Levens Hall

In the village of Levens, just a few miles south of Kendal, near the entrance to the Lake District, sits Levens Hall. While the inside is pretty amazing, I did not visit the house itself. Rather, I opted to have a go at the gardens.

This place has a long history. From Wikipedia we learn...

The first house on the site was a pele tower built by the Redman family in around 1350. Much of the present building dates from the Elizabethan era, when the Bellingham family extended the house. The Bellinghams, who were responsible for the fine panelling and plasterwork in the main rooms, sold the house and estate in 1689 to Colonel James Grahme, or Graham, Keeper of the Privy Purse to King James II, who made a number of additions to the house in the late 17th century. His son Henry Graham was a knight of the shire for Westmorland.

Further additions were made in the early 19th century.

As you can see, these windows seem pretty much in keeping with the sorts of things you see in the many other Elizabethan era buildings that remain in the country. 

No, what attracted me was the gardens.

Levens has a celebrated and large topiary garden, which was first created by the French gardener Guillaume Beaumont, the gardener of King James II and the designer of the grounds at Hampton Court.^[3] Beaumont also planned the tree planting in the deer park, now inhabited by black fallow deer and Bagot goats.

The park and gardens laid out by Beaumont between 1689 and 1712 have survived remarkably intact. They have been described as retaining "almost all of the essential elements of the completed scheme as shown on maps of the park and gardens of 1730".^[4] In December 2021 the gardens were featured in the BBC series Gardeners' World.^[5]

While I'm fairly sure that many of the trees are not part of the ones originally planted at the end of the 17th and beginning of the 18th century, I am confident that quite a lot of effort has been made to keep this looking as much as possible as it was intended.

This is first topiary in the world and it is meticulously maintained.