A Southern BELLE

Born in 1919 to the fifth (and last) Earl of Orford and his wife, Emily, at Wolterton Hall, the family’s 500-acre estate in Norfolk, Lady Anne Walpole first experienced Rosemoor as a fishing lodge, used only between March and May. Following the death of her father in 1931, Lady Anne and her mother moved full time to Rosemoor, where they stayed until the outbreak of World War Two.

At that time, the garden was, as Lady Anne describes it, ‘dull and labour intensive, typically Victorian with great use of annuals in beds around the house’. In 1932 the family made their first mark on the garden, when the Stone Garden was built on a patch of rough land. Designed by Lady Anne’s mother, it was built by their chauffeur-handyman and woodman, who collected stone from the nearby lime