'A dream of England': The Hampshire rose garden that's one of the finest in private hands
A thousand English roses now bloom in the restored walled garden that forms the heart Dummer House, Hampshire, home of Sir Crispin and Lady Davis. Charles Quest-Ritson visits this beautiful 27-acre estate; photography by Mimi Connolly.
Throughout his years of working in Germany and North America, Sir Crispin Davis dreamed of buying a country house in southern England and cultivating a garden. In fact, he has done much more than that. In addition to modernising and replanting almost every feature that he inherited at Dummer House, which he bought in 2014, he has created an important new rose garden, large and utterly delightful.
The house is a fine example of homely Georgian architecture and the estate, near Basingstoke, belonged for many years to the Terry family, who built the present house around a much older core. They were friends of the Austen family of Steventon and Chawton, and Jane, the novelist, danced with the sons of the house, of which there were seven, as well as knowing the six daughters. It was to accommodate so many children that the building grew to its present extent.
The ‘meandering’ garden offers a view of the 13th-century parish church and its white-painted belfry; pink ‘Fritz Nobis’ and Royal Jubilee roses feature on the right.
Dummer House came with 27 acres on a level site, which included a remarkably spacious main lawn stretching south towards parkland, sheep pastures and arable land beyond. A see-through group of metal deer, fashioned and shaped in outline, gives scale to the view of the parkland. Previous owners had planted a fine avenue, focused on the drawing room, of weeping silver pears Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’. This popular small tree has a tendency to look shaggy, but Sir Crispin has trimmed and trained his as neat hemispheres on short trunks; the effect is dynamic and charming at every season, but especially in spring, when thousands of daffodils flower underneath. Nearby is a smaller lawn surrounded by mixed borders, as well as well-established trees and shrubs. A tree-like cotoneaster with many low branches makes a favourite den for grandchildren to climb up inside until they can no longer be seen.
Dummer’s structure of open spaces, hedges and specimen trees remains as Sir Crispin found it, although the herbaceous plants in the borders, bold and lavish, are almost all his introductions. Delphiniums, phloxes, salvias and peonies — some of his favourite genera — are here in plenty and he has a remarkable eye for contrasts and harmonies of plant shapes and colours. Repetition and succession planting maximise the effects. The planting of evergreens against the north wall of the house — ferns, phormiums, elaeagnus and elegantly trained yews — is superb. Throughout the garden, Sir Crispin’s plantings offer a masterclass in horticultural artistry.
‘Versicolor’, the striped Gallica rose sometimes called ‘Rosa Mundi’.
Sir Crispin’s favourite plants, by far, are roses. A rose garden sums up for him the best that an English country house can offer in early summer. Dummer came with a run-down, walled kitchen garden, rather closer to the house than usual, which he decided to convert into a rose garden; it now contains some 1,000 roses. It adjoins the parish churchyard and has, as a backdrop, the south side of the 13th-century church — ‘delightfully modest,’ according to Pevsner — with a pre-Reformation tiled roof and a remarkable white-painted clapboard belfry.
There were no half-measures in creating this horticultural heaven. Sir Crispin employed the Portugal-based landscape architect Richard Westcott to help with the structural work. Roses respond to good soil, so Mr Westcott brought over a team of Portuguese workers to replace the tired earth of the entire kitchen garden, digging it out to a depth of 22in. Big machines were hired to help with this major operation and fertile fresh soil brought in. The only feature spared was a handsome, well-established quince tree, which now dominates one of the garden’s four quadrants.
Grace, a David Austin rose that lives up to its moniker.
As so often happens, the old kitchen garden was not a regular shape — polygonal, but not a rectangle. Nevertheless, Sir Crispin had a clear idea of the formal design and layout that he wanted. There should be a fountain at the centre, aligned on the two doors — one entering near the side of the house and the other leading out to the main garden. He drew out in detail the ground plan that he wanted and asked Mr Westcott to prepare working plans and specifications. Each of the four segments should have a distinct design and character — meandering, romantic, suitable for entertainment and a cottage garden.
This means, for example, that the ‘meandering’ garden has a wiggly layout that begs the visitor to dawdle and soak up the beauty of the roses, whereas the ‘entertainment’ garden includes a sheltered, sunken area where eight dining chairs surround a round garden table. The character of the whole walled garden is now defined not by the names of its four quadrants, but by its roses, even if the way one traverses each of the segments does confer a distinctive sense of exploration.
Rosa ‘Francis E. Lester’ rambles along the barn roof above Gertrude Jekyll and ‘Versicolor’ roses, and the table of the sunken ‘entertainment garden’ is backed by the crimson Rosa Munstead Wood.
When it came to choosing roses, Sir Crispin turned to David Austin Roses for advice and the company sent its top rosarian Michael Marriott to help. Mr Marriott remembers that ‘Sir Crispin asked that a fair selection of the roses should be fragrant and include a good proportion that were suitable for cutting’. The upshot is that a very great number of Austin’s ‘English’ roses from 10 years ago are the main inhabitants, but mixed with the best old roses, including Rosa gallica var. officinalis, R. gallica ‘Versicolor’ and ‘Charles de Mills’.
Mr Marriott advised that no fewer than five specimens of each cultivar should be planted closely together so that they appear to develop into a thick clump — advice that Sir Crispin accepted and now endorses because, he says, the impact of the individual clumps is vastly improved.
The Lady of the Lake grows tumbling over one of the arches.
Among Sir Crispin’s favourite David Austin roses are Desdemona, which has large, white, strongly scented flowers in small clusters, and two sumptuous sweet-scented crimson varieties, Munstead Wood and Darcey Bussell, that are now difficult to find. He praises pink Princess Anne for its long season of flower, but he also thinks very highly of many once-flowering roses — everything from ‘Versicolor’, the striped Gallica rose sometimes called ‘Rosa Mundi’, to the glorious scented ‘Fritz Nobis’, which cannot be bettered for sheer flower power early in June.
Traditional Hybrid Teas and Floribundas are not forgotten — ‘Sally Holmes’ and A Whiter Shade of Pale perform very well here, but Chandos Beauty is perhaps the best of all modern roses for its scent, colour and health, as well as its prolific production of flowers.
Rosa Harlow Carr, named for the North Yorkshire RHS garden.
The underplantings are simple: lamb’s lugs, nepeta and hardy geraniums, chosen to complement the many-coloured roses discretely. Incredibly, all is maintained by just one gardener, the gifted and tireless Laura Feltham, who sustains the highest standards of cultivation. Skilled rosarians know how difficult it can be to succeed so consistently. Sir Crispin’s dream of England is today among the best modern rose gardens in private hands.
This feature originally appeared in the June 3, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
