Wrapping up On her final visit to Folly Farm, Anna Pavord considers the new elements Dan Pearson has added to the gardens
In her final visit to Folly Farm, Anna Pavord looks at how the new areas designed by Dan Pearson, which wrap around the Lutyens-designed gardens, help link the historic garden to the wider landscape
Folly Farm in the Kennet Valley, Berkshire, was well named for anyone trying to make a living from the place when it was first built in the 17th century. The soil is very poor, mostly gravel beds with a thin skim of topsoil and the site very open to wind. When the Edwardian architect Edwin Lutyens moved in to transform the old farmhouse, he protected the different compartments of his now famous garden with tall, formal hedges of yew. Beautifully detailed walls of handmade brick enclosed the kitchen garden and were used to make an intricate series of courtyards around the original entrance, straight off the adjoining country lane.
The garden designer, Dan Pearson first came to Folly Farm in 2009 and saw immediately that the work he had been commissioned to do must take account of the wider setting in which the house and its garden stood. The following year, he started on the daunting task of wrapping an outer landscape around what had previously been an intensely inward looking place. “For me,” he says, “making a link to the wider landscape was an absolutely key part of our work here.” The garden that Lutyens laid out lies to the south and west of the house and covers about 11 acres. No attempt was made to take in the 11 acres of pasture that lay to the north. But in some ways the poor soil of this previously un-landscaped area was considered an advantage by Dan Pearson. He saw it as an opportunity to create a bold new entrance, curving through pastures sown with a mix of wildf lowers that would actually f lourish rather better in an impoverished environment than they would in a richer soil, where they would be at a greater risk of being swamped by vigorous grasses.
There were practical reasons too, for taking this bold step. The original entrance was cramped, completely unsuited to the age of the car, which had scarcely started when Lutyens was at work. And the bold, new drive circling past the house gave Dan the chance to introduce a new feature, a big pond to the right-hand side of the new drive, which has dramatically enhanced the environment. Now, the stretch of water attracts all kinds of insects and birds to what had previously been a rather barren stretch of land. “We landscaped it, but very gently, so that the ground now rises to a high point beyond the pond.” The rise in the ground was also the most practical way to get rid of the spoil excavated for the pond.
This new work brings a pleasing landscape right up to the edge of a garden, with an original drainage ditch now cleverly landscaped to become wider, more like a moat, encircling the original curtilege. Dan designed a series of weirs to slow down the f low of water and provide a new sensory experience – the sound of water tipping down a series of small falls on its journey from the pond. The grass by the watercourse is planted with bluebells, Fritillaria meleagris and tiny, wild-looking early narcissus as well as later pheasant’s eye, Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus or Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’ rise in sheaves by the waterside. The gardening team use bags of lavender stems cut from the kitchen garden to curb blanket weed here and find it a more effective solution than barley straw.
An old hedge line of oak trees – “our pride and joy” says Dan – now stands revealed as an important feature in the meadow and a new shelter belt of British native trees has been planted for the long term. Establishing new specimens has not been easy. The team found that large stock went backwards; small specimens found it difficult to get going.
Nevertheless a new grove of pine trees ( Pinus sylvestris) is now bedded in on top of the knoll and alders ( Alnus cordata) f lourish on the banks of the pond. Willows, such as Salix daphnoides ‘Aglaia’, Salix candida and Salix irrorata, add softly glowing colour to the winter landscape.
Views back towards the garden are re-focused (Dan’s term) by a boardwalk that zig-zags in and out of plantings of flag iris ( Iris pseudacorus) and bulrushes, giving shifting views out to the distant trees or back across to the house.
Various simple bridges link the new landscaped meadow with the original Lutyens garden beyond. One of them, lined up with the west elevation of the house and its curious balconied sleeping platform, connects with the old swimming pool garden, the swimming pool now grassed over. A fine set of ziggurat steps here was designed by Dan in a style that pays homage to the Lutyens steps in the tank garden, but does not copy them. “The aesthetic is the same,” he points out, “the overall impression, but we made ours from solid blocks of limestone, without the complex detail of the risers that Lutyens employed.”
A major new intervention was made in the curiously empty space alongside the sunken garden, where the Lutyens design just petered out into nothing. Here, Dan has added a formal area now known as the Wind Garden, which squares off the former rather unsatisfactory space. In style, the planting is entirely modern, but the design follows the formal lines of the historic core. Sheltered by hedges on three sides, it is open to the west, looking over the wider landscape beyond. The space is divided into a grid, defined by grass paths and finely detailed brickwork.
Here, as Dan points out, the garden is on a slightly higher level. “Being open to the west, it does catch the wind. Everything in here has movement.” Big mounds of Panicum ( P. virgatum ‘Strictum’, P. virgatum ‘Shenandoah’ and P. virgatum ‘Warrior’) are interplanted with pale, swishy clumps of Stipa lessingiana, which Dan thinks is a better plant than the more usual Stipa tenuissima. The red stems of the fine dogwood Cornus alba ‘Kesselringii’ pick up the colour of the tiled roofs of the house beyond. At Folly Farm we see the skill of a very confident designer, assured enough to fit his own work delicately into a historic core, bold enough to add a whole new layer of meaning to the original vision. USEFUL INFORMATION Folly Farm opens under the NGS for four tours a year. Places are strictly limited and need to be pre-booked. Contact the NGS on 01483 211535 or visit ngs.org.uk for details of 2019 tours.