Easton Lodge Gardens, Bishop's Stortford, England

Queen Elizabeth I granted the park at Easton to Henry Maynard in 1590. He built a new lodge in 1597 to replace a medieval manor house by the church. A patte d'oie of radiating avenues was planted in the 17th century. A bosquet was planted and a canal dug, extensive lawns and informal shrubberies were introduced.

By 1811, an estate map shows that a ha-ha, a gravel drive which swept around the South Lawn and an ice-house had been added. In 1847 a fire severely damaged the Elizabethan house, and it was almost entirely rebuilt.

In 1865, when she was three years old, Frances Evelyn Maynard inherited the estate from her grandfather, Henry 3rd Viscount Maynard. As the Countess of Warwick, she became well known as a leader in society and not least for her liaison with Edward, Prince of Wales. By 1880, the Dutch Dairy garden and rose gardens had been added and during the 1890s several further additions were made at Stone Hall including a Friendship Garden and Shakespeare's Garden.

In 1902 Harold Peto was commissioned to redesign the gardens. Said to have been inspired by Sir Francis Bacon's essay 'Of Gardens' written in 1625, Peto set about creating formal lawns and borders, a yew walk, intricate wooden pergolas, an Italian garden with balustraded pool, a Japanese garden and a pleached lime avenue with its own tree house.

The work was largely done by unemployed labourers found through The Salvation Army. Peto was given a free hand and unrestricted budget to create one of his finest works. The Japanese gardens were the largest he created. He also created an Italianate garden with a large pool and the cobbled courtyard and fountain.

During the Second World War, the estate was occupied by the US Airforce and 10,000 trees were blown up to make way for runways. Most of the house was demolished in 1950 and thereafter Maynard Greville, a keen arboriculturalist, started to create an arboretum on parts of the formal Italian and Japanese gardens. He died in 1960 and most of the property was sold off.

In 1971, Brian and Diana Creasey purchased the West Wing and started to create a garden incorporating some of the remains of older garden features. In the 1990s they purchased more land and intensified their work of reclaiming the Peto gardens. In 1995 a plan was drawn up to restore the remainder of Harold Peto's gardens; including the Italian garden , the croquet lawn, yew tree walk and Japanese garden.

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

HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT

The lands and hunting lodge at Little Easton were granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1590 to Henry Maynard; a map of 1593 shows the site of the lodge and walled garden. Maynard, who was knighted in 1603, demolished the hunting lodge and built a large Elizabethan mansion. He was succeeded in 1640 by his son, also William, who surrounded the new house with a park planted with a double avenue of trees aligned on the west front. The estate at Easton then passed through William's son, Banastre, to his grandson Henry who became the fourth Baron Maynard. Soon after his death without issue in 1742, the grounds were recorded in an engraving by Skynner, which shows the park had been formalised with radiating avenues laid out in a patte d'oie. His brothers Grey, and then Charles succeeded him and it was during Charles, sixth Baron and first Viscount Maynard's time that Muilman's description of the grounds (1770) was published. This records a 'large park, gardens, canals, serpentine walks, shrubberies and various other useful ornaments' (Muilman 1770). The bachelor first Viscount was succeeded by his cousin Charles in 1775. Chapman and Andre's county map of 1777 shows that he quickly modernised the gardens by the replacement of the canal with an oval basin but otherwise the grounds were unchanged. By 1811 an estate map of the gardens and park are shown in a form which changes very little until the 1870s.

The second Viscount died in 1824, without a direct heir, and the estate passed to his nephew Henry. Henry made many improvements to the estate, laying roads and building lodges and cottages. In February 1847 a fire almost destroyed the Elizabethan house but Henry commissioned the architect Thomas Hopper to rebuild the original central wing and to extend the house in the Gothic Revival style.

When the third Viscount died in 1865 he left his estate to his three-year-old granddaughter Frances Evelyn Maynard, who in 1881 came into her inheritance and married Lord Brooke, later the fifth Earl of Warwick. In 1902 Lady Warwick commissioned the architect and garden designer Harold Peto to create an elaborate setting for the north side of the house. During the first decade of the 20th century Easton Lodge was famous for its society gatherings, but during the First World War the Essex Yeomanry used the park for training. In February 1918 the house suffered a second fire and in 1919 and 1921 parts of the estate were sold. Following the 1918 fire the architect Philip Tilden was commissioned to rebuild the west wing, constructed as a separate building, and he is also thought to have been responsible for additions to the Peto garden (Magnus and Spencer-Jones 2000). In 1937, the year before her death, Lady Warwick established a country nature reserve in the park. Her younger son, Maynard Greville, inherited the estate in 1938 but took little interest in it. During the Second World War it was requisitioned by the War Office and the park cleared of trees to make way for an airfield. After the War, the house was demolished, leaving only Tilden's rebuilt west wing, and the gardens were abandoned. Following his death in 1960, Maynard Greville's daughter Felice Spurrier inherited the estate, built herself a house to the east of the Japanese lakes and sold the surviving buildings and grounds to Charles Wearn, who sold much of the stone paving and statuary in the gardens and in 1971 divided the buildings into three and sold them. The surviving west wing of Easton Lodge was purchased as a private house, known as Warwick House, since which time new garden features have been added and restoration of the early 20th century gardens has begun.

The site remains (2000) in divided private ownership.