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In summer, the garden at Yarlington is a busy place. By day, the wide lawns host a succession of charity fairs, glamorous galas and weddings, while, at night, strains of Donizetti and Mozart float out over the dusky parkland as the Garden Opera makes its annual visit, bringing a romantic magic to the darkening, evening - scented grounds.
But today all is silent, and the garden seems to hold its breath The wind that bowls across the park - fierce enough, at times, to tear great limbs from the gardens ancient cedar, and send mighty hay bales rolling like tennis balls - is quieted, sc that the frost thickens on the twigs and leaves, sprinkles the topiary with diamond dust, turns seed heads into jewels and the papery heads of hydrangeas into strange, glittering, coral - like forms.
Yarlington is not an easy place to garden: the soil is heavy, the visitors voracious, the wind a constant, remorseless foe. The house was built in 1782, and no less a commentator than George III, passing by en route to Weymouth, was moved to remark on the hubris of the squire, to build a house in such an evposed spot: "Hah! A hold man. to hiiild a house there".
But the red brick house, completed in 1782, had a modest grace and dignity, and the views over the Somerset meadows were calm and wide, spreading out towards the ancient earthworks of Cadbury Castle. For Carolyn and Charles de Salis, newly married in 1960, Yarlington was irresistible. The building was still badly battered from its wartime role as a home for evacuees, and the grounds consisted of little more than a dilapidated rose garden and some encroaching woodland. Yet the original walled kitchen garden and dovecote had survived, miraculously, unscathed. And the couple felt that, with time, they could restore the house and create a suitably elegant setting for it.
They began by making a simple, stylish yew - hedged court to frame the entrance The next step was to dig a ha - ha to the south and east of the property, giving uninterruped parkland views of grazing cattle and shapely trees, in the English landscape style that was the height of fashion when Yarlington was built. This left them with a wide, featureless lawn on the south side. So, over the next decade, guided by both a sense of history and a need for practicality, they divided the area into three. On the east side a new rose garden was established, set round a formal lily pond and protected from the wind by a stilt hedge of pleached limes. On the west side, they felled a block of trees, leaving just a grove of copper beeches, and dug out an Italianate sunken garden, bounded by a balustrade and presided over by statues of Apollo and Artemis.
In the formal layout of the sunken garden, the love of evergreens that characterised the early 18th century is in evidence - clipped box hedges, balls of phillyrea, sheets of ivy, but enriched with specimens that would have been unknown when the original garden was laid out - glossy, fragrant sarcococca. puckered Viburnum japonicum and handsome shrubs from Australasia - pyramids of Pittosporum Garnettii, spears of phormium and the great bastions of olearia flanking the arbour. In this wisteria - clad shelter, with its long view across the lawn to the rose garden, hangs a plaque of Napoleon: Charles is an authority on the Emperor, and collector of Napoleonic artefacts.
Behind the sunken garden lies a walled swimming pool garden, and from here winding paths lead through myrtle and mahonia, osmanthus and Itea ilicifolia to the woodland dell, with its plantings of acers and katsuras, and to the west lawn and its pergola. Based on a design by Victorian garden guru John Loudon, it is covered not with roses but with the crab apple Malus John Downie, wreathed with blossom in spring and now sparkling with intricate flowers of ice. A laburnum tunnel leads out towards the park and, behind a low yew hedge, the land falls abruptly away to reveal a deep, mysterious hollow of rocks and ferns that was probably created in the late 19th century to accommodate the Victorian passion for ferns. This was discovered in the 1960s, piled with rubbish, and gardener Fraser Gardner has restored it, clearing the site of the original pool, which he hopes will, one day, be filled again with water trickling romantically down the rocks. He has also uncovered overgrown paths, planting the sides with shade - loving varieties.
Fraser is particularly fond of the kitchen garden, with its walls and layout unchanged for more than 200 years. "I love the sense of continuity," he muses, surveying the clean, box - edged quadrants, the mossy walls with their tracery of immaculately pruned fruit, the old vine house tucked into the warmest corner. "Its a place where you can dream," he says, with quiet pleasure. And never more so than today when the whole garden is held, hushed and white, in winters icy enchantment, every leaf outlined in crystal, every tree transformed into a shimmering fountain of frosted silver, dazzling and perfect.
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Landscape Design