PAINSHILL PARK LANDSCAPE GARDEN IN Cobham, Surrey, is an 18th-century fantasy of gothic follies, Arcadian vistas, woodland dells and mysterious grottoes, yet by the mid-20th century it had crumbled to invisibility. Estate manager, Mark Ebdon, who began work 33 years ago as a trainee, still remembers his first day. “It was just woodland,” he recalls. “It took a whole day to drive up to the Gothic Tower as we had to cut our way through. I was faced with 160 acres of wilderness and equipped with just a bow saw and a mattock.” Workers didn’t even realise that, somewhere inside the forest, an enormous serpentine lake provided the centrepiece of lost pleasure grounds to rival horticultural superstars such as Stourhead, Hestercombe and Stowe.
In a year of Capability Brown celebration,…