Waltham Place
Photo: Mark Percy / CC BY-SA 2.0.
Overview
The Japanese Garden at Waltham Place is a small triangular Japanese-inspired garden within the wider biodynamic farm and ornamental garden estate at White Waltham. Waltham Place describes it as a quiet garden “easily overlooked,” using water, rocks and plants to create a serene, compressed landscape. It is one of the named garden areas within the ornamental gardens.
History
Waltham Place is a historic estate with walled gardens, early nineteenth-century specimen trees and older garden structures.
The garden was created in 1993 by the British garden designer and broadcaster Nick Bailey, who has identified it as one of his early garden-design projects.
Its current garden identity was reshaped under Strilli Oppenheimer, who worked with Dutch naturalistic garden designer Henk Gerritsen after meeting him in 1999. The wider ornamental gardens were redesigned from 2000, with an emphasis on naturalistic planting, ecological processes, organic management and biodiversity.
The Japanese Garden appears as one of the intimate named spaces within this later Waltham Place garden system, but the official Japanese Garden page does not give a specific creation date or named designer for this individual garden. For database purposes, it should therefore be treated as a small Japanese-inspired garden within the modern Waltham Place ornamental garden framework, with the exact date and designer left unknown unless estate records provide stronger detail.
Current access is controlled through guided visits. Waltham Place states that the gardens cannot be visited unaccompanied, with public garden tours available on selected Wednesdays and Fridays in the season, and private group tours by appointment.
Design features
The garden is described by Waltham Place as a small triangular garden shaded by yew. It uses water, rocks and plants to evoke a larger landscape of lakes and mountains, explicitly referencing Japanese shakkei / borrowed-scenery principles. Its features include a shallow kidney-shaped pebble-lined pond, Japanese maples, Bambusa / Pseudosasa japonica, Phyllostachys nigra, yew, snowberries, rocks and a stone toad-and-toadlet feature.
Garden elements
Waters and islands
Stones
Other elements
Current status
Extant small Japanese garden within Waltham Place’s ornamental gardens. The gardens are not open for unaccompanied visits; access is by guided tour or private group booking during the garden season.