People : Thomas Mawson, Garden Designer, Town Planner and Exceptional Landscape Architect.

Thomas Hayton Mawson (5 May 1861 – 14 November 1933), known as T. H. Mawson, was a British garden designer, landscape architect, and town planner.

Personal life

Mawson was born in Nether Wyresdale, Lancashire and left school at age 12. His father, who died in 1877, was a warper in a cotton mill and later started a building business. He married Anna Prentice in 1884 and the Mawsons made their family home in Windermere, Westmorland in 1885. They had four sons and five daughters. His eldest son, Edward Prentice Mawson was a successful landscape architect and took over the running of his father’s firm when his father developed Parkinson’s disease in 1923. Another son, John Mawson, moved to New Zealand in 1928 as Director of Town Planning for that country. He died at Applegarth, Hest Bank, near Lancaster, Lancashire, aged 72 and is buried in Bowness Cemetery within a few miles of some of his best gardens and overlooking Windermere.

Working life

To make a living, he worked first in the building trade in Lancaster, then at a London nursery where he gained experience in landscape gardening. In the 1880s he moved back north, where he and two brothers started the Lakeland Nursery in Windermere. The firm became sufficiently successful for him to be able to turn his attention to garden design.

Mawson’s first commission was a local property, Graythwaite Hall, and his work there showed his hallmark blend of architecture and planting. He went on to design other gardens in Cumbria such as Langdale Chase, Holehird, Brockhole, and Holker Hall around the turn of the century.

In 1891 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Belle Vue Park in Newport, Monmouthshire, Mawson’s first win in an open competition. His design was, in fact, designed for the neighbouring field, the site of the then Newport and Monmouthshire Hospital after Mawson misunderstood directions on his first visit. The mistake was not realised until the first site visit, after the contract had been awarded. Between 1894 and 1909 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Dyffryn Gardens near Cardiff. The Rushton Hall estate in Northamptonshire has early 20th century formal terraced gardens designed by Mawson between 1905–1909 and implemented by his brother Robert.

Later Mawson designed gardens in various parts of Britain, and others in Europe and Canada. In London he designed gardens at The Hill, in Hampstead for Lord Leverhulme. The impressive 800 ft long pergola is now open to the public as part of the West Heath. He designed Rivington Gardens and Lever Park in Lancashire also for Lord Leverhulme. Padiham Memorial Park (1921) was another commission in Lancashire. Mawson also designed the gardens at Wood Hall near Cockermouth, Cumbria, which were completed in 1920. Much of this garden still survives today.

From 1910 to 1924 he lectured frequently at the school of civic design, Liverpool University. He also contributed articles on garden design to The Studio magazine and its annual The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art. In the 1920s he designed gardens for Dunira, a country house in Perthshire.

In 1923 he became president of the Town Planning Institute, and in 1929 the first president of the Institute of Landscape Architects.

International work

In 1908 he won a competition to lay out the Peace Palace gardens at The Hague. He also advised on the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States. In 1912 Mawson toured several Canadian cities, beginning in Halifax and ending up in Victoria, British Columbia. As well as giving talks, he proposed several (unaccepted) designs including for Wascana Centre in Regina, Brockton Point lighthouse, Coal Harbour and Lost Lagoon in Vancouver, and urban design plans for Banff and downtown Calgary. Mawson’s vision for Calgary, had it been implemented, would have changed what was then a dusty prairie town, into a city of the City Beautiful movement.

Legacy

With the passage of time some of the original features have deteriorated. A number of Mawson’s parks were restored in the early twenty-first century. For example, the two municipal parks at Stoke-on-Trent (Hanley Park and Burslem Park) and a rose garden at Bushey were restored as part of the “Parks for People” programme for historic parks and cemeteries in the UK.

Archive

More than 14,000 plans and drawings together with 6,500 glass plate negatives and photographs comprise the archive of Mawson documents. They are stored at Kendal Record Office having been offered to the Cumbria Archive Service following the closure of Thomas H. Mawson & Son of Lancaster and Windermere in 1978. As at 2010, the material has not been fully catalogued and conservation is proving difficult.

Selected writings

• 1900: The Art and Craft of Garden Making, 1st edn 1900, 5th edn (recommended), 1926.
• 1908: “The Designing of Gardens”, article in The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1908
• 1911: Civic Art Covers the principles of town planning
• 1927: The Life and Work of an English Landscape Architect

 

People : Beth Chatto , Plantswoman, Garden Designer, Gardener , Author, Aged 91 And Still Going Strong…

Beth Chatto, OBE (born 27 June 1923), is a British plantswoman, garden designer and author best known for creating the Beth Chatto Gardens near Elmstead Market, in the English county of Essex. She is also known for writing several books on gardening for specific conditions. She has lectured throughout the UK, United States, Canada, Australia, the Netherlands and Germany. Beth Chatto’s gardening and writing use the principle of the right plant for the right place, developed from her husband Andrew Chatto’s lifelong research into the origin of garden plants.

The Beth Chatto Gardens

Construction of the Beth Chatto Gardens began in 1960 as a garden attached to the Chatto family home on land that had previously belonged to the Chatto family fruit farm. It had not been farmed as the soil was considered too dry in places, too wet in others and the whole area had been allowed to grow wild with blackthorn, willow and brambles. The only plants that survive from the earliest days are the ancient boundary oaks surrounding the Garden. The Beth Chatto Gardens comprise a varied range of planting sites totalling five acres, including dry, sun baked gravel, water and marginal planting, woodland, shady, heavy clay and alpine planting, and now include the Gravel Garden, Woodland Garden, Water Garden, Long Shady Walk, Reservoir Garden and Scree Garden. It was the development of these sites that prompted Beth Chatto to write books on gardening with what could be considered as “problem areas” using plants that nature has developed to survive in differing conditions.

Today Beth Chatto continues to work within the Beth Chatto Gardens, write for international and national press and appear in international media.

Exhibitions

In January 1975 Beth Chatto created a small winter garden at one of the Royal Horticultural Society Halls, London SW1. More exhibits followed and eventually the Beth Chatto Gardens “Unusual Plants” exhibition arrived at the Chelsea Flower Show. Exhibits by “Unusual Plants” were awarded eleven consecutive Gold Medals at the Chelsea Flower Show from 1977 to 1987. Exhibits by The Beth Chatto Gardens can still be seen at the Tendring Hundred Show in Essex

RHS Hyde Hall : The Only Way Is Essex.

The Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Hyde Hall in the English county of Essex east of London. It is one of four public gardens run by the Society, alongside Wisley, Harlow Carr, and Rosemoor. In the year ended 31 January 2010 it received 130,011 visitors.

The garden at Hyde Hall was created by Dr and Mrs Robinson in 1955. Hyde Hall was formerly a working farm on a hilltop surrounded by arable land. The site was cleared and 60 trees purchased from Wickford market a few miles away. These trees now form the Woodland Garden.

In the 1960s shelter belts of Lawson and Leyland cypress hedges were planted. During this decade the farmland to the west of the Hyde Hall hilltop was incorporated into the garden.

In 1976 Helen and Dick Robinson formed the Hyde Hall Garden Trust which would manage the garden on a long term basis. The trust donated Hyde Hall to the Royal Horticultural Society in 1993.

Sitting prominently on a hilltop with sweeping views across the rolling Essex countryside, Hyde Hall takes full advantage of its 360 degree views. At the centre of the garden you will find intensely cultivated planting schemes that slowly begin to soften and blend out into the surrounding landscape. The result is an eclectic mix of horticulture from traditional rose gardens and herbaceous borders to large sweeping borders of grasses and meadowland.

A perennial favourite at Hyde Hall is the Dry Garden which showcases a fantastic range of drought tolerant plants and now you can enjoy even more of it thanks to an extension doubling its size. Other much-loved areas are the Courtyard Gardens which celebrate the ever popular cottage garden style of planting, but with a modern twist, and a new lake nestled at the bottom of Clover Hill.