To The Manor Born - Revisiting Packwood House

 

Our plans to visit a different National Trust property in another county yesterday had to be shelved after a serious accident closed the motorway. Instead, we resorted to Plan B, revisiting one of our favourite local places. With Packwood House being the ancestral home of Jon's 9 x great-grandmother, Alicia Featherston (1592 - 1645), after a three-month absence, we were overdue a repeat visit. Last time we'd been (HERE) I was wearing gloves! 

We started our trip with a wander in the woods but took a wrong turn along the forest path and ended up in an overgrown swamp seemingly miles away from anywhere. With my vintage silk kaftan tucked in my knickers to avoid being torn to pieces by brambles and trying our best to avoid the ankle-high mud, we eventually found a farmer's fence to climb over and eventually reached the main road scratched, muddy and, in Jon's case, covered in bites.

The weather forecast had been for a warm day with occasional deluges and thunderstorms. The skies couldn't have looked more ominous but, other than a sharp shower on the forty-minute journey there, it stayed mercifully dry.

It's lovely that we no longer have to pre-book our National Trust visits, a welcome return to spontaneity. With distancing restrictions lifted, the previously rigid one-way system had been relaxed. Parts of the garden that had been closed previously were now accessible, including the fabulous kitchen garden where we compared the progress of our crops with theirs.

Good to see that Stonecroft isn't the only garden with giant mutant alliums!

As always, I have to photograph any gate, arch or door. I'm obsessed!

The colour co-ordinated planting made us swoon with joy. Purple, aubergine, pink...I'd never have the discipline to limit the colour palette in our garden, I want all the colours!

As an enthusiastic - but not particularly knowledgable gardener - when I spot plants that grow freely in our garden I look at when grows beside them and assume that they'll also work in ours. We've got Crocosmia, sempervivum, euphorbia, sedums and bronze fennel in abundance so if Phlox thrives at Packwood, it can in our borders, too.

Another obsession, antique wrought iron benches and the need to pose on them!

My silk kaftan escaped the swamp unscathed, thank goodness. 

The Alpine border had been roped off on our previous visits. The intense pink daisies and the electric blues of the Eryngium were an absolute delight.

Get off my land! Jon's ancestors, the Featherstons, planted these yew trees over 400 years ago. Jon's got his groovy charity shop shirt on again. As he's the former Lord of the Manor he decided he could get away with going out in his Crocs, stuff the peasants.

Currently the school summer holidays, quite a few kids were playing hide and seek amongst the trees - very considerate really, I hate having people photobombing my pictures! 

The planting along the pathway to the summer house reminded us of Stonecroft's, chaotic, colourful and alive with pollinators and plant hollyhocks, went straight to the top of the mental garden to-do list for next summer.

We loved the juxtaposition of the typically English Tudor manor house with the exotic Yukkas flanking the front door.

Of course, with the relaxation in restrictions, we could finally go inside Packwood House for the first time in almost two years. Although no longer mandatory, everyone wore masks, used the sanitiser at the door and maintained their distance. 

When asked why in 1904, Alfred Ash, a Birmingham businessman and confirmed city dweller had, somewhat impulsively, bought the 134 acre Packwood Estate in rural Warwickshire at auction he replied, I bought it because the boy wanted it.

The boy was his beloved 16-year-old only son, Graham Baron Ash (pictured above). As he preferred to be called, Baron was said to be both reserved & courageous with a party-loving generosity. His work with the family firm, which he never much cared for, came to a halt at the outbreak of the First World War when he volunteered for the medical corps. Before joining up he travelled to, amongst other places, Burma, India and Egypt, where he recorded his encounters with the people he met. In his diary, he writes of bribing a priest in China to order to acquire an ancient roof tile. This, it is said, was when a lifetime of haggling over antiques begun.

Determined never to go back into the family business after leaving the army, Baron dedicated the rest of his life to restoring Packwood House, stripping back the lavish Victorian interior, considered at that time to be hopelessly outdated, and restoring the house to reflect its original Tudor heritage. Years ahead of his time, Baron set about acquiring architectural salvage from demolished historical buildings and hunting down antique textiles, furniture and artefacts from around the world to furnish his dream country house. There were some modern comforts included, this was, after all, a young man's party pad and so en-suite bathrooms and a sprung dance floor were added to make 16th Century Packwood House the ultimate in Jazz Age party venues.

The interior is just as beautiful as the gardens. If you can go...go!

Before we went back to our car picnic we popped to the plant shop and treated ourselves to a couple of perennial Mount Fuji Phlox plants (the tall white flowers) that had been grown by the gardeners at Packwood. The weather played nicely, I was able to transplant them as soon as we got back and then it kindly chucked it down for an hour to water them in. Now we've planted a bit of Jon's ancestral lands in our garden!

We weren't expecting a charity shop outing this week what with rubble collecting, tip runs, the painter and decorator possibly starting our exterior upstairs windows, Jon's preliminary dental implant visit & the lads having their annual boosters but the vets have just called, they've been pinged and they'll all having to quarantine so we've off for a rummage in the morning. 

To add to my excitement Jon's cooking an Indian feast and its rum night. See you soon!