The garden at Basildon Park

Created as a pleasure ground in the 1800s, falling into ruin in the early 1900s, and lovingly restored by the Iliffes in the 1950s, the garden at Basildon Park has had its ups and downs. Find out what you can enjoy in the gardens today, including a rose garden, Italian terrace and historic trees.

Winter in the garden

Discover the bare beauty of the garden in winter with frost-jewelled evergreens and far-reaching views over the Thames Valley. Among the silhouette of branches, you’ll find spots of colour with pastel hellebores, evergreen shrubs and bright red berries. See if you can spot the first of the snowdrops which appear along the driveway.

The pleasure grounds

Around the rear of the mansion, you’ll find the pleasure grounds. Trees and evergreen shrubs frame the pleasure grounds and views over the park and countryside.

Lady Iliffe’s rose garden

One of the Iliffes’ additions to the pleasure grounds in the 1960s was the rose garden, which really comes to life in the spring and summer months with a mix of old roses, peonies and spring bulbs reflecting Lady Iliffe’s original planting design.

Terrace

A formal Italianate terrace, built of large stone blocks, encloses a formal lower lawn and gives wide-ranging views over the Thames Valley hills. The terrace is located at the rear of the mansion and was built in 1850 as part of the pleasure grounds creation, to complement the central block of the mansion.

Umbrello Seat

The thatched umbrello you can see within the pleasure grounds, was created in the mid-1990s, based on a design by the garden’s original designer JB Papworth.

The umbrello would once have been the centre of a round, formal Victorian rose garden with large, dense evergreen trees forming a backdrop to the flowering borders. It would have been a quiet place for people to sit and relax in, perhaps enjoying some tea.

Today, two of the evergreen plants remain from the original garden: the maritime pine (Pinus pinaster), and the Lawson cypress (Chamaecyparis lawsoniana).