How the Romans plan to conquer the Chelsea Flower Show
Toga-wearing wine-pourers, a peristyle around a flowering garden, luminous frescos and water gushing through channels – you would be forgiven for thinking yourself caught up in some kind of bacchanalian time travel to ancient Rome at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. It all comes courtesy of the enterprising hotel The Newt in Somerset. This year the show’s headline sponsor has chosen to build The Newt in Somerset: A Roman Garden, a courtyard affair that provides a horticultural glimpse of Roman Britain, on its large Main Avenue plot. The Newt team – including archaeologist Ric Weeks and head gardener Stephen Herrington – are just the people with the knowledge and enthusiasm to produce this aesthetic and historical delight, because they have already done something similar: one area of The Newt’s 1,000 acres, which sit between Bruton and Castle Cary, contains the Villa Ventorum, an airy reconstructed Roman villa, complete with spa complex and hilltop garden, inspired by the excavations of its own original Romano-British country estate.
In April showers, from under the colonnade of the aptly named Villa of the Winds, there is a wide view over the Somerset hills as timeless as the methods involved in the villa’s creation. Even the rainwater is being collected via the gutters into butts. There is the villa, its garden and an innovative glass-sided museum, which has made one original mosaic touchable and the whole project kinetic, with timelines and exhibits of finds. A fragment of a gold toga brooch shows this was probably the home of a local leader, a magistrate, one of 50 or so legislators of his rank in Britain.
Koos Bekker (former CEO of South Africa’s Naspers media company) and his wife, Karen Roos (sometime editor of Elle Decoration SA), bought the estate in 2013 and, with the knowledge they had gleaned from their South African property, Babylonstoren, set about the mammoth project of converting ravishing, Georgian-fronted Hadspen House and its farmyard into two rather different hotel centres with 40 bedrooms (a sort of Austen versus Hardy, panelling versus rustic, contrast), with pools, a spa and three restaurants.
They also, says Weeks, an archaeologist who trained in Winchester and Oxford, provided unique conditions for excavation: 18 months instead of the usual four or five, and a whole site, rather than a few trenches.
Talk of a Roman villa here first surfaced in the mid-19th century, when the digging of a turnpike road turned up coins and fragments of pottery. The land was farmed gingerly until the Second World War, when the dig for victory necessitated extra pushing and shoving, and more treasures emerged from the deep. When the gardener Penelope Hobhouse took on the estate, with her husband Paul, a tenant farmer told her about the finds, and she began to excavate, fortuitously, right over a mosaic floor. The dig continued until about 1970 with the help of archaeologist Crystal Bennett, a Bruton local who had a glittering career at Petra, the ancient red city in Jordan. Then all went quiet until the Bekkers, who have a ‘great passion for history’, bought the place, and invited the Oxford archaeologists in. What they unearthed turned out to be a very important part of Roman Britain.
Lying on a strategic trade route – the A303 is an ancient road from east to west – the settlement here became a big farm populated by Celtic Britons with ‘five or six roundhouse settlements’ and was taken over by the Romans soon after the invasion in AD 43. Within a generation the locals had adopted the Roman way of life, and over the next 250 years or so this became a truly high-status dwelling. The bathhouse was upgraded into something really elaborate: the walls were still perfectly preserved under the mud when the dig began, and featured traces of a very expensive fresco paint containing ground marble. Other signs of opulence included the huge quantity of glass found on site, at a time when it was more expensive than silver. The house was glazed, and pieces of drinking vessels were found. Weeks claims there was ‘more glass than on the six other villa sites I’ve worked on combined’.
Detective work also found that the house was used seasonally, probably in summer – rubbish buried in layers showed that the villa was occupied only for three months a year; furthermore, the burials on the site were all low status ‘indicating that the magistrate and his family were buried at Ilchester’, which was then the site of the main local forum and more important than the one at Bath. The mosaics the archaeologists found – one of Diana, one of Bacchus – were of local stone and are now on vibrant display in the museum.
The villa itself was meticulously rebuilt a few metres north of the original, on the same orientation, using original methods such as wattle and daub walls, rammed-earth floors and fresco painting, and opened in 2022. The entrance hall – vestibulum – has a view straight through to the garden, like a Palladian villa (an architect once told me double doors back to front are ‘nature’s air conditioning’). Everything is built as it would have been. The cupboards, for example, are copies of ones at Pompeii. Here is a Newt worker dressed as the steward with his lyre, cosplaying protecting his master as he undertakes the daily business of running his estate. The rooms become increasingly stately – amusingly there is a fresco featuring the Prince and Princess of Wales along with the Duke of Sussex, painted in togas and sandals on horseback, Roman style. ‘Maybe we will repaint him as George,’ says Weeks. The grandest reception room has painted roundels of British birds, copied from a ceiling at Fishbourne, a Roman palace in Chichester.
The bathing complex of cold plunge pool, games and changing room competes only with the current spa at the hotel with its hammam, sauna and salt room. The original family would have moved around the home ‘depending on the time of day and light’. Any form of artificial light, olive oil or tallow was a huge expense; the house is built to embrace its garden views.
A colonnade sweeps along the back of the villa, leading into the garden; Weeks thinks, ‘having spent a couple of winters up here’, it may well have gone out much farther, forming a kind of cloister surround. This they have chosen to build at Chelsea. The Villa Ventorum’s garden is based on what they think it looked like around AD 350, in its pomp; the Chelsea one is a recreation of an earlier style, from AD 78, just before the eruption of Vesuvius. Herrington drew it by hand; the estate architect, Katie Lewis, designed the building for Chelsea. Garden historians have gone through medicinal records, cookery books, writings by Pliny the Elder and Columella (the Roman Alan Titchmarsh), as well as evidence from paintings and seeds found on digs, and worked out what would have grown when, down to the planting arrangements.
Herrington, who used to work at the National Trust’s Nymans and at Leonardslee Lakes & Gardens, as well as in botanic gardens in Scotland, says you can glean enormous amounts of detail. Here in Somerset, the plants are split into those used for medicine and those grown for food. In Chelsea they are mixed together: ‘They would have had formal elements like hedges and herbaceous borders.’ They also had statuary, water pools and channels, manure and volcanic ash for compost, and even crazy paving and topiary.
What are the plants? Herrington says, ‘No cultivars, all old varieties obviously.’ Compared with planning most Chelsea gardens, the limited plant choice seems to have been something of a relief. Here in Somerset, the myrtle struggles – ‘I don’t know why they built the house right here,’ says Herrington – but it will flourish at Chelsea, alongside a central black mulberry tree (the Romans brought mulberries with them, carrying seeds across the empire). There will be French lavender, pomegranates, wild cherries and opium poppies – they used the latter for pain relief – and Gallic roses, cabbage roses, Madonna lilies and sweet iris. Of the edible and medicinal, wild carrot, thyme, camomile, catnip, oxeye daisy and wild angelica will feature. The topiary: yew and bay. Plus braziers on stone plinths, herm statues (the heads on plinths that decorated Roman gardens) and fountains in basins.
Making any show garden presents a logistical challenge – a heart-pounding mix of timing, transport, heat, water and luck. The Newt has a nursery on site at Avalon Farm (from where its retail empire operates, selling everything from marmalade to its own cider), where they are growing the plants, although the roses will be dug up from the villa garden. It will all arrive in vans at Chelsea, although ‘sometimes you end up putting things in fridges or hothouses’, and then for a few days there is feverish activity and enormous camaraderie as the work reaches its climax before the show opens on 21 May. Weeks will be there explaining all in a toga, with Herrington coming and going, and there will be wine and ‘cyder’ and live music. The Newt sponsors Chelsea not only because of the brand exposure but also because they share a belief in the power of gardens, and indeed the desire to support gardeners. Chelsea Flower Show, held in the grounds of the Royal Hospital every year since 1913 (give or take a few wars and a pandemic) is the glorious start to the London summer season, dear to green-fingered Brits who come from all over the country to enjoy the combination of blooms, wonder gardens and royal patronage.
Back on the estate there are multiple other garden delights – the rebuilt parabola garden near Hadspen House, originally installed by Penelope Hobhouse; The Story of Gardening museum, Beezantium (a lakeside apiary), a farm shop, a house and garden shop, a greenhouse, a gelateria, three exquisite and different restaurants – the Botanical Rooms in the house, the Garden Café and the Farmyard Kitchen – all serving homegrown produce. In the Georgian house, the nearby stable block and – half a mile away – the Farm Yard, homemade clementine cruffins (a cross between a croissant and a muffin) miraculously appear at tea time.
It’s hard to leave the estate, but Bruton, a few miles away, is seriously modish. This was perhaps kicked off by the arrival of the Hauser & Wirth gallery, former employer of both The Newt’s personable CEO Ed Workman and his equally dynamic wife Alice, who runs the gallery Bo Lee and Workman, with Jemma Hickman, in a restored Methodist chapel in the town. Phoebe Philo’s mother Celia and younger sister Frankie have set up a vintage homeware shop, Philo & Philo. Phoebe has a house nearby; so do Sam Taylor-Johnson, Cameron Mackintosh, Stella McCartney –you get the picture. The old post office now houses Caroline Strecker’s Rag of Colts, reshaping saddles into leather handbags.
From the end spring new beginnings, as Pliny wrote at the time when the villa’s former owners ruled the roost.