History of the Garden

The house is surrounded by 30 acres of spectacular award winning gardens. The landscape has developed slowly since monastic times. The monks certainly grew vegetables in large quantities, but whatever gardens they had have disappeared over the centuries.

The only monastic structure that remains today is the Great Pond at the top of the garden. This now brings water into the garden but originally its purpose was to power a mill for grain, which stood on the site of the present day Forge.

Sir Francis Gwyn created the beginnings of the garden that we see today during the early 18th century. Monsieur Beaumont, who was a pupil of Le Notre in Paris, and later worked for Col. Graham at Levens Hall in Cumbria, may well have influenced the design. Graham and Gwyn were close friends and colleagues in parliament.

Gwyn used the water to create the three lower ponds and the cascades that can be viewed from the centre of
the Border. He also planted the great Yews as part of his design, and probably the largest Limes.

During the 18th century the lawns were laid out and the walls were built. It is likely that little was done early in the 19th century and the garden was in as poor a state as the house when Jane Evans purchased it in 1863.

The Evans family created a typical Victorian garden; at the back a kitchen garden that would have produced an amazing range of fruit and vegetables at all times of the year, and at a colossal expenditure in labour; at the
front dark shrubberies of Yew, Bamboo and Rhododendron Ponticum. Flowers were mainly grown in the kitchen garden for cutting. Summer bedding would have provided the colour in front of the house; this would have needed constant protection from rabbits and peacocks.

Using the legacy of the eighteenth-century landscape and the nineteenth-century trees, three generations of the Roper family have made a garden worthy of the house that it surrounds. The newest addition is the Centenary Fountain. Formally opened in 2005 by Anne Swithinbank, it celebrates 100 years of the Roper Family at Forde Abbey and with a maximum height of 160 feet it is the highest powered fountain in England.

The garden is truly a developing entity. It is always changing with the seasons and years. Its character in the spring is totally different from that of the autumn. There is, however, no time of the year when things of interest to the gardener, and beauty to the visitor cannot be found.

To learn more about the garden please click here