The Loveliest Valley: A Garden in Sussex

Woolbeding House lies in the valley of the River Rother in West Sussex, an unchanging English landscape. Time had appeared to stand still when, in 1972, Simon Sainsbury and Stewart Grimshaw leased the house and gardens from The National Trust. For over four decades, they worked with a talented team of architects, designers, and contractors to create a masterpiece of twentieth-century garden design, a Sussex Arcadia. In 'The Loveliest Valley', Grimshaw recalls catching intriguing glimpses of the house on visits to Sussex, the serendipitous nature of their purchase, and the painstaking process of breathing new life into both house and garden. Photographer Tessa Traeger has captured images of Woolbeding in every type of English weather, extreme and benign, from dawn to dusk. Her photographs record in sumptuous detail Woolbeding’s beguiling seasonal moods: from the summer firework colors of the “hot borders” to mist- curled lakes and frosted lawns. The story of Woolbeding and its renaissance is told in accompanying texts by Christopher Gibbs on its history, garden designers Mary Keen and Julian and Isabel Bannerman on the formal gardens and the Long Walk, sculptor William Pye on his Cedra water sculpture, and Traeger on her record of the gardens. 'The Loveliest Valley' is a testament to how a beautiful garden can be created in the modern age, linking the great English gardening tradition with fresh ideas and experimentation.