Hidcote: A Garden for All Seasons

Hidden away in a small corner of rural Gloucestershire

is a garden which has achieved celebrity status.

You can travel anywhere in the world as a gardener

and talk about the garden at Hidcote,

and suddenly people understand what you're talking about.

Hidcote is unique,

and so unconventional

that it influenced the development of English landscape design.

Well, it's like any great garden, it transports you to another world

and you realise that that is a touch of genius.

But the man who devoted his life

to creating this archetypal English country garden, Lawrence Johnston,

was in fact a lonely, eccentric American

with a secretive and tormented personal life.

I would have thought there was a falling out,

as to how vocal and how violent, we shall never know.

In this film,

we unravel Hidcote's extraordinary creation, over a century ago,

from a muddy field on a draughty hilltop

to a stunningly lavish garden

which, after a recent restoration, has become recognised

as one of the greatest and most inspiring of all time.

Hidcote is the jewel in the National Trust crown.

This was the first property the Trust acquired in 1948

specifically for the garden alone,

because of its great horticultural importance.

The garden lies just outside the town of Chipping Campden

in the Cotswolds.

Despite its secluded location,

it attracts people from all over the world

who come to see the unique design

and constant displays of colour

all through the year.

Hidcote is a great source of inspiration to many visitors.

Sir Roy Strong, the eminent historian,

came here in 1974,

just as he was about to design and build

his own garden in Herefordshire.

Sir Roy's winter visit made a huge impression.

It was a complete revelation to me.

Bright blue sky,

sun falling onto the frost,

and that wonderful, winter, magical sort of day.

And of course, there weren't any flowers here.

But what it taught me immediately

was the fundamental thing about making a garden.

A good garden depends on how you orchestrate the terrain.

Everywhere I turned here, I'd gasp with excitement

about the variation in the size and the shape of the rooms,

the sense of vista and surprise.

Taking somebody up and then you're looking at the Cotswolds landscape beyond,

and the thrill of it.

And turning a corner - and topiary, I fell in love with.

All these things orchestrated,

suddenly, you were in a completely magic land.

Garden designer Chris Beardshaw

was completely captivated when he first visited Hidcote

when he was just eight years old.

I came here with my parents,

who had just got a National Trust membership.

So I was dragged along, I wouldn't say kicking and screaming,

but I was certainly dragged along.

And it was one of those moments

where my experience of horticulture prior to that

suddenly started to make sense.

And that, for me, was confirmation

that I didn't want to do anything else in life.

I wanted to garden, to be around gardeners

and I wanted to work with plants.

What makes Hidcote very different from other gardens

is its unconventional layout.

The entire garden can never be seen in one view.

Instead, you're taken on a journey

through corridors of hedge

that pass through a number of discreet cottage garden rooms.

Hidcote's head gardener, Glyn Jones,

thinks its unique design and size

is at the heart of the garden's success.

I think people relate to Hidcote because,

although it is a garden ten and half acres in size

with at least 28 separate garden areas,

you can break it down into pieces,

and people can relate to a section of the garden,

whereas they might not relate to the whole thing

because it's beyond anybody's wildest dreams.

But you can relate to a small section of it

and you can take that away with you when you when you visit Hidcote

and be inspired to go and create something at home.

As well as a variety in the shapes and sizes of the rooms,

the formal architecture is softened

with plants that flower at different times,

providing colour throughout the seasons.

In terms of garden-making,

it's not that vast,

and that is why it retains this absolutely hypnotic appeal.

People can actually still relate to it,

whereas if you go to one of the really great stately home gardens,

it's beyond comprehension.

It's seen as the archetypal English garden.

It's the English garden - as far as the rest of the world are concerned.

It's much copied and mimicked.

The irony, of course, is that

it's not at all an English garden.

It's a garden laid out by an American

who was brought up in France,

and yet it sits at the heart

of the English establishment.

Hidcote's creator, Lawrence Johnston,

was born in 1871.

His parents were very wealthy Americans.

His twice-widowed mother Gertrude was a socialite

with a firm control over her son's ambitions.

Johnston was brought up in France,

but came to Cambridge to study history at Trinity College.

In 1900, he became a British citizen

and promptly joined the army to fight in the Boer War.

But seven years later,

Johnston's mother embarked on a plan

to turn her son into an eligible gentleman farmer.

The details of an estate in a small Gloucestershire village

caught her eye.

The 17th century property

came with nearly 300 acres of farmland,

a small walled garden

and a dozen or so cottages.

The purchase of Hidcote Manor

satisfied Gertrude's ambition

to launch her son into English society.

They bought themselves into being minor landed gentry.

I mean, let's face it,

they're not up to the level of the Astors,

so they're rather down the line.

But it gave them status still.

Land, farm, village -

everything came with it.

But contrary to his mother's wishes and much to her frustration,

Johnston embarked on a plan to use the fields around the manor house

for something far more ambitious -

to build a garden.

When Johnston first encountered this space,

he must have wondered what on earth he was going to do with it

and there's no doubt that Mrs Winthrop wanted him to be a gentleman farmer.

She certainly didn't have notions of him being a gardener, or laying out a grand garden.

Johnston's plan was foolhardy.

With no previous gardening experience,

he hadn't considered Hidcote's harsh location.

It was an absolutely ridiculous position to build a garden.

We're at 600 feet in the North Cotswolds,

we're in the rain shadow of the Cotswold scarp.

We're very, very exposed,

the wind howls across the Vale Of Evesham in the winter,

and it can blow you sideways if you're not careful.

So who in his right mind would build a garden here?

That was the least of his worries.

He still had to come up with a design.

But at the time he sought inspiration,

the gardening world was split by a public debate

dubbed, "The Battle Of The Styles."

Two opposing camps came to blows

in a bid to define a new national style for garden design.

One camp argued for formal gardens

with heavy, structured architecture.

While on the other hand,

a case was made for a more unregimented, wild,

naturalistic garden,

dominated by random planting.

Johnston had the unique idea of fusing both styles,

and he set about creating what became described as

a wild garden in a formal setting.

But establishing exactly how Johnston set about

turning his ideas into reality,

has proved difficult.

The documentary records on this garden

are very, very few.

I mean, we don't know surviving plant lists

and we have no year by year account of the garden growing at all.

So in that sense, it's a complete mystery.

So when the National Trust took on Hidcote over 60 years ago,

maintaining the garden in its original form

was challenging and costly.

The garden was simplified

and lost much of Johnston's unique vision and spirit.

Today, after a £3.5 million ten-year restoration,

Hidcote has almost been restored to its former glory,

as Johnston originally intended.

But to complete the project,

more work is being done

to uncover further evidence of the garden's early development.

It's become my personal mission at Hidcote

to discover as much as we possibly can

about what this garden was like in its heyday

in order for us to interpret it for our many visitors.

Because, you know, this is a Grade I listed garden.

It's absolutely unique for plants that are hardly in the British Isles.

This has inspired so many people over the last 70, 80 years,

and it's important we continue to do that.

Part of Glyn's detective work is tracking down the last few surviving people

who remember Johnston, like his godson.

My parents used to go and stay

with Jonny Johnston every summer for a fortnight.

There he is with my mother, having a picnic.

Oh, wow. We've never seen this before.

In order to interpret the garden, I believe very strongly that

you've almost got to put yourself in Johnston's boots

and get out there and grow the range of plants, have the same planting policies as he had.

With the limited evidence available, Glyn is slowly turning the clock back

by reinstating the types of plants that Johnston first used.

This is one of my favourites. I'll pluck it.

This is... It's a dianthus Mrs Sinkins.

It's a beautiful old-fashioned pink,

but the perfume is of cloves.

It's got a very kind of spicy perfume to it, but I just love that.

To me, that says 1920s, 1930s, what a dianthus would have looked like in that period.

When Johnston started creating the garden, there was little to suggest

that one day it would be so iconic.

When the property was purchased in 1907, there was no garden as such here.

There was a small garden within the confines of those

beautiful stone and brick walls which we now call the old garden.

It may be in the early days he was cautious.

You know, he was new to horticulture.

He was moving slowly, cautiously, building on his skills and his knowledge.

He started very hesitantly with little things around the house.

And then at some stage, and I can only speak from my own experience,

suddenly you become hooked.

I can remember when we bought The Laskett,

I said to my wife, "Don't talk to me about that garden".

Well, there really wasn't one.

But within a fortnight, I'd put wellington boots on and had become positively obsessed by it,

and have been ever since, and I think something similar happened to him.

Johnston became addicted.

It was the start of an obsession which his mother would need

deep pockets to fund, and would eventually drive them apart.

And although he went on to create a visionary garden which broke rules

and established a new style, he started more conventionally.

This is one of the first parts of Hidcote as Johnston had laid it out.

It's where Johnston was really testing himself against the climate.

Of course, we're in the confines of the old walled gardens,

so it's quite a sedate area to start gardening in.

In a way, the muted colours and the control, the topiary,

all of those are Johnston starting to form his opinion of how Hidcote may eventually be.

He wanted that old English look, so he brought topiary, and you could buy topiary then.

I mean, the early photographs show

yew pyramids with little birdies sitting on the top and all that sort of thing.

Well, if you had a chequebook like he did,

it's instant.

But Johnston wasn't content to stop here.

He was on a roll, and set about expanding the garden and spending more of his mother's money.

He pushed out beyond the confines of the old walls, creating two more low-lying terraces.

One, with formal boxed edged beds overflowing with dwarf fuchsias is still the same 100 years on.

Then, down a few more steps, he created a pool, which in later years

he redesigned so it could be used for bathing.

In just a few years, Johnston's abilities as a garden designer were evident.

Johnston's art of being able to lead someone into a space,

tease you with a view and then tempt you in tangential directions,

and you end up dithering,

"do I go this way or to my original, or this way or back where I came from?"

That's all part of the garden.

It's that sense of drama, that sense of adventure.

The success of Hidcote depends on a brilliant mastery of the terrain.

The manipulation of the terrain is, I think, second to none.

That is why it retains this absolutely hypnotic appeal.

I can't think of anybody who

responded to the terrain in such an absolutely brilliant way

in getting the architecture right almost from the beginning.

One of the most amazing things as well is that in September,

there is a period of about one week where the sun sets

absolutely centre in the middle of Heaven's Gate.

It's moments like that that you just realise what

a genius Lawrence Johnston was,

because those things aren't accidents, that's the work of a genius.

Hidcote's position might have afforded great views,

but the garden was on a hill and very exposed to all weathers.

Johnston protected his plants by cleverly planting hedges for shelter, over 4.5 miles of them.

It was enough in the early days for the gardeners to keep on top of the cutting.

But even today, it takes the entire team over six months.

Johnston's confidence in the garden was evident.

His hedges provided both shelter and structure.

But his special skill was the way he softened the formality with a natural style of informal planting.

But Johnston's mother, Gertrude, was losing patience with her son's obsession.

The garden was costing her a fortune.

There would be those who would have looked around at the time

and said, "Why on earth are you wasting your money?"

Mrs Winthrop, of course, felt that he was wasting his money and that

he was squandering the wealth that she and her husbands had generated.

She was very anti this notion, this rather sort of superfluous appendage to the house.

Well, there are two enigmatic people, aren't there?

Mother and son, the mother, clearly, by the photograph, extremely dominant.

Probably there must have been an enormous amount of tension there,

and also a kind of desire to make a statement apart from her.

It may well be that the garden is an expression to get out of the house

and leave her stuck in the house when she was old and tottery,

and he can get out with the gardeners, away from this crone.

I would have thought there was a falling out.

As to how vocal and how violent and...you know, how disagreeable

that falling out was, we shall never know.

Gertrude decided to stop her son's spending and put Hidcote up for sale.

It looked likely that Johnston's creation so far was all in vain.

But in the end, it wasn't Johnston's mother who put a halt to his gardening obsession,

but something far more sinister.

The First World War had broken out, and Johnston had to abandon his garden.

In 1914, he sailed for Belgium with his regiment.

Within weeks, he was fighting for his life at Ypres.

The First World War had a cataclysmic effect, because not only were the people

really not in a good state when the war broke out,

but also the great houses were taken over as hospitals.

There were conscriptions.

You suddenly found all the male servants went.

The women would be left, but even they went into the factories.

So it was a complete dissolution of the society.

Also, the gardens were dug up.

Vegetables were needed.

The population had to be fed. It was the end of something.

It was the absolute end of aristocratic life as it had been known for 200 years.

But in October 1914, Major Johnston was amongst

the 1.5 million casualties in the first battle of Ypres.

He'd been shot up in France,

left for dead on the battlefield.

He was collected by the porters and left on a pile for burial in a mass grave.

But one of the officers that was in charge of the burial party

spotted a flicker of movement in Johnston,

so obviously he was rushed to the military hospital,

and he was kind of brought back from the dead.

Thankfully, not only did Johnston survive his horrendous injuries,

but his mother had a change of heart and decided not to sell Hidcote.

Johnston was sent home to convalesce at the King Edward VII hospital in London,

very close to the Royal Horticultural Society Lindley Library.

It presented him with the perfect opportunity

to turn his thoughts back to his unfinished garden at Hidcote.

Glyn has come to see the very books that Johnston was reading for inspiration in 1915.

The library holds one of the most extensive ranges

of rare horticultural books in the world, some dating back hundreds of years.

Oh, that's the date there.

Proof of Johnston's research is plainly evident in the library's loan register.

On this page here is a signature that I'm very familiar with, L Johnston.

This is, you know, absolute evidence

of the books he was reading and the books he was being inspired by

almost 100 years ago, when he was at that critical time of laying out the garden at Hidcote.

These were partly his inspiration, so fantastic to be here,

probably in the same building, reading the same books as he was.

From the long list of books that Johnston was reading in his sickbed,

there is one that's caught Glyn's eye.

Thomas Mawson's The Art & Craft Of Garden Making was published in 1900.

I think Mawson, Thomas Mawson, is the biggest influence on Johnston and on Hidcote.

There's one passage here that I think encapsulates Hidcote

quite well, actually.

It says, "the arrangements should suggest a series of apartments

"rather than a panorama which can be grasped in one view".

And that's really interesting because Hidcote is a journey.

You can't see it from one spot anywhere in the garden. You've got to get into the garden.

You've got to travel through it in order to get a feeling for it,

to understand it and just to enjoy it.

I think that passage really does encapsulate what Hidcote is all about.

Johnston's skill was to take these themes,

distil the best elements down

and then shrink them to a manageable scale within his garden.

This isn't a garden which copies other gardens.

There are suggestions of others, but actually, this is really quite pure.

At the end of the First World War,

Johnston's elderly mother was in poor health, and chose to spend

her time in the south of France,

leaving her son free to return to his garden.

It was the start of a crucial period in Hidcote's development.

It's really only after he comes out of active service...

He's a retired army officer

with an abundant income, and he turns his attention

to garden making at Hidcote on a quite substantial scale.

Up till now, Johnston had relied on a local source of unskilled labour.

But given his ambitions for the garden,

he now needed professional help to turn his plans into reality.

In the 1920s, I think the main shift in this garden was that

Johnston was given the confidence to start to garden,

to start to design, to start to express himself.

And that confidence came, I think, largely from one individual.

Johnston employed Frank Adams as his first head gardener.

Adams had worked at Windsor Castle for King George V -

qualifications which no doubt impressed his new employer.

At that point, there seems to be a huge gear shift in the way that the garden developed.

It's much more ambitious.

It's a much more integral design.

There's more integrity to the whole structure,

a cohesion between the spaces.

So perhaps those abstract, somewhat whimsical theatrical thoughts

that Johnston was well known for were made real.

The horticulture was dragged into them by Adams.

Johnston was probably the inspiration, the man that

came up with the big ideas for the structure and the design.

But I think Adams was the horticulturist, was the gardener.

He was refining the garden.

He was making the garden from being a great garden to being an outstanding garden.

Adams had the practical knowledge to help Johnston realise

his flashes of inspiration.

This area of the garden is the great exploration

of horticulture that Lawrence Johnston was trying to get at.

This is about one man's love with his horticulture

and with his plant material.

So Adams, I think, injects the notion of cohesion,

of fine horticulture, and of romance and theatre.

Their working relationship was horticultural symmetry.

By the mid-'20s, Johnston's domineering mother was nearly 80,

spending all her time on the French Riviera, where she eventually died.

Her death was expected, but Johnston was shocked

to discover that in her will, he was cut from inheriting any of

her immense capital, only to receive an allowance...

which nevertheless left him a very wealthy man.

There must have been a big divide there at some...at some point.

Something which reflects that divide is the fact that she ring-fenced...

ring-fenced the Johnston capital, so that he could not get his hands on it.

Johnston on the surface appeared to have everything -

a hefty income, status and an exceptional garden,

which by the early '30s had gained recognition

and was open to the public two or three days a year.

But Johnston didn't enjoy the attention.

He was a solitary character.

One of the reasons this garden exists as it does today,

one of the reasons that it is such an extraordinary piece of work,

is because Johnston was so dysfunctional as an individual,

in terms of his relationships, in terms of bonding with individuals -

his dogs were the closest thing he came to.

And I think that really does explain an aspect

of his character - he was happier with animals,

and they must have given him the love and affection

which he probably didn't get from his mother, who looked like

an old battleaxe, er, and didn't really get from anybody else.

I think Johnston has been described as a closed book,

he only associated with people

that I think he felt were worthy of his company.

And I think when you walk around the garden, the design of the garden

reflects that as well, because it's a very inward-looking garden.

You can't see beyond the high hedges so you're forced to study the design

and to study the plants that grow within this kind of design landscape.

It's kind of not embracing the wider world beyond the confines of the garden.

The garden is all that's important in his life at that moment in time.

Despite his eligibility, Johnston was still single,

and this inevitably led to speculation.

I mean he may well have been completely asexual -

and really no interest either way.

Who knows whether he sort of popped down to the dockside and picked up a sailor? I don't know!

I mean, in that period, to be gay,

in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde incident...

I mean, people might have known, but it would never be referred to,

and it would certainly be regarded as beyond the pale within the establishment classes.

Johnston was however close to one female companion, Norah Lyndsay,

a well-respected garden designer

who enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at her Oxfordshire manor house.

Norah and Johnston shared a love of all things horticultural.

She offered advice and support as Hidcote was developing.

But their friendship led to gossip that Norah's daughter Nancy

was in fact Johnston's love child...

..a rumour strenuously denied.

If he had been able to forge strong relationships, and had had family,

and had had an extended social network,

perhaps his attention wouldn't have been quite as focused on the garden.

We wouldn't have got the delivery of the product that we have today.

Johnston's multi-faceted personality has revealed a multi-faceted garden,

which had broad appeal. It's a perfect piece of work.

The garden was the marriage and the family he never had.

It was a kind of substitute. And I see nothing wrong with that.

Johnston was very selective in his friendships, mainly preferring the company of other well-connected

gardening enthusiasts, like Mark Fenwick, who'd created

his own highly-regarded garden - Abbotswood, near Stow-on-the-Wold.

Fenwick used his influence among his high society chums

to get Johnston elected a member of an elite gardening club.

Well, the Gardening Society was founded in 1920.

It's a male society, the only female that's ever been allowed

to be elected to the Gardening Society is the Queen Mother.

So I think that gives the flavour of it, it's a group of people who are basically

I suppose the equivalent of landed gentry,

they have estates and means to maintain quite substantial gardens.

It would have given him the sort of status that he desired.

He would be accepted in the gardening equivalent of being

elected to Boodles or Whites or one of the smarter,

upmarket, London men's clubs.

This cosy club of titled, wealthy gardeners

gave Johnston an opportunity to flex his horticultural muscles.

He wanted the best possible plants for his garden

and he was prepared to travel

all the way round the world to collect these

or to send people to collect them on his behalf.

But what was important, I'm sure, to him, was that

he had better plants than Fenwick down at Abbotswood and...

It's kind of keeping up with the Joneses, I think.

Johnston became obsessed with acquiring newly-discovered

and rare plants - and at a time when plant hunting was at its peak.

It was a period I suppose where we were able to harvest the best from the imperial, the Empire,

that we are dragging ideas in,

we're bringing plants in, we're very eclectic in our thoughts.

And it's difficult to imagine Johnston creating Hidcote in any other time

than in the 1920s, because it was such a vibrant period.

Johnston's wealth enabled him to sponsor and travel on a number of

plant-hunting expeditions all over the world.

On one trip to South Africa,

he even took his cook and butler.

Johnson's plant-hunting trips, er, they fall into two categories,

I suppose - those which genuinely contributed something,

and those which were a little bit of a horticultural jolly, one suspects.

Certainly from a plant-hunter's perspective,

he wasn't hugely respected or even wanted on those expeditions.

But these trips gave Johnston a mass of new, exotic varieties,

which he planted back at Hidcote in areas like the rock garden.

This one area of the garden is coming to the end of a major restoration.

This was a special rock garden, it was, you know,

the creme de la creme of private rock gardens in the British Isles.

Glyn and his deputy, Vicky, want to find out exactly what

varieties Johnston planted here when the rock garden was first created.

But most of the records have been lost or destroyed

and there are only a few photographs,

so they have to play plant detectives.

There's just little titbits to go on, so it just makes you, in a way, more curious to find out more,

and go rummaging, to find more information.

The one place that might have some clues is the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.

Here, they have records dating back hundreds of years

which document the plant-hunting trips Johnston took part in -

like an ill-fated expedition to Yunnan province in China,

where Johnston joined the highly respected botanist George Forrest -

the Indiana Jones of the plant world.

The journey they undertook was just immense -

just getting there would have taken weeks, if not months.

Forrest led the expedition, which by all accounts was

fraught with danger, often disguising himself as a local.

He didn't even have waterproof clothing,

and it does rain a lot when you're up in the mountains, and there would've been no vaccines.

I just wonder how often was he ill or was he just so hardy

that he was exposed to everything and he didn't become ill?

George Forrest bitterly regretted allowing Johnston to join the Chinese expedition.

The Botanic Garden's archivist, Graham Hardy, has found Forrest's

original letters of complaint sent back to a colleague at Edinburgh.

On the base of the first page, this is what he writes,

"Had I raked GB..." - that's Great Britain,

"with a small-toothed comb,

"I couldn't have found a worse companion than Johnston.

"And I cannot say how often during the past three months I have

"cursed myself for being so foolish in consenting to him accompanying me.

"I have indeed paid for my folly.

"A person more utterly selfish I have yet to meet,

"and I'm not the only one here who thinks so,

"for none like him."

Johnston was used to travelling in style and comfort,

and it was this that had no doubt triggered Forrest's outbursts.

In spite of the bickering, they amassed a collection of new plants and seeds,

all of which were recorded and compiled in the Edinburgh archives.

So any other information on these trips, expeditions,

if there's anything known, would be really quite interesting.

These records list in detail every type of seed and plant

collected on Johnston's expedition and where they were distributed.

Aquilegia Alpina - you've got that on the rock garden now, we've got that one.

We were aware that Edinburgh were sending out seeds and

plants and cuttings, but you don't realise actually

how many seeds and cuttings until you look through the records, and to how many people.

And it was all over the world, and it was botanic gardens,

and it was private people that had a lot of money.

Glyn and Vicky hope these books will hold the key to revealing which plants Johnston was collecting

so they can reinstate the same varieties in the rock garden back at Hidcote.

Ah!

Interesting!

We've come across one entry, here, 1949, which we don't seem to have

documented in our kind of survey documents.

So these are all plants... This is quite exciting really, cos none of

these plants we've ever known to have been grown at Hidcote in the past.

So, again, it's a new shopping list for us to start trawling through

and to see if any of these plants will fit in the garden today

with some of the projects that we're doing.

So any of those numbers there that refer to potentially sub-alpine or

alpine material, with the east bank of the rock garden,

there's plants there that we can trial and grow on that area

to see how they survive.

Can we stop here all weekend, just cross-referencing these numbers?!

Johnston might not have been a popular travelling companion,

but his involvement did have benefits.

But there's no doubt that the purse he was able to provide

facilitated the introduction of huge numbers of very, very garden-worthy plants -

plants which we still enjoy at the heart of our gardens today.

Johnston had collected a wealth of new plant material, which he packed into the garden.

Today, Hidcote is home to over 4,000 species, and Glyn has to

make sure all the garden team's plant knowledge is up to scratch...

Big dahlia as well in the background there, that's one of my favourites.

..including the apprentice known by the team as Scouse John.

Right, Jonny, we've got a plant that's incredibly important to our collection at Hidcote -

this yellow-flowered one here.

Now I would hope you know this one!

-Hypericum Hidcote!

-Absolutely, well done!

It is, that's so important to Hidcote because it's one of the plants that

Johnston selected as of being of great garden merit.

And almost every garden in the country now

has probably got a Hypericum Hidcote.

-Anything you know about this one?

-Is this an astilbe?

No, it's not, it's from New Zealand, it's a southern hemisphere plant.

Erm, this one, it's a Hebe, and it's one that is called Hebe Hidcote.

So it's a lovely one with lots of different colours on it.

When the flowers first emerge, it's a lovely kind of lilacy-blue,

but they fade all the way through to white, you see.

So it goes all the way through that transition, and it's a bombproof plant, you can do anything with it,

you can prune it almost off to your ankles, and it will always come back again, you can grow it high,

it's evergreen, lovely kind of, you know, lush foliage on it,

and it probably starts flowering in May and it goes right through

until the middle of winter - a great value plant again.

It's just absolutely awe-inspiring every day, you're constantly rewarded, you know - the plants,

the hard landscaping like the hedges and the gazebos

and all the different bits,

it's just, it's just so inspiring and so beautiful.

Now lacecaps, hydrangeas, produce male and female flowers.

When the female flowers are young, they're upright like that, kind of

like saucers, waiting to collect the pollen, to be pollinated.

And then once the female flower has been pollinated,

do you know what she does to the male?

For a wild guess I'll say she turns her back on him!

She does! Yes, absolutely, look!

You can see, she's, once she's pollinated,

she turns upside down, so you see this one here,

not yet been pollinated, so she's upright, expecting pollen.

But these older flowers here that were born a few weeks earlier,

she's turned her back on the male.

But I love stories like that, it's kind of...sexual encounters of the floral kind!

At this stage of me knowledge of gardens,

this is best garden I've ever been to or know about.

Erm, so to be training here, it's just fantastic.

Some less hardy varieties that Johnston collected needed protection from the Gloucestershire frosts,

so he specially built a plant house.

After the Second World War, it became dilapidated and was eventually demolished.

But using rare photographs taken back in the '30s as reference, the plant house has now been

faithfully rebuilt to exactly how it was in Johnston's day.

Ha-ha! Come on, you've got to do your best now, Jas!

I think he'd be proud that we've actually put the original building back,

and we've respected the history and the design of the original building.

Today the plant house is being opened by gardening celebrity Roy Lancaster.

This is for Hidcote, and Lawrence Johnston!

CHEERING Excellent!

Never have I seen anything quite like this,

outside of a botanic garden.

Er, this wonderful structure here is absolutely superb.

I can well believe that if Johnston was to walk in

at the back of this group tonight, and look from a distance, he'd be happy to see some of

the plants that he originally put in here, still growing on the wall.

Johnston's problem was there simply wasn't the space or

the right climate for some of his subtropical collections.

But he had the perfect solution.

Every autumn, Johnston would leave Hidcote in his chauffeured Bentley

and drive down to the sun-kissed French Riviera at Menton,

spending the winter months in his secluded villa, Serre de La Madone.

Johnston bought the property in the 1920s and built the garden from scratch over a 25-year period.

The favourable climate was perfect for a whole range of exotic plants

he'd collected on his trips that would never have survived the colder English weather.

Glyn has come over to France as he thinks it holds the key

to finding out more about Johnston's illusive character.

This place is so important to round the circle, in the life of Lawrence Johnston.

There are even surviving specimens in the garden dating back 80 years.

It's a Banksia, this wonderful, southern hemisphere shrub, tree,

which has these magnificent kind of soft lemon-yellow flowers,

which once they're faded, you get almost like pine cones, fruiting bodies,

which when a forest fire comes through, they get baked

and the seed is disseminated onto clean virgin ground

from which they germinate and new ones are born.

I think this plant kind of typifies just why it was important

that Major Johnston got a garden down here in the south of France,

because it was a canvas on which he could grow

all these magnificent and very unusual tender plants outdoors

without any heat. It really is a plantsman's playground,

one of which you can spoil yourself totally in.

Johnston employed 23 staff at the villa, including 11 gardeners.

Martin Smith, president of the Menton Garden Society,

is taking Glyn to meet the last member of Johnston's staff still alive.

Freda Bottin looked after Johnston in his later life.

He's very ill and very old.

Her father, Alfredo, was Johnston's butler for 25 years.

In your father's role working in the villa here, what sort of tasks do you think he enjoyed doing the most?

Er, I don't know, he enjoyed to work for Monsieur Johnston.

Monsieur Johnston was...

He have a great admiration for him.

Freda got to know Johnston probably better than anyone else.

Il etait shy. He was very timid.

You mentioned Major Johnston having lots of parties here - I mean, did he enjoy the parties and...?

No!

-He didn't?

-No!

By the 1950s, Johnston was showing signs of dementia and Freda helped with his full-time care.

He was bedridden for three years?

On a drip feed for a long, long time.

Voila Monsieur Johnston.

And all his staff in constant attendance.

In the spring of 1958, after a long illness, Johnston died, aged 86.

His funeral was held in France and later his body was brought back to England.

I closed his eyes.

I do feel like we know a lot more about his character now

than we did just a few hours ago.

I mean the garden and the plants I now believe were the whole purpose to his life.

You know, I guess the plants were his friends, and he can communicate

better with the plants than he used to do with human beings.

After Johnston died, the National Trust's challenge was to retain

his vision and maintain the huge numbers of plants in the garden.

-How long have you been here?

-Er, just over a year.

Some are very rare and Johnston is credited for personally introducing

them into the UK - and must be preserved.

It's one of the plants that Johnston would have brought back

from those plant-hunting expeditions. Have you taken cuttings from it before?

-No, Chris, I haven't.

-Well, what you're looking for

is a non-flowering shoot - that's a good specimen there.

Just take out the right-hand stem if you can.

That's it, perfect. So let's take it back to the bench

and we'll chop it up a little bit more!

This is a plant that Lawrence would have handled himself.

Johnston would have probably, if not planted it, he'd have positioned it,

and would've had a say in where it went in the garden,

but of course even better than that, he'd have had a say in how it came to these shores in the first place.

So it's hugely important.

On one hand, from a purely horticultural perspective, it's just a mahonia cutting,

but on the other hand, it's a piece of gardening history.

This is our gardening heritage, and what we're doing is

propagating it to make sure that that heritage goes forward

and is still there for, you know,

my children or your children to be able to experience.

But you've got such a wonderful opportunity, working here.

You can go anywhere in the world

after your careership here, and talk to people about Hidcote,

and doors will open, because you've trained at the best English garden.

So I'm very envious, actually. You've got my perfect job.

Once Scouse John's apprenticeship ends, his dream is to get

a full-time job with the rest of the gardening team at Hidcote.

He's fitting in well, but the team has spotted an uncanny resemblance.

You look at him, and physically,

he's the same height, he's the same kind of build.

Er, Johnston wore a moustache.

Dare one say slightly receding - John won't thank me for saying that!

But, he was and there is a real, real resemblance between John and

Johnston, and the garden team make a bit of a joke out of it actually, we call him Young Johnnie, so...!

Young Johnnie not only looks like Johnston, but it turns out he's an Edwardian junkie.

I'm interested in the whole era, really.

You know, the music, the gardens.

It's quite bizarre that I've ended up working

at a garden which was created in that time.

And its creator, Lawrence Johnston, was one of the big

garden creators of that era.

Most of the staff, you know, find it really bizarre.

You know, it's like Lawrence is coming back through the medium of a young Scouser!

Lawrence Johnston was buried alongside his mother

in a village not far from Hidcote.

His modest epitaph is simple -

Gifted gardener and horticulturist.

Much loved by all his friends.

He may not have had the good fortune

to have the sort of relationship which one would expect a man

to have - fulfilled emotional and spiritual relationship with another human being.

But I think that he would look down from above

and get huge gratification

about the fact that he had given it to everyone,

through his garden, through the miracle of creating this garden.

It's a lovely legacy, it's beautiful! It's a beautiful thing.

I think it would surprise him, and he'd be rather shy about it, embarrassed.

If Johnston was able to follow a coach party through Hidcote Manor...

..I think he'd be horrified.

I think he'd be horrified not at the quality of the garden.

He'd be horrified at the number of people who are visiting.

This wasn't ever intended as a garden to take large visitor numbers.

This was a garden laid out for one man.

BIRDSONG

We're closer today to understanding Hidcote Manor than we've ever been.

And the restoration has to continue in order for us to get the true picture of Johnston and his garden.

And I think that hunger for knowledge and an understanding of who he was, and where he came from,

what inspired him, will just keep us driving to learn as much as we can.

We're not naive about it, we'll never know everything.

Because of Hidcote, because of, er, this man's creation, erm,

you know, I've found a new life,

I'm destined to spend the rest of me days as a gardener.

Erm, I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing now

than working at Hidcote.

Erm, you know, it's absolutely incredible what this man's creation

has done to my life.

Johnston's garden is now over 100 years old

and although other gardens during that time

have contributed to the development of new styles

in garden design, it's Hidcote that's regarded as the model

of inspiration all over the world.

And though we don't fully understand the man that created it,

Hidcote is held up as one of the greatest garden icons of the 20th century.

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