Exbury, the Rothschilds’ garden refuge
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“There’s more to driving a steam train across Exbury Gardens than clambering on to the footplate and ‘off we puff’,” Marie-Louise Agius says lightheartedly, if not a tad incredulous at the assumption that it’s easy. “You’re having to feel, listen, sense, anticipate and react. Every time you drive there are a different number of people on the train, a different weight, it may be dry, it may be wet, the fire is a different temperature… There are so many variables,” she says.
The locomotive in question runs along the estate’s narrow-gauge railway, which departs from the replica Victorian station Exbury Central and travels through a tunnel, over a bridge, round the Dragonfly Pond and through Summer Lane Garden to offer a unique perspective on the more-than-200-acre woodland garden that attracts 125,000 visitors a year.
As an occasional “joyrider”, Agius always has one of the full-time drivers standing beside her in the cab. Her uncle, Lionel de Rothschild, prefers to remain a passenger. “I’m not mechanically minded,” he says. The train was introduced in 2001 by de Rothschild’s uncle Leopold de Rothschild, who also loved driving the train. De Rothschild recalls a particularly wet day in 2004 when he waved off Leopold and his pal Queen Elizabeth II. Both dressed in waterproofs, “they went off giggling to play trains”.
Exbury Gardens was founded in 1919 by de Rothschild’s grandfather, also named Lionel – a prominent member of the banking dynasty, parliamentarian and horticulturist who, over the course of 20 years, cultivated a world-famous collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and magnolias, along with other shrubs and trees. After his death, de Rothschild’s father Edmund and uncle Leopold took over the estate.
Growing up at Exbury, both de Rothschild and Agius enjoyed what was to them a massive playground but were also expected – whatever their age – to help. “Grandpa used to telephone – you’d pick up the phone and he wouldn’t even say hello. He’d just say, ‘Meet me at the big house at 10,’ and boomf, the phone would go down,” she recalls. “He’d be there armed with unbelievably dangerous implements, and my younger sister Lara and I would be sent up trees to hack out dead wood. I was only about eight or nine, but as a child who was definitely much happier up a tree than anywhere else; wielding those instruments was enormously good fun.”
De Rothschild also enjoyed snipping and dead-wooding but was “not such a tomboy”, preferring to keep his feet on the ground. Today, the gardens are a charitable trust run by a board of directors headed by Agius’s father Marcus Agius, former group chairman of Barclays. Her mother, Kate de Rothschild, Lionel’s sister, is on the board.
De Rothschild and Agius’s passion for plants evolved in very different ways. De Rothschild, now 69, was initially compelled to follow the family tradition after Cambridge, spending 10 unhappy years as a banker before finding the courage to leave the profession. “I wasn’t good at it and I didn’t enjoy it,” he says of the experience. “My cousin warned me, ‘You’re going to be bored to tears, as you’ll just be moving money from where it’s not wanted to where it is.’ He was right.” His interest in horticulture began in the mid-1990s when his cousin Miriam asked him to contribute to her book The Rothschild Gardens. His passion ignited, he has since written his own book on the subject, The Eighth Wonder of the World: Exbury Gardens and the Rothschilds, which was published in 2021.
Agius’s conversion was speedier. After graduating from Edinburgh University with an MA in sociology, she dismissed banking and found herself instead “happiest in the gardens”. When her cousin mentioned a landscape design course at KLC School of Design in London, she found her pathway. “I figured it would give me another year of procrastination but immediately fell in love with landscape design,” she says. “It’s so diverse. No day or site, client or brief is the same. It’s like conducting an orchestra, you’re the one with the overall vision.” At 47, she is now the senior director at Balston Agius landscape and garden design practice, a member of the RHS Woody Expert Group – a resource of expertise for hardy trees and shrubs – and an RHS judge.
The planting at Exbury has been expanded over time to provide year-round interest. More than 1,000 hybrids of rhododendrons have been raised over the three generations, hundreds of thousands of bulbs planted, a National Plant Collection of Nyssa trees cultivated and a collection of 7,000 Nerine sarniensis (Guernsey lily) nurtured, containing 700 named varieties in sparkling reds, oranges, whites, purples and pinks. Future projects will include introducing climate-resilient species into a copse of champion trees.
The gardens are a family concern but de Rothschild and Agius have an affinity in their shared horticultural expertise and passion for their heritage. They make a good team precisely because their temperaments are polar opposites. “Lionel is very gentle, I adore him,” says Agius. “He’s a figurehead for the gardens. He has the knowledge and is very good at talking to audiences.”
De Rothschild attributes his accommodating nature to being a twin, arguing that Charlotte, his senior by 10 minutes, took the lead from the womb: “Charlotte said, ‘It’s time to be born,’ and I said, ‘I thought we were supposed to wait another two months.’ She said, ‘No, it’s time to go!’” Likewise, he believes Agius’s dynamism and leadership skills make her the ideal person to take the gardens forward. “She has huge, unbelievable energy, fantastic enthusiasm, wonderful knowledge and focuses very well,” he says.
Agius returns the compliment: “We both have an unadulterated passion for the garden. When we walk the grounds, we’ll share ideas. It will be ‘I read about that’ or ‘I’d like to try this’. We’re like kids in a sweet shop.”
As both live on the estate, those walks have become a rewarding part of daily life. “These gardens educate me. Every time I come into them I see something I’ve never seen before. It’s walking down a path at a different time of day or in a different season and something’s doing its party trick,” says Agius. “We’ll also note where there’s a gap or when something has died because it’s a massive garden for Tom Clarke, our head gardener, to get round.”
Both concede that Exbury could not survive without Clarke, his team of 10 gardeners and 30 volunteers, or the estate’s employees. Nor could they exist without the visitors. “We are very lucky and we’re very happy to share this with them,” says de Rothschild.
Agius nods: “It’s a privilege that blows your socks off every day. Nobody here takes it for granted.”
Exbury Gardens & Steam Railway, Exbury, Southampton, Hampshire; exbury.co.uk
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