In England she has long been considered the garden designer of the establishment. Yet the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury actually flaunts her lack of professional qualifications. “I’m completely untrained,” she says in the drawing room of her Continental retreat, the 18th-century Château de St. Clou, in Provence, France.
Born Marjorie Wyndham-Quin to a distinguished British naval officer and his wife, and educated by governesses at her family’s estates in Ireland and Wales, she never suspected a career was in the cards. Her marriage in 1945 to the future Sixth Marquess of Salisbury destined that she would become chatelaine of two of England’s most storied stately homes, Cranborne Manor and Hatfield House.
Lady Salisbury, now 86, took a particular interest in restoring the elaborate gardens on both properties. She was just following her instincts, she says, honed from plotting little gardens as a child. But the results were so beguiling that friends began asking for her help. With those friends being the likes of Lord Brabourne (grandson of Lord Mountbatten), Prince Rupert Loewenstein and the Prince of Wales, a thriving occupation was born, albeit one she kept limited. Though she is known for strict, controlled layouts and historical scholarship, her gardens frequently feature flamboyant elements too, such as baroque topiaries and grand parterres. Upon the death of her husband in 2003, Lady Salisbury handed over Cranborne and Hatfield to their eldest son, following English tradition. Being torn from the twin jewels upon which she had put her stamp hardly slowed her. She bought a town house in London, where she took up residency for the first time in her adult life, and repaired to Provence. There, between assignments, she wrote A Gardener’s Life, a captivating account of her accomplishments, with chapters on all her major gardens, photographed by Derry Moore. (The book was published in December 2007 by Frances Lincoln.) Though she refuses to hire an assistant or use a computer, her business is flourishing. In 1997 she took on one of her biggest projects, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour Brant’s 222-acre White Birch Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut, the latest phase of which is landscaping for the adjacent Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which will open to the public next spring.
Dressed as she customarily is in an elaborate high-collared lace blouse with a stunning choker of diamonds and pearls, Lady Salisbury seems a regal figure straight from the Victorian age, an impression reinforced by her ramrod-straight posture and perfect diction. But, in fact, she has often been ahead of her time. In 1948 she became one of the very first gardeners to go organic, when she banned pesticides from Hatfield.
Most of England’s traditional horticultural community snickered at her eccentricity. “I was written off as a complete nutcase, a crank,” she says. When she was finally vindicated, Lady Salisbury never gloated. “I’m just glad people have discovered that [these chemicals] are unsafe.”
