a Jacobean manor house, which, before the First World War, had been painstakingly dismantled and rebuilt on this new site by the architect Detmar Blow. Its owner, Hugh Morrison, was one of the richest men in Britain, thanks to his grandfather, James. Known as ‘the Napoleon of shopkeepers’, James Morrison made one of the great Victorian fortunes, starting out in haberdashery before moving into banking and railways. He bought the Fonthill estate in the early 1830s, but eventually found it too far from London and gave it, in about 1845, to his second son, Alfred, who lived there for the rest of his life. Alfred’s son, Hugh, inherited in 1897, but, as his mother showed no signs of moving out of the main house, he engaged Blow to build him a home of his own on the eastern edge of the estate.
The Drawing Room Garden is all reds, purples and pinks, with masses of Rosa ‘De Resht’, ‘Bleu Magenta’, ‘Penelope’ and ‘Ispahan’, plus seed-sown red lupins.
They chose a wonderful site, on a sunny hillside sheltered from the north and east by the steep escarpment of Little Ridge Wood. In those pre-war days of cheap, abundant labour, the hillside was sculpted into great stone terraces on an almost Mycenaean scale, planted with an Edwardian abundance of roses and bedding. For the first few years, the Morrisons lived in an exquisitely reconstructed Jacobean manor, at that time called simply Little Ridge, but, after children and further inheritances, the original building was repeatedly extended and renamed Fonthill House. Photographs from the Country Life archive reveal it to have been a beautifully picturesque exercise in the 17th-century style — the kind of house of which Sir Edwin Lutyens would have been proud.
Fonthill House in Wiltshire was known as Little Ridge when it appeared in Country Life in 1912. It was destroyed in the 1970s.
Unlike many other country-house owners, the Morrisons survived both wars with their fortune remarkably intact, but, after Hugh’s death in 1931, changing social lives and staffing shortages made huge private houses such as Fonthill almost impossible to live in and, by the early 1970s, his son, John — made Lord Margadale a few years before — had decided to demolish the whole thing.
A late campaign to get Blow’s masterpiece spot-listed, led by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and the Victorian Society, failed largely because officials at the Department of the Environment had got it muddled with one of the other houses on the estate, which they were under the impression had been demolished years before. By the time they realised their mistake, Blow’s house lay in ruins, to be replaced in 1972 by the current neo-Regency villa, which stands at the middle of the original terraces, although not, maddeningly, quite on the central axis.
Tania Compton’s involvement began about 20 years ago, in her bathing costume. ‘I was over for a swim one afternoon,’ she recalls, ‘soon after Lord Margadale [Alastair Morrison, who inherited the title in 2003] moved in, and I made some disparaging comments about the dwarf-dahlia bedding. It was something of a throwing-down-the-gauntlet put-down, but they knew changes were needed and I was the lucky person to be asked to come up with a masterplan.’ The previous two generations, as she puts it, ‘had been horse rather than horticulture aficionados’ — the first Lord Margadale established the Fonthill Stud, which bred Classic winners under his son — and the once-fine Arts-and-Crafts gardens had suffered decades of neglect, with lank leylandii hedges half hiding tumbledown fruit cages.
Some of Detmar Blow’s original steps lead down towards the swimming pool.
Her plan divided the garden into sections, enabling the work to be done in stages, keeping the best surviving trees and shrubs. The house is approached by a sinuous, mile-long drive, which crosses a bridge over Fonthill Lake, then winds gently uphill through woods and pastureland. Finally, it enters what feels like a dark, narrow cutting before emerging, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, into a huge amphitheatral space carved out of the hillside, with flights of steps sweeping up from either end above an arched central loggia. The last stretch of the drive is framed by handsome Persian ironwood trees, Parrotia persica, alternating with clipped box and standard holm oaks, Quercus ilex, underplanted with massed white narcissi, the alliums A. ‘Mont Blanc’ and A. stipitatum ‘Mount Everest’ and Japanese anemones.
To the west of the house, the unlamented leylandii have given way to three distinct spaces, their grassed centres divided by yew hedges, with the original wall along one side and a long retaining wall below, which boasts a fine collection of fan-trained figs. Closest to the new house, the Drawing Room Garden occupies the space where the 1920s drawing room once stood. Designed to feel like an extension of the house, this is one of the most intensely gardened areas, all red, purple and pink, with masses of Rosa ‘De Resht’, ’Bleu Magenta’, ‘Penelope’ and ‘Ispahan’, plus the annual poppy Papaver somniferum ‘Lauren’s Grape’. Beyond is the Cornus Garden, initially intended as a cricket pitch, but now dominated by a group of eight Cornus kousa var. chinensis, some standards and others multi-stemmed.
The 1972 house looks over clipped yew pyramids outlining the South Lawn, enclosed by Tania Compton’s trademark triple hedges of box, nepeta and white Rosa rugosa.
The sequence culminates in the Fountain Garden, centred on a serene William Pye fountain. In spring, its deep borders are yellow and white with Magnolia stellata and the flat white dinner-plate flowers of Viburnum plicatum, underplanted with chrome-yellow Paeonia daurica subsp. mlokosewitschii. In autumn, the colour scheme switches to pinky-purple, with Hydrangea paniculata and a 164ft ring of Sedum ‘Herbstfreude’ (now Hylotelephium × mottramianum ‘Herbstfreude’).
The south side of the house opens onto a formal lawn, supported by stone walls more than 20ft high, flanked at lower levels on either side by two further gardens — one framing the swimming pool and another, slightly wilder one centred on a small lily pond. The swimming pool sits in the middle of what had been the Edwardian rose garden, complete with Blow’s pretty corner pavilion, now wreathed in wisteria. A hedge of headily fragrant mock orange, Philadelphus ‘Belle Étoile’, runs along one side and the awkward slope towards the house is disguised by four standard Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’, which at first glance look like olive trees.
Of the south lawn, the designer says: ‘Given how many walls and steps and other areas of stone there are, we wanted it to offer a visual rest and be all green, yet remain structural.’ The outer three sides are enclosed by her trademark triple hedges, with clipped box sandwiched between two layers of white Rosa rugosa, their stems hidden in a bed of nepetas.
‘I use rugosa everywhere,’ she adds. ‘It looks great, it’s tough and it’s cheap as chips. If you’re creating a long rose hedge, why spend hundreds of pounds on named varieties when you can buy rugosas for 99p a pot?’
It’s a sentiment of which James Morrison would surely approve.
Tania Compton’s cornus champions
Several varieties of cornus grow beautifully at Fonthill.
Cornus kousa var. chinensis
The most elegant of all the Chinese cornuses, with horizontally inclined, arching branches studded with beautifully spaced starry bracts, which have the profusion of blossom. It has the natural elegance of a selection over the clunkier hybrids, an abundance of dangling strawberry-red fruits and fabulous autumn colour. Its close relation, ‘China Girl’, bred in Holland in the 1970s, has slightly larger bracts, but similar refinement.
Cornus kousa ‘Miss Satomi’
This Chinese dogwood has all the attributes of C. kousa var. chinensis, but with pink rather than creamy white bracts. It’s one of the most gorgeous shrubs for any garden that has rich, neutral to acid soil that doesn’t get too dry. In full flower, it has a similar effect to Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum ‘Pink Beauty’, which makes a beautiful partner where their spreading canopies have space to make gracefully layered sheets of inflorescence.
Cornus x elwinortonii Venus
This one is the opposite of everything elegant and refined. Its bracts are the starched white handkerchiefs of the Cornus tribe, but it proved irresistible to try it at Fonthill in its Chelsea debut year, and it is thriving in the deep, humus-rich greensand on the edge of North Wood.
Cornus ‘Eddie’s White Wonder’
Where a more rounded silhouette is wanted, this American hybrid has large, rounded, overlapping bracts. It thrives in spring after a long, hot summer, so is getting more reliably dazzling for British gardens. Other than C. kousa var. chinensis, all these cornuses come with an Award of Garden Merit from the RHS.
The gardens at Fonthill are open to visitors on select days — see their website for details.
This feature originally appeared in the June 17, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.