A Victorian show garden
By 1853 Hawkesyard, then still known as Armitage Park, was already being noticed as a place of unusual horticultural ambition. A visitor writing in the Cottage Gardener described it as “curious, interesting, and beautiful”, with undulating ground and wide views from the house. His main interest was the remarkable range of gardens and glasshouses created under Josiah Spode. He singled out the Victoria House and adjoining Stove Aquarium, each about thirty-five feet square, where the giant water lily Victoria regia was being grown successfully, together with other exotic water plants. The heating system especially caught his attention, as hot-water pipes had been laid near the sides of the tank and close to the surface rather than at the bottom, and the plant itself was thriving. He also noted the skill of the gardener, Mr Bolas, and the successful cultivation not only of aquatic plants but even melons in the same warm, moist environment.
The account shows that the estate was far more than a country house with ornamental grounds. It was a carefully contrived horticultural showplace, reflecting both wealth and a keen engagement with the latest Victorian advances in glasshouse cultivation. In 1856, a few years after this visit, Josiah Spode formally renamed Armitage Park as Hawkesyard, a change that marked both a rebranding of the estate and the maturing of his ambitious vision for it. This was not simply experimentation for its own sake. In the years that followed, Hawkesyard’s horticultural achievements were recognised beyond the estate itself, with produce and plants exhibited at major national shows and awarded prizes by organisations such as the Royal Horticultural Society and other leading bodies of the period. These successes place Hawkesyard firmly within the wider mid-19th-century culture of competitive horticulture, where innovation, display, and prestige were closely linked.
Beyond the Victoria House stood a long range of glass devoted to grapes, peaches and nectarines, said to extend for more than a hundred yards. From there the visitor was led into the pleasure grounds, where the experience became almost theatrical. A tunnel cut through the hill opened suddenly onto a hollow or crater-like space, at the centre of which stood a circular greenhouse raised on rock. Around it were arranged ferns, rhododendrons, heaths, mosses and lycopodiums, creating what he called a scene like “fairy land”. This description is especially valuable because it gives a vivid contemporary picture of the tunnels and the glasshouse on the rocky mound, both of which later passed into local memory and legend.
The same walk continued through contrasting garden scenes. There were terraces bright with flowers, a circular fountain, an arbour of climbing roses, a rocky glen thick with ferns, and an orchid house with moss-covered pillars before the route returned to the vinery. The writer thought it one of the most interesting and varied places he had ever seen. He also recorded that Spode allowed the grounds to be visited twice a week during the summer, which suggests that the estate—soon to be known as Hawkesyard—was already gaining a local reputation as a place worth seeing. Read alongside later references to prize-winning exhibits and continued horticultural success, the article confirms that mid-Victorian Hawkesyard was designed not simply for private enjoyment but to impress visitors through a sequence of carefully staged horticultural effects.