IT was an otherwise ordinary day in 1962 when, following a tip-off from a local newspaper article, botanical illustrator and writer Miles Hadfield found himself beside a main road, peering through delicate, iron-grilled clairvoyé set into an old brick wall. Stone pineapples topped the supporting columns. It was, he later noted, ‘an unusual lay-by’. Entering and passing through the rampant willow herb, he could see ‘distorted yews’ and ‘a gem of a pavilion’. Together with Gilbert Harrison of the National Trust, Hadfield had just broken into the derelict gardens of Westbury Court in Gloucestershire.
The Victorian house had been demolished, as were so many others in the 1950s, but the
