THE DETAILS
STYLE
A small, south-facing country garden with circular lawns surrounded by gravel gardens, topiary and a conservatory with semi-tender plants
SEASONS OF INTEREST Year-round, including clipped evergreens and trees with autumn interest
SIZE 1½ acres
SOIL Alkaline clay with flint and chalk
Surrounded by the chalk downland of south Wiltshire, Alex and Philip Davies’s garden is as beautiful in late autumn as it is in high summer. November’s short days light up with the brilliant yellow fountains of ornamental grass Molinia ‘Transparent’, the gobstoppersized scarlet hips of Rosa ‘Scharlachglut’ and the delicate white flowers of Oenothera lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’, while on misty mornings multiple seed heads are draped with glittering spiders’ webs. All this exquisite detail is set within yew and hornbeam hedges that frame a lucid design of strong topiary shapes and a pair of circular lawns surrounded by gravelled areas where self-seeding is actively encouraged.
Alex moved to the Parish House – originally a row of workers’ cottages owned by the Stourhead estate – with her four teenage children in 2000. “A Tarmac drive came right up to the house, there was a flowerbed, a vegetable patch and a lot of grass,” she recalls. She crammed the south-facing area in front of the house with plants including ten hybrid cockspur thorns, Crataegus x lavalleei ‘Carrierei’ and an avenue of slender yew pyramids: “I used it amost as an experimental zone to start with and then over the next few years I began to carve a design into it, reducing the ten crataegus down to four, and taking out six of the yews.” Alex planted hornbeam to screen the parking area from the house and a yew hedge on the eastern edge of the garden to deter the deer, and now thinks of this area as a walled garden, albeit one with green walls. “The hedges help filter the wind, too, as we’re quite high up and exposed,” she adds. Then, to make the garden more manageable, she laid down circular lawns that echo the lollipop shapes of the crataegus and contrast with the square hedges.
The gravelled areas around the circular lawns are home to plants such as dieramas (angel’s fishing rods), hesperanthas (formerly schizostylis), agapanthus and Melianthus major, the honey bush: “The gravel garden suits our heavy clay soil, which has a lot of flint and chalk in it. South African and Mediterranean plants seem to do well with low fertility, moisture at their feet and gravel around their necks to keep them dry.” Alex simply lifted the turf, planted into the clay below and then applied a thick layer of Cotswold chippings, choosing not to use a weed membrane so her garden plants can seed about. This does mean that she has to be on the ball from early in the year and she has to hand-weed when necessary, trying not to disturb the ground below the gravel too much.
“I garden in a much looser way now than I used to,” Alex continues, “letting the plants that like it here, such as the pheasant grass Anemanthele lessoniana, bronze
fennel and monardas, move themselves about and fill up whole areas. The critical thing is to have the strong geometric shapes within the looseness, otherwise the garden wouldn’t hold together, and of course the formal shapes become even more important in winter when other things have died down.”
Growing up in Malaysia and Kurdistan before moving back to the Surrey Hills in her teens, Alex always “lived outdoors”, noticing plants and wildlife wherever she was. Later, as a young married woman with small children, she found her London garden an essential place of peace and calm. “My mother-in-law was a really knowledgeable plantswoman and taught me an incredible amount about plants. Then I started getting more interested in design and put my ideas into practice when we moved to the West Country.” Here, Alex discovered Sandra and Nori Pope’s walled garden and nursery at Hadspen House and found their use of colour spellbinding.
A conservatory stretches across the front of the house where Alex can experiment with growing the semitender plants she loves, including large-leaved evergreen African hemp Sparrmannia africana, and rose pink-flowered evergreen passion flower Passiflora x exoniensis. Pairs of trees flank its entrance: yew, crataegus and cloud-pruned myrtle Luma apiculata,
originally “a mistake” when a variegated myrtle died off and Alex decided to cloud-prune the surviving plain green rootstock: “Myrtle is very quick to develop and its small, dark-green leaves become really dense with clipping.”
Although the ornamental areas are Alex’s domain, Philip does “the lawns, hedges, heavy lifting and lots of encouraging”, and in late summer both of them scythe the long grass in the naturalistic areas beyond the yew hedge where orchids and yellow rattle are encouraged. A boggy area of land adjoins the north side of the garden, full of sedges, thistles, hogweed and oak, and while many gardeners might be anxious about weed seeds floating over the fence, Alex actively hopes for some of its wild beauty to migrate into her garden: “The dog roses that just rise up out of the bog are utterly beautiful. If they seed into our grass, it would make me very happy.”
THIS PAGE, ABOVE LEFT The rich, deep crimson flowers of Hylotelephium ‘Matrona’ contrast with the grey-green foliage of euphorbia OPPOSITE The gate, made to Alex’s design by Townsend Timber (townsendtimber.co.uk), is framed by Rosa ‘Scharlachglut’, fennel and dark ‘Matrona’ stonecrop