The enchanting gardens at Biddulph Old Hall have a peculiarly English beauty

Adopting a place with a history is rather like taking on a rescue dog. You do it on a whim and, for the first few weeks, everything is wonderful. Then doubts start to surface. All is not as it first seemed, you look regretfully at the magnitude of what you have now signed up to, the heart grows heavy. But then suddenly, one day, you find that you are miraculously devoted to it. Nigel Daly and Brian Vowles, whose architectural design company specialises in restoring old properties, looked at one such house on a dispiriting January evening in 2008. Mainly 17th century with 18th- and 19th-century alterations and additions, Biddulph Old Hall in Staffordshire was, Nigel recalls, a building ‘so incomprehensible in shape, mass and texture that we could not begin to decipher it’. And the large garden was not just an overgrown lawn with some desultory shrubs, but also had at its core a brooding and structurally precarious ruin of an Elizabethan manor house. Set aside any picturesque thoughts of Tintern Abbey – it was more Wuthering Heights meets Game of Thrones. One of the walls had, and still has, the crater created by a cannonball fired at the height of the English Civil War. ‘We shall have to buy it – obviously,’ Nigel told his partner Brian.

The couple come from very different disciplines: Nigel originally trained as an actor and Brian as an engineer. Their design work had always been for private clients – the pair won Channel 4’s Grand Designs Award for Best Restoration in 2008 for their painstaking work on a half-timbered house in Shropshire – and they had been hungrily searching for a place of their own to restore. That dark, cold January night, Biddulph Old Hall appeared out of the gloom like the Castle of Otranto, all cawing rooks and swags of thick ivy barely disguising a dangerously unstable stone tower. ‘Our first 10 years here were a relentless battle against imminent collapse, invasive damp and bankruptcy,’ says Nigel cheerfully.

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The place has an intriguing spiritual and artistic history. It was an Elizabethan safe house for secret Catholic worship in an era when Catholicism was punishable by death, while, in the early Sixties, a community of Buddhist monks came over from India to set up a sanctuary here. But it was the story of a forgotten Pre-Raphaelite painter, Robert Bateman, who spent 16 years living virtually as a recluse at Biddulph Old Hall, which has most inspired the idea of the garden.

Bateman’s circle of friends included Edward Burne-Jones, whose hallucinatory series of paintings entitled The Legend of the Briar Rose is based on the story of Sleeping Beauty. In the four pictures, young men and women seem drugged by the verdant beauty of the natural world, which threatens to ensnare and overwhelm them. Bateman and his wife Caroline created a garden within the ruins that rejected high-Victorian formality and embraced the wildness of the Briar Rose paintings. ‘We have taken our inspiration from the descriptions and sepia photographs that record this spectral garden,’ explains Nigel, whose interest in Bateman resulted in him writing The Lost Pre-Raphaelite: The Secret Life & Loves of Robert Bateman (Wilmington Square, £25). ‘We gained an understanding of exactly the right moment to intervene, which has required fiendish levels of intuition if the overall effect is to be successfully maintained.’

They have made a white garden within the shattered stone walls, one of the most difficult styles to achieve in England because rain – and there is a lot of it in Staffordshire – turns white petals to brown in an instant. But Nigel and Brian are nothing if not tenacious. Many gardeners would have weakened and let colour dilute the original vision, but their garden remains as white and frothing as a cumulus cloud. White climbing roses, including ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ and ‘Madame Legras de Saint Germain’, form the core of the enclosed garden within the ruins. These are underplanted with loose arrangements of regal and Madonna lilies, as well as white varieties of foxglove, agapanthus, valerian and monkshood. Architectural grey and silver foliage plants such as lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantina), Senecio candidans ‘Angel Wings’ and the large, pleated leaves of artichokes stop the garden from becoming too uniform in colour and texture.

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Gardens that look backwards can often descend into pastiche, but the beauty of Biddulph Old Hall is that it gathers up all its history, nods to it respectfully but never becomes bogged down. You do not need to know anything about its complex and mysterious past to appreciate it, but the stories Nigel and Brian tell deepen the enjoyment of this palimpsest of a place. A sinuous knot garden references the original Elizabethan manor without looking whimsical or out of place. Even the most self-conscious of the gardens, an enclosed rectangular reflecting pool that resembles a scene from Bateman’s sensuous paintings, is beautiful in its own right.

It is a very hard garden to resist. It has a peculiarly English quality, in which the centuries seem to collapse in on themselves and an era 400 years ago seems more vivid than the present day. The Old Hall’s history is only a backdrop to the family dramas that have played out there, in war and peace. Recusant Catholics fearing for their lives; a forgotten Pre-Raphaelite painter with a family secret; Buddhist monks finding Nirvana among the Elizabethan ruins; and, most recently, Nigel and Brian breathing life and character back into the place. But for all its beguiling charm, the enclosed garden has a darker side. Even in high summer with the roses in full bloom, you have the unsettling feeling that if you turned your back for just a second, those thorny roses and lush ferns would stretch out and close over you and, within a minute, you would be completely lost.

Nigel Daly Design: nigeldaly.co.uk.
Biddulph Old Hall, Biddulph, Staffordshire is open strictly by appointment only to groups of up to 30 people. To arrange a garden visit, email brian@nigeldaly.co.uk