THE BOUNTIFUL POTAGER
Step behind the 18th-century walls of this East Sussex garden to discover a riotous abundance of cut flowers, fruit and vegetables growing cheek by jowl
A riotous abundance of cut flowers, fruit and vegetables in an East Sussex garden
Sandy Coppen’s walled garden at
The Beeches in East Sussex is a model of its kind, an exuberance of fruits, flowers, vegetables and herbs so beautifully laid out and expertly grown that the garden attracts admirers from throughout Europe. “It’s a minor miracle,” Sandy says. “If anyone had said to me 20 years ago that I would want to spend my time gardening and would have created a garden that people wanted to visit, I would have just laughed.”
Sandy had little gardening knowledge before falling in love with the elegant 18th-century house that sits in the South Downs National Park. She was so taken with the house itself, and its location, that she didn’t initially register that such places usually come with large gardens attached: “The first spring after we moved in, I walked into the 300-year-old walled garden and looked around. Even I, with my lack of experience, could see that it was run down. I said to myself, ‘Blimey, this is big – what on earth am I going to do with it?’”
What Sandy did next was to read as many gardening magazines and books as she could, enrol in a series of gardening courses at the local Plumpton College and visit other gardens. From the latter, she learnt “planting and design ideas as well as practical things, such as the usefulness of brick edging and the importance of compost bins”. Sandy now has 11 compost bins, which produce masses of goodness to return to the soil, and beds edged in reclaimed bricks.
The garden originally consisted of four large beds. Sandy found these daunting, so divided each in half with grass paths. The size then felt manageable and she started filling them with seed-sown annual flowers and, later, with fruit and vegetables.
The backbone of her cut-flower selection consists of common, easy-to-grow varieties such as cornflower, scabious, cosmos, larkspur and nigella. She also has a spectacular display of sweet peas, produced from dozens of plants. To support them, she has built a permanent structure of rigid wire netting about 2.5m tall. The young sweet pea plants are planted on each side of the ‘fence’ in mid-may.
Sandy has several personal favourites that she wouldn’t be without, including Ammi visnaga, an airy plant with umbels of white flowers that is shorter and stockier than the popular Ammi majus. As a foliage plant to give body to any bunch of flowers, she recommends Moluccella laevis, with spikes of apple green, earning it the common name of Bells of Ireland.
Sandy’s plant palette doesn’t tend to change dramatically because she is so happy with the colours of the cut flowers that she grows, although she does regularly try out new plants. She is particularly enthusiastic about the latest addition:
Flowers spill onto paths and creep up through vegetables, growing together harmoniously
an annual lavender called Lavandula multifida ‘Spanish Eyes’ that she grows from seed: “It’s so dainty and so easy to grow. You get fresh lavender flowers every year without the bother of tending the shrubs that always seem to end up woody and ugly.”
Plants are crammed together much more closely than the textbooks and catalogues recommend, making the most of the space and creating a bountiful effect. The garden feels full and generous, with flowers cheek by jowl with fruit and vegetables.
As with the cut flowers, Sandy grows a range of basic vegetables such as salads, leeks, beans and shallots, focusing on varieties that are not generally available in shops and markets: “I don’t bother with many potatoes because they take up a lot of space and they are not expensive to buy. I do grow ‘Red Duke of York’ because I love the colour of them in a salad, and ‘Pink Fir’, which are so tasty but never for sale in the shops.” Perhaps the most unusual vegetable she grows is the tomatillo, a south American fruit with a spicy taste that resembles a green tomato. “I only grow one because they are so vigorous and a single plant is enough for loads of salsa verde,” she says.
All the plants are grown from seed sown in February: “I know that a lot of people sow in the autumn but I’m rather tired by then, so it is quite nice to clear everything down, give the soil a good mulch of manure and forget it all during the winter.” The result of this is a luxuriant garden filled with perfume and colour. Flowers spill onto paths and creep up through vegetables, growing together harmoniously.
The rich soil ensures masses of fruit and veg – some of which is left on a table at the garden gate alongside an honesty box – but most gets consumed. Sandy does a lot of juicing, potting, pickling and preserving: “That is something else I enjoy doing, which I never would have believed before coming here. Now, like the garden, I just love it.”
THE BEECHES, Barcombe, East Sussex, opens for the National Garden Scheme (see ngs.org.uk). B&B is available in the house. Visit thebeechesbarcombe.com for more details.