The Italian Job

Since Christmas myself, Alan and Pete have been working on reinstating a feature of the Italian Garden, which is the usual area I’m responsible for. We’re working on reintroducing a parterre situated to the left of the Mansion (looking up from the Italian Terrace). The parterre was turfed over, we believe, some time around World War Two – due to reduced staffing levels.

Although the Italian Garden was restored in 1982 this area was not completed due to a lack of funds. This project has now been funded by the National Trust raffle – thanks to visitors for purchasing these! In December we started work on marking out the site, although work had to be halted for a short period due to the snow. We’ve started again after Christmas and are making great progress.

After measuring out the 20m X 10m bed we started to lift the turf (this will be re-used in other projects). We then dug down to about 12cm depth – excavating over 20 tonnes of soil in the process. This was dug out by hand and then moved by tractor and trailer, where it will be re-used somewhere else in the gardens.

When we excavated the area we found some of the original pre-1945 red and white gravel. This was fantastic as it confirmed what we thought the colours of the original gravel were – as we were only going from black and white photos and could see they were a contrasting colour. We think that the original colour scheme included blue plants so the bed would have a patriotic theme (which would have been perfectly viewed from Lord Egerton’s apartments).

Also this week we’ve started to fix the metalwork in place which holds in the edges and gives definition to the shape of the bed. The metalwork has been made locally by Broadbents of Mobberley. We can now really start to visualise what it will look like. We hope to have finished this by high season at the end of March. Watch this space!

Jamie Jackson
Craftsman Gardener