By MICKEY RATHBUN
English gardens are famous for their follies — not amusing musical performances, but whimsical structures in parks and gardens surrounding stately manor houses. As a student of architectural history back in the 1980s, I was fascinated by these giddy creations and the aspirations behind them.
Follies were all the vogue in the 18th century, when landscape architects, most famously Lancelot “Capability” Brown, began to design naturalistic — although painstakingly planned and maintained — gardens that incorporated faux pyramids, Roman and Greek ruins, and crumbling medieval towers, edifices that came to be known as “follies,” defined by the “Oxford English Dictionary” as “the popular name of any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder.”
Among Brown’s 170 or so gardens is the 1,000-acre park surrounding Highclere Castle, where the PBS television blockbuster “Downton Abbey” was filmed.
Some of the most memorable follies are at Stourhead, in Wiltshire, England, whose gardens, complete with man-made lakes, islands and grottoes, constitute a theme park of architectural antiquities. While the marble temple was a perennial favorite, follies could take any fanciful form.
Although there are garden follies throughout Europe, the British Isles have more follies per square mile than any region, according to the Folly Fellowship, an organization established in 1988 to preserve, protect and promote fanciful garden structures.
Last summer, my husband, Chris Benfey, and I spent a couple of weeks in England doing research for various writing projects. While I had thought of follies as the product of a bygone historical era, I was delighted to find that the folly craze is still alive and well in British gardens.
For the past several years I have been investigating the life of my grandfather, George Gordon Moore. The Canadian-born son of Irish refugees from the Great Potato Famine of 1845 to 1852, Moore made a fortune in Midwestern railroads and moved to London in 1908, where he lived a glamorous and charmed life (for a while, anyway).
Moore had spent time at a grand Elizabethan manor house called Stanway, in the Cotswolds, where he had wooed the famous British beauty Diana Manners back in 1910.
I had struck up a pleasant correspondence with the current owner and resident of Stanway, James, Lord Neidpath, 13th Earl of Wemyss and the ninth Earl of March, and he invited us to come see the house.
Not far from the great Arts and Crafts gardens at Hidcote, where we stopped for lunch, Stanway originated as an 8th-century monastery. It was substantially rebuilt in the 17th century of a local, butter-colored limestone called “Guiting Yellow.”
In the 1720s, a visionary landscape architect named Charles Bridgeman installed a stupendous water garden, one of the finest in England. It featured a canal and a series of cascades (what the British call waterfalls) that ran down the long, steep hillside behind the house, crowned by an Egyptian pyramid. Unfortunately, the water garden was difficult to maintain and was destroyed in the 1830s.
Lord Wemyss is passionate about the property, which he has owned since 1974, and is determined to keep the place running — not an easy feat these days — by offering it for tours, weddings and other festivities.
After serving us tea, he took us through the house, regaling us with fascinating tales about its past occupants. He told us that J. M. Barrie, author of “Peter Pan,” had rented the house every summer from 1923 to 1933. He said that Barrie’s favorite parlor trick was to attach postage stamps to coins and flick them onto the 18-foot ceiling of the living room, where they would stick.
Although we could see traces of the stamps far above our heads, this feat seemed implausible, perhaps requiring the assistance of Tinkerbell, or Peter Pan himself.
In 2003, to generate public interest and for his own amusement, Lord Wemyss restored the canal portion of the water garden and installed a 300-foot-tall gravity fountain, the tallest in the world. (Gravity fountains are fed from a natural water source high enough above the fountain’s base to generate a jet of water. The Stanway fountain is 1¼ miles from the Cotswold escarpment, 900 feet above sea level, where there are abundant natural springs. According to Lord Wemyss, the last gravity fountain was built in 1850.)
After the tour, our host ushered us outside and, with great ceremony, turned on the fountain and watched our amazement as the jet came shooting up to the sky.
My husband is writing a book about Rudyard Kipling, so we also went to Sussex to see Kipling’s house, Bateman’s. (The writer settled there after spending four years in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote “The Jungle Book” and Captains Courageous.”)
We spent the night in Sussex with our friends Bill and Virginia Nicholson at their lovely farmhouse, parts of which date from the 14th century. Bill Nicholson is a prolific screenwriter and author of “Amherst,” a novel based on Emily Dickinson and modern-day Dickinson scholars. Virginia Nicholson, a scholar of women’s history, is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s sister, who lived and gardened at her famous house, Charleston, also in Sussex.
Vanessa Nicholson clearly inherited her grandmother’s green thumb, and her husband took us on a tour of their 5-acre garden.
Like the best English gardens, the Nicholsons’ meanders through discreet spaces and incorporates several water features, including a brook.
We strolled down tidy pebbled paths, admiring borders lush with eye-catching perennials, including lavender and lady’s mantle, and lupine and foxgloves in a rainbow of colors.
Bill Nicholson was especially partial to the drifts of small, volunteer daisies that had seeded themselves everywhere. At the farthest end of the garden, he led us over a bridge into a bucolic wooded area, where we came upon a most unexpected sight: a sky-blue compact car mounted high above our heads on a Doric column.
I wondered how they got it there. He explained that their three children had all learned to drive in the car, a Nissan Micra.”
The day came when they’d all passed their tests,” he said, “and the clutch on the car failed, and it had to be scrapped.”
Around that time, he said, he was “pondering how to make walks in our garden more interesting.” He asked his builders if they thought they could put the car on a column. “It was a challenge they couldn’t resist,” he said.
As with all follies, the project took some engineering. The car is, in fact, supported by a steel girder sunk into a concrete plinth. The girder, as he explained, “is concealed inside a polyurethane Grecian column, of the sort manufactured for builders of McMansions to create posh porches.”
“I think the very incongruity is the point,” he added. “It’s so much the opposite of what most people put in a garden. We like to say nothing about it, and let visitors come upon it unaware. Breaks the ice at parties, as they say.”
Mickey Rathbun can be reached at foxglover8@gmail.com