Garden of the Week
There’s all you can dream of – and more – in this enchanting garden
When Mima and John Bolton moved into their cottage 40 years ago there wasn’t much going on in the one-acre garden. “There were some climbing roses in the front, some bluebells, elder trees and an old orchard with a few fruit trees,” says John.
But he and Mima were prepared – indeed, they’d bought the piece of land with the express intention of creating a garden from scratch. “Gardening is in my blood. Both my mother and grandmother were gardeners and I started as a little boy,” John says.
And so they set to work. They designed different garden rooms, including a knot garden in the front, a quarter-acre woodland garden, mixed herbaceous borders, a kitchen garden and an Oriental courtyard at the rear.
As wind was one of the primary enemies at the top of the plot, they created shelter banks for protection.
“Once the garden rooms were laid out, we started planting trees and shrubs, many of which
have now reached 9-12m,” John says.
Entering the garden for the first time is to begin a journey you couldn’t imagine. You’re led to explore different rooms, each giving a unique experience. At the front is a formal box parterre, the pockets imaginatively filled with wood chips, ornamental stones, potted hydrangea and ricinus, or planted grasses such as Stipa tenuissima. The gravelled areas around the side of the house are decorated with tender shrubs and perennials such as Salvia patens ‘Oxford Blue’ and ‘Cambridge Blue’, as well as a stone trough and pots full of alpines including houseleeks and a dwarf juniper.
“Initially, it was quite difficult to get things to grow in the woodland garden,” John says, explaining that while the soil in the whole garden is freedraining, it’s especially dry in the woodland area as the trees take up a lot of moisture. On top of that, the plants have to cope with a lack of sunlight.
The woodland garden is a sheltered place with Hydrangea aspera and Hydrangea
paniculata, aucuba and euonymus thriving among yew, beech, birch and unusual trees, such as Catalpa fargesii duclouxii. Snowdrops, hellebores and ferns like dryopteris, athyrium and polystichum, flush the garden in shades of green.
The scented herb garden, with its ornamental structure, consisting of paths spreading out from a diamond-shaped bed in the middle to triangular beds, stimulates different senses with the aroma of various origanum varieties, sage, rosemary and
Artemisia abrotanum among foxgloves and clove pinks.
Jim and Mima manage the garden organically. This includes the kitchen garden which consists of eight raised beds where they grow runner beans, French beans, broad beans, peas and early potatoes.
“We’re not using any sprays except for in the greenhouse, when we get a heavy attack of whitefly. In the rest of the garden, we didn’t have massive problems with pests,” John says. Once you stop using any chemicals, a natural balance of pests and predators establishes, in which problems don’t usually
get out of control. “Sometimes I wipe off some aphids from rose buds with my thumb and finger, or I wash them off with the hose,” John says. Wildlife, such as bees and butterflies, visit the garden, with birds nesting in mixed beech, hawthorn, elm and ash hedges and feeding at stations set up for them.
The lush herbaceous borders peak in July, when an abundance of shrubs and perennials are in bloom, including forsythia and hypericums, achillea,
bergamot, echinacea, ligularia,
chamomile, senecio and phlox. These blend in with ornamental grasses like Stipa gigantea and miscanthus ‘Cosmopolitan’.
“We had to replace some plants that weren’t doing so well on the free-draining soil,” John says. Achilleas and bergamot coped well with the conditions, while ligularia needed lots of watering until the roots established. “Initially we brought in tractor-loads full of local farmyard manure to
improve the soil, and now the borders are planted up we’re mulching with garden and mushroom compost,” John adds.
When you arrive at the Oriental courtyard garden, you enter a place of peace and tranquillity. John trained two pine trees and one Ilex crenata into a cloud shape, then there are the purple-leaved Acer palmatum ‘Atropurpureum’,
Nandina domestica and a false acacia, which is pruned each year to keep it small.
The delicate, granite stone features are modelled on a traditional Japanese tea garden. “There are three elements of stones in a Japanese tea garden. The stepping stones keep the feet of people attending the tea ceremony clean, stone basins provide water to rinse hands and mouth, and the lanterns give light, if the ceremony is held in the dark,” John explains.
It’s just one more example of the imagination that has inspired this remarkable garden.