Blog Lake District
← Back to Blog
Hutton in the Forest's garden has never been redesigned wholesale by a single famous name. Instead it has been reworked, generation after generation, by the family who actually live there — which gives it a genuinely personal feel that's harder to find at some of the grander, more professionally landscaped gardens nearby.
Henry Vane Fletcher — by all accounts an enthusiastic planter, responsible for over fifty thousand trees across the estate — built the Walled Garden in the 1730s, with high brick walls originally intended for training fruit trees. The Cascade and Middle Pond followed in the 1750s, engineered to harness water from the beck running through the garden, and are best viewed today across the wildflower meadows of the Low Garden.
The nineteenth century added a formal rhododendron garden, laid out under the guidance of the architect Anthony Salvin for Lady Vane in the 1870s. Over time it became overgrown and tangled — by the current Lord Inglewood's own account, something of a "muddle" by the time he inherited — and has since been progressively cleared and replanted, opening up views to the Cascade that had been lost for decades.
The current Lord and Lady Inglewood, who inherited the estate in 1989, have continued the pattern of active change rather than preservation for its own sake: restoring the Walled Garden into today's flower garden, clearing the Low Garden, and planting an arboretum around the historic dovecote. Hutton's garden is, in a real sense, still being written.
The gardens at Hutton in the Forest can be included in a bespoke gardens and heritage day.