Percy Thrower, who became the leading face of British gardening on television, was born on 30 January 1913 in the head gardener’s cottage at Horwood House, the first child born there. His father, Harry, had come from Bawdsey Manor in Suffolk, the family home of Maude Denny, to make the garden around the house she and her husband Frederick had just built outside Little Horwood in north Buckinghamshire. When Country Life wrote about the estate in 1923, it said the gardens had been “gradually laid out by Mr and Mrs Denny with Mr Thrower, the gardener.” Couples now marry in that garden, in the licensed Blossom Garden beyond the lily pond, or in the Drawing Room of the 1911 house above it.
A bacon fortune in Dutch brick
Frederick Denny had made his fortune in pork and bacon. The estate he bought in 1911 came with two farms, eleven cottages and the old Rectory, and for the new house he went to Detmar Blow, with interiors by Blow’s French associate, Fernand Billerey. Denny asked for a house reasonably imposing but compact enough to be comfortable. It had fourteen bedrooms, was built by the London firm Holland, Hannen & Cubitts, and carries the date 1911 on its rainwater heads.
The walls are of thin, pale, hand made brick imported from Holland, with stone mullioned windows, tall chimneys and gabled bays, in the Jacobethan manner. On the garden side, two storey bay windows flank a stone doorcase with an open pediment carved with swags, and the interior has panelling and fireplaces to match. The Grade II listing of 1984 takes in the service wing, the thatched stable ranges around the courtyard, the forecourt walls and the brick gate piers with their stone benches as well as the house.
The garden Harry Thrower made
The drive runs straight for about 500 metres under limes that Harry Thrower planted soon after 1911, ending at a walled forecourt. Behind the house the garden opens in a sequence of compartments. Closest is the lily pond, a spring fed, stone lined pool with rounded ends inside clipped yew hedges, laid out on the site of the old Rectory. Beyond it lie lawns with very large old trees, some probably surviving from the Rectory garden, a two acre walled garden and, towards the brook, woodland that in 1923 was “a roughish little field newly planted with silver birch”. Bluebells carpet it in spring.
The layout, given its general direction by the architects but shaped by Mrs Denny and her head gardener, survives largely intact, and the park and gardens are on Buckinghamshire’s Local Heritage List. What has gone is the ground north west of the house, where an apple orchard, a rose garden and a tennis court gave way to later building.
Harry ran a garden staff of sixteen. He grew fruit and vegetables for the house, was expected to produce peaches, melons and grapes, and kept the beehives. Percy started under him as a pot and crock boy in the spring of 1927 and left in 1931 for the royal gardens at Windsor; Mrs Denny was so impressed that she had one of the chauffeurs drive father and son there. Percy first appeared on television in 1951 and presented Gardeners’ World from 1969 to 1976. Harry stayed at Horwood until his death on the last day of 1939 and is buried at St Nicholas’ church in Little Horwood, where his headstone remembers him as “highly valued friend and head gardener for many years” to Mr and Mrs Denny.
After the Dennys left
The family stayed a generation. The estate went to auction in 1936; in the war a girls’ school evacuated from the Isle of Wight took over the house, followed by a boys’ preparatory school, the Old Ride. British Rail bought Horwood in 1962 for a marshalling yard at Swanbourne that the Beeching cuts stopped, and in 1966, with 38 acres, it passed to the Post Office as an engineering college. Accommodation wings and a swimming pool followed, and around 1992 BT, the Post Office’s successor, sold it to a hotel company. Now independently owned, Horwood has 160 bedrooms after a £6 million renovation, most of them in a contemporary extension designed to take its style from the old house.
Vows by the lily pond
The ceremony room in the old house is the Drawing Room, with a high ceiling, its original stone fireplace and a large bay window over the lawns. When the estate was sold in 1936, the catalogue described the lily pond as designed to be seen from the drawing room; yews two to three metres high now screen it, with paths cut through them along and across the water. The room opens into the Manor Bar and a panelled sitting area, and stone steps lead down to the pond and the Secret Garden.
The licensed outdoor setting is the Blossom Garden, reached past the lily pond and through the Secret Garden gate, with a view back to the house. For a blessing or a renewal of vows there are the Manor House steps under their wisteria, the old oak and the Well in the woodland. Larger ceremonies can be held in the Eyre and Cook Suites, which are licensed too. Couples book the registrar themselves with Buckinghamshire Registrars, who will not take the booking from the hotel on a couple’s behalf.
From the Manor Bar to the Cook Suite
Drinks follow in the house or the gardens, with Prosecco, cocktail, Champagne or gin bars and canapés; for winter drinks there is the Manor Bar. A small wedding can stay in the Drawing Room for dinner, since it seats 60 for a banquet. The Cook Suite, the largest room, has its own entrance, foyer and bar in the Cook Wing, and seats 180 for the wedding breakfast, with room for 250 at the evening party.
Three packages, Blossom, Wisteria and Sweetpea Sundays, each bring a drinks reception, a three course wedding breakfast with half a bottle of house wine per guest, an evening buffet, a dance floor and a room the night before. Prices start at £120 per guest for a Sweetpea Sunday in January, February, March or November, and the menu tasting is free. Couples with their own caterer can take dry hire, with kitchen space, from £5,500 on a Sunday in those months; caterers come from an approved list or pass an independent audit. A late bar until 1am can be added.
Honey, wild garlic and Winslow cider
Harry Thrower’s kitchen garden supplied the house all year round, and the present kitchen still draws on the estate. Honey comes from a hive of more than 25,000 bees kept with the charity Urban Bee-lievers, the chefs forage wild garlic, mint, rosemary and blackberries in the grounds, and apples from an orchard planted in 2025 go into the menus in season. Most of the meat comes from the Buckingham Butcher, and the cider from Rennie’s Winslow Cider, a not for profit producer in the village at the end of the road. Harry’s Bar & Kitchen is named after the head gardener, and Restaurant 1911 after the year the house was built.
Upstairs in the Manor House
The three Manor Suites, Verney, Quainton and Dunton, are at the top of the Manor House, with bay windows over the drive, the lily pond or the countryside. On the wedding morning they serve as dressing rooms, from which the couple can watch guests arriving. The thatched stables around the courtyard, built for a family keen on hunting, now hold eight bedrooms suited to close family and the wedding party. A room the night before brings the 15 metre pool, sauna, steam room and gym, and H Spa sells day packages for a bridal party.
For a rehearsal dinner or a brunch the morning after, there are the Burton Suite and the Manor Library. The Library, at the far end of the old house, keeps its original stone fireplace and has walls themed on the apple orchards Harry Thrower tended.
Horwood House is on Mursley Road at Little Horwood, about 15 minutes by car from Milton Keynes Central, which has regular trains to London, Birmingham and Manchester. Luton Airport is about 40 minutes away and Heathrow a little over an hour. For other Buckinghamshire houses, read our Edits on Hedsor House and Stoke Park, or browse wedding venues in Buckinghamshire.
The Drawing Room or the Cook Suite
The choice that shapes a wedding here is where dinner is served. Up to 60 guests can dine in the Drawing Room, with the garden Maude Denny and Harry Thrower laid out at the foot of its steps; any more, and dinner moves to the Eyre or Cook Suite. Read the Horwood House Hotel & Spa profile and check your date.
