Hestercombe Gardens

Hestercombe House is a historic country house in the parish of West Monkton in the Quantock Hills, near Taunton in Somerset, England.

When the house and gardens were inherited by Coplestone Warre Bampfylde (1720–91) in the 18th century, a Georgian landscape garden was laid out, containing ponds, a grand cascade, a gothick alcove, a Tuscan temple arbour (1786), and a folly mausoleum. Bampfylde was an amateur architect of talent and a friend and adviser to Henry Hoare who laid out the gardens at Stourhead . Bampfylde also designed a Doric temple for the grounds, which was built around 1786, with an ashlar tetrastyle prostyle fronted by Tuscan columns and a large modillioned pediment. A Victorian formal parterre was added near the house by Henry Hall in the 1870s.

The Edwardian garden was laid out by Gertrude Jekyll and Edwin Lutyens between 1904 and 1906 for the Hon E.W.B. Portman, resulting in a garden "remarkable for the bold, concise pattern of its layout, and for the minute attention to detail everywhere to be seen in the variety and imaginative handling of contrasting materials, whether cobble, tile, flint, or thinly coursed local stone".

The "Great Plat" combined the patterned features of a parterre with the hardy herbaceous planting espoused by Miss Jekyll. Lutyens also designed the orangery about 50 m east of the main house between 1904–09, which is now Grade I listed, as are the garden walls, paving and steps on the south front of the house. On either side of the Great Plat are raised terraces with brick water channels. The eastern area is laid out as a Dutch garden laid out with perennial plants such as Large white flowering Yucca gloriosa as groups used vertical elements alternate with purple colored flowering dwarf Lavender (Lavandula), catmint (Nepeta) or silvery colored Zieste (Stachys), Cotton lavender (Santolina), China Rose (Rosa chinensis) or Fuchsia (Fuchsia magellanica).

Since October 2003, the landscape and gardens, extending to over 100 acres (0.40 km²), have been managed by the Hestercombe Gardens Trust, a registered charity set up to restore and preserve the site with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £3.7M. The Georgian landscape, Victorian shrubbery and terrace and the formal Edwardian gardens combine to create biodiversity and interest for visitors. The site is used by Lesser horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus hipposideros) as both a breeding and wintering roost site. Numbers of Lesser Horseshoes at this site are only exceeded by one other site in southwest England. The bats use roofspaces in a former stable block as a maternity site. It has been designated as a Special Area of Conservation (SAC).