Garden of the Week
This Shropshire mill house, dating from 1403, is bordered by two rivers and offers a plantsman’s paradise with its own microclimate
When Sean O’Donovan retired from teaching his ambition was to move to a detached house with a much larger garden, but he couldn’t find anything suitable, despite searching for two or three years.
Seven years ago he found himself in the Newport area of Shropshire and popped in to see an old school friend. “He took me to Brook House because two of his staff were busy decorating it and I found out the property was about to go up for sale. As soon as I walked in and saw the beams and the inglenook, it felt exactly right and it had everything on my tick list and more – both outside and in.”
Sean had been accumulating lots of plants ready for his move for some time. When the day finally came, it took three or four journeys in a van to transport his treasures to Brook House.
“I had a lot of woody plants and they included Japanese acers, rhododendrons and cornus. They were beginning to suffer, so as soon as I moved in I started to plant them.
“I made a few mistakes on the way,” he says. “I planted
Cornus kousa chinensis close to the house but it was far too dry because the soil is very light here. After a year or so I had to move it down the garden, to a more moist position close to the river, and now it’s doing really well.”
The slightly acid soil also suited his potted-up rhodos and they soon recovered once they’d been planted. “The light soil allows me to grow a much wider range of plants than I used to be able to grow in my
old Warwickshire garden, which was on heavy clay,” he explains. “I can also garden throughout the year, although gardening isn’t work for me – it’s far more of a hobby,” Sean says.
It’s not hard to understand why Sean fell in love with Brook House because it looks like something straight out of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, with its mellow brick walls. It dates from 1403 and was originally used as a mill house. An even earlier mill was mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086 and the rose-clad ruins of this can be seen in the garden. The main house was remodelled in 1830 and the original Coalbrookdale cast iron windows can still be seen. The bridge in the garden was built by Thomas Telford, so there’s history that runs through this plot like a thread.
There are two rivers bordering the plot – the Meese and the Strine. These two watercourses, with their constantly flowing water, keep the garden frost-free and the lower reaches benefit from moist, alluvial soil.
The orchard contains old apple trees – these crop abundantly and there are three varieties Sean admires, ‘Blenheim Orange’, ‘Ashmead’s Kernal’ and ‘Lord Derby’. They provide a glut and Sean takes some to be juiced and bottled, as they make great gifts for friends.
Another advantage of being the owner of an old mill is that Sean has ‘riparian’ rights that allow him to extract a certain amount of water from the river.
This is pumped up and used to irrigate the garden. The light soil is hungry as well as dry and gets fed regularly with home-made garden compost and horse manure produced by his two ponies, housed in the paddock. One is a goodnatured Shetland called Seamus and, the other, a Welsh pony called Willow. There are also two rescue cats that patrol the garden, catching mice and voles.
After Sean had planted all his woody plants, he sat back and waited for spring to arrive to see what was already in the garden.
There were some lovely hardy geraniums and some Japanese anemones.” He plugged any gaps with more perennials and added exotic plants for extra drama. They include red-flowered grevilleas, indigoferas, dahlias, cannas, brugmansia and handsome ornamental bananas. Some stay in large pots through summer but others, such as brugmansias, go straight into the ground.
As Sean says, as he returns to his garden with a spring in his step, “if you’re a gardener, you’re an optimist!”