Leighton Hall

A deer park was created at some time between the mid-16th and mid-17th centuries. In the mid-19th century John Naylor retained part of this park, filling it with pale fallow deer. The deer park is thought to have been lost following the sales in 1931.

William Kemp's formal gardens around the house were in a style that he referred to as 'architectual gardening' in his book How to lay out a garden etc.'. They consisted of two main areas - a terraced garden with an octagonal pool, and a flower garden (the Library Garden) on two levels enclosed by a high wall. Both gardens featured statuary, fountains and other ornaments and had geometric beds planted with seasonal bedding. Most of the statuary was removed in the various 20th-century sales. Little of the original formal gardens remains, although the basic layout survives.

The gardens and pleasure grounds were ornamented with buildings such as summerhouses and a camellia house and there were areas of evergreen shrubberies with winding walks through them. A more informal area included a serpentine pond with a statue of Icarus in it.

The development of the estate at Leighton Hall coincided with the Victorian conifer craze, when seedlings of conifers were being transported to the UK from the United States and elsewhere. John Naylor bought coast redwood seedlings from California (Sequoia sempervirens) and planted up a grove of 33 of them in about 1857. Sir Charles Ackers added further redwood plantings in about 1935. The resulting pinetum covers about 12 hectares and includes many other specimen conifers, some dating back to the 19th-century phase of planting by John Naylor. Examples include pines, firs, spruce, hemlock and cedars.

In 1888 a chance seedling of two conifers was found growing on the estate. This was a cross between two different species of conifer, the Monterey Cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) and the Nootka cypress (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis). These two species would not grow together in the wild, but were planted together in Naylor's woodland. The resulting cross - the Leyland cypress (x Cupressocyparis leylandi) - became a popular hedging plant due to its fast growth rate but has since become a scourge of many neighbourhoods by growing too tall and causing boundary disputes. The original Leyland cypress blew down in 1954.

Type

Estate

Purpose

Ornamental

Principal Building

Domestic / Residential

Period

Victorian (1837-1901)

Survival

Extant