Rooted in the PAST & PRESENT
When Jane Gates decided to up sticks to West Sussex, she transplanted much of her old garden to transform the new
Garden designer Jane Gates always wanted to live in a barn but this fine example just outside West Grinstead, tucked between the folds of the Downs and the High Weald, almost slipped through her fingers. “I saw it online and rejected it immediately,” she says. “There was a huge, dark, concrete patio and a hideous weeping conifer right outside the door on one side, and large, orange pebbles on the other. The whole place just looked so bleak.”
That is not a word that could be used to describe the garden today. In the three and a half years since she bought it (fate and a persuasive estate agent having intervened), Jane has transformed the space into a light, contemporary garden where sweeping beds of grasses and tall perennials seem to hold the house in their embrace while softening the transition to the meadow areas beyond.
Most surprisingly perhaps, the garden has a maturity that belies its youth, all of which can be put down to Jane’s clever planting, which retained all the existing trees (bar the weeping conifer) and makes effective use of bulbs, fast-growing annuals and perennials. Crucially, it also saw her reusing plants from her previous garden, many of which had already made several moves with her before. “My brother is a landscaper and I offered to buy him a trailer if he helped me move,” Jane says. “I think we made about 20 journeys in the end.”
The plants she brought ranged from tulips planted in pots the previous November – to ensure she would have colour in the spring (she moved in late 2017) – to climbing roses that she cut back and dug up. Box balls, Melianthus major, artichokes and shrubs such as Viburnum opulus and a chaste tree (Vitex angus-castus), with its fragrant blooms in late summer, were all transplanted to give instant structure, as were small trees including a catalpa and two cercis. Grasses, including Miscanthus sinensis ‘Ferner Osten’ and Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, and other plants such as Libertia grandiflora were chosen because they not only grow fast and tall, but they are also easily propagated. “You can just pull the clumps apart in autumn and they double in size in a couple of years,” Jane says.
As shrubs are best transplanted between October and late March, before the growing season begins, Jane had her work cut out. The garden she inherited was mostly laid to rough lawn, with just a couple of sparsely planted beds cut into the sloping grass behind the house and a hedgerow that almost bisected the plot. Working with her brother, they set
to immediately, moving the hedgerow to the boundary, installing an engineered Indian stone patio (to complement the riven Indian stone patio on the other side) where the concrete had been and laying down a membrane to facilitate Jane’s longed-for gravel garden – a dream ever since she had visited Beth Chatto’s garden as a garden design student, 20 years earlier. “I love the way the stones show off the plants,” she says. They dug and filled a pond, poured and raked 15 tonnes of pale gravel and created a small stumpery for Jane’s beloved tree ferns in one of the few shady spots. By mid-april, the garden was complete, with a new, large semi-circular bed around the patio to the rear of the house, which both increases the planting area and hides the uncomfortable slope of the lawn.
Today, this is a serene space filled with green and white planting that changes subtly through the seasons, moving from snowdrops and tulips (‘White Triumphator’ and ‘Spring Green’) in the early part of the year to huge cushions of feathery Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’ and Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ interspersed with white cosmos and the strap-like leaves of libertia, which Jane loves for their succession of pure white, star-shaped flowers. Interesting foliage is a constant – be it the leathery evergreen leaves of hellebores (Jane cuts them back in late
winter to show off the emerging flowers), euphorbia’s glaucous whorls or glossy box balls, trimmed annually to keep them neat.
The gravel garden on the other side of the barn echoes this area in its use of grasses and foliage plants, but here Jane has been influenced by the work of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf and by Sussex Prairies, just up the road in Henfield, and the result is altogether more colourful. Rivers of gaura Oenothera lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’, russet sedum Hylotelephium ‘Herbstfreude’ and Verbena bonariensis eddy around a central Magnolia ‘Susan’, with swirls of Carex comans bronzeleaved, Stipa tenuissima and dark-leaved ajuga amplifying the effect. Plants self-seed easily in the gravel and Jane is delighted that several – columbines, eryngium, artichokes (she removes their lower leaves to maintain their lovely vase shape) and veronica among them – have done so.
Although the garden may have been made at speed, it is this relaxed approach that imbues the space now. A swing hangs on a branch of an ancient oak tree, inviting visitors to idle, although Jane prefers to take her leisure another way. “One of my favourite things to do is to simply walk around the garden in the evening, looking at all the plants,” she says.
“I find it so therapeutic.”