A PASSION FOR TOPIARY AND TREES

The garden at actor and TV presenter Griff Rhys Jones’s home in Suffolk, where he lives with his wife Jo, overlooks the Stour Estuary. From here, the river snakes its way inland along the Essex/Suffolk border to the pastoral landscapes of Flatford Mill and Dedham Vale, immortalised by the painter

John Constable. The garden’s formal clipped hedges of box and yew, and its avenue of holm oaks ( Quercus ilex), gradually give way to a more relaxed layout, with mown paths through wildflower meadows, where the garden blurs into the landscape.

A lot of care has gone into working out vistas, so that in one direction you might have a view of the estuary, and in another, the house, its Suffolk-pink walls contrasting with the dark green of a knot garden and swathes of lavender.

Suffolk pink is thought to have been developed by cloth dyers who added blood from oxen or pigs to colour the limewash with which they painted their homes. The county doesn’t have much in the way of quarries or brickworks, so building materials included flints from the fields, reeds, clay and timber, which were then covered in plaster or render. In the case of Griff’s house, the clay with which it was built was in the backyard. ‘The house came out of the pond,’ as he puts it. The pond, dug to provide the building materials and water for livestock, has one shallow sloping side, which would have allowed cattle or horses to walk in and drink, and Griff and Jo say they still find horseshoes there.

The initial design for the garden was ‘sketched out on the back of an envelope’, according to Griff, but he and Jo have spent hours assessing the viewpoints and deciding on planting schemes. Griff got the idea of a holm oak avenue after seeing a picture of one in a gardening book.

The vegetable garden (which is Jo’s domain) is laid out in box parterres, each devoted to different vegetables, such as broad beans, artichokes, asparagus, onions and pumpkins.

But the main reason for the box hedging is that it masks the chicken-wire barriers installed to keep out rabbits.

The topiary shapes provide a pleasing formality and look good all year round. Griff insists the garden is low-maintenance – while the yew, box and holm oaks may need clipping once or twice a year, this is not nearly as labourintensive as a herbaceous border. The garden is split into compartments, each with a different character. It includes a pergola in one section that supports old-fashioned climbing roses, while the borders around it are filled with peonies, hardy geraniums, alchemilla, sweet rocket ( Hesperis matronalis) and veronica. Griff describes the garden as a ‘sequence of events’, and one great flowering event is the daffodil display in a field once rented by a Dutch bulb nursery. The nursery dug up the bulbs when they moved out, but some were left behind, and these have naturalised over the years, resulting in a river of cream-coloured flowers in spring.

Griff loves growing fruit, and there are espalier pears, fig trees, a grapevine, medlars and apples here, though he has no idea which kind of apples because he and Jo bought rootstocks, which are much cheaper than grafted varieties. Rootstocks are usually supplied to nurseries, which then graft other varieties to them to produce trees of different sizes or apples with specific flavours or attributes, but left to themselves they will develop into mature fruit trees.

As well as the topiary trees,

Griff has planted natives such as ash, oak, hawthorn and alder. Some were bought as mature specimens while others were whips (young unbranched tree seedlings). He and Jo are handson gardeners, and they’ve paid their dues in terms of earthmoving, planting and path-laying (mini- diggers are, apparently, great for removing turf).

Griff says gardening ‘is all about having fun. When the weather’s good, I like nothing better than being in the garden.’

Rows of lavender hedges and (below) the knot garden outside the house, which is painted in traditional Suffolk pink

Griff and his wife Jo