Garden of the Week
Mature trees, shrubs and perennials, planted for year-round interest, pull you into this welcoming plot that you just can’t help exploring
There’s a group of honey-stoned villages, a few miles west and north-west of Banbury, that are every bit as pretty as the Cotswolds. Fiveways Cottage lies close and it’s the cherished home and garden of Michael and Jenny Aldous.
The cottage-style house sits in open farmland and the garden mostly lies to the front and sides of the cottage. In order to reach the front porch you have to wend your way through this lushly-planted garden, which seems to hug the house in a welcoming way.
Jenny says: “When we came here 30 years ago it was a dreadfully windy site with six ghastly conifers, and that was all.” However, they still fell in love with Fiveways, because they were looking for a blank canvas they could use to create a traditional cottage garden.
“The first thing we did was take the conifers down and
then concentrated on adding hedges and boundary plants to keep out the wind,” she says. Thirty years later, the garden is an oasis of calm with mature trees, shrubs and perennials, planted for year-round interest. The shelter belt’s so dense that very little is visible from the road. But when you open the tall, wooden gate, it’s like entering a secret garden of delights and you can’t help exploring. This garden pulls you in.
The first real bit of gardening they did was to dig out a large island bed to accommodate perennials that they’d dug out from their previous garden. “They included phloxes, aconitums, hardy geraniums, irises and achilleas, and they thrived because the soil is very easy to work,” Jenny explains. “We added shrubs and trees, because we wanted our garden to be interesting throughout the year.”
Jenny’s personal shrubby favourites include pittosporums and the gold and green, variegated elaeagnus ‘Limelight’, because both provide leafy, winter structure. The fact that pittosporums thrive here is proof that the shelter belt is really working – you can sense the warmth of the microclimate as you walk round.
Jenny and Michael, both
members of the British Clematis Society, have more than 200 clematis. “Most of them are small-flowered and bloom from July onwards, and many scramble through shrubs and trees,” Jenny says. “One of my favourites is ‘Victoria’, because the full purple-blue flowers stand out really well.”
Jenny also grows ‘Prince Charles’, which is a paler grey-blue. “I also admire ‘Huldine’ because it’s very floriferous and reliable, with green-centred, white flowers.”
They’re cut back hard in February, so pruning is easy.
One of the most idyllic spots is the wild garden area. “The grass isn’t immaculately mowed here, but we’ve planted lots of daffodils in the grass so it’s a lovely place to sit. There’s a pond nearby and that adds a peaceful touch, too.”
By autumn, there’s plenty of colour and the rural setting allows the light to pick up fiery tints, whether it’s a redberried rowan or cotoneaster, or warm-red Japanese maple foliage. There are 10 Japanese maples growing in large, rugged pots in key positions and this raises them up, making them more prominent.
Deciduous shrubs, such as weigela and euonymus, also colour up well and, when winter comes, the glistening white trunks of Himalayan birches and the shaggy stems of the evergreen strawberry tree ( Arbutus unedo) shine out.
Jenny recalls the words of a head gardener she knew many years ago. “He used to talk about “an ’armonious mass,” Jenny recalls, “without the ‘h’. That’s what we’ve tried to achieve here.”