Last month, the Garden Museum Literary Festival (a traveling event that visits a different historic garden each year in the U.K.) arrived at Iford Manor, just a few miles southeast of Bath in Somerset, England. Over two days, there were fascinating talks and conversations with designers, writers, and makers, including potters Edmund de Waal and Frances Palmer; photographers Tessa Traeger and Ngoc Minh Ngo; and landscape architects Jinny Blom and Tom Stuart-Smith.
But perhaps the most wonderful discovery was the location itself. Iford is a Palladian manor house (its Georgian façade conceals its older Elizabethan origins) with an extraordinary Italianate garden created by the architect-turned-landscape-architect, Harold Peto, who bought the property in 1899 and developed the gardens until his death in 1933.
Location is everything—and Iford Manor’s is spectacular. Although “challenging” might be the way some describe it. Accessible only via two narrow, twisting lanes which meet on a medieval stone bridge that crosses the River Frome, the property sits on a slope in a wooded valley on the cusp of Somerset and Wiltshire. The steep slope means that the garden has been cut into the hillside in a series of terraces and walks, many of which are designed to offer tantalizing views out to the bucolic landscape.
Although much of the garden had been created long before Peto’s arrival, his passion for the Italianate style, and for ancient architecture, statuary, and antiquities led him to reimagine it into a series of classical and often theatrical walks and rooms.
Its modern renovation begins with Elizabeth Cartwright, who bought the property from Peto’s nephew in 1965 and began a series of repairs. Along with her husband John Hignett she would continue to restore the house and garden until their son and daughter-in-law, William and Marianne Cartwright-Hignett, became the custodians in 2016. In 2022 head gardener Steve Lannin arrived to continue the estate’s development and preservation.
Join us for a tour.
Photography by Clare Coulson.
The Cloisters
The Great Terrace
The Walled Garden
Iford Manor is now closed for winter but will reopen in spring 2026.
See also:
- Garden Visit: Charlotte Molesworth’s Topiary Garden at Balmoral Cottage
- Garden Visit: British Landscape Designer and Rose Enthusiast Tania Compton’s Spilsbury Farm
- Garden Visit: Le Jardin Plume, a Modern Impressionist Masterpiece in Normandy
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