LIVING ROOMS IN BLOOM
Beneath the clouds of cottage-garden favourites, there is a classic floorplan in this West Sussex garden – a series of ‘rooms’ threaded together by a carefully crafted planting scheme
A carefully crafted planting scheme in a West Sussex cottage garden
When architect Jenny Lewin first went to view Pest Cottage in 1990, she couldn’t find it. “No one I asked seemed to know the place, but when I eventually located it, I peered through the windows and thought, ‘This is perfect.’” Jenny and her husband left London to raise their two young daughters in West Sussex, attracted by its multitude of interesting old buildings. On the fringe of Midhurst Common, brick-built Pest Cottage is concealed at the end of a woodland track, and many locals still don’t know of its existence.
“Upstairs, there was just one bedroom and a tiny box room, but it didn’t matter because the garden was so big that we could make outside spaces to compensate for the lack of inside ones,” Jenny explains, undeterred by the “sleeping beauty brambles” that grew up to the door. “And I really like the charm of a place when things are a bit worn and paint has started to peel. Three reclusive ladies had lived in this tiny cottage. It felt like finding a children’s storybook home in the woods.”
As Jenny explains, she began by “gently pushing back into the garden, finding bits of paths, small sections of wall, clay pipes, ornaments, little trinkets and clues to its past life. I didn’t want to clear it. I wanted to sit with it for a while and get to know it.” Over time, she carved spaces out to accommodate family life, making distinct areas for particular uses and times of day. “It’s so much cheaper to enlarge your home by using the garden if you
can, dividing spaces with plants or low stacks of timber sleepers, for instance.
“The shed where my office is now was an outside toilet and coalhouse when we came, but early on, it was somewhere for us to entertain and have Christmas dinner. Nowadays, the terrace outside is our coffee spot, even in winter with a coat on.” The dining area is now further into the garden, a deck of timber sleepers laid directly onto a bed of sand – “no cutting, no nails, no foundation, no tools needed” – framed with pots of herbs and edged on one side with four types of mint for use at the ‘mojito bar’ made of pallets: “We eat outside a lot, either cooking on the little barbecue or further into the garden where there’s a fire.”
Using cheap building materials such as railway sleepers that she could manoeuvre on her own with the aid of a sack trolley, Jenny terraced the slope to link lower and upper parts of the garden: “I made a whole series of little terraces, which also act as steps, and although the soil here is mostly very dry, the area behind the back edge of the sleepers gets quite damp, so different things will grow there. The planting is quite linear in the garden because of that effect.”
Recalling her Scottish childhood when she would lie on the ground and look closely at daisies, Jenny emphasises that she’s “as happy looking at a tiny daisy as anything exotic. It’s not about individual plants, but
“I’m as happy looking at a tiny daisy as anything exotic. It’s not about individual plants, but about the garden as a whole”
about the garden as a whole, and if plants like growing here, I usually let them, except for couch grass. A lot of plants won’t cope with the hot, dry conditions in the summer, although lizards and grass snakes love it. I don’t want to struggle to make things grow.”
Self-seeders abound, including some often considered to be weeds such as wild strawberry, herb Robert and yellow-flowered sulphur cinquefoil. Others are more ‘respectable’ garden plants, including wall daisies Erigeron karvinskianus, magenta Lychnis coronaria and campanulas in blue and white, and woodlanders such as foxgloves and ferns.
There are areas of designed planting, too, such as a combination of creeping thymes and rust-coloured New Zealand sedge Carex testacea, in conversation with a quartet of circular orange garden seats. Jenny explains: “Beneath the woolliness of the planting, there is an underlying organisation – a classic architectural floorplan where walkways lead into and out of rectangles, and staircases link different levels.” Clipped shrubs, including a cluster of variegated holly lollipops and low box hedges, also lend structure to the garden, as do carefully placed containers including a run of galvanized buckets planted with pale orange pelargoniums along the ‘coffee terrace’ edge. Herbs,
tomatoes and strawberries grow in pots, and a few climbing beans twine themselves up obelisks in a pair of big galvanized dustbins: “I like things to graze on when I’m in the garden, eating a little bit from here and there.” A velvety daybed occupies a vine-clad greenhouse where strawberries hang within easy reach outside the door.
The surrounding trees are an important part of the garden’s character for Jenny: “They make the area dynamic, bringing a lot of movement and sound. They reflect light wonderfully, too, almost like a glitter ball at times.” It comes as no surprise to hear that when they were teenagers, Jenny’s daughters had lots of parties in this most sociable of gardens. As she says: “If you make the space, people will come.”
JENNY LEWIN’S GARDEN at Pest Cottage, Midhurst, West Sussex, usually opens for the National Garden Scheme. See ngs.org.uk for details. For information on Jenny’s architectural practice, see jenniferlewin.co.uk.
“Beneath the woolliness of the planting, there is an underlying organisation”