Folly Farm, Reading, England

The following is from the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest.  

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

A modest, timber-framed, 17th century cottage was gradually enlarged to become a farmhouse, lived in following his retirement in the late 19th century by Robert Fenn, a renowned gardener to the Bolingbroke family in Oxfordshire. In 1906 Robert Fenn sold the farm to H H Cochrane who immediately employed Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944) to enlarge the house for him. Lutyens, then at the height of his reputation as a fashionable country house architect, produced a relatively small, dolls-house-like extension in late 17th century style, and with the help of Miss Jekyll (1843-1932) laid out the first phase of the garden in a simple manner, adjacent to the east and south fronts. Zachary Merton bought Folly Farm in 1912, and employed Lutyens to extend the house to the west in his `Surrey style'. The former croquet and tennis lawns adjacent to the original south front were replaced by a formal Dutch canal. At the same time a parterre garden was created to the west of the canal garden (adjacent to the extended south front), and from the parterre the axis was extended south as far as the walled kitchen garden . The Sunken Rose Garden was also formed to the south-west of the house. All this was accomplished with planting advice from Miss Jekyll.

Zachary Merton died in December 1915, and his widow let the house to Lutyens for the summer of 1916, when Miss Jekyll was persuaded on a very rare visit out of Surrey to stay. During the 1920s and 1930s the house was owned by the Gilbey family, who employed eight gardeners at Folly Farm. During the Second World War it became a maternity home, reverting to a private residence after the war ended, in which use it remains (1998).