…to get to her friend H.E. Luxmoore’s garden.

When I first came across H.E. Luxmoore it was not in his capacity as a close friend of Ellen Willmotts, not even in his role as House Master at Eton College, but in his friendship with one of my favourite authors, ghost maestro M.R. James. There is very little to beat the feeling when two of one’s great interests collide…

Henry Elford Luxmoore (1841-1926) spent pretty much all his life in the world of education, firstly at Eton, then at Kings College, Cambridge, before returning to Eton as a Classics tutor. He took a great interest in people’s welfare (he fought against the founding of a laundry in the school, for example because he thought the local tradesfolk needed the business…) and enjoyed a close (un-creepy) relationship with his pupils, which often turned to lifelong friendships.

James was one of those pupils. Luxmoore would not only remain friends with him, but attend James’s famous Christmas parties where he would try-out his ghost stories (he was famously present in 1903 when James debuted his best-known work, Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad). He would later introduce his former pupil to another close friend, Ellen Willmott, probably by correspondence, around the same time he was championing James for the role of Provost at Eton.

Luxmoore met Willmott through another of his pupils, Alan Moore, whose father, Dr Norman Moore, was attending Ellen in possibly her darkest time (sorry, no room for it here, but check out chapters 8-10 in Miss Willmott’s Ghosts for the full dirt…)

It was 1899 and Luxmoore was nearing the end of his time as a House Master. This did not mean that he was finishing with Eton. He would spend the rest of his life there, and he had a new project.

There was a grotty piece of land in the River Thames, that had been used as a dumping ground for years. It regularly flooded and was frankly a bit of an eyesore. Luxmoore determined to turn this wasteland into a garden.

Over the next few years he would clear the land and (presumably) build flood defences to create what is still known as Luxmoore’s Garden, and from the 100+ letters from him to Ellen we have fetched up (so far) it would seem that a large number of the plants came from Warley Place.

When I was writing Miss Willmott’s Ghosts, I had a great deal of difficulty envisioning exactly what was meant by ‘the garden’, sometimes also referred to as ‘the island’. An island? In the middle of the Thames? How would that work? There was little online and I was a bit lost.

The only contemporary images of Ellen visiting Luxmoore, which sadly I can’t share here, show only an eager chap in his best hat opening a gate in some railings to a piece of open ground, with Windsor Castle in the background, for a well-dressed woman, seen from behind, wearing a big skirt, large hat and tight jacket. If it’s helpful the outfit looks like this:

It’s only clear that it IS Ellen because Alan has kindly labelled it:

My Tutor opening the gate leading onto the bridge leading to his near garden for Miss Willmott.

Another, almost identical but this time with the gate being to a hole in a hedge labelled:

My Tutor opening the gate leading onto the bridge leading to his further garden for Miss Willmott.

There were a couple more; one showing a small hut with a lawn, with rows of interesting-looking plants in the foreground, the other of the weir in the middle of the river. It didn’t mean much to me, so I ended up fudging it in the book and hoping that at some point I’d be able to visit this intensely private world and see for myself.

On Wednesday I was finally able to do just that. Eton College opens its gardens once a year for the estimable National Garden Scheme. An entire army of volunteers also puts on a spread of over 90 giant cakes and several hundredweight of scones for sale on behalf of Thames Hospice, which it was, of course, only polite to support…

Finally, I was able to put together the places Luxmoore mentions in his letters.

Luxmoore often writes from his final home, Baldwin’s End, marked with the cross at the bottom of this handy map we were given to find our way around:

A few steps from his front door, there was (and, indeed, still is) a little gate in some fencing leading onto some wild land.

The people in the picture are walking towards the island, not that you’d know it. Even today it is entirely shrouded:

though if you look backwards, you’re still really close to the college:

These days there are two magnificent bridges leading onto the island, built in the early 2000s…

…but in Luxmoore’s day there was just the one ‘bridge’, made of a plank or planks, so Ellen, dressed in her wonderful late 19th century pomp, would have literally had to walk the plank to get to the island. I’d reckon it’s six or so metres across, so that plank must have been pretty springy.

Luxmoore’s garden has changed a lot since he first made it, but some things look as though they are much the same as ever. Certainly it retains its sense of mystery, with paths everywhere, some woodland…

…some paved…

…some with stepping stones…

…some with pergolas…

…some with gravel…

…and those, especially, are very much in the Robinsonian ‘wild gardening’ style that Ellen loved so much:

The garden is such a combination of dense, minimally tended hedge-paths…

…dense borders…

…and wide formality…

…that it’s really hard to work out just how big this garden is. So close, yet entirely secluded from the world, I can only guess that it’s about 2-3 acres, I really don’t know.

We also can’t know what it really looked like, though a close read of Luxmoore’s (often thank-you) letters may soon shed some light on it. Oddly, it’s almost impossible to see the river that surrounds it.

It looks as though this quaint, shingled apple store is an original:

I was lucky enough to meet the gardener, who let me have a peek inside at the old racks…

…so I’m thinking there must have been an orchard on at least part of it. The apple trees planted there today don’t look more than about 20 or 30 years old, but they may replace older ones.

The little cabin in the photo that I (alas) can’t share may have been replaced with this handsome shelter…

…proudly telling us this is Luxmoore’s Garden:

Luxmoore himself is never far from us here. His bust looms from a little shady nook, where he regards us benignly, if somewhat quizzically:

Other features are clearly newer. A paved rose garden, for example…

… and a pond with an armillary sphere:

Other features may go back to Luxmoore’s time. The shape of this overgrown greenhouse…

…despite being made from concrete and glass, reminded me of an exact contemporary of Luxmoore’s garden that I saw recently in the bizarre, slightly creepy and utterly marvellous Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale in Paris:

…and I wouldn’t rule it out as being original to Luxmoore’s time. As a Classics master (he even took to writing to Ellen in Latin to help her learn the language) he would have approved of the acanthus liberally planted in the borders:

…and particularly fine at the moment:

Other areas have neither changed in look nor purpose. Just behind me as I took this photo of a rare glimpse of the river…

…there was a class being given to current students, sitting on the grass, much as Luxmoore’s pupils might have done.

On garden open days there is a one-way system, with two bridges leading onto the island, the second taking the visitor from a secluded paradise back into the slumbering spires…

…but when Ellen came to visit Henry on one of her many, many visits, she would have had to renegotiate that plank across the river. It clearly didn’t stop her. She would also have enjoyed the Headmaster’s garden (Luxmoore is variously generous and rude about Edmond Warre), the Vice Provost’s Garden and, of course, the Provost’s Garden, all of which visitors can enjoy on the NGS open day.

As I wandered through, I thought of the school’s most famous Provost, MR James, who must have enjoyed this magnolia almost as much as I did.

I did not see any scary-looking ash trees in the vicinity.

I was lucky enough, however, to meet some of the gardeners who look after this historically important horticultural Eden. I hope to work with them in the future to see if we can’t figure out some more about Luxmoore, Willmott and the garden they both enjoyed.

In the meanwhile I am indebted to one of them in particular, who took the time out to walk down the road to Eton Town Cemetery, where Henry Elford Luxmoore was laid to rest in 1926. It would have taken a lot longer to find his grave without the help, so thank you, Simon!

There is much work to do on Luxmoore and his letters, this post is really just a stopgap until I have more news. I am just glad to have finally worked out what on earth his garden actually looked like. The mystery is, if not solved, at least, beginning to reveal itself.

One last observation. As I wandered through the borders I noticed this scabious. Could it possibly be Scabiosa ‘Miss Willmott’? It looks suspiciously like the one for sale here…