Idyllic gardens,
IN BRIEF
Name Silver Street Farm. What Private garden. Where Devon.
Soil Clay.
Size Three acres. Climate Temperate. Hardiness zone USDA 9.
ISABEL BANNERMAN
PHOTOGRAPHS
Leaving the huge, hot sky on the edge of the Somerset Levels heading west, the road turns east and into the folds of the Blackdown Hills as you cross into Devon. Here the ferny lanes are in deep shadow, the shade of imperturbable oak trees. Mercurial rivulets hug the edges of the dark, which suddenly lights up in the break created by a welcoming gate and a farmhouse, its formal façade basking in the heat, blushing behind a riot of roses and rather shy, grey sash windows. This is home to Alasdair and Tor Cameron and their three children, and although Alasdair and Tor have done so much in the eight years since they moved here, nothing they have done jars with the fundamentals of Devonshire fields and farming. Sheep graze behind gates and fences that are new but do not feel it; a ruddy, red local pea gravel runs up and round the rescued cobbles and is laid as a thin dusting over compacted hoggin for firmness under foot and wheel. These are the details that make a garden and house feel properly grounded in its landscape. They make it smell and feel right, as though it has all just ‘happened’ – the hardest thing to achieve.
Alasdair is the best kind of energetic plantaholic; a garden designer with a successful business, he has fearlessly drained and taken in hand the claggy field he found behind the house. He then dug up and planted, not just a garden, but huge swathes of waving fronds and inflorescence, rivers of colour intersected by curling byways. The scale of things is large enough for his daughter to trot a pony on a path between torrents of lush herbaceous planting and a camomile lawn so green it might be under water. Umbellifers abound and they have done something I have always meant to do, planted spare parsnips from the vegetable garden to grow into metre-high perennials with flat-headed umbels. The whole of the sweeping border is lively with leaf shape, a dancing graph of spikey heights intended to be left over winter. I have a theory that prairie planting cannot be made to work in this part of the South West, where the lack of frost and high autumn rainfall merely turn a blackened border to a slush, dahlias turning to jelly. But here the standing seedheads bring as much joy to Alasdair and Tor as the high summer abundance.
The southerly aspect on the entrance side of the house is a feast of foaming Anthemis tinctoria ‘EC Buxton’ and Lupinus luteus, which grows tall among the fancier lupin cultivars ‘Cashmere Cream’ and ‘Chandelier’ – all of which are a buttery yellow, echoing the limewash on the house. Rust- and ochre-coloured bearded irises play with this theme. A slate table and chairs are almost engulfed. Lead tubs fit to burst, tulips followed by sweet peas giving way to salvias, silver helichrysum and umbellifers. The planters are various and generous, full of treasures and orphans; one designer perk is to collect up discarded or failed plantlings from jobs and bring them back to life. It is one reason why designers’ gardens are often un-designed, a sentimental mixture of chuck outs and misfits we could not leave behind, battled into our plots when rushing between jobs. Alasdair nurtures these ‘miserables’ and everything burgeons for him: aromatic and culinary herbs; teepees of sweet peas; the colours irresistible of Salvia involucrata ‘Hadspen’ and S. confertiflora, the red velvet sage.
Sage brings us round to smells, and scent carries us to the sheltered, west-facing end of the house where Alasdair has made an enclosed garden of scented things. Alasdair and I share a worship of old-fashioned scented roses, such as Rosa ‘Charles de Mills’ and the creamy violet-scented R. banksiae, growing well, but yet to flower. Here are gathered all the spring-smelly flowered shrubs, daphnes, olearias, and Viburnum x carlcephalum and V. carlesii. Swept on with the urgency and impatience of the plant fiend with not enough hours in the day, Alasdair rushes me to the east of the house where he has just opened up a whole new front of figs, rosemary, espaliered apricots and lavender. Again, these had to be ‘re-homed’ in a hurry.
Scent is a driver but so is fearless colour. I commend any gardener who successfully plants a rambling rubicund Rosa ‘Chevy Chase’ with the colour saturated buds of apricot R. ‘Climbing Lady Hillingdon’. Here these two romp successfully up the ochre lime-washed front of their house (around the cool grey windows). This combination is a startling echo of the tour de force here, a pair of 3m-high (and still climbing) Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ either side of the front door. I have seen R. x odorata ‘Bengal Crimson’ climb to great heights but not ‘Mutabilis’, yet here it is clambering up the house, luxuriant in shaggy showers of shocking pink and egg-yolk bloom. This boldness is completely successful and is repeated throughout the garden, clockwork orange, rock’n’roll purple and starlet scarlet all sing together, threaded on cadences of sulphur and lime phlomis and Cephalaria gigantea, and yellow-hued Patrinia.
You can tell from the use of structural elements – clipped green-leaved beech beehives arranged formally but modestly along the front of the house, and the Malus transitoria as a transition from garden to meadow orchard – that the makers of this garden are informed, environmentally aware and professional. The garden at Silver Street Farm is completely assured, but nowhere does it even mutter ‘designer’. It is the home and haven of, not just plantspeople, but people who love to nurture and be playful with their plants.
USEFUL INFORMATION
Find out more about Alasdair’s work at camerongardens.co.uk
blue
Tall orange spires of Kniphofia ‘Tawny King’ and Eremurus ‘Romance’ mixed with the zingy orange of ‘Prinses Juliana’ create a fabulous contrast to the blues of Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ and S. nemorosa ‘Ostfriesland’ cooled by the white of
‘Perfecta Alba’.
Facing page Lychnis chalcedonica offers another bold colour choice with its rich red flowers, here combined with the airy tussock grass which Alasdair says is amazing in winter, the pinkish red Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ hiding with the Knautia macedonica, self-seeded fennel and Geranium ‘Brookside’ filling the front.