A gallery of plants
This seaside Dorset garden set in a former quarry has evolved into a joyful Mediterranean-style paradise
When Suzanne Nutbeem and her husband Stuart moved to their new house near Swanage, in Dorset, 14 years ago, they faced a number of more unusual gardening challenges. The wind coming off the sea howled around the building and battered the plants, while the soil was poor, lumpy and free-draining. Set in the hollow of a former quarry dug by the previous owner, the view onto the garden is from above rather than horizontally, and this, too, required a change in perspective.
“The base of the quarry is flat but the sides step upwards, and the terraces are held back by walls of the Purbeck limestone that was extracted,” explains Suzanne. “It’s a kind of square bowl: the garden is about 20ft below the house and when you’re in the garden you look upwards!”
At around the size of the centre court at Wimbledon, the garden has room to play with, but the flat area started off as a poor lawn, too wet in some areas and dry on others, while the terraces were rubbly and free-draining. But with
a natural vigour and yen for experimentation, Suzanne was not deterred.
“He was no gardener, but he did a wonderful job on the structure! So we dug out the rubble with a mattock and put some decent soil into the terraces. It’s a bit like gardening with everything in pots – very free-raining and hostile. Once we’d done that, I spent about five years working out how to use the garden. At first, I put everything in the wrong places. You can see the garden from above, every scrap of it; I’d put things in, look at them from the house, realise they looked awful and go down and rearrange them!”
Although Suzanne had favoured the cottage garden style in her previous home, when they moved to the coast, she thought she’d try something different. “I spent the first five years putting in seaside plants – the trouble is, most of them are very dull,” she says. So she dug up the pines, palms and yuccas, transferred them to pots, and the planting evolved to become more Mediterranean in feel.
Her confidence and light-hearted attitude is a joy, and she loves the process of experimentation and trial and error, but her epiphany came many years ago;
“I was about 30 and a friend
I’d just met turned up one day, collapsed into a chair and said, ‘I need a coffee, I’ve just moved my lawn!’ She had decided that it was in the wrong place, so she’d dug it up in squares, stuck them in a wheelbarrow, and put it somewhere else. I had no idea this was even possible, and it was quite big. I went outside and stared at my then garden with new eyes. This has been a lovely garden to do, it’s like a little secret world, people come down the alley to the side and just say ‘wow’,” she says.
“I can’t draw to save my life, but I have a good eye for form. Foliage
matters as much as the flowers, and when it comes to shapes and colours, I really go for the leaves. I can’t do the tropical, big-leaved thing here as the leaves would get torn to shreds in the winter – but we never get frost in the hollow, it just passes across the top.”
She uses a lot of silver foliage, such as olives, hebe and astelia, which goes with the dark grey Purbeck stone and helps to lighten it. Meanwhile, the leaves of drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants are conveniently small.
Over the past nine years, Suzanne has got the measure of her garden and it’s now filled with tall things that work well in relation to the house and burst attractively upwards and outwards. The topography is softened by maturing trees and shrubs and brightened by a summer infill of plants such as cosmos and Verbena bonariensis, while judicious propping and staking keeps large, lax, but undoubtedly glorious plants like perovskia more or less upright.
And while Stuart always said that he would have preferred a piece of concrete painted green, he has, nevertheless, been highly instrumental in the grand transformation. “I’m a cut and chuck sort of gardener. I’ll prune in the undergrowth and he did all the picking up! It’s been a very good partnership,” says Suzanne.
It was, therefore, a surprise when The Hollow first opened for the National Gardens Scheme seven years ago for Suzanne to discover how many people are almost afraid of their garden. “Gardening should be joyful! People seem to buy plants that are small and pretty and expect them to stay that way, but I just keep pruning to keep things in check. I believe that there’s no such thing as no more room, so I just keep planting. I like to treat my garden as an adventure and see where it takes me next!”