All Hands Garden Group visit to Gatton Park, Surrey by coach

Luckily, it was the day after the hottest Bank Holiday May temperatures that we set off for the historic Gatton Park. We were welcomed with a hot drink and homemade cake in the magnificent Gatton Hall tea room before splitting into two groups for our guided tour of the grounds, starting with its history. The hamlet of ‘Gatone’ was valued in the Domesday book at £6 but from the 18^th Century was owned by various families who initially built the hall itself and engaged Capability Brown to provide a typical landscape. Gatton was given parliamentary borough status in 1450 with the privilege of having two MPs, both in the pocket of the lord of the Gatton Manor and was one of the infamous Rotten Boroughs and described by William Cobbett in 1830 as a “very rascally spot of earth” until the 1832 Reform Act did away with it.

The last person to own Gatton Park outright was Sir Jeremiah Colman, of mustard fame, in 1888. He made use of the glasshouses and became a global authority on orchids. Colman’s additions to the park include the Japanese garden, the rock garden, the pleasure gardens and the parterre.

Our tour of the garden took us through the rock garden and Japanese garden, which was featured in the Channel 4 ‘Lost Gardens’ series and featuring a very young Monty Don.

We finished our tour with the Grade 1 listed church of St Andrews, initially built as a chapel for the Hall, with a cosy parlour for the lord and family and hard pews for the congregation. Since 1948, The park has housed a boarding school, now state owned with circa 1,000 pupils. The group went on to a nearby garden centre for lunch and plant buying!