The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury made light of her reputation as the grande dame of establishment gardening. She told interviewers: “I have no professional qualifications whatsoever . . . I’m a complete amateur.”
Anyone who visited her two greatest projects, Hatfield House and Cranborne Manor, might have regarded this claim with scepticism, but Lady Salisbury was being entirely honest; she often described her horticultural innovations, which included the construction of parterres, topiaries and, at Hatfield, an Elizabethan-influenced knot garden, as being the logical progression of her childhood interest in plants and nature. She believed that “children see things in miniature” and, in the best way imaginable, her work tended to reflect a childlike sense of wonder and delight at the possibilities that a project might produce.
She was well known as an adviser to European and American high society, most notably for friends and clients including Lord Brabourne; Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Rolling Stones’s financial manager; and the Prince of Wales, for whom she designed the gardens at Highgrove. When he attracted mockery for his much-repeated claim that he talked to his plants, Lady Salisbury was bustled to his defence with the mixture of guilelessness and common sense that defined her work and life. “Don’t all gardeners do that?” she asked. “If you love and care for your plants, it makes such a difference.” She nonetheless conceded that “the poor fellow never lived that down”.
“Her work tended to reflect a childlike sense of wonder and delight
Marjorie Olein Wyndham-Quin was born on St Swithin’s Day, July 15, 1922, at Orwell Park in Suffolk. Her father, Captain Valentine Wyndham-Quin, had a distinguished military career in the Royal Navy, serving in the First and Second World Wars and being mentioned in dispatches four times. Her mother, Marjorie Pretyman, was a noted society beauty. Her second daughter, nicknamed “Mollie” to distinguish her from her mother, had something of a rootless existence in her early years, led a peripatetic existence, moving 22 times in 23 years. She spent much of her time being educated by governesses at the family estates in Wales and Ireland before settling in Dorset. It was here that her interest in gardening began, when she had her own plot to garden. She would later describe this period as having discovered “the intense pleasure of garden design”. A much sought-after figure in society, she, along with her sisters, Ursula and Pamela, were photographed by Cecil Beaton in the Fifties, in imitation of Singer Sargent’s portrait of Percy Wyndham’s daughters half a century before. After many offers of marriage, she chose Robert Gascoyne-Cecil in 1945, and in between bearing him seven children over the next decade and a half, she began a career that lasted for the rest of her life.
Gascoyne-Cecil became Viscount Cranborne in 1947. Mollie was an innovator from early on. A supporter of organic farming from a very young age, she banned pesticides and artificial fertilisers from her first family home, Cranborne Manor, from 1948, much to the incredulity of other gardeners. She took quiet satisfaction in having her views vindicated in later years, commenting: “I’m just glad people have discovered that [these chemicals] are unsafe.”
Advertisement
At Cranborne she constructed a symmetrical garden that was classical and trendsetting in its design, and continued to receive accolades for decades afterwards; in 2005 it was named one of the ten best gardens in Britain.
Viscount Cranborne inherited the title of Marquess of Salisbury in 1972, allowing Marjorie to style herself Marchioness. This also resulted in a move to Hatfield House, the Salisburys’ Jacobean family seat in Hertfordshire. Lady Salisbury was initially dismayed by the poor state of repair in which she found the gardens. However, she rolled up her sleeves and began restoring the grounds to their former glory; as she said: “One felt very responsible . . . one didn’t want to make a mess of it.” She travelled across Europe to study gardens built around the time that Hatfield was constructed, during the Elizabethan era, and visited the house’s archives to gain inspiration. The results, which took years to bring to fruition, sealed her reputation as an expert gardener and a woman of near-sublime taste. She was more grateful on the house’s behalf than her own. “The house was isolated [and] everything looked wrong,” she said. “A garden must relate to its house.’
When she left, after her son became Viscount Cranborne in 2003, she refused to be sentimental. “You must look ahead. You cannot look back.”
There was no other personal project to compare to Hatfield, but there were many others that occupied her over the following decades. When the Marquess purchased the Château de St Clou in Provence in 1984 (“Don’t you think your family has enough houses already?” Lady Salisbury asked), she became a chatelaine, spending decades restoring the château. She was very popular with her staff and locals, and rejoiced in the affectionate appellation of “Madame la Marquise”.
In addition to her own homes, she was much in demand as a freelance garden designer, and cheerfully worked into her eighties on international projects that included Peter and Stephanie Seymour Brant’s 222-acre White Birch Farm in Connecticut and the World Youth Alliance’s garden in Manhattan.
Advertisement
The New York Times duly hailed her as “the high priestess of garden design”. She worked without an assistant or the use of a computer and was often surprised to see the differences in culture and approach in other countries; at her successful urging, the Brants hired a permanent head gardener for White Birch Farm, having previously relied on casual staff.
“She was well known as an adviser to American high society
They had seven children, including Lady Rose, a jewellery designer, and six sons: Robert, the 7th Marquess of Salisbury, who as leader of the House of Lords (like his grandfather) saved the hereditary element of the chamber from complete abolition; Lord Charles, a former high sheriff of Hertfordshire; and Lord Valentine and Lord Michael, who have worked in the telecommunications sector. Her fifth son, Henry, died in infancy, and her second son, Lord Richard, was killed in Rhodesia in 1978, aged 30, by a stray bullet fired by the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army. She is survived by her sons Robert, Charles, Valentine and Michael, and her daughter, Lady Rose Dunne.
One organisation that she remained a staunch supporter of was the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children; she was firmly anti-abortion and served on the executive committee in the Seventies, regularly lobbying politicians and clergymen with her views. Towards the end of her life she also became an outspoken opponent of euthanasia.
The summation of a long and successful career was the publication of a semi-memoir, A Gardener’s Life, published in 2007 by Frances Lincoln, focusing on all of her significant achievements. The book, photographed by Derry Moore, sold well and resulted in continued acclaim for Lady Salisbury, who, by then a widow, had left Hatfield and divided her time between a townhouse in Chelsea — with immaculate roof garden — and Provence. Away from gardening she eschewed grand society parties (most notably Charlie de Beistegui’s 1951 Venice extravaganza) for family life, and was an approachable, unpretentious figure who was much admired by her peers.
When asked by The Times about her defining principle of life after Hatfield in 2004, Lady Salisbury, then a dowager, replied: “Well, a belief in the Christian life — that has been the leitmotif, I would say. A guide to how one lives.” If charity, virtue and humility are the hallmarks of the true Christian existence, she epitomised them all, along with a horticultural flair entirely alien to the Garden of Gethsemane.
Advertisement
The Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, garden designer and author, was born on July 15, 1922. She died on December 12, 2016, aged 94