that is forever England. Rupert Brooke has his. I nominate Le Bois des Moutiers, 150 miles south of Portsmouth, perched on a white clifftop sloping steeply north, a jewel box of precious plants in ideal conditions round the first (and perhaps best) country house of one of our best twentieth-century architects, Edwin Lutyens. His working partner, Gertrude Jekyll.
The house was built for the Mallet family of bankers in the last years of the 19th century, while the pre-Raphaelites were a recent memory, and Arts and Crafts were germinating. Something tells me Lutyens had seen Gaudi’s work in Barcelona. His is more spare, less Gothic, a strong stone block austere on the inland side, facing its formal gardens, and a wall of many windows looking north to the sea.
In Devon this steep-sided sea-facing valley would be called a combe. A little stream wanders sinuously down the middle to a pond perched (artificially, I assume) on the edge of the sea-cliff, with the port of Dieppe visible in the distance. The sense of arrival here is complete; behind, the woodland hemmed into the combe, below and beyond the great horizontal the French call, with accidental poetry, ‘le grand large’.
Tall blue cedars process down the valley bottom, sheltering a collection of rhododendrons and their customary companions in a pattern familiar from Leonards Lee, Borde Hill…. and many English Gardens. None that I know, though, have quite this sense of destination, of inevitability, of paradise found.
Happily the present owners, the Seydoux family, tycoons in the film industry, allow visits to the gardens if you book in advance.
