MARY BERRY’S NEW GARDEN

I always enjoy going back to visit gardens we have worked on, and last week it was a real treat to visit Mary Berry in her new garden. We started to help Mary with the design in early 2017, when she had her previous, much larger garden at what had been the family home for many years.

I spent a day with her and husband Paul and sketched out possibilities. Mary and Paul have now been bedded down in their new garden for about a year. Everyone I work with who downsizes and leaves a garden that they have developed and cherished for years, always takes on their new plot with relish. I think the idea of refining all your gardening knowledge and ideas into a new Utopia must be hugely satisfying, and Mary is no exception.

We formed a mini vegetable garden with brick raised beds, at a height of 450mm so they are ideal for perching on.

We used Old Farmhouse

Blend bricks from Vandersanden (formerly Hoskins) and the same for the greenhouse base and the low retaining walls around the muchenlarged terrace adjacent to the house.

Mary is an avid gardener but has little free time so a new big terrace (complete with bay trees in baseless pots) stretching the length of the house is ideal for entertaining and relaxing. We included wide steps up onto the lawn and sitting-height brick retaining walls all round – useful overflow for seating.

Pots of favourite herbs (including lemon verbena for her drizzle cake) just outside her kitchen French doors are essential. Mary’s favourite rose is ‘Chandos Beauty’ and beds of this highly fragrant, pale peachy pink hybrid tea, that flowers repeatedly from June to the frosts, frame the sunken terrace. The tennis court, being only 15m from the terrace, previously dominated the garden so we brought in instant 1.8m high yew hedges in troughs from Elveden Estates (these never fail to establish instantly) and planted them to