The man who gave us pond life

Publish date: 2024-05-09

ANTHONY ARCHER-WILLS was 16 when he, his parents and grandmother moved into the ancient Stile House in the Sussex village of Pulborough. At the time, Anthony was intent on a career as a sailor, but during school and college holidays he began to take an interest in the cottage garden, a fairly uniform, flat piece of ground with an old orchard and a small border of hollyhocks and roses.

"You could see every part of the garden from anywhere you stood. It was pretty enough but there was no mystery, no secret hidden paths, nowhere to play hide-and-seek and, above all, no water."

Although he was a novice in gardening and ponds, the young Archer-Wills set about making his first pond in the garden, much against his parents' better judgment. "I had no idea what I was doing. It was small, pathetic and abysmal and leaked after the first year," says Archer-Wills. "But I loved it.

"It was an underwater garden, home to goldfish, water boatmen and water lilies, and when the water cleared I loved to watch the shafts of sunlight at the bottom of the pond."

After that, there was no stopping young Anthony, who drove his mother and stepfather to distraction as he dug up their perfectly flat garden and turned it into a landscaped valley with a stream running through it and ponds at the bottom, all with his bare hands, using a home-made contraption made out of old lawnmower rollers to cart the soil away.

His grandmother, who loved flat expanses of lawn, would wring her hands in despair as yet another pond ate into the grass. To placate her, as she was by this time quite elderly and plagued by chills in her bones, he created a "hot spot" for her near the top of the garden by the waterfall.

It is one of the most delightful parts of the garden, a south-facing semi- circular wall of warm stone, overhung with scented azaleas, Mexican orange blossom and climbing roses. "I made it for her, carrying each rock by hand, and she used to sit in the sun for hours, smelling the flowers. Later I would wheel my mother in her wicker bath chair to the same place."

When not gardening, Archer-Wills would enjoy experimenting with his other hobby: blowing up his stepfather. "I was a bit of an amateur chemist and inventor and would spend hours in my workshop making mechanical contraptions and explosives. My stepfather loved fires and bonfires and often I would hide explosives in the fireplace and watch in amusement as the whole lot went bang." Fortunately the massive inglenook fireplace in the cottage appears none the worse for wear.

Subsequently, he failed his exams in navigation and rapidly began to go broke. A kindly godfather bailed him out by commissioning a water garden from him, and so began a career that would change the face of water gardening and spark a craze for butyl pond liners.

Nearly 40 years later, it is finally time for Anthony Archer-Wills to leave the cottage and garden that has been home to four generations of his family. He will leave behind his exquisite garden, one that has been a source of inspiration for all his work and which has earned him the title of "last word" in English water gardening.

"Everything I have done in my career, from pond design to stream and waterfall creation, to planting schemes, was all first tried out in my garden in Sussex and before that, thought about for hours and hours in the bath there," says Mr Archer-Wills.

"It is hard to imagine what water gardening was like in the Sixties. You would dig out a hole and line it with concrete, and whichever way you tried it was impossible for it not to look artificial. Through experimentation I developed a new way of creating water features, which were much more fluid and natural using butyl as opposed to concrete."

That really was the big breakthrough and is the reason why gardening with water is so popular today. Before Archer-Wills's experiments in Sussex, people had to be content with either very formal, geometric designs, with no attempt to make them look natural, or would have to make desperate attempts to cover up artificial lines of concrete.

As well as the water features, his garden reveals his experiments with garden styles and colours: the woodland area with silver birches, bluebells and cowslips and the foliage colours ranging around the garden from dark green through purple, lemon yellow and bright acid green. He was a trendy gardener before gardening became trendy.

The house itself is an old, timber-framed, Tudor hall house, with a 17th-century addition. Mr Archer-Wills and his wife, Lynn, a garden design expert as well as an accomplished illustrator, added a sunny conservatory to the rear of the house on to which the main bedroom looks, over a Juliet-style balcony, draped in passiflora and scented jasmine.

Sadly, all those years of carting rocks and barrows of soil around have taken their toll on his back and, although the garden is only about an acre, it is too much for him to take care of.

Indeed, some of the secret, magical pathways he created have become even more overgrown than he initially imagined. "I can't actually do any physical work in the garden any more, which is a great shame, so it is time for someone younger or fitter to take it on," he says.

"It is with very mixed feelings that I am selling Stile House, and I do hope that whoever ends up buying it will have a passion for gardening."

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