The Great Country Estates of Britain Series. Part Six: Syon Park

Syon House and its 200 acre park is the London home of the Duke of Northumberland, whose family have lived here for over 400 years. Originally the site of a medieval abbey, Syon was named after Mount Zion in the Holy Land. The abbey was dedicated to the Bridgettine Order, established in the 14th century by the great Swedish mystic St Bridget.

Above: An etching of a likeness of the abbey

One of the last great abbeys to be built (founded by King Henry V in 1415), Syon was dissolved by King Henry VIII in 1539.

In 1547, King Henry VIII's coffin was brought to Syon on its way to Windsor for burial. Reputedly, it burst open during the night and in the morning dogs were found licking up the remains! This was regarded as a divine judgement for the King's desecration of Syon Abbey during the dissolution of the monasteries.

Following the discovery of the ruins of the Abbey Church in 2003, Birkbeck University of London have continued to undertake annual excavations. Our friend Becky spent most of last summer there excavating.

After the suppression of the abbey, the estate became Crown property and became the possession of the 1st Duke of Somerset, the Lord Protector to the young son of King Henry VIII, Edward VI. He built Syon House in the Italian Renaissance style, over the foundations of the west end of the huge abbey church, (which was the size of a cathedral), between 1547 and his death by execution in 1552.

Syon was then acquired by a rival, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, whose son, Lord Guildford Dudley, married Lady Jane Grey, the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII. It was at Syon that she was formally offered the Crown, which she accepted reluctantly. She was taken to London by boat up the Thames and proclaimed Queen. Nine days later, she was displaced by King Henry VIII's eldest daughter, Mary Tudor, who had her executed the following year.

Mary Tudor re-established the abbey at Syon. But when she died suddenly in 1558 the nuns left the country on the accession of her Protestant sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

In 1594, Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, acquired Syon through his marriage to Dorothy Devereux and the Percy family has lived at Syon House ever since. Henry Percy led an extraordinary life. He was a great scholar, became the patron of the English astronomer Thomas Harriot, the first man to map the surface of the moon before Galileo and earned his nickname ‘Wizard’ by experimenting in alchemy. He was a friend of Sir Walter Raleigh and their interest in the New World led them to consume great quantities of tobacco and potatoes. But it was on 4 November 1605, that the Earl’s fortunes declined overnight. A distant cousin, Thomas Percy, who was a staunch Roman Catholic, dined with the Earl at Syon before joining Guy Fawkes and his accomplices the next day, in the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament. As one of the principal ‘gunpowder plotters’, Thomas was shot trying to make his escape. Although innocent of the charges brought against him, the Earl was implicated through his association with Thomas and the fateful meeting at Syon. He was confined in the Tower of London for the next 15 years on the orders of King James I.

His nephew, the 10th Earl, became a great patron of the foremost artists of his day, including Anthony Van Dyck and Peter Lely. But it was his reputation for impartiality during the English Civil War, which led him to become governor to King Charles I’s younger son, James Duke of York, from 1646-9, who was to become the future King James II. The younger children of King Charles I lived at Syon in 1646 and the King visited them during his imprisonment at Hampton Court Palace.

Above: a painting of Syon House dating from before Robert Adam and Capability Brown were employed to modernise the house and garden in around 1760. However no major changes were made to the external structure of the building. There are various distortions in this painting: the house is shown closer to the river than it really is, the river is shown too small, and the boats too large.

In 1750, Sir Hugh Smithson inherited the Percy estates through his wife, Elizabeth Seymour (the Percy family name had ceased due to the 11th Earl of Northumberland only producing a female heir). Proud of her ancestry, Elizabeth and her husband revived the Percy name. In 1750, Sir Hugh became Earl and then 1st Duke of Northumberland in 1766. The first Duke and Duchess of Northumberland were determined to make their mark on Syon Park; their solution was to completely redesign the estate.

The Scottish architect, Robert Adam was instructed to remodel the interior of Syon House and the Northumbrian designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, to lay out the grounds in the fashionable style of the English Landscape Movement. Brown and Adam had more in common than just being fashionable designers; both were aspiring to create a new ideal form of an earlier time. Whilst Adam’s architecture was inspired by classical Rome, so Brown took the medieval deer park as a model for an ideal countryside. Both were consciously borrowing the connotations of wealth, power and antiquity, and packaging them for their clients.

Above and Below: Adam's plans for Syon House

The Duke was one of Robert Adam’s chief patrons and engaged him soon after Adam returned from Italy. In 1761, Adam published his plan for the interior decoration of Syon House, which included a complete suite of rooms on the principal level, together with a rotunda to be erected in the main courtyard. In the event, five main rooms on the west, south and east sides of the House, from the Great Hall to the Long Gallery were refurbished in the Neo-classical style. It was enough to place a stamp on the architect and his work in England and it is said, “at Syon the Adam style was actually initiated”. Syon House is feted as Adam’s early English masterpiece and has been recognised as the finest surviving evidence of his revolutionary use of colour, as in the design for the Mirror Room below...

The Anteroom (below) also demonstrates the use of colour, particularly in the scagliola floor.

Above: The Long Gallery

Below: The Red Drawing Room

Above and Below: The Great Hall, one of the Adams' finest works.

The power and influence of the Dukes of Northumberland was confirmed when the 3rd Duchess was appointed official governess to the young Princess Victoria. The bedrooms of Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, are still named after them and retain their original beds. The young Princess would have enjoyed the conservatory in the gardens, which was completed in 1830, the first conservatory to be built from metal and glass on a large scale...

The official website: Syon Park

The Bluebell Walk...

One of the quintessential delights of an English estate is a Bluebell wood - a dense copse of deciduous English trees such as Oak and Birch, under-planted with a generous carpet of bluebells (and other assorted spring-time bulbs). It evokes memories of the English countryside and many a ramble.

We have designed and planted our own Bluebell Walk...

It is 100m long and runs from the main drive down to the lake and olive grove. Everything looks a little sad at present, what with it being winter, and the trees being newly-planted, but we have high hopes that in the fertile soil it wont take more than a couple of years to really get established.

We hope that one day the line of Silver Birches above will look more like these below...

We await the advent of Spring, when the dormant and sparse woody branches will burst forth into verdant splendour and we may get a glimpse of what it will look like in the fullness of time. One can hardly see the trees from a distance during Winter...

We used a combination of trees in shades of Blue and Silver and achieve the colour scheme we wanted: Silver Birches (Betula pedula), Weeping Silver Pears (Pyrus salicifolia pendula) and Bluebells (Hyacinthoides sps), with a planting of Plumbago and Alders on the other side of the walk.

Above and Below: Weeping Silver Pears (Pyrus salicifolia pendula)

The current Winter state of our Pears...


Below: A bosquet of Silver Birch Trees

And examples of Bluebell under plantings....

The Hydrangea Lawn...

The Hydrangea Lawn is located to the West of the Chapel Garden and Manor House. Stretching 56 by 100 metres, is bordered by a Cupressocyparis hedge, of the ovensii cultivar. This cultivar produces a lovely dense evergreen hedge, similar to Leighton's green, and other Leilandii species, but is canker resistant. It will produce a hedge which is as amenable to hard clipping as yew and other traditional hedge trees, but grows very quickly (about 3 feet per year). We will let the hedge grow to 6 feet in height, so that it provides an ample backdrop to the Hydrangea borders on the West and Eastern sides of the lawn...

The Hydrangeas will grow to a height of 3-4 feet, and will be mainly pink and blue varieties, being intermittently fertilised with lime to create the difference in colour - the colour of the blooms is related to how much aluminium is available in the soil. For hydrangea blooms to be pink, the aluminium in the soil needs to be sequestered from the plant's roots. Adding garden lime several times a year will help to raise the pH. Hydrangeas take up aluminium best at a lower pH, therefore raising the pH will help to reduce the blue of the blooms. Aim for a pH of about 6.0 - 6.2. The plants may fail to thrive at a pH above 6.4. To turn hydrangeas blue, aluminium must be present in the soil. To ensure that aluminium is present, aluminium sulfate may be added to the soil around the hydrangeas. It should be well diluted and added prior to flowering. Once the soil has the required aluminium, you need to lower the pH with acidic vegetable matter, such as coffee grounds, fruit and vegetable peels, grass clippings etc.

If the soil naturally contains aluminium and is acidic (low pH) the color of the hydrangea will tend toward shades of blue and/or purple.

The choice of fertilser will also affect the colour. A fertilizer low in phosphorus and high in potassium is helpful in producing a good blue colour. Superphosphates and 'blood and bone' should be avoided when trying to produce blue flowers.

The long axis of the lawn will run down to the circular Nymphaeum at the northern end. On either side of the entrance to this are 2 semicircular hedges in negative relief to the entrance, with a Black Mulberry tree (Morus nigrans) planted in the centre of each, mirrored by 2 Black Mulberry trees at the Southern end of the lawn.

Through an elaborately clipped arch in the hedge on the western side of the lawn is a woodland pathway which leads down to Spencer's corner, through a field of red and white Horse Chestnuts (Aesculus hippocastanum and Aesculus carnea respectively) See post on Spencer's corner (to come). Through a similar arch, on the eastern side of the lawn, One enters the Chapel garden.

This lawn is designed mainly for Croquet and Gin on a hot summer's afternoon, but I think with the hedging and the statuary, will look just as beautiful on a frosty winter's morning.

Draft Of The Grand Plan

Well. We are now approaching 4000 trees planted over the last month, with a few more set to arrive soon. That will be all for this year. With so many trees needing to be planted at once, it was important that we knew where they were all going. Thanks to a rough map, we had that taken care of well in advance.

But for all of those out there in the ether of cyberspace, who are unable to stand in the middle of the park and survey all the hard work, I have had a second [but still rather unaccomplished] attempt at drafting a plan of the park (the 15 acres of farm excluded from this plan) so that One may get an idea of the overall layout of Willowbrook Park, and how each of the themed gardens and areas fit together...

Above Plan revised August 2013

In future posts (and with future refinements) I shall add to this plan, (which is still in a semi-embryonic state) and also take each separate area of the plan and illustrate the design points in finer detail, starting with The Hydrangea Lawn.

The Jetty...

The jetty has been complete for a few weeks now. Having decided where it was going and how big it was going to be, we had to decide how we were going to construct it. Our friend Richard helped us with the build. He did some recognisance work during his holidays at the lake, kayaking under the many private jetties on the lake and discovering how they were put together. After this we set about the construction...

It started off as posts in the ground. We cemented them in with quick drying wet condition concrete mix (it doesn't get much wetter than this)....

We then affixed 6" x 2" H4 treated timber to the marine grade strainer posts,
all the way around the jetty with 6" lag screws, ensuring that it was level...

After that we braced the framing internally with further lengths of 6" x 2" timber and
lag screws, pre-drilling all the holes with a brace and bit...

Finally, we placed the top boards on and nailed them in with 4" nails, then trimmed the edges with a circular saw...

Above and Below: Almost finished. I was waiting till the lake was lined before I took the final shots. Now there is a finished jetty, with an empty lake!

We then promptly ended up draining the lake in vain. We managed to get the water down to a few inches in the bottom, but when the company turned up to install the liner, they said that they couldn't install it if there was any water in the lake at all, because they could not weld the liner to the rubber boots they had made for around the jetty posts. Frustrating! (You'd think that a company that specialised in lining ponds and lakes would have equipment that could cope with surface water!).

So we now have to wait until it dries out completely, which will be about December. In the meantime we have planted all the bulbs that were to go around the lake, elsewhere, and have post-poned the order for all the water lilies and lotuses. Still, it will give me time to restore the boat.