Blending in

Using her knowledge of the local vernacular, designer Marian Boswall has created a garden for Reighton Wood that integrates beautifully with its surroundings

On the edge of a wood in rural Kent, a garden designed by Marian Boswall for a botanist, merges beautifully with its surroundings

T ucked away behind high hawthorn hedges in a verdant, curvaceous valley is Reighton Wood, home of Robyn and Mark Reeves and their three children. Surrounded by fields of cows lazily grazing, the f lower-studded garden sits on the edge of the market town of Tenterden in the Weald of Kent. The narrow lanes hedged with sweet briar and fragrant honeysuckle that thread through the lush countryside reveal nothing of the hotbed of gardening quietly taking place here.

“Understanding the setting is important,” says landscape architect Marian Boswall, whose practice MBLA is only a few miles away from Reighton Wood. She and Robyn first met when Robyn enrolled on one of Marian’s design courses, and this intimate garden stuffed to the gunnels with trees, shrubs, perennials and bulbs is the result of the friendship between the two women. “Robyn is a botanist and wanted a garden with episodes, areas, movement and abundant planting for pollinators and people,” says Marian. “She is very artistic and intuitive, so we had the most lovely time discussing ideas for the garden, and she has embraced every suggestion and really made the garden her own.”

For Robyn and Mark the garden is all about the wonderful setting, something Marian felt it needed to embrace more fully. “The house faced away from the countryside, with the biggest views to the lane-side hedge,” she says. “We worked with the architect Derek Rankin to refocus the house on to the valley; he designed a contemporary extension, which really helped turn the house around to make the most of the view and fill the house with light.” The planting that extends from the house, not only celebrates the architecture, but also in turn cleverly conceals and then reveals the view that the Reeves so love. From this hillside position views extend to the south, over a rural idyll of fields, dotted at intervals with grand old oaks. An inspired piece of planting in the garden teams the magnificent Chinese crab apple, Malus hupehensis underplanted with white spirea and Ornithogalum nutans. This is echoed in the folds of the fields beyond with great clouds of blossom from native hawthorn and a haze of cow parsley beneath.

From the house long, tree-lined allées provide the prospect of leading you further into the garden and woodland beyond. The land drops briskly away, the vertiginous banks are swathed in our native fern and carpeted with broad brushstrokes of bluebells. In spring wood anemones spill down the valley sides heralding the awakening season. “The garden builds up gradually through the spring to become a riot of colour shape and form in midsummer, and is an immersive sensual journey of scents and movement as the plants end up encroaching on the paths and towering above the visitor,” explains Marian.

Foliage underpins any planting; it acts as a prelude to the flowers that come later, but for me it is the use of colour that sets the planting at Reighton Wood apart. The green Hakonechloa macra swirls around the trunks of Prunus serrula, in contrast the dark-foliaged cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’, froths waisthigh. Elsewhere swathes of perennials, including geraniums, astrantias, persicarias and euphorbias, are confidently combined in a maelstrom of form, texture and colour. Knitting this Rousseauesque planting together is the light and airy Knautia macedonica. The wine-coloured flowers punctuate the air. Together with bronze fennel, Foeniculum vulgare ‘Purpureum’, which hangs over the lower-storey planting, their repeated presence unifies the discord perfectly. Shrouded in wisteria, a beautifully designed pergola stretches the entire length of the south side of the house and provides welcome shade in the heat of the day. Festooned in early summer with fragrant white blooms.

Reighton Wood is a garden that is subtle yet striking in design, a garden muscular yet free f lowing and dreamy, a garden with an unerring sense of proportion and detail, a garden stuffed with interesting plants but uncluttered by an awareness of fashion or competition and, a garden that feels like it has grown as a response to its surroundings. It feels familiar and comforting strolling the many paths and exploring the hidden corners. Robyn and Mark feel strongly that this is their place and have a sense of duty to leave something special after they have gone. I think they might succeed.