Garden of the Week
Pam Tuppen’s plant addiction has led to a wonderful year-round garden that looks after itself while providing maximum enjoyment
Simon Caney Marianne Majerus
On March 18, Pam Tuppen will be 90. Almost certainly, she'll spend part of her big day in her garden. “Oh yes, I should think so,” she says. “I do love to potter!”
Pam’s Kent plot, which she has tended now for 35 years, is the most perfect spring cottage garden one can imagine – crammed with snowdrops, hellebores, aconites, cyclamen, crocus, primroses and irises. But such is her love of plants that it hardly draws breath all year round; when one plant goes over the top there are others ready to burst into bloom.
When she moved in with her late husband Richard and their two sons, Paul and Alex, then 15 and 13, the garden was a completely blank canvas with very few plants at all.
The house is built into the side of a bank so the first thing to be done was create a series of terraces and a rockery in the bank, using stones from architectural salvage yards. The area still exists to this day, a south-facing slope sheltered from the elements that plants absolutely love.
Once the rockery and terracing were finished, Pam set about enthusiastically planting up the rest of the quarter-acre garden.
“I really can’t remember what went in first,” she says. “I wanted to have a really traditional cottage garden feel, without much bare soil. We put in a path with various
archways dotted around so the garden is split off into different sections. You walk around it as if you’re being drawn along – it has a bit of a ‘secret garden’ feel.”
In summer, climbing roses adorn those archways, while a host of other plants add a riot of colour and fragrance. “Oh, I have a bit of everything,” says Pam. “Aquilegias, delphiniums, geraniums – really all the sorts of things you’d hope for in a cottage garden. And lots of pots!”
There’s a patch of grass (“I can’t really call it a lawn”) and a terraced courtyard but most of the garden is given over to Pam’s plant addiction. She is a firm believer in letting plants “fight it out” and only moves them if they’re particularly unhappy. “It’s not what you’d call a tidy garden,” she says. “I’m not so keen on formal gardens with too many straight lines. I just cram in the plants where I think they’ll go best.”