Rycote Park’s mellow brick buildings and courtyards are a testament to Bernard and Sarah Taylor’s sensitive and remarkable reconstruction work over the 23 years since they bought their estate near Oxford. Charles I, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I stayed here but, by the time Taylors arrived, the house was largely ruined and Rycote’s lake was a scrubby area of alder and willow.
It may seem churlish to focus on the Taylors’ battle with blanket weed but, given the weed’s annual bid for world domination, it is not unreasonable.
Blanket weed, aka Spirogyra or long string algae — the green menace clogging up pools and ponds from the UK to the US and beyond — took up residence as soon as the Taylors had restored their 12-acre lake back to an elegant serpentine of water around a couple of islands.
The lake had been created, long before blanket weed invaded, by Lancelot “Capability” Brown. It was part of a landscape he made over 20 years from the 1770s, sweeping away the complex, formal gardens that can be seen in an early 18th-century Kip and Knyff etching.
Brown’s plans for Rycote are lost but a clue to the extent of his work here comes from £2,500 deposited in his Drummond’s Bank account by Rycote’s then owner Lord Abingdon. While it’s difficult to translate that into today’s money, Roderick Floud, author of An Economic History of the English Garden, estimates that the £21,538 Brown was paid by the nearby Blenheim estate, mostly for its 150-acre lake, would be equivalent to around £34.4mn today.
So far, Rycote’s lake restoration has cost the Taylors around £300,000. When work began in 2001, two diggers revealed a wall across the centre — a standard feature to protect men downstream as they were digging out the original lake. The wall is still there, submerged as it would have been in the 18th century. The Taylors have also installed a bridge and a thatched, wooden boathouse — there is evidence of both having been here originally.
The Taylors’ excavation work produced 150,000 cubic metres of waste silt, which was distributed across 60 acres over nearby fields. The muddy eyesore took a year to dry out and settle enough to be grassed over.
Sensitive digging also uncovered the puddled clay lake base, the antique version of Butyl liner; sluices; and a drainage system. Brown was the Ronaldo of 18th-century drains. Thanks to him, the fertile run-off from the fields above the lake, where sheep graze, is taken under the lake rather than into it, which would boost flood risk as well as bumping up the lake’s blanket-weed appeal by adding to its fertility.
Once rainfall had filled the restored lake, blanket weed appeared. A couple of bubbling, ring-shaped aerators were installed, which reduced the weed on the surface layer, less so deeper down. Raking out the blanket weed barely impacted its exponential growth and so, in 2020, the Taylors called in the cavalry, Dr Andrew Worthington from Spirex Aquatec.
“Having removed a huge quantity of silt mechanically, the active residue manifested as prolific weed and algae growth,” he says. The blanket weed and hornwort had grown so dense that when they were surveying the lake, the motor on their boat kept jamming. “I had to resort to paddling, which was very hard work,” he says.
Weed and algae were the main problems, caused by an excess of nutrients, particularly from the stream feeding the lake, which is rich in phosphorus. Rotting leaves from trees around the lake made things worse, again increasing fertility.
That autumn, Worthington sprinkled his magic dust — finely ground chalk — across the lake’s surface at a rate of one tonne per acre. The microchalk, calcium carbonate ground to less than 3 microns (or thousandths of a millimetre), mostly dissolves, unlike some other chalk treatments which leave visible sediment.
Treatments will continue annually until the lake achieves balance, usually in 1-5 years. It seems to be working, although Sarah Taylor points out that as temperatures fall at this time of year, and after heavy rain, the weed often retreats and overwinters before coming back with gusto in spring.
Worthington, an admirer of Brownian landscapes, points to the ongoing challenges of nutrient-increasing fallen leaves — to say nothing of excrement from birds and fish.
Rycote boasts an impressive bird population including teal, swan, egret, grebe, coot, moorhen, wild mallard, oyster catcher and even the occasional white-tailed eagle.
On cue, a couple of cormorants grunt overhead. Sarah Taylor leads me to an overspill area that drains into a brook and from there to the Thame, a tributary of the Thames. The overspill area is an Environment Agency prerequisite for lakes of more than 25,000 cubic metres.
The Taylors have achieved their charming, tranquil landscape by planning, effort and the patience to deal with bureaucracy generated by the requirements of various statutory bodies, including Natural England and Historic England. One key to their success is the Parkland Restoration Scheme the Taylors commissioned from Elizabeth Banks, the Royal Horticultural Society’s first woman president, who created the formal gardens around the house.
They have also had to fit it around busy careers: Sarah, a fund manager, was a director of Friends of Oxford Botanic Garden and continues to give preserve; Bernard, an organic chemist and financier, is one of Oxford university’s first lay trustees and led the government’s 2017 Taylor Review of the Sustainability of English Parish Churches and Cathedrals.
As we walk towards the house, Sarah looks back along the hoggin path around the lake where a Paul’s Himalayan Musk rose is romping through a chestnut. “In spring there are snowdrops and naturalised narcissi here. And winter is a joy when the shapes of the trees are clear and the whole of the lake can be seen.”
Some of the trees Sarah has chosen for the lake are shelter against road noise while others are ornamentals, including Nyssa sylvatica and acers such as A griseum, chosen for their bright autumn colours. She has added various other specimen trees from Arbutus, the strawberry tree, to Dawn Redwood, the deciduous conifer Metasequoia glyptostroboides, and a eucalyptus which was a present from their daughter-in-law.
A less successful planting is a Liquidambar styraciflua Festival. With an amused eye roll, Sarah points out that the tree has so far decided to grow sideways instead of vertically.
But for now, blanket weed’s world-domination bid may have been halted, or at least slowed, at Rycote, where a pair of swans and their five cygnets glide picturesquely over the lake.
My efforts to obliterate blanket weed
A few miles down the road from Rycote, the blanket weed in a 7-metre diameter pool installed by husband David and I at our home resists all our murderous efforts. The weed barely noticed our mini barley straw bales — which is supposed to get rid of it. And a UV filter pump makes beautifully clear water by killing single-cell algae but doesn’t touch the blanket weed.
I didn’t tell Worthington that we had tried off-the-shelf chalk powder treatments, although I’m sure he’d feel vindicated: each treatment we applied cleared the weed before it returned in a few months.
As I write, in November, the weed has retreated but I know that it is only having a restful break before returning in spring 2024.
Now we’re on the hunt for Myriophyllum spicatum or Potamogeton crispus weed which, Worthington assures me, will aerate the pond and see off the blanket weed. JO
Jane Owen is an FT contributing editor and garden author
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