Garden of the Week
A classic case of less is more, Bunny Guinness’ easy-care country garden exudes effortless – and enviable – elegance and tranquillity
Bunny Guinness, of BBC RGaadrdioe n4e’srs’ Q puaensetli, o ins Time also a busy landscape architect with six Chelsea Show Garden gold medals to her name. Her mother Barbara still runs a perennial plant nursery, despite being 88 years of age, and she’s the niece of the famous rosarian David Austin, so both gardening and hard work are in her genes.
Bunny moved into Sibberton Lodge, situated in the village of Thornhaugh near Peterborough, in 1984, in the days when she and her husband were still working in London.
“It was April Fool’s Day and the weather was bitterly cold,” she recalls, “and I began by planting a thousand, tiny, bare-root ash trees, field maples and a few walnuts. I was planting up to fifty an hour at one point.”
Now the shelter belt is mature, it screens nearby farm buildings, cuts out the prevailing southwesterly winds and provides
a crop of walnuts, although the squirrels seem to have spotted them in recent months.
Once the trees were planted, Bunny began thinking about the garden. “The courtyard was covered in a thick layer of concrete. There were corrugated iron farm barns and telegraph poles with wires, and the little walled garden was completely overgrown.”
Bunny hired contractors to remove the heavy concrete and clear the site, and then began to plan how to lay out a garden.
“No one minded in those days if you made a garden on agricultural land, but that’s all changed now,” she adds.
She carefully drew up plans before starting to plant and now the garden wraps itself round three sides of the house. The garden sits on an elevated ridge and Bunny has created a ha-ha that overlooks her meadow where she keeps two Oxford sandy and black pigs. “They’re lovely and ginger, with black spots,” she enthuses.
There are views over the meadow and fields, so the garden feels much larger than half an acre. The core of the garden consists of an uncluttered lawn with a simple rectangular pond decorated with six small stone balls. A carefully placed ornate gate, framed by two stone pillars,
gives a glimpse of farmland beyond, and there’s a feeling of calm. On either side of this area there are allées of pleached hornbeams, planted as tiny bare-root trees. A trompe-l’oeil mirror extends the eye in front of a stone wall, throwing back the reflected light along the tree-lined path because Bunny doesn’t want too much shade.
“It’s very dry underneath the hornbeams so I’ve some box balls in simple pots and an underplanting of brunnera, the herbaceous clematis ‘Wyevale’, sEaurocnoycmocucsa fso,rtunei and oriental hellebores. I also use a lot of spring-flowering bulbs.”
These areas are kept simple as she has only one day a week in the garden, with another day done by a garden helper.
“I don’t have time to do lots of intense gardening because I work for three days every week, designing gardens with my daughter Unity,” explains Bunny, “so I’ve streamlined the garden so we can keep on top of it.”
Over the years she’s built up a lot of artisan contacts through her landscape design practice, including metal workers, wood carvers and carpenters. Her reconstituted stone balls and ornate galvanised tripods, for instance, come at a far better price than those sold at garden centres. These simple designer touches of repeated motifs unite and enhance the planting throughout the garden.
A chequerboard pattern of paving and thyme, a circular wooden seat supported on stone balls, ammonite-inspired paving, a series of ornate tripods, or terracotta pots and rhubarb planters are all clever garden design devices.
Bunny also uses the same shade of paint on containers
and woodwork to create a coordinated colour theme. And she has a novel way of planting small trees in large, painted containers: “I grow them in bottomless containers – taking the bases out of these with an angle grinder – so that the tree is rooted into the ground. I use medlars, quinces and yew and, this way, there’s no repotting or dying back.
One of the most intensively gardened areas is the vegetable garden, which is close to the kitchen door. Raised beds contain garlic, leeks, kale, salads, spinach, globe artichokes, herbs, celeriac, and flowers. ‘I’m a massive herbivore and this is my outside larder,” Bunny says. Plenty of ‘hunter gathering’ takes place throughout the year.
When Christmas beckons Bunny adds festive touches, and two Portuguese laurels ( P) arruenpuesp lupseirtaednica with small Christmas decorations and rusty metal letters that spell Noel. An ash tree in the field is decorated with red paper and a fully antlered reindeer looks on. These enhance this beautifully laid-out garden, adding that personal designer touch.