Garden of the Week
This glorious Dorset garden has seen a metamorphosis over six decades as the owners have developed it into an all-season paradise
The neglected garden at Domineys Yard, with a huge ash heap laced with multi-cell portable batteries, seemed unpromising when William and Jeanette Gueterbock moved into the pair of 17th century cottages in 1961.
“It’s a good job we started when we were young!” William says. “I visited a lot of other gardens and nurseries to gain ideas and gradually improved it with structures and planting, as time and money allowed.
“It’s situated on the 500ft contour on the edge of the Dorset Downs, so the heavier cold air drains off readily while hills to the west protect it from the full force of the prevalent west winds. The soil’s mostly neutral greensand, which gives great planting opportunities.”
The couple started by removing the elm coffin board fence that divided the two cottage gardens, levelling the ash heap and transforming an outside loo into a patio, using the stone for walling. They replaced a line of sickly standard roses with an
herbaceous border and laid a lawn.
They bought more land at the top of the lawn, complete with a 24m (80ft) pear tree and five 100-year-old cherries – a remnant of past orchards. In five years, a beech hedge they planted from 45cm (1½ft) forestry slips in a trench with added manure reached 1.8m (6ft).
“The pear and cherries provided shade and leaf mould, so the neutrality of the greensand shifted to acidity, enabling us to plant camellias, rhododendrons and other acid lovers,” William says.
Eventually the cherries died and the pear fell in a storm in 1990, but by that time the planted magnolias, acers and a copper beech had grown.
The front of the house is smothered by climbing rose ‘Étoile de Hollande’. “For 25 years we didn’t know its name, until we saw it flowering in the Loire Valley in France and the owner identified it,” says William. The flower bed opposite the house, backed by a beech hedge, is packed with colourful perennials, with climbing roses and clematis supported by locally made black-iron obelisks.
Between 1969 and 1985 the couple bought the individual adjacent cottages situated in the yard and planted climbing
Clematis montana wilsonii and an autumn-flowering camellia in a pot against the facades. “The soil around the houses is alkaline as a result of builders’ rubble being buried from the era before skips,” William explains.
Spring bulbs flourish and herbaceous plants and unusual shrubs, such as a double yellow tree peony and species mahonia, continue the seasons. A bank of primroses and bulbs thrive in the grass, together with self-sown yellow and orange-flowered Lilium pyrenaicum.
A plant-packed ornamental garden, with lawn, trees, shrubs, curving flower beds and a vegetable garden, was created behind the cottages. “The ancient stone privy is now a shed and the tree screen and yew hedges – all seedlings from the garden – offer protection from cold winds,” William says.
In 1975 they bought part of an adjacent paddock and built a swimming pool, potting shed, store and grass tennis court. They planted this area with acers, a red oak, blue hydrangea, gingko and tulip tree.
“We soon learned to tie up the tennis court nets after half a dozen hedgehogs got caught in them on the first night,” William says. “We dunked each one in a bucket of water to straighten them out, so we could ease their necks back through the netting.”
As the tennis court was used less and less, in 2005, beds were marked out and dug to make a more formal Court Garden in contrast to the curves elsewhere. It features 500 box plants with pairs of Pinus flexilis ‘Vanderwolf’s Pyramid’, goldleafed pittosporum and variegated Liquidambar
styraciflua ‘Golden Treasure’ giving height to the formal beds.
On his retirement from the Navy in 1995 William purchased a 2½-acre field nearby, which he has developed into an arboretum. “It’s in a lovely setting by the
Lydden stream, which flows over gravel where the greensand peters out,” he says. He cleared and re-fenced the area, and planted native trees along the boundaries to merge with the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty landscape.
Streamside plants and more than 300 trees and shrubs were added. Fritillaries have naturalised and snowdrops, daffodils, bluebells and cyclamen come in due season. The striking autumn colour lasts from October to December, followed by fine winter stem colour before the New Year snowdrops.
“This year is our 32nd anniversary of opening for the NGS,” says William. “Over 50 years on from starting gardening at Domineys, each season provides its own moment of glory. As the garden and arboretum have developed, the bird population now includes all three woodpecker species as well as many butterflies and 60 moth species.
“It’s a wrench that the time has come to move somewhere smaller but we hope the future owners have as much pleasure living and gardening here as we have,” he adds.