Italian Garden

Dig a Little Deeper

This part of the Garden started life as the family tennis court but in 1982 Robert Stephenson Clarke and his wife Maria created the ‘Bride’s Pool’, named after a mid-nineteenth-century marble statue by Antonio Tantardini that once stood there. Since then, the Italian Garden has gradually evolved.

A first redesign was carried out in 1997 by award-winning garden designer Robin Williams, who filled the upper terrace with roses and planted box hedging (Buxus sempervirens) around the pool terrace. He designed the rill that runs down to the pool from the statue of a naked female, arms outspread. This statue, ‘Welcoming the New Year’, is a marble resin copy of an original by the local artist Ev Meynell. Williams also introduced the twelve swagged Whichford terracotta pots that flank the pool.

The planting here is markedly different in style from the looser, more relaxed planting elsewhere and however you approach the garden you feel the impression you have strayed from Sussex into the Mediterranean. The sound of water, the terracing, topiary and the encircling pines and eucalyptus mirrored in the pool transport you to hillside gardens around Florence and Rome.

In 2010, inspired by Andrewjohn and Eleni Stephenson Clarke’s travels in Italy, the Upper Terrace was transformed. A colourful camellia-filled entranceway was added to create cool shade, along with geometric beds edged with sweet-smelling myrtle and Magnolia ‘Kay Paris’. From here you can enjoy a clear view over the water of the pool to the Parkland beyond.

In 2020, RHS award-winning garden designer Chris Beardshaw redesigned the planting in the Italian Garden with a greater emphasis on perennials. He mixed subtle background plants, such as stachys (Betonica officinalis ‘Hummelo’), perovskia (Salvia ‘Little Spire’), Salvia Mystic Spires Blue and pale-yellow Santolina pinnata subsp. neapolitana, with bolder Dietes grandiflora (a lily-like white South African flower with a purple-and-yellow centre), the long-flowering perennial wallflower Erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ and Agapanthus Silver Moon.

A signature plant of the Italian Garden has remained: the orangey- red Lilium lancifolium ‘Splendens’, a good contrast to the strong blues.