Midwinter is a time for ancient things: bone, iron, stone, wood; the steadfastness of slow-growing hollies, the solidity of an oak silhouette and a desire to fight the darkness with traditions that endure. Few gardens fulfil that desire more perfectly than those at Helmingham Hall. Arriving through tall gates into a 400-acre park, echoing with the throaty bellows of bucks, you feel the old folklore of the winter solstice. Herds of fallow and roe deer have nibbled away for centuries at rolling grassland dotted with copses and magnificent solo trees.
Approaching the hall, barley-sugar brick chimneys gradually loom through the mist rising off the moat, where drawbridges are raised every night as they have been for hundreds of years. The Tollemache family, arriving at Helmingham in the late 15th century, continually improved the estate with gatehouses and avenues, ponds and neighbouring farmland; 20 generations later, with Ed and Sophie Tollemache as current custodians, this patchwork of embellishments and additions makes a magnificently unified whole.
A recently replanted box parterre with cones designed to mirror the decorative brickwork of the hall.
The gardens, flanking either side of the hall, fall into two areas. To the west, the original productive garden was laid out around the time the hall was finished in 1510, but maps show it as an even older Saxon site. Moated for protection, it had a wooden palisade before brick walls went up in 1745. To the east, garden designer and former chatelaine Lady Xa Tollemache created a second set of garden rooms in 1982, including a historically sympathetic knot garden and rose garden. All of the designs have superb structure and an arresting geometry, emphasised by cruciform grass paths and expertly maintained evergreen topiary, a perfect foil for Helmingham’s romantic roses that are equally important in winter.
‘We use Damask and Moss roses to train over Xa’s maypole supports,’ explains the head gardener, Brendan Arundel, who arrived at the Suffolk garden in 2021 after training at the RHS’s gardens at Wisley in Surrey and Hyde Hall in Essex. ‘These varieties are pliable, with long whippy growth, so we can focus on a sculptural effect; other types can be too woody or firm,’ he elaborates. Rosa ‘Céleste’, ‘Madame Plantier’ and ‘William Lobb’ wrap horizontally across the supports; species roses with knock-out hips are gently manipulated into loose fountains: R. duplex smothered in fine spikes, R. virginiana dripping with shiny red baubles that last for months. Thick yew hedges, trimmed with concertina corners, enclose it all in cloistered calm.
Torus, a mirror-polished stainless-steel sculpture by David Harber, perfectly reflects the silent Saxon moat with its yew topiary, draped with lights for the annual winter garden trail.
Every part of Helmingham Hall emanates a sense of stillness. Walls, water, hedging, cedars, oaks: they all wrap around you, like layers of pass-the-parcel, and muffle the outside world. The walled garden is the epicentre of this protected idyll. To enter, you must cross a steep-banked earth bridge over the silent water of the Saxon moat; an island within an island, it predates the hall as the original, 1,000-year-old sanctuary. Long double herbaceous borders are backed by rusty iron posts and wires with roses trained in spider-web rings. ‘We needed more mystery,’ explains Mr Arundel, ‘so we created tunnels and screens. Otherwise, visitors would see the garden all at once.’ These help sub-divide the one-acre area into beautifully defined compartments within the eight main beds. Iron tunnels and archways, free of the sweet peas and gourds that cling to them all summer, become a Bridget Riley artwork, casting sharp black shadows in clear light. There are breathing spaces for wildflowers, lollipopped Prunus fruticosa ‘Globosa’ and gnarly pollarded Cercis canadensis. ‘We don’t want to see bare earth, we want to clothe it more,’ states Mr Arundel, who has interplanted steel-blue lines of cavalo nero with flowers and left asparagus foliage ripping like a wildfire across one stretch. The lichen-smattered walls, inside and out, carry a tracery of espaliered branches: shiny cherry bark, arthritic-knuckled pears, a smooth fan of fig. Around the base are themed borders: one hosts a merry menagerie of frogs, snowmen, acorns and rabbits; another has yew buttresses bouncing down in scalloped bookends. Calamagrostis bracytricha and molinias stand all winter along the Grass Border at the back, next to mahonias, daphnes, sarcococcas, Pittosporum ‘Arundel Green’ and the ghostly peeling trunk of Heptacodium miconioides.
The Knot Garden: the box is cut with an electric hedgecutter one year and hand shears the next, so it becomes structured yet soft.
Without the fanfare of flowers, the smaller details sing out: Buxus sempervirens ‘Suffruticosa’ trained into the Tollemache fret, iron supports such as heraldic Tudor poles, topiary cones in the Parterre mirroring the decorative brickwork. Weathered stone eagles brave the wind on entrance pillars, their talons furred with moss. ‘The juvenility of all the summer growth hides the garden’s age,’ agrees Mr Arundel. ‘Winter reveals its ancientness.’
It also reveals the skill of the gardening team, made up of four full-time staff and one part-time gardener, plus six volunteers. Grass paths are edged every week in summer to retain crispness; the box parterres and knots are alternately cut with an electric hedgecutter one year and hand shears the next so it becomes, as Mr Arundel puts it, ‘structured yet soft, like a blancmange’. Chris Reeve has pruned trees, roses and topiary at Helmingham for 26 years, coaxing every plant into a well-judged character. Giant sea urchin yews slouch along the edge of the moat, some precariously tipsy, a curving flowery mead snaking between. In winter, the Apple Walk thrusts its beautifully wonky symmetry into a pewter sky, bare boughs raised in a guard of honour.
Half a millennium of tending and tweaking and digging and shaping has given the garden a rare magic. It forces you to slow down, to linger, to stop and listen. Human time seems to come to a standstill. Visitors, Mr Arundel notices, ‘naturally respond to the blend of formal and informal, history and modernity. They always hone in on the spirit of the place’. In winter, that spirit is palpable and utterly captivating.