FREEZE FRAME
Spherical topiary and curving lawns create a dramatic geometry in this all-seasons garden, set off to perfection by a sprinkling of frost
This all-seasons garden in Somerset is perfected by a sprinkling of frost
The village of Pen Selwood, near Wincanton in Somerset, sits on the same fertile, free-draining greensand soil that nurtures Stourhead, the great English landscape garden over the border in Wiltshire. For Lucy Nelson and husband James, moving from “a small sticky patch of clay near Sherborne” in 1996, this was horticultural heaven and an opportunity for Lucy to indulge her love of flowering trees and shrubs, including those that take lead parts in winter. On a sparklingly frosty January morning, the garden is laced with the scent of daphnes, witch hazels and winter box.
“When we moved here, it was mostly grass, with Irish yews, a handkerchief tree and some camellias,” Lucy says. Faced with a sloping site, she called on designer Michelle Pryor, who had worked on her mother’s garden, for advice. “Before even thinking about plants, Michelle insisted we install deer fencing, and work out the hard landscaping scheme. My brother [architect Martin Llewellyn] was designing extensions to the house in an Arts and Crafts style, so we wanted to continue that approach.”
Inspired by the formal garden at Hestercombe near Taunton, where architect Edwin Lutyens’ geometric structure is softened by Gertrude Jekyll’s bold planting, Michelle drew up a series of curving terraces. “I was attracted to her idea of using rounded shapes that look like open arms,” Lucy says. “We had three daughters, and someone told me the Irish yews were female, so it seemed a good fit.”
The layout of the garden capitalises on views south into the Somerset countryside: “We have a natural theatre, in which the terraces around the house are like seats. I didn’t see the slope as a problem but an opportunity.” Walls of stone loop and curve away from the house, creating an area for dining, a circular pond, concave seats and sinuous steps that lead down to a wide circular lawn framed by borders clothed with evergreen shrubs such as pittosporums, sarcococca and osmanthus that contrast with the graphic russet and red stems of dogwoods and hydrangeas. “We clip some of the evergreens into spherical, puddingy shapes to echo the circles in the ground plan, and leave others to grow naturally,” Lucy says. Beyond the lawn, a hornbeam avenue is underplanted with evergreen Sarcococca confusa covered with tiny, fragrant creamy-white flowers.
Lucy thinks it important to mix in winter-flowering shrubs among the “endless topiary”, and those that flower on bare branches hold a special attraction. “They seem a bit primeval somehow,
It is important to mix in winter-flowering shrubs among the topiary
as if the sap is rising, and I love anything that stops winter feeling like a dead time,” she says, citing Rosemary Verey’s book The Garden in Winter as a source of inspiration over many years.
In late autumn, as the temperature drops, the scented, white, peony-like blooms of Camellia sasanqua ‘Gay Sue’ open, followed shortly by pink-flowered Rhododendron ‘Christmas Cheer’. From December to March, Daphne bholua ‘Jacqueline Postill’ can be in flower, its clusters of sugar-pink flowers among leathery green leaves emitting gusts of sweet scent into the cold air; and in January the witch hazels begin unfurling their spice-scented, spidery flowers of narrow, crimped petals from bare stems.
In the naturalistic areas of the garden, there are fine specimens of Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Pallida’, a tall, spreading witch hazel with fragrant pale yellow flowers, as well as smaller varieties, including coppery orange H. x intermedia ‘Robert’ and H. x intermedia ‘Jelena’. The dead, papery flower heads of hydrangeas add another texture, as do the colourful stems of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ and Salix alba var. vitellina ‘Britzensis’ around the lake.
There are berries, too: plump, crimson-red crab apples festoon Malus ‘Gorgeous’ in the small orchard near the house, and brilliant pink- and red-stained white berries illuminate Sorbus ‘Pearly King’. Both trees give value across several seasons – spring blossom, autumn leaf colour and berries that last well into winter – something that determines Lucy’s plant choices more and more: “I want plants that perform over a long period, and if they have flowers for just a week and look dull for the rest of the year, they have to come out.” For Mandy Fowler, Lucy’s gardener of 15 years, that means replacing deciduous viburnums with shrubs such as the Japanese pink pussy willow, Salix gracilistyla ‘Mount Aso’, with its intensely tactile furry catkins: “They’re wonderful for cutting and bringing into the house, too – gorgeous with variegated holly, witch hazels and winter box.”
As winter yields to spring, thousands of small bulbs nose their way out of the ground weaving a floral carpet of snowdrops, aconites, crocuses and irises across the garden. The next act is about to begin in this most dramatic of gardens.