There may be no American ambassador to the Court of St James’s at the moment, the last incumbent, William Farish, having resigned in July, but “it doesn’t bother me if the Queen comes tomorrow. The garden is always kept to as high a standard as it can be,” says Stephen Crisp, head gardener at Winfield House, the ambassador’s official residence.
The 12½-acre garden that surrounds the 35-room neo-Georgian house in Regent’s Park, central London, is kept in spruce condition, ready for the grandest of visitors. Although Crisp doesn’t irrigate the garden, the wide expanse of lawn in front of the house (big enough for helicopters to land on) is still a verdant, striped green in September thanks to this washout summer, and not a weed can be seen in the flowerbeds and woodland walks that border the garden.
It is quite an achievement for Crisp, with only a team of two to help him in the second largest private garden in London after the Queen’s own at Buckingham Palace.
Regent’s Park itself covers 480 acres, laid out in the early 19th century by John Nash, the great architect of stuccoed central London. Winfield House stands on the site of the earlier Hertford Villa — later St Dunstan’s Villa — and was built in the 1930s by Barbara Hutton, the staggeringly rich heir to the Woolworth fortune, who had moved to London with the first of many husbands in 1936. She returned to America as the second world war broke out, and the house became, among other things, an American officers’ club. In 1946, Hutton sold her lease from the Crown Estates on Winfield House to the American government for the princely sum of one dollar.
Crisp is mindful of the property’s dual role: to represent the most powerful nation in the world, but also, as a residence, to be hospitable — there is a big Fourth of July celebration held in the grounds every summer, as well as a variety of picnics and parties, and, of course, visits from heads of state.
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To this end, he has planted a row of Magnolia grandiflora (a plant of North American origin) along the front wall of the imposing red-brick house, both to soften the facade and to add a grand theatricality to the approach. The magnolias are clipped into pyramids and underplanted with topiary balls that will eventually meld into each other to create a cloud hedge.
This is an example of the long-term thinking that Crisp can apply, a luxury denied to ambassadors and their wives, whose tenure is tied in with the presidency. When he arrived in 1987, the bones of the garden were already in place, created in the 1820s as a pastoral landscape by Nash, heavily influenced — Crisp reckons — by Humphrey Repton.
But, he says, “it was a sleeping beauty”, with little horticultural detail in the planting.
Nash’s intention had been that each of the houses in the park should be like a country villa and indeed, from the vantage point of the terrace of Winfield House you see the trees inside the garden merging with those beyond to create a “borrowed landscape”, which gives an impression of even larger grounds.
If you stand on the banks at the eastern edge of the garden, the layers of shrubs and trees that act as both screen and noise filter between the garden and the road outside create a similar, slightly incongruous illusion that the copper-domed Regent’s Park Mosque is actually within the grounds.
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The garden is laid out on the traditional lines of an English country house, albeit on a smaller scale than usual, with formal elements: brilliant herbaceous borders; a rose garden and beds; a clipped box parterre; a formal pond and a terrace brimming with bedding plants.
It gets looser and wilder as you move away from the house: at the far end of the garden, there is even an area left long for wildflowers.
Crisp has planted more than 200 trees, some of them replacement hardwoods and others to take the garden into the future. Commemorative American species have been planted for various ambassadors — the Farish legacy is a tulip tree.
There is, however, one surprise area in this ordered landscape. Hidden behind shrubs on the sunny site of a former platform tennis court is a potager where perennials, vegetables and herbs mingle in colourful disarray, many of them, such as the purple climbing beans and maize, grown from seeds collected by Crisp on a trip to America.
Near the new tulip tree, a golf pin still stands, embellished with the stars and stripes flag, in waiting for the next ambassador to practise his putting.
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Crisp will demonstrate how to use garden materials for Christmas decorations at the Museum of Garden History in London on December 1. To book, call 020 7401 8865