CARDIFF’S GARDEN GENIUS

I first saw the gardens at Twyn yr Hydd House, Margam, in 2002 and was immediately struck by the high quality of workmanship that I encountered. While visiting a local library I asked if there were any books about Twyn yr Hydd.

They only had one which, amazingly, had a picture of the garden in it and identified the garden designer as Ralph Hancock. An initial search identified that he had also designed the roof gardens at the Rockefeller Center in New York and also the roof gardens at Derry and Toms Department store in Kensington, London.

With the help of the Royal Horticulture Society I found an article which was published in a 1993 edition of the society’s magazine. The article identified that as well as building the gardens at the Rockefeller, Hancock had also built the roof gardens at Derry and Toms department store in Kensington, London.

Apart from these tantalising pieces of information very little was know about Ralph Hancock. How could so little be known about a man who had built such well known and charismatic gardens?
At this time no one had even identified his nationality. In 2006 I set the Garden History group I was teaching at Neath Port Talbot College a challenging task... to find out as much as possible about Ralph Hancock. What they found has identified a fascinating history about one of Cardiff’s great unsung heroes.

Clarence Henry Ralph Hancock (Ralph) was born at 20 Keppoch Street, Cardiff on July 2 in 1893. Sadly we know very little about Ralph’s early life. Ralph’s father was Clarence Hancock and worked for a firm of auctioneers called Evans and Hancock who were based at Wharton Chambers, Cardiff. In 1917 Ralph married Hilda Ellis at All Saints Church in Penarth. Family tradition has it that her family thought that she was too young and they disapproved of their relationship, so she eloped with Ralph.

Her age on their wedding certificate is stated as older than her actual age which seems to confirm the story. At the time of their marriage they were living in Westbourne Road, Penarth. They later moved to Augusta Road in Penarth where both their sons were born. Bramley in 1918 followed in 1920 by Denys. At the time of Denys’s birth records show Ralph s occupation as being a Marine and General Insurance Broker working from James Street, Cardiff.

What prompted Ralph’s change of career is unknown. We do know that as a young man he was keen on orchids and that in 1926 became a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society. Given Ralph’s work in connection with marine insurance and his love of horticulture, it is tempting to wonder if he knew or had any connections with the Cory family who, as well as being shipping magnates, also were great horticulturalists and played an active part in the creation of Duffryn Gardens.

In 1927, the family moved to Surrey where Ralph undertook the first of his more famous garden projects, designing and constructing a garden for HRH Princess Victoria, at her home in Buckinghamshire. The garden was something that Ralph was immensely proud of and one that Princess Victoria also seems to have appreciated. One of her staff wrote to Hancock in 1930 commenting that, “You will be glad to hear that the gardens you designed for Princess Victoria continue to give every satisfaction and are sources of great pleasure to Her Royal Highness.”

Photographs of the garden show a naturalistic style with the use of huge rock outcrops. This fondness for the use of rock combined with the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement is not surprising, given the period that Hancock was actively involved in designing and constructing his gardens.

On May 31 1930, Ralph set sail for New York. In order to promote his work in the US, he published an illustrated booklet entitled English Gardens in America and described himself as being “Landscape Gardener to HRH the Princess Victoria of England”.

The promotional booklet must have worked, as Hancock went on to design an exhibition garden at Erie Station in New Jersey. He also staged exhibits at the Massachusetts Horticulture Show where he won several awards including, in 1933, the Presidents Cup. Hancock was also one of the designers of the prestigious Lydia Duff Gray Hubbard garden in New Jersey which now forms part of the Garden Club of America Collection.

Between 1933 and 1935 Hancock was to embark on the construction of one of his most ambitious projects, a series of roof gardens called The Gardens of Nations on the eleventh floor of the Rockefeller Center in New York. Hancock’s designs were a staggeringly ambitious project intended to reflect the cultural styles of gardens from Holland, France, Spain, Italy, Japan and England.

The logistics in constructing this kind of garden are breathtaking. First there was the application of waterproofing material to the roof. Then there was a mile of subsurface drainage tiles to prevent water sinking into the roof space and 3,000 tons of earth, 500 tons of brick, 100 tons of natural stone had to be hauled up via the service elevator. Some of the 2,000 trees and shrubs proved to be too tall to fit in the elevator. These were hauled up the side of the building to the eleventh floor using block and tackle. The garden also required 96,000 gallons of water which was lifted to the highest point in the garden by an electric pump. The positioning of heavy features such as walls and rockery had to be planned to coincide with the location of the roof’s supporting steelwork.

Throughout the project Ralph was in regular correspondence with both John D and Nelson Rockefeller. As well as designing and building the gardens, Hancock ran what we now refer to as ‘garden tourism’ by charging a dollar a visit for what was known as the Sky Garden Tour.

The roof gardens at the Rockefeller Center were visited by Trevor Bowen, the Managing Director of Barkers who had taken over Derry and Toms in Kensington, London. Bowen liked what he saw and employed Hancock to create a similar effect in the heart of England’s capital.

Again, the logistics involved in the construction are impressive. On opening, the gardens contained over five hundred different varieties of trees and shrubs. In common with the gardens at the Rockefeller Center, the gardens at Derry and Toms had an international flavour and featured Spanish, Tudor and English woodland gardens. The gardens were completed in 1938 at a cost of £25,000.

This must have been a particularly busy time for Ralph as he was also winning Gold Medals for his display gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show. A review in Amateur Gardening magazine in May 1936 comments that, “Mr Ralph Hancock had gone to the expense of bringing a special weatherworn limestone all the way from Pennsylvania.”

That same year, Hancock also found time to publish a book called When I Make a Garden. The book is well illustrated with black and white photographs of examples of his gardens both in the UK and the US. In the introduction he comments that “a single photograph conveys so much more than pages of written matter. I have, therefore, largely allowed the illustrations to tell their own story.” What this means is that apart from the photographs that are identifiable as the Rockefeller Center there is no indication of where, or when, any of the gardens were constructed.

Ralph continued to be a very successful exhibitor at Chelsea, winning Gold Medals in 1936, 37 and 38. The gardens constructed at Chelsea had moved away from the naturalistic rock garden style towards the more Arts and Crafts style that we now associate him with. His 1938 Chelsea garden was particularly popular.

A review in Amateur Gardening comments that, “Mr Ralph Hancock had one of the most ambitious schemes in the garden avenue; a model of an old mill cottage, complete with millstream and sunken garden, the whole construction being carried out in a most realistic manner. It was a centre of attraction throughout the show.”

As well as working on the book and constructing gardens at Chelsea, Ralph also found time to exhibit gardens at the Ideal Home Exhibition in 1936, 1937 and 1938. Each of the Ideal Homes gardens was required to conform to a theme. The theme for the 1938 show was Novelists and their Gardens for which the designers had to take as inspiration their favourite living author.

For this garden Ralph collaborated with the author Rafael Sabatini. Sabatini is famous for his tales of high adventure such as Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk, which were made into movies in Hollywood and gave a young Errol Flynn his first ever starring role.

Ralph’s garden tribute to Sabatini featured a half timbered cottage and also his trademark herringbone brickwork. The planting consisted of rhododendrons, heathers and aquatic plants near a winding brook, maybe as a reference to Sabatini’s love of fishing.

In 1939 Ralph won a Silver Cup at Chelsea for a formal Mediterranean garden. Eighteen months after the Ideal Home Exhibition, Britain was at war. Like many families in Great Britain, Ralph’s was not to be immune to the tragedies of war. Second Lieutenant Denys Hancock lost his life in 1941 in North Africa. Another causalty of war was the roof garden at Derry and Toms. The roof garden would be rebuilt but the death of their youngest son hit Ralph and Hilda hard.

After the war Ralph worked with Bramley as Ralph Hancock and Son. There was the construction of the Gardens of Peace at Temple Newsam in Leeds. In 1947, Chelsea restarted and Ralph returned with a rock garden, a formal garden and also had an exhibit shown in the garden designers section. It was at one of these post war Chelsea shows that Sir David Evans-Bevan commissioned Ralph to build the gardens at Twyn yr Hydd.

They are probably the last gardens that Ralph was involved with before his death in 1950. It is perhaps fitting that they are in Wales, the land of his birth and are now used by students studying horticulture.

The students involved in this research went on to win an INSPIRE Adult Learners Award in connection with their work - something I’m sure Ralph Hancock would have approved of.