The hairy times faced by Hestercombe

There are many ways for a garden to be lost, and Hestercombe​, in Somerset, England, has had close shaves with several. Let me tell you about just two.

Edward Lutyens​ and Gertrude Jekyll are the best-known partnership in English garden history. Miss Jeykll, as she was universally known, already had a towering reputation as a plantswoman and garden-making artist when she met the hotshot young architect Edward Lutyens. Together this slightly odd couple made more than 100 gardens, distinguished by Lutyens' architectural spaces, staircases, pergolas, rills and terraces, and Jekyll's masterful mixed plantings, especially her borders of carefully, expertly, modulated colour.

In 1903, the pair built a garden in front of the house at Hestercombe, widely considered one of their finest works, called the Great Plat. But the early 20th century was tough on Hestercombe and by the 1970s, it was the headquarters of the county fire brigade. The Great Plat seemed to some to be a perfect training ground for firefighters and a proposal was put to bitumen it. Put to the vote, the Great Plat survived – by one skinny vote.

The near-loss (the garden equivalent of wallpapering a Botticelli fresco) triggered support for restoration. The crumbling stonework was repaired and Jekyll's planting restored after plans were found under some tins in one of the garden sheds. Now her much-loved seaside daisy sprouts from Lutyens' beautiful walls and staircases; the big glossy ears of bergenia line the borders; and roses and wisteria dangle from the pergola that backs the whole vista.

A further flirtation with total annihilation occurred around the back of the house, and was once again averted by just one individual. Philip White was working at Hestercombe for the Somerset Wildlife Trust in the early 1990s, and on lunch time rambles through the overgrown valley at the back of the house noted what looked like the ruins of an 18th century landscape garden – the edges of a silted-up lake, a derelict waterfall, the tumbled pillars of a former temple.

White's research revealed a landscape garden had been designed by artist and former Hestercombe owner Copplestone Warre Bampfylde. To generate interest and funds to reclaim it, White organised an exhibition of Bampfylde's​ work, and when that didn't make the budget to finance the dredging of lakes and the felling of hundreds of trees, he remortgaged his house. The re-created garden was opened in 1997; with one of Bampfylde's paintings of the fern-edged cascade at Hestercombe acting as a template for the replanting.

The various ways in which Hestercombe has dodged the bullet of neglect that is the usual suspect in the death of gardens adds a frisson to a visit. As well as the utopian serenity of the landscaped garden, the cleverness of Jekyll, and all the Lutyens ideas you want to take home, a visit generates an immense feeling of gratitude – it's still here.