We went for the autumn colour and came home wondering who had planted it all in the first place.
We have been to Westonbirt several times this month. It is one of those places that is very easy to return to, especially in autumn, when the trees seem to change almost by the day and there is always some new corner worth walking through. It is also somewhere we can happily spend an afternoon with our daughter and both dogs, which probably explains why we have been back so often.
On our last visit, we took a wrong turn and ended up in front of Westonbirt School. Gabriel and I stopped and looked at the house for a moment, trying to work out whether it had once belonged to the arboretum, who had lived there and how long the estate had stayed in the same family.
When we got home, I started looking into it and found that the story went much further back than I expected.
Before the Holfords
Westonbirt had already passed through centuries of ownership before the Holfords arrived. During the Middle Ages, the manor was held by the Clerke family and by the early seventeenth century it had passed to the Crews, a family with roots in Cheshire.
The important change came in 1665, when Sarah Crew, heiress to Westonbirt, married Richard Holford, a lawyer. Through that marriage, the estate entered the Holford family and remained associated with them for more than two hundred years.
Sarah died without children, and Richard later married Elizabeth Stayner, daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Stayner. It was through this second marriage that the Holford line at Westonbirt continued.
By then, the land around the house was already being shaped. Historic England records a park beside the house by 1674, and by the end of the century it had been divided into two parks. Westonbirt was still a working estate, but the landscape around the house was beginning to take on the form of a country seat.
Over the following generations, the Holfords also built considerable wealth away from Gloucestershire. The family prospered through law and through its connection with the New River Company, which supplied water to London. Peter Holford later became one of the company’s governors.That wealth would eventually make possible the Westonbirt we recognise today.
Robert Stayner Holford and the Arboretum
Robert Stayner Holford began planting at Westonbirt in 1829, when he was twenty-one. By then, the family had already owned the estate for generations, and Robert would later inherit both Westonbirt and a very large separate fortune.
He was interested in art, books, architecture and landscape, and the arboretum seems to have grown out of all of those interests at once. The trees were not simply arranged as a scientific collection. They were planted for shape, colour and effect, with wide rides, carefully opened views and individual specimens given enough space to become features in their own right.
It is easy to forget that when walking there now. The paths and trees feel settled into the landscape, as though they had always been there, but much of what we see was carefully planned.
Robert was also planting at a time when British horticulture was becoming fascinated by species arriving from abroad. Plant collectors were travelling through North America and Asia, and estates such as Westonbirt became places where newly introduced trees could be grown on a grand scale.
Some of the planting was much more personal. In 1856, Robert and his wife Mary each planted a giant redwood near the entrance to the arboretum. Forestry England records the story that Robert was rather put out when Mary’s grew better than his, and her tree still appears the stronger of the two.
A few years later, Robert planted three more giant redwoods for his daughters Margaret, Evelyn and Alice. They became known as the Three Sisters and are still growing at Westonbirt today.
It is details like these that make the history feel less remote. Behind the huge estate and the formal gardens, there was still a family noticing whose tree had grown tallest.
Westonbirt House
Robert’s plans extended well beyond the arboretum. He enlarged the park, developed formal gardens and, between 1863 and 1870, rebuilt Westonbirt House on a much grander scale.
Designed by Lewis Vulliamy, the new house reportedly cost around £200,000, an extraordinary sum at the time. The house, gardens, park and arboretum were all part of one estate, which is quite hard to picture now that the road separates Westonbirt School from the National Arboretum.
When we accidentally arrived there, the house felt almost like another property entirely. In Robert’s time, it would have been the centre of the same landscape.
He died in 1892 and Westonbirt passed to his only son, Sir George Holford.
George Holford
George continued his father’s work and added many of the plants for which Westonbirt is now particularly well known. By then, interest among British gardeners and plant collectors had shifted increasingly towards Asia, and many of the maples and rhododendrons associated with Westonbirt date from George’s time.
This is especially noticeable in autumn. Much of the colour people now travel to see is the result of planting decisions made more than a century ago.
The scale of the estate was enormous. At one point, around fifty gardeners and twenty foresters were employed at Westonbirt. George was also closely connected to the Royal Family, serving as Equerry to Edward VII and receiving royal guests at the house.
There is something difficult to imagine now about an estate being run on that scale, with gardeners, foresters, domestic staff and generations of the same family moving through the house and grounds. It belonged to a world that had already begun to disappear by the time George died.
He had no children, and when he died in 1926 the estate passed through his sister Margaret’s family to her son, Edmund Robert Parker, Fourth Earl of Morley.
The End of the Estate as One Place
George’s death came at a difficult time for Britain’s large country estates. Houses of this size were enormously expensive to run, the economics of landownership had changed and inheritance taxation had become much more significant.
The Finance Act 1894 introduced Estate Duty on property passing at death, and later governments increased those duties. It would be too simple to say that one law caused Westonbirt to be sold, but Forestry England notes that the burden of death duties, together with the cost of maintaining the estate, was probably an important factor.
In 1927, only a year after George’s death, Westonbirt House and much of the surrounding land were sold. Lord Morley kept the arboretum, but the old estate was no longer going to remain together in the way it had for generations.
The house was bought by the Martyrs’ Memorial and Church of England Trust and became a girls’ school in 1928. It remains Westonbirt School today.
That was the answer to the question Gabriel and I had been asking on our walk. The house and arboretum had once belonged to the same estate, but history had pulled them apart.
How the Arboretum Survived
Lord Morley retained the arboretum after the sale of the house and continued to maintain it. Members of the gardening staff remained, and W. J. Mitchell was appointed curator, so the collection did not simply fall into neglect when the family estate was divided.
Lord Morley died in 1951, and in 1956 the arboretum passed to the Crown in lieu of death duties before being placed under the care of the Forestry Commission.
From there, Westonbirt gradually changed from a private family collection into a place the public could visit.
Today it is managed by Forestry England, which has continued planting while preserving the character of the historic landscape. The arboretum now contains around 15,000 specimens and about 2,500 species of tree from around the world, and more than 100 of those species are considered threatened in the wild.
What was once a private Victorian collection now has a role in conservation, research and education, but the old layout is still there beneath it all.
Knowing the history has made Westonbirt feel quite different to me. The next time we go, I know I will notice the rides and the old specimen trees in a way I did not before, and I definitely want to find Robert and Mary’s redwoods to see whether hers really does look better.