Garden of the Week
This typical cottage garden has fruit trees, self-seeding plants, climbing roses and a busy vegetable potager – all with a natural feel
Before Pamela Metcalf moved into The Old Black Horse in 1980, it was a vegetable market garden, with a beautiful old walnut tree and various apple trees. The previous owner tilled the whole area and kept livestock such as pigs and hens. “We also kept sheep, goats and hens when we moved in, and we still have hens,” Pamela says. As she had a family with small children, one of the first things she did was to plant grass in areas so the children could play cricket and use climbing frames. She also planted trees such as Sorbus intermedia, Catalpa bignonioides ‘Aurea’, eucalyptus, Betula utilis jacquemontii and gleditsia for more interest, along with apple trees in the kitchen garden. The garden wasn’t so much designed as developed, although Pamela always had an idea of how she wanted it to look.
Her creativity and love of nature have given the garden a very natural feel, but this is the result of a balancing act between allowing nature to ‘do
its own thing’ and some careful planning. Evergreens such as pittosporum, sarcococca, euonymus and pieris make sure there’s structure and interest throughout the seasons, and Pamela created some height with arches and pergolas, softened with trailing roses and clematis.
Ajuga spills over hard lines of paving and edges while alchemilla, lavender and small grasses such as Festuca glauca have self-seeded in cracks in paving and gravel. “This way, a boring gravelled area turns into gentle waves of grass,” Pamela says. She likes to let things grow but might pull out some plants before the whole area is carpeted.
The garden has year-round interest – in spring, no sooner have snowdrops and aconites finished than scilla, daffodils, bluebells, irises and tulips come up. The beautiful wildflower meadow is now in its fifth year, with bird’s foot trefoil, campion, meadow clary, lady’s bedstraw, wild carrot, knapweed, ox-eye daisy, cow parsley and field scabious. It took some time for yellow rattle to get established, weakening the grasses and making space for the flowers to grow, but now it looks very colourful, providing interest from spring into summer.
The garden peaks in summer. Pamela has a passion for roses and when they’re in bloom there’s an array of different varieties with a lovely scent, some of them arching over
pergolas such as the rambling roses ‘Albéric Barbier’, a charming old English rose with cream double flowers, ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’, with abundant strongly fragrant flowers, and ‘Chevy Chase’, a classic with little deep crimson button flowers. There are also shrub roses such as ‘Windrush’, an old David Austin variety with large, soft yellow flowers, and ‘Penelope’, ‘Cordelia’ and ‘Felicia’ – which Pamela calls ‘the girls’ – and her favourite ‘Pearl Drift’, with clusters of large flowers in a light rose, with pink tips.
The herbaceous borders are also in full glory throughout the summer with the deliciously scented hesperis, foxglove, hollyhock, lupins, pinks,
ligularia, heuchera, dahlia, sisyrinchium, penstemon, echinops and campanula. “It’s organised chaos!” says Pamela. Lots of plants self-seed and make themselves at home, and Pamela only occasionally digs them up to move them around.
Autumn is colourful too, with Cotinus coggygria ‘Grace’, hydrangeas and acers, and in winter, eleagnus and berberis provide special interest. To complete the picture, areas are lightened up with container displays of fuchsias, geraniums, trailing petunias, lobelias and the scented acidanthera in summer.
The beds in the vegetable potager are surrounded by nicely-shaped box hedging. There are lots of soft fruit bushes such as gooseberry, raspberry, blackcurrant, as well as plum, pear and apple trees.
The vegetable garden is keeping Pamela busy now, and having just finished all the apple pruning, she’s getting ready for the season, starting off peas and broad beans.