Garden of the Week
This colourful Surrey garden offers an enjoyable exploration, an eclectic yet confident style and lots of ideas to take away
Acquiring a garden is an immensely personal thing and here, almost more than anywhere else, beauty was in the eye of the beholder. When Margaret Arnott and Terry Bartholomew moved into their new home three decades ago,
the garden was a neglected mass of dated and dead plants, a disused veg patch and long-since-expired apple trees. But while the site spoke of general dereliction, it still held enough charms to captivate them.
“Back then, it was a horrible tangle of rhododendrons, kerria and buddleja, with dead bamboo and a healthy crop of ground elder,” remembers Margaret. “There were several dead sheds, too. They were still standing, but would have fallen over if you blew on them!”
But the wide plot that sat behind the bungalow appealed to her tastes and there was one other major bonus. “The honest truth is that I bought it because I fell in love with the most beautiful monkey puzzle tree in the garden!” she confesses.
With the help of Margaret’s parents, they set about clearing the site, working from the end of the garden towards the house. As a plan emerged, they planted a backbone of evergreen shrubs and added a pergola, something that had been on her wish-list for ages, and a pond.
With time, the sloping garden was divided into three sections. At the bottom, a patio, bounded by
a wall and steps up to the central section. “There's no planting at the patio level, so the greenery starts at wall height,” explains Margaret. “In the middle of the garden is a beautiful, lush lawn surrounded by flower beds. The soil's dry so we feed it with organic matter, but not as often as we should – we're really naughty!”
Behind this is another wall, and you go past two ponds and under the monkey-puzzle tree to finally reach the formal top garden, with its parallel paths and box hedging.
The planting has come on leaps and bounds as well. Gone are the weedy, '70s throwback' shrubs, replaced with neatlyclipped evergreens – pittosporum is a favourite – which, in turn, are lavishly surrounded by perennials such as phlox, penstemons, geraniums, dahlias and many other glorious things.
The border edges are sharp and the lawn winds elegantly up the hill; the curves of the flower beds and the layers of mature planting concealing the full
extent of the garden and injecting a sense of mystery. There’s also a rich vein of ornamentation; urns in the flower beds, rustedsteel plant supports, brightly coloured ceramic balls and a line of quirky metal ants, progressing along the top of a brick wall.
“I always hope that we’re not getting too ‘gnomey’,” says Margaret. “We haven’t actually got a gnome, but we’ve got everything else!”
Her planting design started off relatively conventionally, with a restrained colour scheme of pink, blue and purple, but this didn’t last. “I went to Great Dixter and it was a revelation,” says Margaret. “I took one look at the hot border and thought that if I could have oranges reds and yellows then
I jolly well would! Now I don’t really have a colour scheme as such; any colour will do.”
While Heathside was a garden created for personal pleasure, it didn’t take long before Margaret had her sights set on a new goal. “I love visiting other gardens and, in a way, it contains ideas from all the gardens I have ever been to. So I soon started thinking about the National Garden Scheme and thinking ‘I wonder if I could ever get it good enough'.
“I love the garden. I get up in the morning and look through the big windows and just think how lovely it is. It gives me a real sense of joy and I feel so calm when I see it. We don’t go away as we were both airline cabin crew for 34 years. We travelled the world, but we missed the garden then. We would rather be here to look after it now.”
In fact, their situation has reversed entirely, from a work environment that was full of people and no fresh air, to a garden with lots of fresh air but no people. “No people, apart from the visitors, and I love having them,” says Margaret. And for those visitors it’s now an enjoyable exploration, with an eclectic yet confident style, and lots of ideas to take away.
“I like anything and everything,” she declares. “I go for interesting plants and I love exotics and all the things that you shouldn’t be able to grow, such as tetrapanax, Melianthus major, abutilon and climbers such as bougainvillea and hibiscus.”
“If ever I buy a plant, I find myself walking around for days, trying to think about where to put it. I hate hebes, but not a great deal else. I like a little bit of everything, that’s the trouble!"