Preston Court Rhubarb
Sunday morning: the house is weirdly quiet, and it feels rather melancholy knowing that Bento won’t be bounding in from the garden to say hello. It’s a dry day, but rather overcast, and there is rain forecast for later. Our travellers will be leaving their hotel in Paris this morning and heading for the airport. Ken & Bento have a direct flight to LAX, where she’ll meet her dad; Monty will see them off and get a flight to Heathrow.
I drove to Preston in the late morning for a short walk along the trails, and took a few photos along the way. Standing on Court Lane and looking out across the lake in the grounds of Preston Court, the scene felt almost primordial: dominated in the foreground by the vast, corrugated leaves of a giant rhubarb (Gunnera manicata), with the still water beyond reflecting the canopy of mature trees, and the pale stone of the estate buildings just visible through the haze. It is the kind of photograph where the foreground flora seems to be staging a quiet takeover — and perhaps, given how these plants grow, it isn't entirely wrong to think that.
The Giant Rhubarb
Despite its common name, the plant in the foreground has no relation to the edible rhubarb in your garden — it just looks like a cartoonishly scaled-up version of one. Gunnera manicata, known as giant rhubarb or, delightfully, "dinosaur food," is a South American perennial native to the coastal mountains of southern Brazil. It was introduced to Europe in the 1800s by Belgian horticulturalist Jean Jules Linden during his botanical expeditions to Latin America, and the first specimens were grown in the UK around 1837. The Victorians were immediately enchanted — its sheer theatrical scale made it irresistible to the designers of grand estate gardens — and colonies of Gunnera manicata can still be found today around the lakes and waterways of many stately homes and country estates across Britain. The specimen here is a perfect example: thriving beside the lake's edge in exactly the permanently moist, organically rich soil that these plants crave, its leaves reaching up on prickly stems that can extend to three metres in height, each individual leaf capable of growing up to two metres across.
There is a topical botanical footnote worth adding. A recent study by the Royal Horticultural Society has found that most Gunnera manicata plants currently growing in the UK are actually a hybrid — Gunnera × cryptica — a cross between the true G. manicata and the invasive G. tinctoria. This hybrid has now been banned from sale in the UK, and gardeners are required to prevent it from spreading beyond their gardens. Whether the impressive clump at Preston Court is the true species or its hybrid twin, it is a magnificent thing, and in this setting, with those great architectural leaves framing the lake and the ancient buildings beyond, it earns every inch of the dramatic foreground it occupies.
Preston Court and Its Medieval Roots
The estate behind that shimmering water is far older than it might first appear. The grounds of Preston Court sit on the site of a medieval palace of extraordinary distinction: this was the favourite Kentish residence of Juliana de Leybourne (1303–1367), known as the "Infanta of Kent" on account of the enormous wealth she inherited — at least forty manors in Kent and Sussex alone. She was among the wealthiest women in medieval England, a countess of Huntingdon, and Preston was where she felt most at home. An inventory taken after her death in late 1367 recorded staggering riches held at Preston alone: over £1,241 in cash, silk and cloth-of-gold hangings, fine silverware, and a vast larder of oxen, hogs, mutton and fish. Even today, if you look carefully into the water of the upper pond at Preston Court, you can make out the remains of the small flint wall that once formed part of her medieval palace.
Before Juliana, the site had an even earlier sacred history. Prior to the manor house, there was a monastery at Preston Court, and the ornamental lakes we see today were originally the monks' "stew ponds" — carefully managed fish pools that kept the brothers supplied with fresh fish for Fridays. The family who bought the estate in 1980 — and whose descendants run the venue today — have long cherished this layered history, with the current owner's father collecting historical papers about Juliana and pointing out the remains of her palace in the lake. The Preston Court estate now spans around 600 acres of private Kent countryside, much of it given over to rewilding projects, water meadows, and nature reserves that sit harmoniously beside the ornamental lakes and historic barns.
St Mildred's Church
Standing just beside the lake, partially glimpsed through the treeline in this image, St Mildred's Church is one of the most quietly remarkable churches in Kent. With Saxon origins, the building we see today is mainly of the 13th century, with significant remodelling and extensions carried out in the 14th century. In 1857 it was restored by architect William White, who installed the distinctive dormer windows that replaced the earlier aisle windows and give the building its slightly unusual character. The church holds a particular treasure that sets it apart from almost every other parish church in the county: a parochial library dating from 1710, one of Dr Bray's founding libraries, inscribed "for the use of the Vicars of Preston" — one of only ten such parish libraries surviving in Kent, and the only one still held in a parish church. The church is a Grade I listed building and functions as a living place of worship within the Canonry Benefice, holding regular services and remaining a popular choice for weddings given its ancient flint walls and stained-glass windows.
The dedication to St Mildred is itself a thread connecting this quiet corner of Kent to the earliest days of Christianity in England. Mildred was a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess who served as Abbess of the nunnery at Minster-in-Thanet, and she is one of the most venerated early English saints. That her name is attached to this church — watched over by the lake that once fed monks and sheltered the medieval palace of one of England's richest noblewomen — gives the entire scene a wonderful depth of history, much of it hidden behind a curtain of giant rhubarb leaves on a grey May morning.
