The family has gardened on this patch of West Sussex since the 12th century, when the Percys were given the Petworth House. The descent, unbroken from father to daughter, involved changes of name from Percy to Seymour (the Dukes of Somerset) to Egremont, Leconfield and Wyndham. Our first bill for plants, in Latin, still in the family archives, is dated 1348 – for 24 pear trees and two gallons of tar for greasing the trees to protect them from rabbits.
The present Baroque house was built in 1690 and still has parts of the older manor within it. It is strange to find behind a passage door Medieval outside walls with lead rainwater pipes, hoppers and blind windows. Our children used to imagine that a fairy-tale old lady might be spinning behind one of the windows.
This sense of the outside coming in is very strong. There is no garden near the house; instead the 18th-century landscape sweeps from the far horizon up to the stone baseline of the west front, where it seems to pour through the long Baroque windows and spill on to the carpet. This effect is beautiful on a summer’s evening. Down the long enfilade of nine state rooms, green sunlight lands in pools on the floor while deer and sheep graze just outside the window.
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The painter Turner spent much time at Petworth and captured this light in his landscapes of the park. The enfilade has been repeated in the walled gardens, where I have used the brick arches to punctuate long vistas defined by hedges of banksia roses and pergolas of white wisteria.
The house is on a grand scale. The ground-floor windows are very tall and the rooms high- ceilinged. Someone once said to me: ‘It’s lucky you’re both tall living in rooms like these.’ More poetically, on being shown his bedroom a friend said: ‘I love coming to stay here as there’s room for your spirits to soar.’ This sense of space has guided my planning of the grounds. The kitchen garden was in full swing by 1703.
We have a letter to the Duke of Somerset from his steward saying that ‘the kitchen garden is in a very indifferent condition due to the blight affecting the apricots, peaches, cherries, grapes, melons and currants. Nor are there any cucumbers, herbs and sallatings. There is so little that if Your Grace’s family were at home it would not subsist them.’ The duke did not agree that this was because of the weather, and the head gardener, Miller, was sacked.
My husband and I were married in April 1978 and moved into Petworth, where the next month we held a dance for neighbours and friends with the flowers mostly from the garden and glasshouses. Several very large shrubs of Rhododendron fragrantissimum, a hybrid from two Himalayan species, were brought in from an unheated greenhouse to decorate the Marble Hall. This white rhododendron has large frilly trumpet-shaped flowers with a pink blush and is one of the most scented of all shrubs. Its honeysuckle aroma filled the austere room and wafted down the passages. Equally beautiful were the tall vases filled with branches of Cornus nuttallii ‘Monarch’. I have planted a drift of this favourite dogwood, which flowers at the same time as the pheasant’s eye narcissus. The creamy-white flower bracts, which look as if they have been starched, dance in the breeze above the latter to make a most lovely sight in May.
Such magnificent plants that decorate the rooms are the legacy of one man, Fred Streeter. Born in 1879, he came to be head gardener at Petworth House in 1929 when he was 50 years old. He was put in charge of an eight-acre kitchen garden, ten glasshouses, 200 acres of grounds, a woodland garden and a staff of 35 gardeners. Trained to exacting Edwardian standards, he had worked his way through many private gardens, from a bothy boy who washed pots for two hours before breakfast and bathed in the hot-house rain tank to a journeyman, then to the famous nursery James Veitch & Sons in Chelsea, where he prepared plants for the Temple Show, the forerunner of the Chelsea Flower Show. He made his first BBC radio broadcast in 1935. For the next 40 years, Fred had a huge following on Sunday afternoons. Listeners warmed to the rich, unaffected Sussex accent that gave practical advice based on years of experience. It was said that his voice was as famous as that of Winston Churchill.
The standard of fruit and vegetables grown for the house became well known. Particularly impressive were the muscat grapes, nectarines, apricots and peaches. Even more remarked upon were the flowers and table decorations. One Christmas little electrically powered fountains played in the candlelight between the place settings. My father-in-law had a fresh vase of red carnations on his desk every morning and used one as a buttonhole for London visits. Flowers for the house were bedded in sphagnum moss that was sent by train from the family estates in Cumbria. When the moss arrived at Petworth it was immediately placed in a fine-meshed net and pulled through scalding water in case it harboured any alien pests from the North. We still embed moss (locally grown) round our house plants.
Fred died in 1975. He left a legacy that is all round us at Petworth House. His espaliered pears, greengages and plums clothe the walls, and the sunken garden, made in the 1930s for Lady Leconfield, my husband’s great-aunt, is still much used. The glasshouses have gone, except two, which grow a large range of plants for the house under the expert eye of Jonathan Arnold, our head gardener. The walled garden still produces vegetables and now has an ornamental garden where I have worked with huge pleasure for over 40 years, adding my own ephemeral layer over the ghosts of the past.
A version of this article originally appeared in the July 2022 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
