FACT BOX
Character of the garden Traditional English cottage style with several garden ‘rooms’ and a vegetable garden
Aspect South facing
Soil Alluvial
Owners Bee and Nigel Eastman, moved here in 2011
THouse 18th-century Cotswold stone cottage, which was formerly two properties
Open Adam’s Pool is open under the National Gardens Scheme. See the website for details of 2020 openings (ngs.org.uk) here is every reason why the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire have been designated an ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’. Rolling hills, charming market towns and chocolate-box cottages form the quintessential classic English rural scene. Away from the hub of busy tourist spots, sleepy honeyed stone villages are tucked into pockets of countryside where gentle streams meander beside the narrow lanes. Chedworth, near Cirencester, is one such village.
Bee Eastman made the village her home in 2011. A former forensic consultant, on moving to her pretty cottage, Bee expanded her gardening pastime into a full-time passion, which she enjoys alongside her new-found hobby of stone carving and etching. ‘Since retiring, I decided to explore my creative side by enrolling at the Putney School of Art and Design,’ Bee explains, who then went on to study stone carving at the New Brewery Arts Centre in Cirencester. Her prints and sculptures have been exhibited and sold locally and in London, and her artistic talent is clearly seen in the layout of her garden, too, which she designed from scratch.
Dating back to the 18th century, Adam’s Pool was originally two homes. When Bee and husband Nigel first moved here nine years ago, the garden was well loved, but in a different form; Bee’s vision was to create a series of garden rooms with plenty of space for relaxing. ‘The first alteration to the garden was to construct a courtyard abutting the older part of the house by building a folly wall with a quatrefoil recycled church window,’ she explains. The wall incorporates ledges to hold candles, and the topiary-studded courtyard is a perfect sun-trap, with lavender spilling across the gravel, Verbena bonariensis and Nigella damascena, love-in-amist providing low-growing colour, while pale pink roses and Clematis ‘Perle d’azur’ spill from the walls of the house and folly wall.
In the rear garden, a rectangular lawn is surrounded on two sides by abundantly planted borders, one in ‘hot’ colours and the other planted in soft pinks and blues. In the hot border, chocolatey red Dahlia ‘Karma Choc’ and ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ are dotted among towering sunflowers, while spires of bright yellow Lysimachia Punctata,
loosestrife, and fiery orange crocosmia jostle for space among cheerful yellow Rudbeckia fulgida
var.sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’ and Sedum spectabile.
Further height is provided by the apricot-yellowcoloured flowers of the ‘Teasing Georgia’ rose