Seamless character
George Plumptre finds that framing delicate and airy planting with evergreen structure perfectly complements this late-medieval manor house
Delicate planting and structured evergreens enhance medieval Yelford Manor in Oxfordshire, says George Plumptre
In January 2015, when the Oxford Mail reported on the sale of contents from Yelford Manor near Witney, the newspaper confirmed that the house had been in the hands of only five families in 1,000 years. The new owners, Christian and Pip Hoyer Millar, were about to become the sixth. Looking at the timbered, gabled house in its setting of broad, big-skied Oxfordshire farmland and with a glimpse of a modest norman church on the far side of the garden, you imagine that not a great deal has changed through the centuries—certainly
Yelford Manor, Witney, Oxfordshire
not since the present house was built in 1499 on the site of the Norman original.
Of course, as we shall see, there has been a succession of changes, but the present, very new, garden skilfully perpetuates a sense of calm timelessness entirely complementary to the long history and open landscape setting of the house.
The work at Yelford is a delightful addition to the vagaries of how garden designers get commissioned. In 2014, a few weeks after she and her husband acquired Yelford Manor, Mrs Hoyer Millar was on the hunt for a new fireplace and visited Architectural Heritage near Stow-on-the-wold. When she was making a successful purchase, she casually asked whether the owner knew of a local garden designer. ‘I do actually,’ came the response, ‘my wife.’
And so it was that Katie Guillebaud was commissioned to produce a master plan for the 7½ acres, which she’s been putting into action ever since.
Mrs Hoyer Millar’s quest for a designer was largely prompted by the challenge of incorporating into a new garden the ugly remnants of a farmyard immediately to one side of the house, which included concrete yards, lengths of breeze-block walls and a mixture of farm buildings.
The farm had been an integral part of Yelford’s long history, but, in the 1950s, the house had reached a state of advanced
decay, having been divided between three farm tenants for many years. It was then purchased by two Oxford academics, who carefully restored it and turned it back into a single house. Their work was continued from the mid 1980s by the journalist Roger Rosewall and his wife, Christine Huddleston, who also created the evergreen structure of the garden that Mrs Hoyer Millar wished to retain.
Now, when viewed from the house, the well-established yew hedges and topiary to one side of the garden frame the expansive airy planting that Mrs Guillebaud has devised throughout. There are adjacent areas—the far edge merges into woodland— but this is not a garden of ‘rooms’.
The planting style celebrates the marriage of late-summer colour and perennial grasses and flows seamlessly throughout with engagingly subtle variations from one bed or border to another.
This is a garden of tall, slender plants and there is a mesmerising sense of movement, as well as flowing shapes and a subtly mixed colour palette in which shades of green and brown are enlivened by flashes of brilliant pink, mauve or white in that most enticing of combinations, delicate but bright: perovskia and persicaria; thalictrum and sanguisorba; cephalaria, verbena and gaura. The overall effect is like a group of light cotton dresses caught on a summer breeze.
Creating a feeling of openness and movement was central to Mrs Guillebaud’s aspirations: ‘I love island beds: the sense you get of being able to view them from all sides,
the ability they create for grasses to be backlit by sunlight and the sense that there is easy continuity with the landscape.’
The open style flows into the area that was farmyard, where it’s hard to believe that what is now a wildflower meadow leading to an immaculately designed swimmingpool garden was once covered in thick concrete and dotted with farm buildings. The more attractive of them have been retained, such as the old cart lodge that shelters one side of the pool garden.
Here, the restrained planting continues with a boundary of aerial hornbeams above new Cotswold-stone walls and unusual pin oaks (Quercus palustris) clipped into umbrellas above clumps of deschampsia, molinia and a variety of panicums.
The style of the new planting accentuates the contrast of the glorious topiary family that clusters on the far side of the main garden, with sheltering woodland behind, through which paths lead secretly to the Norman church and the pond that’s fed by the remnants of the medieval moat. Looking from here across the seamless
layers of Mrs Guillebaud’s planting around the main lawn and with the characterful façade of the house as the backdrop—all uneven lines, timber and steep gables— you get a rich, memorable impression of a garden that has, within a few years, given a place of deep establishment a modern and refreshing new identity.
George Plumptre is chief executive of the National Garden Scheme
The style accentuates the contrast of the topiary and sheltering woodland behind