COLOUR BY THE COAST
Rachel James’s garden close to the Dorset shoreline has to endure strong winds and thin soil, yet still delivers bounty behind its sturdy stone walls
Rachel James’s garden close to the Dorset shore endures strong winds and thin soils, yet still delivers bounty within its sturdy stone walls
n a benign summer’s day, crunching along the path that skirts the limestone roundhouse and encircles the pond, you could imagine yourself being in rural France – perhaps in a lovely gîte in the Dordogne. In fact, Rachel and Allan James’s mellow Grade Ii-listed stone manor house, built between 1590 and 1720, is just a couple of fields back from the cliffs of the Jurassic coast. It has been restored in the best possible taste, with grey-green window frames and every outward sign of modernity stripped away, to leave a house that sits perfectly in its tranquil surroundings.
But its proximity to the coast brings gardening challenges that have taken Rachel 20 years to learn to handle, as she has wrestled with both salt-laden winds and thin soil. “In the summer, our garden is pretty and filled with colour but in winter you soon come to realise that everything is grey: the walls, the terrace, the sky, the sea, the stone –everything,” Rachel says. “I asked for advice from garden designer Georgia Langton and she said that what we were lacking were evergreens. She was right – we would be lost without them here.”
Principal among these are two sentry lines of holm oaks (Quercus ilex) that frame the view from the sitting-room windows to the sea. Clipped into lollipop shapes, they help to anchor the lawns to the house on one side and echo the rounded lines of the fields on the other. Underneath them, a host of Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ bob about in the breeze. “The idea here was to just let the lawn drift off into the landscape and I think we have achieved that,” Rachel says. “Various friends have made suggestions for additions to the garden over the years but, to be honest, no one ‘gets’ the severity of the prevailing winds here unless they have experienced them. It can blow for days on end and, of course, that cuts out a lot of plant choices.”
When she and Allan found the house in 1984, it was a derelict farm with outbuildings, all in much need of love and attention. The stone walls that form the boundary and wiggle through it, pierced by a series of enticing gateways, have been retained to offer some respite from the wind. A local stonemason lovingly repaired them little by little over several years and now they are in fine condition. A windbreak of elders helps, too.
Rachel has long since given up fighting nature, preferring to be relaxed about the
planting and to concentrate on what does well here. “Why bang your head against the wall trying to grow things that just don’t like it? It’s pointless and wasteful,” she says. Her absolute triumph is the orchard, which positively sings with colour, awash with poppies, scabious, nigella and Ammi majus. It looks different every year according to what Rachel decides to sow and then, as well, what comes up. Poppies are a constant and this year’s other picks include Scabious ‘White Perfection’ and ‘Blue Perfection’, Orlaya grandiflora and the classic cornflower Centaurea cyanus ‘Blue Boy’.
The idea for this planting came about by chance about 15 years ago when they were plagued with black medick weed and had to resort to glyphosate on the whole area: “Of course, we were then left with a large expanse of bare soil, so we hit on the idea of throwing packets of annual seeds on it. From then on, we were hooked.” The herbage is cut down at the end of August once some seed has been gathered for re-sowing – the area is mown and scarified. “We are not yet on top of the medick, so, regrettably, we do still need to use glyphosate again each year,” Rachel explains.
Elsewhere, the soil has needed a lot of enrichment as it is naturally thin and, in places, the land is nearly at bedrock. “We used to import lots of farmyard manure annually, but we have gone away from that because it introduces too many weeds,” Rachel says. “We are deeply rural here, so we have more than enough weeds blowing in from the fields without introducing more
in great dollops around our roses!”old-fashioned roses do well here. One favourite is the vigorous rugosa rose ‘Roseraie de l’hay’, which has richly perfumed red-purple flowers. Rachel also grows standard ‘Macmillan Nurse’, a naturally healthy modern variety with an old-fashioned rosette flower in white flushed with peach.
Come high summer, the paths narrow considerably, taken over by lavender, catmint and myriad hardy geraniums, and the terrace is bearded with Mexican fleabane Erigeron karvinskianus. Rachel is both adventurous and tolerant with her plants. She doesn’t mind the late-flowering shrub Clerodendrum bungei coming through the wall because she enjoys its fragrant pinky-red blooms and she turns the tall, fluffy white-flowered Fleece flower she knows as Polygonum polymorpha (now Persicaria alpina) to her advantage to fill a spot on the main lawn.
Gardener Anita works three days a week, which helps keep some modicum of control but in fair weather the garden is Rachel’s favourite place to be: “I knew absolutely nothing when I started but I like to think I know a little more now.” She continues to fret and worry about it, and there are still occasional losses – with her much-loved box succumbing to blight and a favourite Elaeagnus angustifolia ‘Quicksilver’ pegging out – but she remains cheerful and sees the way that nature takes control, moving things about at will, as something of a minor miracle: “I feel that sometimes we gardeners shouldn’t get in the way of that.”
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