We’re on a stately-home-and-garden visit with friends.  We get separated over the entry formalities, but on completion, the friends rush over with news which one of us hears as, ‘they have a garden in ruins’.  We’re hooked.  

In 1868, Ludwig Ernest Wilhelm Leonard Messel emigrated to Britain.  He was probably 21 or 22 at the time.  By 1890, by then a man in his forties, he had bought a Regency country house in Sussex and founded a dynasty which was to play many significant roles in the theatre of British society.  You may know his home – Nymans – a National Trust Property with a fabulous garden and, yes, some ruins. 

Ludwig was born to a German Jewish banking family in Darmstadt.  He was well educated and, one assumes, comfortably off, yet he and his siblings emigrated to Britain.  Terroir was curious to know why, and a quick internet search started to provide details of some issues that are still familiar today.

John Hilary, one of Ludwig’s great-great-grand-children writes that, despite being able to integrate into German society and retain their faith, and despite the fact that ‘Britain was not always a welcoming environment to foreigners, it clearly offered greater freedom and opportunity to German-Jewish migrants than the restricted society they left behind’. https://jch.history.ox.ac.uk/article/writing-messel-family-history-labour-love  For a banking family, London’s role in global money matters must also have been a lure. 

So Ludwig establishes the stockbroking firm of L. Messel and Co, marries an English woman (Annie Cussons), becomes a naturalised British citizen, has six children – four girls and two boys - and eventually uses his wealth to buy the Nymans estate.  John Hilary sees the purchase as the epitome of ‘putting down roots and integrating into their new home environment’ but the website ‘Shalom Sussex’ suggests that integrating into the British gentry was ‘a goal he [Ludwig] would never achieve’.    https://shalomsussex.co.uk/the-messel-family-living-in-britain-with-german-heritage/

So what happened? It seems that WWI happened. The war was never going to be easy for a German immigrant. For example, renovations at Nymans, carried out by his youngest brother, architect Alfred Messel, in a rather Germanic style, included a high tower. Ludwig was accused of using this tower to communicate with Germans or Germany.  The tower was later demolished, but Ludwig died in 1915, depressed and possibly heartbroken, over the conflict between the two nations he loved. 

Ludwig’s eldest son Leonard inherited Nymans after his father’s death.  Leonard’s upbringing was quintessentially English (Eton, Oxford, the Territorial Reserve and marriage to Maud, daughter of Punch cartoonist, Edward Linley Sambourne).  Despite this cv, however, a German father was seen as sufficient to prevent Ludwig’s sons from serving abroad in WWI, although both they and Maud served their country in various ways while remaining based in England.

In their turn, Leonard and Maud both became avid plants-people, the German influenced Regency was house converted into a mock medieval Manor House and some ambitious planting work was undertaken (including Maud’s Rose Garden and an impressive collection of rare plants).  The garden was often opened to the public in the interwar years. Finally the shadow of German immigration seemed to have been laid to rest.  

Sadly disaster struck in the cold winter of 1947, when the house burned down destroying not only the mock medieval great hall but also Leonard’s extensive and irreplaceable collection of horticultural books.  The house was partially rebuilt but extensive ruins still stand. 

The final generation to be raised and nurtured at Nymans, were Leonard and Maud’s three children Linley, Anne and Oliver, born around the turn of the 20th century.  Linley seems to have been a rather elusive figure, marrying in 1933, divorcing and remarrying in 1945 after playing an active role in WWII.  Anne was a gardener, artist and socialite - one of the ‘Bright Young Things’ of the 1920s. She also married twice, firstly to Ronald Armstrong-Jones (her son was Antony Armstrong Jones, later Princess Margret’s husband) and, in 1935 to the ‘Adonis of the Peerage’ (according to Wikipedia), aka Vicount Rosse.  Nowadays, divorce is a norm, but in the interwar years was probably the prerogative of the wealthy.  Did changing marital partners produce mere society gossip or was there an element of scandal as well? 

Oliver Messel was an artist and an extraordinarily talented theatre designer.  He too may have had to ‘manage’ his lifestyle.  His long lasting same-sex relationship with Vagn Riis-Hansen, at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, must have had to be handled with discretion.   All the Messel lives seem to have had an element of the theatre about them.

So, you are shouting, where is this ruined garden?  Stop droning on about 20th century social mores. 

Allow us, therefore, to indulge you.  I had, of course, misheard the message relayed to us on arrival at Nymans: it is not a ruined garden but a garden in the ruins - of the mock medieval great hall.  It is a magnificent piece of design and horticulture, worthy of Anne and Oliver (and possibly the elusive Linley too).  A knowledgeable ‘ruined room’ steward added depth to our visit and there is sufficient space to move around and admire the architecture and sculpture as well as the planting.  A worthy addition to the already stupendous Nymans’ gardens.  

The great hall in its heyday (note minstrels’ gallery at the far end - above left), and the ruined hall as it stands today (above right).

Below: the new ‘Garden in the ruins’ (below left and centre) and the blank supporting wall where once was the minstrels’ gallery.

The planting (below) is bold and architectual, using large plants to great effect in a confined space.

The corten steel ‘room dividers’ (below) are stunnng; artworks in their own right but reflecting key images of the Messels and their garden. The Cedar of Lebanon was the Messel family emblem.

The interplay between the modern garden and the ruins create a magnificent atmopshere, and makes the whole appear much larger than it is. A piece of theatre in the ‘rectangle’ which creates a very fitting tribute to Oliver Messel and honours the architectural detail (below) which has been, literally, honed by fire.

Remarkably the gable window (above left) still has tiny shards of the original glass caught in the corners of the decorative stone work (above centre and right).