A Royal crisis amid the beauty of a garden on the hill
Discovery deep in the archives tells an unknown story of a famous garden
The man in this picture looks around him appreciatively at the dazzling whites marking the garden's border.
It is a blisteringly hot day, July 4, 1933 and staff have been working around the clock to ensure the garden doesn’t wilt for his visit.
The Lilium Regale, brought from China by plant hunters, and delphiniums respond magnificently.
‘How peaceful this is,’ he sighs several times, one of his host’s dogs in his lap.
And no wonder he finds tranquility in this garden. Outside all is turmoil.
The chain of events that will create the greatest constitutional crisis in the modern history of the British Royal Family has begun. He is at the heart of matters.
He is Edward, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne.
Two years earlier he had met and fallen in love with Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee, and together they will write headlines all over the world.
The picture is taken at Highdown House in the hills above the seaside town of Worthing in West Sussex.
Edward is a guest of Sir Frederick Stern and his wife, Lady Sybil.
It is a private house with extensive gardens so Edward can find temporary sanctuary from the press and court who are already sensing something is not quite right with the man who would be King.
Sir Frederick is not the subject of this story but he has a fascinating one of his own.
A horse race loving playboy from a long line of super rich merchant bankers, he moves to the South Coast of England and transforms his life, turning himself into one of the country’s foremost breeders of exotic flowers, trees and plants.
He expands the gardens at Highdown performing a minor horticultural miracle by growing on chalk soil.
He funds plant hunters to bring back exotics from China and South East Asia to fill it and becomes the country’s foremost expert on peonies and snowdrops along the way.
An RHS Victoria Medal of Honour is awarded.
Gardens are never just about flowers and plants though. They contain narrative as powerful as any house or monument. Highdown is no different.
A few years back I researched the gardens for a post graduate degree thinking I was simply looking for details of Sir Frederick’s horticultural career and how he developed his land.
I found something extra, a jaw dropping discovery that tingled the spine.
Ensconced in the West Sussex County Council Public Records Office I poured over old Land Registry maps and local history books trying to fill out the Highdown story.
At the end of a tiring day I took one last glance at the online archive for Highdown.
Sir Frederick’s books on flower breeding were listed but at the bottom something simply catalogued Visitor’s Book appeared.
For a while I considered leaving for some fresh air, I had notebooks full of stuff anyway.
But something made me request the item.
The small, unprepossessing book was waiting for me the next morning.
Like any such memento the signatures and messages from visitors are mundane enough even if these were written by 1930’s high society, bankers and silent movies actresses.
Further in though the pages stiffened.
For pasted into the pages were a series of black and white pictures that revealed an untold secret history of Highdown. The garden was the scene of a story populated by Royals and politicians.
On the first of these pages, alongside four pictures, is the signature of Edward P ( P for Prince of Wales)
He is only three years away from abdicating the Crown to marry Wallis.
In a note Lady Sybil says: ‘the Prince talked incessantly about gardens and gardening and gardening personalities, and I asked him how long he had been interested in gardens. He said ‘three months’ and laughed at his own ignorance and impatience. He said several times ‘how peaceful this is’’.
Over the page Elizabeth, Duchess of York, visits on her own the following May. As a Bowes Lyon she had connections with the owners of the vast estate that surrounds Highdown.
In 1936 she visits again with her husband Albert and poses with members of the Bowes Lyon family just nine months before he ascended the throne.
The abdication crisis timeline is completed when in October Mary, the then Queen Mother visits and poses again in the garden with Stern after planting a Chinese Hornbeam which still thrives today.
The picture is taken five months after Albert's coronation.
It is also posed just 17 days before her elder son, now the Duke of Windsor, and his new wife were to have their controversial meeting with Hitler at Berghof, a trip she cannot have been unaware they were planning when she visited Highdown.
Certainly as Edward gave an alleged Nazi salute on a trip that infuriated the British Government, his peaceful time at Highdown just four years earlier must have seemed a long time ago.
The snapshots keep revealing more chapters in the garden story.
Queen Marie of Romania is shown the gardens in July 1936 although why she was there is not clear.
And as the pages keep turning here unmistakably is Prime Minister Lloyd George with his daughter Megan in October 1926 posed by the waterfall and grotto Stern had created from a former pig pen.
Sir Frederick was a financial backer of the Liberal Party and travelled to the Versailles Peace Conference with Lloyd George as post World War One settlement negotiations took place.
Queen Marie was there too so that might have prompted the later visit.
These then are the hitherto unknown stories of Highdown, buried in an archive waiting to be discovered.
What is also remarkable about these photographs is that Stern, the garden obsessive, does not let his guests dominate the narrative.
Also told in the pictures is the story of the garden. While the abdication crisis is played out there is another tale to unfold.
The battle to create beauty against the odds high up in the South Downs.
There is no photograph of the house, Stern was simply not interested in bricks and mortar.
What you get, albeit in black and white, is a 1930s horticultural origin story.
Elizabeth is pictured in the rock garden that was created at the bottom of the cliff, the rock clearly visible amid the lime-tolerant shrubs, proving how far Stern still had to go to win his battle against the chalk.
Similarly Marie is posed in front of the chalk face at the back of the house with boulders at her feet.
Some of Stern’s exotics can be seen beginning to thrive but there is much work to do to transform it into the verdant wonder it is today.
Notice too how the Lloyd Georges are posed bottom and right of the picture so that the glory of the grotto and waterfall can be seen even in winter.
Even the star of the show, the errant Edward, must share billing with the lilies and the delphiniums.
Today the gardens are open to the public but are sadly divorced from the house, which is now a pub and hotel.
Thousands of visitors walk the same routes every year posing for pictures at the same places those secret guests did almost a century ago.
They are creating their own histories amid the exotics, the hornbeams and the peonies.
Highdown Gardens is owned by Worthing Borough Council and is open to the public. New investment has seen the opening of a visitor’s centre telling the story of the gardens partly based on my research.
https://highdowngardens.co.uk/
A full paper on that research is available in The Journal (issue 1, 2022), the magazine of the Sussex Gardens Trst.