‘No matter how often I go, it never fails to be lovely’

I first went to Helmingham Hall when I studied Amenity and Decorative Horticulture at Otley College in the late 1980s. It was the first official garden visit of that course and I thought it was just magical.

The house is a wonderful Tudor building, built of red brick, with soaring brick chimneys. If you look at it across the moat from the garden, the clipped yew shapes echo the roofline of the house; not exactly, but enough to resonate. The Tollemache family have lived there since 1510 and they still do, but the current gardens owe a lot to Xa Tollemache and the wonderful former head gardener, Roy Balaam, who was her willing accomplice in all sorts of amazing things.

From a distance, the house seems to float in the landscape and when you get closer, it appears to float on the water of the moat as well. Rather than a mown slope, a meadow runs down to the moat, filled with ox-eye daisies and wildflowers.

The walled garden is a mixture of formality and gentle laxness. There are beautiful double borders, filled with wonderful, tall summer perennials, and there are rows and rows of very beautifully-kept crops. Fruit trees and formal veg beds are divided by magnificent, buttressed, clipped evergreens, leaning into the walls.

When I first went, I just wanted to go home and kick my own garden! It was so unlike it – in the nicest sense. At Helmingham Hall you see plants that have been used to create a kind of colour wash with living things, and I love the wonderful tunnels, with sweet peas, beans and ornamental gourds; fruit and flowers, in the walled garden.

When I did my book, Secret Gardens of East Anglia, it was a key garden on my list. In some ways, it’s quite well known and I sometimes imagine people asking what is so secret about it. But there are things you don’t see, then, all of a sudden, there is an ‘ooh!’ moment! No matter how many times I go, it never fails to be lovely.

■ Helmingham Hall, Stowmarket, Suffolk IP14 6EF; www.helmingham.com.