Episode 50 - Last of The Laskett? A Great British Garden Under Threat (EMERGENCY BROADCAST)

The Laskett in Herefordshire is one of the most remarkable gardens to have been created in the 20th century but now it’s future is threatened.  Sir Roy Strong, scholar, museum director and the author of over 70 erudite books, and his theatre-designer wife Julia Trevelyan Oman created it as a bolt hole from London, beginning in 1973 – a bleak time of industrial unrest and inflation.  It grew to become the largest formal garden made in the UK since the Second World War.  This intensely personal arcadia was a place of memory, where plants, statuary and garden spaces remembered people whom the Strongs knew and important and recorded important events in the Strongs’ life together.  Clive and John describe the origins and importance of this Elysium, which can be comipared to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.

A plan for the garden

After a long and painful reflection, the National Trust turned down Sir Roy’s offer to g give it them.  It seemed though that a solution had been found when half a dozen years ago it went instead to the gardening charity Perennial.  Perennial has found that it cannot generate the visitors needed to make it pay, not least because they have not succeeded in making a car park.  Since their main charitable purpose is to support working gardeners in old age, illness or hard times, they cannot keep a loss-making property on their books and have decided, if possible, to find a new owner.  If one does not come forward, The Laskett will be broken up.  Already the catalogue of a sale at the Cotswolds auction house of Chorley’s has been published, although the date of the auction has been postponed from the end of this month until June.  
In this emergency episode of ypompod, John and Clive discuss The Lastkett’s importance.  How will it be viewed by future generations?  Is it possible for gardens to keep their soul once the people who first made them have left?  What should we think of this cultural catastrophe in the making?

The Laskett is a beautiful and picturesque place