Return to Albion - Great Dixter
Great Dixter, and its irascible owner/(non)designer/promoter Christopher Lloyd, has loomed large over the English gardening landscape for more than fifty years. In many ways it sits comfortably in the canon of Arts and Crafts gardens—with its dotted lines connecting Gertrude Jekyll, Edward Lutyens, and Vita Sackville-West—but like Lloyd himself it manages, through its quirks, eccentricities and bloody-mindedness, to defy convention and thumb its nose at what everyone else says a garden must be.
You arrive at Great Dixter, like every garden we visited, via a harrowing single track road. Signposted for 60 miles per hour, you’re undecided as to whether you should barrel on at breakneck speed and risk a fiery death, or trundle along cautiously thus extending your time in the danger zone and challenging the brakes of various coaches filled with old age pensioners. If you have the courage to take your eyes off the road, take note, as this beautiful golden Kent countryside shapes the garden you are about to visit.
Immediately you feel that Great Dixter is different, and the fact that it is not a National Trust property means that the garden and its gardeners are free to do things their own way. The paths are narrower, the steps a bit trickier, and the accompanying gift shop and tea room break the mold of the uniform, Starbucks-like monotony of NT gardens. Everything from car park to loos feels like a prototype—built as a one-off to the whims of the person in charge that year.
The meadow that forms the entrance to the 15th-century house is one of the most photographed features of the property, and is one of the ways that Christopher Lloyd* rebelled against tradition. Entrances are supposed to impress upon visitors the status of the owner, not harken their minds back to landscape beyond the gates. The house itself is a ramshackle arrangement of timbered and half-timbered rooms that looked less like a home and more like a place where a squad of cavaliers might huddle before their next assault on Cromwell—interesting to look at, but difficult to live in.
First impressions tell you that their will be no grids or long allées to orient you as you wander. Lloyd described himself as a “non-designer” who let things flow as the spirit moved him, and on a late June morning the plants were trending toward chaos. But make no mistake, Great Dixter is a bit of a palimpsest, seeming disorder written over the bones of a traditional Lutyens/Jekyll layout in the Edwardian tradition. Lloyd’s parents were artistic gardeners in their own right.
The Sunk Garden sticks closest to traditional lines, albeit with a very relaxed approach to deadheading and no respect for personal space. The somewhat casual approach continues in the larger Peacock and High Gardens and reaches a high point in the Long Border. At several points it was difficult to pick your way through the plantings and the massive yew hedges. If you weren’t aware of Lloyd’s strategy of over planting, you might come to the conclusion that they were short-staffed.
The otherworldly feel continues as you work your way through the Orchard and the Topiary gardens. Familiar but slightly shaggy. Things really open up as you work your way through another meadow to the lower moat, and if you turn around you have a great view of the house and gardens in all their Arts and Crafts glory. Continuing along the path you reach the plant stand, the gift shop and excellent tea room (shack) that has a very good and inventive menu filled with fresh dishes straight from the garden.
It’s impossible to talk about Great Dixter without delving into the lore and legacy of Christopher Lloyd. I’ve read that Beth Chatto, a great gardener in her own right, often ran interference for him at social events pointing out those to whom he needed to apologize to for his rude behavior. His writings in Country Life and The Guardian were both insightful and acerbic, and his love for dachshunds and mentoring of current head gardener Fergus Garret exposed his softer side. He was also a fantastic ambassador for gardening and a link to a disappearing type of garden that relied upon a pre-war level workforce, allowing the vision of a single, somewhat eccentric owner, to become reality.
* Unlike the tour guides who, like me, never met the man, I refuse to refer to him as “Christo”.