The private garden at Shute House was designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe between 1969 and 1988, with further alterations in 1993, in association with his clients Michael and Lady Anne Tree. A natural spring rises in the garden and water is the dominant feature, feeding a network of formal and naturalistic features, including the rill, the centrepiece of the garden. The compartmentalised design and the perambulation through it plays with notions of history, philosophy, psychology and art, drawing on classical and romantic landscape traditions. Jellicoe made further modifications in 1994-1995 (his last work) for the present owners Sir John and Suzy Lady Lewis, who have added new sculpture and made further minor alterations.
In 1935 Geoffrey Jellicoe produced a landscape design for Ronald and Nancy Tree at Ditchley Park, Oxfordshire (registered at Grade II*, List entry number 1000463). Nancy, a noted gardener and interior designer, was a leading figure in the firm of Colefax and Fowler and a creator of the country-house style; her son Michael Tree (1921-1999) became a director in the firm. Michael married Lady Anne Cavendish (1927-2010), a younger sister of the 10th Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth, noted for her work in prisons and as a founder of Fine Cell Work, which gave prisoners a skill and an income producing fine quality embroidery. On their marriage in 1949 the couple settled at Mereworth Castle, before moving to Shute House in Wiltshire in the mid-1960s. Having known Jellicoe since childhood, Michael Tree sought his advice on restoring and refining the existing garden, formally commissioning him in 1969 after he had made a survey in 1968.
Jellicoe’s later landscapes are strongly theoretical, indeed philosophical, referencing Jung and antiquity, and linking allegorical themes through the history of western art. At Shute such references are subtle and integrated into the landscape, for the dominant feature is a natural spring at the top of the site, one of the sources in the area of the River Nadder. Jellicoe saw the garden as a perfect project for his semi-retirement, but subsequently, while he was in his seventies, he received the most complex and ambitious projects of his career; Shute offered a place to experiment. Much of the planting was by Lady Anne Tree in consultation with her husband and Jellicoe.
The lower range of Shute House was built (or rebuilt; there may be earlier origins) in the late C16, initially as an almshouse, and subsequently a rectory, north of the medieval parish church and a series of fish ponds. In the early C18 it was extended and aggrandised with the creation of the formal front part of the house that exists today. It became a private house in the 1950s. Jellicoe’s survey in 1968 recorded an C18 ha-ha and terrace, with an overgrown C19 kitchen garden and woodland garden. There existed three main ponds within the formal garden: the first is the source of the stream at the top of the garden in its north-west corner, from which a fall of two feet led to a main ‘L’-shaped pond (called the ‘dog-leg pond’ by Jellicoe), already extended to form a canal alongside the kitchen garden, and from whose uncanalised part there was a fall of four feet to a third, smaller pond – the Cherry or Duck Pond. Below this the stream fell away steeply through woodland, constrained by small dams and including a small pool – the hammerhead pond – before the stream divides and leaves the garden.
The woodland had to be cleared of dying elm trees but there remain C18 beech trees, mainly near the house but including in the woodland garden one particularly tall specimen (now in poor condition) understood to date from the C18. Jellicoe’s plan of the garden ‘as existing’ made in 1968-1969 showed a brick wall separating this semi-wild garden from the house, with between them a lime walk across the lawn that he quickly removed. From the lawn in front of the house there were (and are) views over the ha-ha beyond the fields of Church Farm towards the downs to the south-west, across a meadow bisected by the remains of two C16 fish ponds.
Shute is dominated by its water, which flows naturally and exuberantly throughout the year, and it binds together the various elements as it twists through the site. Jellicoe made a special study of water with his wife Susan, which they published in 1971 as ‘Water: The Use of Water in Landscape Architecture’. It gives an indication of his thinking as the design for Shute took shape. He drew a distinction between ‘water in action’ and ‘contemplative water’, and studied the relationship between sculpture and water. He admired the Japanese Shinto Itsukushima shrine of AD 811 as an example of contemplative water and the Mughul gardens of Shalamar and Achabal in Kashmir as examples of active water, where water descends steep gradients in a series of waterfalls. He also admired the Italian use of water, especially the series of water courses at the Villa Lante – whose rill probably inspired that at Shute – and the Villa d’Este, where fountains were designed to explore the different sounds water can make.
Jellicoe made his initial proposals in 1969-1970, after considering and rejecting options for a tennis court, bathing pool and a cottage on part of the site. In a plan of May 1970 he reduced the length of the canal, and at the east end inserted a two-arched bridge topped by wisteria and backed by a stepped exedra, and designed bases for statues which the Trees had brought from Mereworth. The canal was adapted at the east end to secretly feed a rill created at right angles, between replanted beech hedges, with cascades at the top and small ponds with bubble fountains lower down.
Plans for details of the viewing platforms from 1975 suggest that Jellicoe’s scheme was implemented only very slowly, for only at this time the proposed five platforms overlooking the Italianate canal were reduced to two, aligned on paths through the former kitchen garden, itself re-planned as six box-hedged enclosures. The detailed plans of the garden as executed date from 1977-1979; that including the cascades down the rill (MERL AR JEL DO1 S2/12), dates from 1978 and shows its ponds as hexagonal. He designed ‘V’-shaped tubes in bronze to create an audio-visual experience, with each cascade descending to an increasingly low tone, described as resembling the treble, alto, tenor and bass of a choir (though visiting musicians disputed the claim).
The basic ideas of the camellia walk, a bog garden for the hammerhead pond at the bottom of the woodland, and a temple appeared in 1977-1978, but continued to evolve. A plan of 1977 shows Jellicoe considering the stream between the lowest of the three upper ponds and the ‘hammer-head’ pond at the bottom of the enclosed garden. This bog garden was planted with massive Gunnera manicata. This area was much less wooded than it is now, and he created a hexagonal temple of ivy and a ‘green tunnel’ connected by stepping stones across the stream to the main garden. In a triangle formed by laurel hedges which partly conceal the temple, he and Anne Tree in 1988-1993 created a series of topiary figures supported on iron frames and set in gravel, which they likened to ‘giants’ or giant chess pieces.
Jellicoe also remodelled the fish ponds in the meadow south of Shute House, visible from the house over the ha-ha and butting up to a public footpath. The first plans for this lower area date from 1979, where he proposed to expand one of the two old fish ponds. He remodelled the grassland to create a serpentine, romantic curve, annotating the plan ‘Ode to Charles Bridgeman Your Serpentine is Grand and Fine/ Forgive me when I claim that mine/ Made at Shute in seventy nine/ is much more Elegant than thine’ (AR JEL DO1 S2/11). He returned to Shute in 1986-1988 to remodel these ponds more gently and to add two more ‘connecting ponds’ that step away towards the distant hills, and to open up the view across them from the house. In his last work for the Trees he considered removing the box hedges in favour of a swimming pool and proposed a pyramid for Lady Anne to hang a crystal she had bought, as well as making revisions to the lower ponds in the field. Again, when Jellicoe last visited Shute in the 1990s he said he regarded the lower of the three ponds as unfinished, and wished it to be extended to enhance the impression of continuing further into the distance.
In 1993 new owners John and Suzy Lewis asked Sir Geoffrey to return to Shute. Sir John Lewis is the former chairman of the Wallace Collection and is still the chairman of the Public Monument and Sculpture Association and the Attingham Trust for the Study of Historic Houses and Collections, while Suzy Lady Lewis was the daughter of an eminent gardener, Esther Merton, and is herself an expert on plants. The Trees took some of their sculptures with them, and new herms were introduced to the exedra at the end of the canal and more figures have since appeared in the garden. Jellicoe’s last work, in 1994-1995, was to remodel the cascade between the main and Duck Pond, and the bog garden, with Peter Swann and Associates turning his ideas into drawings. He also produced schemes to replace the box garden with a swimming pool and to create a larger pond in the lower field, two ideas that were not developed. Spens’s book, ‘Jellicoe at Shute’, published in 1993 has many plans and contemporary photographs, and gives a good idea of the landscape at the point when the Trees moved out. ‘Country Life’ in 1993 also describes a ‘topiary bedroom’ developed by the Trees, but this has gone.
Subsequently John and Suzy Lewis have extended the garden westwards beyond the temple. The hedged Angel Walk, designed by Suzy Lewis, leads to a new piece of sculpture and conceals a tennis court and nursery. In the late 2000s a new driveway, also designed by Suzy Lewis, was created to the house from the south.
Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996) was born in London where his father was a publisher, but it was his artist mother who raised him after his parents separated. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in 1919-1923, then visited Italy with a fellow graduate, J C (Jock) Shepherd. The record of their travels was a collaborative book, ‘Italian Gardens of the Renaissance’, which led Jellicoe’s career into landscape architecture, working mainly for private clients. He unleashed his understanding of Italian architecture at Ditchley Park, and the plentiful water at Shute encouraged his return to that formative experience.
Jellicoe supported his nascent practice by teaching the third year at the Architectural Association and he became its principal in 1939-1942. He was also a founder member of the Institute of Landscape Architects, serving as its president in 1939-1949, and founded the International Federation of Landscape Architects in 1948. His pre-war work balanced landscape work with architecture, which included the modern Caveman Restaurant at Cheddar Gorge, and he established a specialism in social housing during and immediately after the Second World War. Only in the later 1950s did landscapes come to dominate the practice, with a roof garden at Harvey’s department store in Guildford and water gardens at Hemel Hempstead, while his partners (from around 1954-1955) Allan Ballantyne and Francis Coleridge continued to work on buildings such as Plymouth Civic Centre. His snake-like water gardens at Hemel Hempstead (registered at Grade II, List entry number 1001710) gave him the opportunity to explore allegorical themes, but it was the Kennedy Memorial that gave him to the chance to ‘put a subconscious idea into a work, so that it is more important and more lasting than the purely visual impression the eye receives’ (Harvey, 17). By the 1960s he had begun to absorb the theories of Carl Jung about the motivations of and influences on human behaviour, and sought to realise the ideas and history of mankind’s moulding of his environment through a series of episodes in a garden. Jellicoe’s three volumes, ‘Studies in Landscape Design’, published in 1960, 1966 and 1970, explored connections between artworks, landscapes and hidden ideas. His designs became more sophisticated, a balance of abstract and traditional elements, seen in his work at Wisley in 1971-1972 and at Shute.
Jellicoe closed his practice in 1973, and in 1975 published ‘The Landscape of Man’ with his wife Susan. An important figure in his life until her death, Susan Jellicoe (1907-1986) was a fine plantswoman who prepared planting plans for many of Jellicoe’s schemes (though not Shute) and took most of the photographs for his books. But instead of stepping back, Jellicoe seemed to work with greater freedom in his last decades. In the 1980s he began for the first time to draw extensively, producing schemes for a series of major projects that included Sutton Place (registered at Grade II*, List entry number 1001554); town plans for Modena and Brescia; the botanical and historical Moody Gardens for Galveston, Texas; and the Atlanta Historical Gardens in Georgia. By comparison with these very large schemes, Shute enabled him to tinker with a great range of ideas on a very small scale; in an interview with Michael Spens in 1993 he considered that the Atlanta scheme owed something to its sense of movement. His limited archive is held at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University, where the drawings for Shute are the most detailed: AR JEL DO1 S2, 58 items.