01 June 2017
Read All About It!
Stody Lodge gardens – saved by The Press.
by J.R.Thomas
Knowing Shaw Sheet readers to be an erudite bunch, whose leisure hours are spent not just in auditoria watching action on stage or screen or listening to the rolling waves of great London orchestras, but also seeking the understanding which comes from the gifted and delicate manicuring of nature, we like to offer occasional gardening reviews. Not how to grow a superior potato, or the best manuring methods for raspberries, or even how to prevent rust on hollyhocks, but occasional notes on English gardens, an art form far from uniquely British, but certainly a major enthusiasm for summer weekends in these islands.
One of the delights about garden visits is finding the unexpected. Readers may remember our recommendation of Penjerrick, that great almost unknown jungle-like Cornish garden, grown to a mature magnificent wildness. Now we have found what one might have expected to find in a Cornish valley – but hidden away in a Norfolk wood. And with an unlikely history.
Stody Lodge is a modest manor house near the town of Holt in north Norfolk, part of the former large Blickling estate sold off after the First World War. The owners of Blickling had used the house as a dower house and made a water garden out of a large area of boggy ground near the house, planting it with a range of plants that like acidic soil, mostly notably azalea mollis, those low growing azaleas which create enormous blushes of colour in the spring. In the centre of these three acres of plants and lakes is one of the best (and tallest) Cedar of Lebanons in the British Isles. The owners also planted a long rhododendron drive from the public road to the house; a drive that shortly afterwards became redundant when the house burned down. The estate had just before this sad event been sold to Lord Rothermere, the joint owner (with his brother) of the Daily Mail.
Newspaper tycoons are men of action and with the advantage of the ever growing cash mountain from the Daily Mail, Rothermere immediately commissioned a new house in the woods on the opposite side of the road and a new garden to go with it. That could have been an aesthetic disaster, and the more sensitive visitor might consider the house as exactly that, though it begins to grow on you after a couple of scones and a cup of strong tea. But what no visitor will consider anything but a delight is the magnificent gardens into which the Rothermere money was dug. The soil was much of a muchness with that across the road but drier; so no lakes but plantings of an enormous collection of azaleas and rhododendrons and well-judged specimen trees in a formal plan of avenues and glades radiating out from the house. Eighty or so years later that is all at full maturity and has the luck to be well but gently maintained by enthusiastic owners (the Rothermeres moved onto grander pastures in 1941), who are gently renewing and expanding, interweaving their plant collections with a low-key collection of mainly metal sculptures as highlights. The old bog gardens are also thriving and the collection of azalea mollis (over two thousand plants) is said to be the largest in Britain – one in the eye for the great spring gardens of Cornwall and the west coast of Scotland.
Stody Lodge is three miles south west of Holt, Norfolk, near Hunworth. The garden is open on selected days in the spring each year, often for charity. Teas and a plant stall usually available.
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