Nymans British Gardens in Time

Four iconic English gardens.

Each is the product of one moment in history

and each one gives us a fascinating window into the century

in which they were made and the people who created them.

Much more than just a history of gardening,

these are extraordinary tales of escape, social ambition,

heartbreak,

downfall and disaster.

In unravelling these remarkable stories,

we reach back over the centuries to see these four great gardens

through fresh eyes and gain a greater understanding

of their real significance.

Nymans is situated on top of a hill

overlooking the picturesque Sussex Weald.

The garden is the creation of three generations

of one highly creative family.

With its roots in the 19th century,

Nymans went on to become one of the most fashionable

and romantic gardens of the Edwardian and interwar years.

One of the critical transformations that takes place

in the life of this garden is the change from high Victoriana

into Edwardian style gardens.

By the time the Edwardian era came along,

it was about compartmentalisation, creating spaces that were usable.

They were human, they were spaces in which to entertain,

they were spaces in which to socialise.

The garden's creation is an extraordinary story

shaped by the most turbulent half century in recent history.

What fascinates me here is that this garden was created

by a German family of Jewish descent,

who not only managed to rise to the top of society in England

but they also created one of the most quintessential English gardens.

Nymans garden is spread over a large rural area

bordered with fields and woodland.

As well as having grand open parkland with spectacular views,

there are smaller, more intimate spaces.

The gardens are both informal and formal.

And are filled with exuberant plants.

You don't see the trees that we're seeing today at Nymans

in parks and towns and cities.

This is quite a unique collection of trees.

But at its heart is an extraordinary mysterious Gothic ruin,

which overlooks the garden, a poignant reminder

of a disastrous event to hit the family who lived here.

It endured despite the fact that almost every conceivable disaster

and challenge was thrown at it.

Today, the garden is run by the National Trust

and is one of the most visited in the country.

It embodies all that we've come to expect of the archetypal English garden

yet it was created by a so-called foreigner, Ludwig Messel.

Ludwig's family were successful bankers

who originated from a small town called Messel in Germany.

Ludwig Messel, together with his brother, came to London in the 1860s

in search of further opportunity,

reputedly with gold coins sewn into their shirts.

Ludwig was ambitious and had a keen financial mind.

He founded a successful stockbroking business

and was part of a new emerging class of wealthy financiers.

In 1871 he married Annie Cussans and they had six children

who ranged in 17 years from eldest, Lennie, to youngest, Muriel.

Ludwig set out to find a house in the country

to bring up his large family.

New railways meant the Sussex Weald and neighbouring counties

became the perfect getaway, soon to be known as the stockbroker belt.

Land was cheap and plentiful and Ludwig quickly purchased Nymans.

The Georgian house came with 600 acres including woodland,

fields, farm cottages and a small four-acre garden.

Ludwig saw it as the perfect home for his family,

but it also fulfilled his desire to be accepted by society.

Historian Andrea Wulf is going to unravel the Messels' life story

and what prompted them to start a new life in rural Sussex.

The moment the English countryside or the kind of traditional

rural life was under threat in the late 19th century,

that's the moment when the nostalgia for country life begins.

That's the moment when city dwellers like bankers, merchants,

stockbrokers, when they come and want to have one of those houses

in the countryside.

So the country house becomes a symbol of ancestry,

of this golden age that is vanishing suddenly.

Garden designer Chris Beardshaw is exploring why the Messels' new home

presented great opportunities for creating a garden from scratch.

The appeal to Ludwig for coming to this space

must, in part, have been its proximity to London

but also its relative remoteness.

The idea that when we sit in this landscape,

we don't see any towns or villages, so you do feel as though you are

pioneering in that way.

And in fact he was pioneering with his design ideas,

with his horticultural ideas and his horticultural passion,

so it fits perfectly that he ended up here.

Ludwig Messel enlarged and altered the existing Georgian house.

But the real focus of his attention was the garden.

Even at this early stage, he demonstrated that he had

hidden horticultural talents.

Ludwig was undoubtedly a horticultural entrepreneur.

He was one of those individuals who wanted to create

something slightly different.

He was very much on trend, following fashions, leading fashions,

and the greatest example possibly in this garden,

the first example is the heath garden.

The idea that one would introduce heathers and ericaceous specimens

is something that hadn't occurred to anyone else,

at least not with that particular range of plants.

It was that pioneering spirit that meant only he was able to do it.

He had the knack of being able to spot something different,

deploy it in the garden and then give it space to breathe.

Nymans was planted with rare and expensive plants.

Ludwig's investment was considerable,

no more so than in his pinetum, which he stocked with newly discovered trees.

Alan Power is Head Gardener at Stourhead

and has an unquenchable passion for trees.

He's come to explore the collection at Nymans which, when planted in 1895,

was another fashionable item on Ludwig's tick list.

You've got to get up close to these things

to really appreciate the scale. Look at the size of that tree.

These trees weren't just fashionable,

Ludwig planned they would also act as vital protection

for his garden from the harsh prevailing winds.

You could create a shelter belt that would provide this,

almost a microclimate, all year round and it would protect your garden,

it would protect the slightly more tender plants.

But it didn't just perform that function,

it performed a really curious, beautiful aesthetic function

in the garden as well that gave you interest around every corner.

It wasn't a cheap thing to plant a pinetum.

You know, in modern terms on a young tree you could be spending £300-£400.

And, you know, when we look at the array of trees that are behind us

here at Nymans, that £300-£400 adds up pretty quickly.

He could have spent his money on anything.

He could have bought buildings, he could have built huge mansions all over the country.

He chose to spend the money on his passion.

These trees were his passion.

Ludwig's big ambitions also included being accepted by the local community,

but with a name like Messel, it wouldn't be easy.

When Ludwig Messel arrived here as a German of Jewish descent,

he must have felt like an outsider, really,

because at that time there was definitely still, you know,

quite a bit of anti-Semitism going on here in England.

For example, take the prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli.

Jewish descent but then he converts to Christianity.

Every time there was, kind of, a problem with his politics,

he was accused as being a Jew, a Shylock, a Fagan,

Chief Rabbi Benjamin.

So they were really abusing him

and they always pulled out the kind of Jewish roots.

So there are definitely discussions which are carried by anti-Semitism.

At first, Ludwig found it difficult integrating

with the local squirearchy, but he had one thing in his favour.

He discovered that many of them, especially his neighbours,

shared his love for horticulture.

This was Ludwig's way in.

It can't be an accident that a man who was so keen

to not only stamp his credentials horticulturally,

but to stamp his credentials from a social and cultural perspective,

ended up in a neighbourhood surrounded by people

who he must have admired.

This small corner of Sussex gave birth to a treasure trove of gardens

which were all famous in the 1900s

for a unique Sussex style of woodland gardening.

Borde Hill, which is just five miles from Nymans,

is a 200 acre estate, run by four generations of one family

and is famous for its rare trees.

Leonardslee, also within a few miles, was celebrated

for its range of prize winning Rhododendrons and unusual wildlife.

And High Beeches, which shared a boundary with Nymans,

was run by the Loder family.

The Loders were members of an elite gardening dynasty who supported

great plant hunting expeditions and packed their garden

with fashionable new specimens.

The gardens in this particular part of England

are hugely notorious, they are trendsetters.

There's a great deal of competition between these gardens

and to gain that extra notch up, to get a slightly improved cultivar,

and if you could name it after, perhaps, the gardener,

the landowner, the designer, the garden itself,

then so much the better.

Entering this elite gardening circle

satisfied both Ludwig's social and horticultural ambitions.

The friendly rivalry fuelled Nymans' evolution and Ludwig decided

to start cultivating his own plants, greatly helped by a key personality,

Nymans' first head gardener, James Coomber.

One of the key to successes really in creating a garden,

especially a garden from scratch, is that you have to ally yourself

with someone who really knows the business

and knows what to do, to cope with the conditions.

And so Ludwig allied himself with Coomber who was a man who understood

how to get plants to perform.

So what we see is a relationship where you have one person

full of ideas and ambition and drive, and the other is the facilitator.

And that is the great secret in a garden like this.

Ludwig was creating a garden for the long term

and it was to be shaped and moulded by successive generations of his family.

Today, Ludwig's great-grandson, Alistair Buchanan,

is still keenly involved with the garden's development.

His contribution has been creating a number of sculpted box hedges.

I created those and that is my legacy to the garden.

Alistair has a flat on the estate

and works alongside the National Trust as the family advisor.

I don't have to pay the wages,

and I don't give orders.

But I can suggest and propose

and I'd like to think that I was a point of continuity.

Therefore, I would hope to be consulted

when there are changes and so on. Sometimes I'm not and so on.

But I accept the level of responsibility

of keeping the family connected with the National Trust.

While Ludwig was absorbed with developing the garden,

his large family of six children had grown up.

His eldest son, Lennie, was pursuing a beautiful young socialite,

Maud Sambourne.

The Sambournes were highly artistic.

Maud's father, Linley Sambourne, was a Punch cartoonist

and mixed with a fashionable London set.

They lived at Stafford Terrace in Kensington,

which today is preserved as a museum.

Maud's family wealth didn't remotely match that of the Messels

but, nevertheless, Lennie was smitten.

Maud, on the other hand, was less sure of her feelings

and initially resisted Lennie during a nine-month courtship.

She spent many weekends down in the country at Nymans,

relaying her personal thoughts in letters back home.

These letters are really wonderful because they give us

a real insight into Maud and what she thinks.

So there's this funny observant teenager.

She's very cheeky, she's making fun of them being German,

and there's, again and again it kind of pops up in her letters.

And there's one which I find very funny because I'm German

and I always get teased for being very punctual,

where she says "We are dreadfully regular.

"Everyone comes down the minute the second bell rings.

"Breakfast at eight sharp, to the minute.

"Lunch at three, also sharp, to the minute."

You know, this is just a slightly stroppy teenager making fun

of what she sees, but also describes very well

what they're doing every day.

And what she describes is this very typical life

of the wealthy at that time,

which is one big round of garden parties, there's tennis,

there's croquet, photographed in sunshine and everybody's happy

and beautifully dressed.

And this is exactly what Maud is presenting in her letters here.

Eventually, Maud fell under Nymans' romantic spell

and agreed to marry Lennie.

She's said to have finally accepted his proposal to her in the garden.

Their marriage would combine Lennie's huge wealth

with Maud's creativity and a shared love for the garden.

So far, Ludwig's ambitions to establish his family

at the heart of English society was paying dividends.

I think that Ludwig did everything according to the rule book, really.

So he creates this image of England here at Nymans.

He sends children, his boys to Eton

and he hangs out with the right people.

So he is really moving up in English society and when you look around,

I think he was pretty successful with what he is trying to do.

But the birth of Maud's first child prompted her to express some observations

about the family she'd married into.

There's a letter where she's just had her first son, Linley,

and she's again writing a letter to her mother, who is in London.

"I feel quite annoyed at it being a boy," so her son being a boy.

"I only hope it will turn out a fair haired blue or grey eyed youth

"with a loyal feeling to his mother's side of the family.

"If he dares to have dark hair, well, I shall dye it golden."

She makes it very clear she wants her children to look like her,

not like her husband.

The family thrived on country living.

Lennie's youngest sister, Muriel, developed a keen interest

in one area of the garden which today is the centrepiece at Nymans,

the herbaceous border,

a key component in any serious English garden.

And for Ludwig, a fashionable must-have on his tick list.

This year, the garden team have completely re-worked them

and after months of detailed planning,

several thousand plants are carefully bedded out.

100 years ago, the borders were influenced by young Muriel.

She was horticulturally very gifted and her first ideas were shaped

with the help of a big name in the gardening world, William Robinson.

Muriel was said to be guided by the great William Robinson,

who, of course, is a most influential individual.

Somewhat curmudgeonly, very clear in his opinions

on how gardens should be presented.

He wanted to reintroduce nature, he wanted to really allow nature

to sweep right into the heart of the garden.

He wanted the informality of trees and woodland

and meadow to offer that curtain, that backdrop to the border,

and it's that marriage between informality and relative formality

which Robinson was so carefully crafting at that time.

Robinson was reacting against the highly formal planting schemes

of the mid-Victorian era which favoured flat groups

of densely planted perennials picked out like the patterns of a carpet.

His vision was of borders that could be spectacular masterpieces

in three dimensions.

These are the centrepiece of Nymans, really.

It's very theatrical.

You've got the fountain, the arch and it sort of adds theatre and drama

as you walk into this area.

Sadly, Muriel Messel didn't reach her 30th birthday.

She fell victim to the deadly influenza pandemic

which killed a quarter of a million people in Britain.

Her legacy, though, is now the crowning glory at Nymans.

It's lovely, because it all goes out in one go

and it's just a good effect at the end of the day.

You definitely have to wear your sunglasses when you come down this section of the garden,

because it's a bit like an '80s disco. We love it.

In the 1890s, one of the critical elements of a garden

on the tick list of ingredients

was undoubtedly the herbaceous border.

It's a very new concept, it's a new idea.

Putting plants together, weaving them, creating a tapestry,

using plants from around the Empire.

But it becomes the ultimate expression of control, manipulation

and artistry within the confines of horticulture.

And it is that impact, that high impact and drama that was demanded,

that was the role of the herbaceous border,

to draw you through the site, and it is like a theatrical performance.

In 1890, when Messel first came here and set out his plans

for a grand landscape and grand park and garden,

I don't think he would ever have contemplated that a few years hence

it would be open to the public and it would be treated as a public park.

I'm sure he would have appreciated how many people

come in through the gates and marvel at what he was able to achieve.

Ludwig created Nymans during a period that marked a change

in the way that people thought about their gardens.

The Messels made full use of Nymans as a focal point

for endless garden parties and social events.

It was something of a halcyon era but it wasn't to last.

Momentous social and political changes

would ruffle wealthy families like the Messels.

The most extraordinary thing, I think,

is Lloyd George's People's Budget.

He introduces that in 1909 and this is the very first time in Britain

that there's a serious attempt to redistribute wealth.

So this is a budget which includes taxing the rich,

there is insurance for unemployed people,

there is old age pensions.

The death duty again is increased.

So this is really why it's called the People's Budget.

This is taking away power and wealth from the nobility

and from the upper classes.

This is the end of how the world used to be

and it scared people like the Messels.

There is an amazing photograph here in this album,

which is titled The Budget.

And on this picture, this is clearly taken in Nymans, in the garden,

you see roses in the background, you see one of the family members

a woman all dressed up nicely,

is standing on a piece of paper which is clearly the budget,

trampling on it.

So they do not like what the Chancellor Lloyd George

is doing there with this budget because it's going to change their world.

This is... These are the last moments of this world.

However strong the family's reaction, they were not prepared

for a far bigger event that would have much more serious implications.

When war broke out in 1914,

Ludwig found his loyalties were torn in two.

He had relatives back in Germany and although he'd lived in England

for over 50 years, he still spoke with a German accent.

There is a moment in May 1915 when this anti-German sentiment

really comes to a height,

which is when the Germans, without warning, sink a passenger ship.

1,200 people die and there are riots all over the country.

So it must have been pretty awful for Ludwig

in his kind of English lovely bubble here at Nymans.

And it's so bad at that time that even the king, George V,

thinks that he has to become more English, and he cuts all ties

to his German relatives.

He changes the very German sounding name of the royal family,

Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, into the House of Windsor.

This is when it starts,

so even the king thinks that he is too German at that time.

Ludwig's son, Lennie, had studied at Oxford,

even enrolling in the British Army,

but it wasn't enough to prevent the family being viewed with suspicion.

I think it must have been an absolute terrible time for him

because he tried so much to be English

and suddenly it just percolated down to this one thing, he is German.

In 1915 Ludwig died, heartbroken.

During the war years, gardens up and down the country

withered with neglect, but Nymans was more fortunate.

Because of the family's German connections, Lennie was debarred

from serving overseas.

Instead he was based close by, training up young soldiers

so he was able to prevent the garden from suffering.

Lennie took Nymans over after his father's death.

But he was surprised when his wife, Maud, declared her distaste

for the house and wept bitterly at the thought of having to move in.

Lennie found a solution,

promising Maud she could completely remodel it.

The house we see today is very, very different to the house

that Ludwig Messel moved into and extended.

So if you look at the photograph, you can see a house

which his daughter-in-law later called a hideous German folly,

and I kind of agree with her a little bit.

So her condition for moving here was that she would be allowed

to completely re-build the building.

What Maud is doing here is, she is creating an atmosphere

of a family which has been here for centuries and centuries and centuries.

They are part of England

and they have been part of England for a very, very long time.

So she's not just moving back 100 years or a couple of hundred years,

she's moving back centuries and centuries.

For Maud, this successfully rooted her young family.

Nymans' rebirth was on a grand scale.

It had a great hall, a billiard room,

a library and numerous bedrooms.

The old German folly had been transformed but at huge cost.

Well, it was never going to be a practical house.

It needed a great many servants.

The heating problems, the servant problems,

it was totally impractical.

I would have said it was a colossal waste of family money.

When they start building it in 1923,

England is hit in post-war depression.

So you have, for example, the 9th Duke of Devonshire in Chatsworth,

once one of the wealthiest families in the country,

is deciding to blow up the great conservatory in Chatsworth

because he can't afford to heat it any more.

So you have the banker here, the kind of nouveau riche,

creating this folly

which gives them this link to England's past,

which tells the story of continuity and very firmly places them

into this golden age of when everything was still in order

and land was power.

To remodel the architecture so that it appeared

as if the architecture had perhaps been here longer than the garden,

and the garden had flowed and was inspired by the architecture itself,

I think was an absolute work of genius.

It's something that really makes this garden stand out from any other.

The bravery to say this isn't working but this piece is,

let's change this.

Maud hoped this costly refiguring would get the recognition

she felt it deserved.

She got her answer when Country Life wrote a glowing article about Nymans

after the alterations were completed.

The Messels have really arrived in England.

Their house is part of the English tradition.

There's a wonderful sentence here.

"So clever a reproduction it is of a building begun in the 14th century

"and added to intermittently till Tudor times,

"that some future antiquary may well be deceived by it."

So I think Maud would have been very proud opening this,

seeing on the first page that she did such a good job,

that someone in the future might be deceived by it.

Everything perfect, just as she wanted it.

The alterations meant the romantic house and garden

now complemented each other perfectly.

Lennie and Maud's influence in the garden pushed it

to the top of fashionable gardens to visit

and escalated Nymans' reputation.

The pinetum had some rare species that were credited as the tallest in the country

and Nymans won the coveted Cory Cup for a new hybrid -

eucryphia nymansensis.

There's a great deal of celebration attached to the gardens

and the plants associated with the Messels,

and of course, many are hugely valuable

in the horticultural world today and persist in our gardens.

Lennie inherited his father's desire to be rooted in English society.

He successfully cultivated numerous plants which still thrive today.

The Messel name became synonymous with good horticulture,

winning prestigious prizes at the Royal Horticultural Society.

To be accepted by any royal society is a great mark of one's achievement

climbing socially.

And to be accepted by the Royal Horticultural Society,

well, it was the ultimate accolade. They've made it.

By the 1930s, the garden and family were at their peak.

Lennie and Maud's youngest son, Oliver Messel,

was emerging as a creative genius in the world of theatre.

He would go on to be the most celebrated designer in stage and film.

Many of Oliver's designs were said to be inspired

by his upbringing at Nymans and the theatricality of the garden.

Together with his sister, Anne, they were part of the fashionable

Bright Young Things.

Anne had two marriages.

Her son from the first marriage, Anthony Armstrong-Jones,

carried on the family creative streak,

becoming one of the country's best known fashion and portrait photographers.

And the family's rise reached a pinnacle

when Anthony married royalty, becoming Lord Snowdon.

But on her second marriage, Anne scaled new social heights herself,

becoming a countess by marrying Michael Parsons,

the 6th Earl of Rosse and moving to Ireland to live at Birr Castle.

This created a marriage of two great gardens,

which still continues today.

Anne and the Earl of Ross's eldest son, William Parsons,

inherited the estate and title in 1979.

He has continued with the family tradition

of being a very keen gardener just as his parents were.

This portrait here is of my parents

set, rather romantically, in the garden of Birr

with my parents in that lovely attire,

dressed, though, very much for gardening,

as you can see from the little pair of secateurs

and the tiny little fork at the bottom.

It's lovely, I think, bringing together

something of my mother's creativity and passion,

my parents' passion for fashion and dress, with real love for gardening.

Anne's talent for gardening was no doubt inspired

by her upbringing at Nymans.

She was a skilled horticulturalist

and quickly made her mark in the gardens at Birr.

These cloisters were designed in greater detail

by my mother, very much on the back of an envelope,

as a cloister with these windows looking in to the great urns,

that are baroque urns that come from Bavaria.

No element of the gardens here has, I'm afraid, ever been designed

by any professional garden designer.

It's always been designed by the members of the family

in each generation in turn.

Evidence of Anne's creativity is unmistakable in the archives at Birr.

House manager at Nymans, Rebecca Graham, has come to Birr

to learn more about Anne's skills as a designer and horticulturalist.

Birr's got such an amazing archive

and it's got two whole sections devoted to the Messel family.

So for us at Nymans, we've got a certain amount,

but nothing like what's here.

I'm interested in Anne and to have her sketches and see them,

and also to see the finished article either in the garden

or in the house, is just amazing.

The relationship between the gardens at Birr Castle and Nymans was fruitful.

Philip Holmes, acting head gardener at Nymans, visits Birr every year

to ensure this close connection continues to thrive.

This is a wonderful wisteria.

The way it's been trained in this sort of dome fashion is amazing.

The scent is very heady and just hark at the bees.

It's very important to keep a link with the family

and also over the years, we've exchanged plants.

Nymans has sent a number of the plants which were raised there

and named after either the family at Nymans or the garden itself.

We've exchanged here with Birr and vice versa.

Birr is especially well-known for its rare tree collection

but William's real love is for exotic plants.

If we can get underneath.

The beauty of this Birr sensation, as it's now called,

is that its flowers are basically purple

but round the edge of the purple, this is edged with white.

And other people sometimes are prone to joke about this as being

the floral equivalent of a good head to an Irish pint of Guinness.

Lord Rosse has travelled the world to satisfy his thirst

for plant collecting, but he only recently discovered that

a consuming passion for collecting is actually a family trait.

From the age of seven, I'd started collecting coins.

I'd been given a coin of William the Conqueror and it started me

in my own desire to go on collecting not only coins, but plants.

Plants from all over the world.

I had a passion for collecting,

which I now realise is very much a Jewish tradition

and was inherited.

But that word was never used.

The Jewish connection was of course never used in conversation with us.

But it's made me realise, for instance,

that I'm every bit as proud to be a Messel descendant

as a Parsons descendant.

Lord Rosse spent time at Nymans during the war years

when he was a boy.

Now, Rebecca, let's see what you've been finding.

I don't remember ever seeing that before.

I do remember being fascinated by the snow at Nymans as a small child.

What does that say, Rebecca? Can you read that?

-William in the snow.

-Yes, it is! It is me!

Goodness, thank you for discovering that!

I've never seen myself in the snow at Nymans before!

That's a real finding. Lovely. Thank you so much.

You're very welcome.

In 1947, Britain was gripped by the worst winter on record.

Nymans didn't escape the snow

and the bitter cold enveloped the entire house.

A plumber with a blowlamp was on hand to thaw the frozen pipes.

In February 1947, in the night of Lennie's 75th birthday,

he's lying in bed, he's recovering from a minor operation,

and he wakes to see his room filled with smoke.

When the fire brigade arrives, they find that the pipes are frozen

so they have to get the water from the pond below the house.

So they're standing outside in the deep snow, cold, old, frail.

Lennie and Maud just watching the flames licking away their house.

It must have been heart-breaking for them.

No matter how hard the firemen fought,

there was little they could do to save the house.

It was filled with their treasures which they had collected all their life

so of course they wanted to rescue some of it

and the person who did that was the butler.

I mean, you look at the pictures,

it's just a tiny little pile of furniture, not much,

most of it just burnt to the ground.

This house was filled with treasures.

Lennie had a very valuable painting, a Valeska painting,

which was in the library above the fireplace.

There is a very touching story about this painting,

because during the fire, there was very little time

to rescue the valuable treasures in this house,

and there was a choice.

The choice was between this very expensive painting

and then a painting of Lennie's mother,

which only really had sentimental value for them.

In the end they chose Lennie's mother.

The house was uninhabitable.

Lennie and Maud found temporary accommodation close by

to recuperate and gather their thoughts.

They lost many possessions, but the one that meant the world to Lennie

was completely destroyed - his collection of rare botanical books.

The terrible news spread quickly to the rest of the family.

I was at school in Oxford when I had news of the fire

in a letter from my mother saying the greatest tragedy in the world

had happened, Nymans had been burnt.

She'd rushed down to be with my grandparents there at Nymans...

..and how terribly difficult it was to organise anything

or sort out anything because the snow was still very, very, very deep.

And how obviously heartbroken my mother was

at the loss of her own great family home.

The botanical collection of books...

..went completely. What a tragedy that was.

The house had undergone its remodelling barely 20 years previously

and now a large part was reduced to rubble.

Ironically, this only served to enhance

the garden's romantic appeal.

If their aim and ambition was to create a piece of the Gothic ruin,

a piece of Gothic romanticism, a baroque castle,

what better way of demonstrating it than a genuine ruin?

And so, rather perversely, the fire is also responsible

for heightening the romance that they so much sought.

Despite the disaster, Lennie and Maud made the extraordinary decision

to keep the garden going

and over the intervening decades the garden continued to thrive

and attract critical acclaim.

And today it still draws family members who visit regularly.

Victoria is one of Lennie's grandchildren.

Smells peppery.

Victoria inherited the Messel creative gene

with a talent for painting and an interest in botany.

Over the years she's recorded a vital botanical archive

by painting the garden's rare plants,

which were specially named after members of the family.

Like rhododendron Leonard Messel.

Camellia Maud Messel.

And a magnolia named after their daughter, Anne.

Victoria's improvised studio was in the old dovecote.

It feels like home.

You get really good light here.

You might not think it but it's excellent. Very, very good light.

Much of Victoria's early childhood was spent at Nymans during the war years.

She had free rein of the garden which was her playground.

My nanny, I think, Miss Lorton who took the photograph.

I was just posed, as the Messels do, we pose.

The little dress Victoria wore is still intact in the Nymans' archive,

including one small blemish.

The colour has kept, hasn't it? It's amazing.

Now then, I don't think that would fit me much at the moment.

I love the colours, the clashing colours.

An amazing orange and the pink.

I was given some chocolate ice cream for being so good

and putting this on and being photographed.

So then I had the chocolate ice cream and spilt it all down the front.

There, all the way down, that was chocolate ice cream.

It is lovely it still has the chocolate stain on it

-because it just shows the whole story.

-How bloody greedy I was!

They had to bribe me to put it on!

In 1953, Lennie Messel died.

It heralded an end of an era.

The family fortunes had dwindled after the war

and with no one family member able to take on the running of Nymans,

it was willed to the National Trust.

Lennie's daughter, Anne, returned from Ireland

and lived on the estate at Nymans as the first family advisor.

She was passionate about the garden

and continued to shape and influence it.

The courtyard garden was one area

where she particularly liked to spend time in her advancing years.

While the rest of Nymans was open to the public,

this area was closed for her privacy.

Nevertheless, she found it wasn't always easy working alongside

the new owners, the National Trust.

You had to admire her spirit,

but she wasn't a good person to get into a dispute with.

She modelled herself, so to speak, on the Queen Mother

and if I was pushing her round the garden in a wheelchair

she'd be waving to the public, "Good morning, how nice to see you",

and so on. Not my style, but it was very much her style.

I used to hear her muttering,

"It's all mine, it all happens to belong to me",

which it didn't, of course, but that was her approach.

Alistair took over as family garden advisor after Anne became frail.

But he'd only been in the role two days when yet another disaster

hit Nymans, this time one that would threaten the future of the garden.

Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said

she heard there's a hurricane on the way. Well, if you're watching,

don't worry, there isn't, but having said that, actually, the weather...

South East England was hit by winds gusting over 80mph.

I was astonished to see a television photograph

taken by a helicopter of a wood where every single tree

had been blown flat.

It looked like a box of matches had been just sprinkled,

all lying in the same direction.

I walked into the garden and hoping that the pinetum would be OK.

To my absolute horror, I wasn't looking out onto the pinetum,

I was looking out onto farm buildings.

There was just two big sequoias left, and that was it.

Philip Holmes, Nymans' acting head gardener,

was a young member of the National Trust team in 1987.

He rushed to Nymans to discover it had taken the full force of the storm with devastating results.

What did it look like on that morning?

Well, it was like a battlefield really.

A bit like those photographs you see of the Somme.

Just skeleton trees where they'd been thrashed to pieces by the wind,

and then there were trees lying on the ground,

great big root plates had come up, you know.

And they'd crushed many of the smaller trees beneath them

which was quite heartbreaking.

We lost virtually all the trees in this area.

The storm left Nymans in a very sorry state.

Hundreds of rare specimens planted during the last 100 years

were ripped from the ground in a matter of minutes.

You must have been itching to know what the garden looked like.

I was. I knew the monkey puzzle on the main lawn had gone down

because from where I lived you could see it on the skyline,

and its distinctive rounded top shape was missing from the skyline, was gone.

And that was a great shame because that was getting on for 100 years old.

After the great storm,

I wondered whether we would ever be able to open again.

We'd lost 486 trees that night.

Despite the devastation the unexpected bonus

was the storm had opened the garden up.

Areas that had become dense and overgrown

now had a chance to breathe new life.

Alan Power, head gardener at Stourhead,

is going to take a closer look to see how one sequoia

managed to survive the storm.

This is one of the most exciting trees.

When they were first discovered they estimated that the trees

were touching, if not exceeding, 400 feet tall and that is remarkable.

Some of the tallest trees in the world.

A really, really important tree on our planet.

So I'm right at the top of this sequoia and, blimey, what a view!

That really is quite amazing.

From where I am, this tree's the first thing that the wind hits,

and, you know, it's maybe 120, 130 years old,

and to have experienced two or three big storm events in its life,

it only gave up once.

And this scar tells the whole story.

There will have been one point that the rhythm of the gusts

and the rhythm of the wind in relation to the tree,

and when they were both working together that rhythm was broken.

It's just the point at which the tree went "bang".

So the story doesn't finish at the scar.

There's opportunities for the tree that came after the storm

and this is the tree's response.

So it leads from the scar and it goes on off into the distance.

Seeing the way it responded after the storm is...it just indicates

how determined the tree was to survive,

in the same way as the family went on to survive and be successful.

After the storm, Nymans had the chance to start afresh.

This process of re-invigoration and restoration continues.

The sunken garden is one of this year's big projects.

Well, this used to be all old camellias around this site,

and we decided that many of them,

because they started to look rather old and untidy,

we would clear them out and have a fresh start.

Changes have to happen.

The sunk garden is being re-imagined,

drawing from photographs from the 1930s.

This careful balance between progress and preservation

is watched over by Alistair Buchanan.

-I think that would be of the mid-1930s.

-Do you?

There's Coomber, definitely standing like that.

-That, I think, could be Uncle Lennie.

-Yes.

And of course it shows the old myrtle plants which used to grow

against the face of this building, which we're going to reinstate.

Restorations of gardens like this are key to their survival.

Restoration doesn't mean that you're halting progress,

at least not in the sense of Nymans.

Restoration means that you're being consistent

and you're remaining pure to the original ethos, philosophy

and concept of the designer.

And for Messel it was certainly about constant investigation,

exploration and advancement of his garden.

An example of this progress is the new South African bed,

which has been designed by garden team member Kirsten Kelly.

So this bed used to be known as the "wild bed" to the Messels.

So what we've done is introduce the South African collection,

put it in the wild bed and we've now got a South African meadow.

It's quite exciting.

By late August the South African plants are soaking up the sunshine.

The whole idea was to kind of have a low planting,

to not interrupt that beautiful view over there

but to attract the viewer's attention to it.

So how many of the plants that you've utilized in here

would Messel have tried previously on this site?

Well, we know quite a few details, because they were definitely

growing melianthus major at the time and that's quite an interesting plant

because it's supposed to be evergreen and here it's cut back by the frost

and then it reshoots every year.

And much more familiar to us today than it would, of course, have been in his day.

I think one of the lovely things about these gardens is it gives you

permission to create really quite brash, colourful combinations

as you do in the herbaceous border, as Muriel would have been

very familiar with in the herbaceous border.

And here you are reintroducing colour combinations

that on paper shouldn't work together.

I think the beauty of Nymans is that the Messels were experimenters,

they were innovators

and it's testing something new and that's what they did.

The beautiful thing is it's our responsibility to protect

the legacy, but it's also our responsibility to try new things,

and that's why Nymans is exciting.

It's become an annual tradition that the Messel family

still gather at Nymans to remember and reflect on Ludwig's legacy.

It's glorious being back at Nymans

and being back at Nymans for such a great family reunion.

But it's certainly true that gardens can never stand still.

Gardens either grow or they go back, sadly recede

and they need to be reinvigorated.

But what is essential, I think, is to keep something

of the original vision of the person who's created the garden.

For me, the legacy of Nymans is very much the principal

of understanding the celebratory nature

in which the garden was established.

That sense of fun and theatre, enjoyment and romanticism

and that's what we see crafted out of the landscape before us.

It's wonderful to see the family today,

even though they're slightly more distant,

maintaining a close interest

in how this garden continues to move forwards.

I think Ludwig, my great-grandfather, would be pleased.

I'm of an age now where I shall be meeting up with him

fairly soon no doubt, and I'll find out.

I think my great-grandfather Ludwig's spirit will always

be in the garden somewhere, even if you don't see it,

hovering there on Phillip's shoulders.

One of the most intriguing aspects of this for me has been

that this is a story about a family, driven by ambition,

incredibly creative, who arrived here as outsiders

and then rose through the ranks of society

and built the most quintessential English garden.

What a triumph.

Three, two, one, cheese!