THERE has been a garden at West Lavington Manor in Wiltshire for at least 400 years. John Aubrey visited it late in the 17th century. He particularly remembered that ‘through the length of it there runneth a fine cleare trowt stream; walled with brick on each side, to hinder the earth from mouldring down.’ That stream still flows through the garden, channelled between its old brick walls.
Aubrey also recalled that the garden had originally been laid out in the 1630s by Sir John Danvers, ‘who first taught us the way of Italian gardens’. Danvers, he wrote, ‘had well travelled France and Italy and made good observations… He had a very fine fancy, which lay chiefly for gardens and architecture.’ Danvers’s Italianate garden has, of course, long since disappeared. In fact, there is a long pause in what we know of
