Dulcet tones Horticulturist Alison Jenkins plants up pots in warm late-summer hues

Set within a wild landscape of ancient woodland and flower-rich meadows, an evolving Somerset garden teems with life

It is nearly 20 years since Cooks Farm last featured in Gardens Illustrated (issue 83). “The garden has evolved somewhat since then,” laughs its creator, Patricia Stainton. “As have I…” In those days, Patricia was at the forefront of a new style of perennial planting – loose, naturalistic and wildlife-friendly – that was then very novel in the UK (less so in Germany and the Netherlands), but has since become ubiquitous. The rich, jewel-like colours she favoured – claret and crimson, deep purple and all-but-black – at a time when gardening fashion dictated ladylike pastels, have since been picked up by the likes of gardeners Sarah Raven and Monty Don, and are now widely admired. (Meanwhile Patricia has been saving the seed of her darkest and most sumptuous flowers every year, to produce poppies, astrantias, antirrhinums and sweet Williams in ever deeper and swoonier shades.)

Today, everyone understands the value of shrubby salvias to deliver long months of late-season colour. Back then, they were collector’s plants. Above all, the idea of selecting planting to sustain populations of bees, moths and butterflies, once seen as mildly eccentric, if laudable, has now become mainstream.

“And that’s really the most important development in the garden,” explains Patricia. “Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in ecology, and what interests me now is how the garden relates to the wider landscape – the woods and water, hedgerows and pasture, the bird life and the insect life.”

The garden is just part of a continuum, she explains, that extends over the 40 acres of Cooks Farm, taking in ponds and wetland, woodland and streams, flowerrich hay meadows and an orchard planted with heritage cider-apple trees and home to a stilt-legged hive specially designed to welcome wild bees. Wildlings such as red campion, viper’s bugloss and purple loosestrife are welcomed in all parts of the garden. Hares graze on the plantings by the farmyard wall, keeping the front of the border dense and bushy. Except for the deer-proofed vegetable garden

The way I like to plant things is slightly by chance; I don’t mind not being completely in control

(visiting deer regularly deliver an indiscriminate ‘Chelsea chop’), there is no division between cultivated plantings and nature’s garden: one blends gently into the other. Patricia is as pleased to see southern marsh orchids seeding in the meadows, or a six-spot burnet moth feeding on devil’s bit scabious, as to witness the first, fat, pineapple bloom on a selection of Eucomis (quite by accident, she swears, she seems to have become a collector), or to savour the complex colouring of a new dahlia. She delights in the tricks nature plays in the garden – the crossing of two sweet Williams (near-black Dianthus barbatus ‘Sooty’ and a rich, magenta-pink form), to produce a gorgeous new bi-colour; the self-seeders that settle in the path; the way Welsh poppies have leapt the wall to settle under a silvery Eleagnus ‘Quicksilver’.

Patricia is used to being a trend-setter. She and her husband Robin Levien are the founders of Studio Levien, a design consultancy that has led the way in the design of ceramics for over two decades. If these days we all favour simple, generous, white tableware, or sleek, space-saving bathroom fittings, our taste has almost certainly been formed by Studio Levien. A new product that gives her particular pleasure is a delicate, white bowl inspired by the pattern of a dragonfly’s wings: Patricia’s love of nature informs every aspect of her life.

“The key to good design,” says Patricia, “is to be appropriate, and to relate the garden to the buildings and landscape around it.” So she favours clean, straight lines close to the house, giving way to curving paths and more amorphous shapes as the garden drifts gently downhill into wildness. A modern oak and glass extension, built in 2008, prompted the creation of a wide, shallow rill. “What I like most is how the water reflects the sky on a bright day, and the movement of the clouds, so it is never a static thing.” Pots of her favourite Eucomis are arranged along each side, interspersed with agapanthus and glossy mahogany aeoniums. To one side stands a box parterre, enclosing a richly textured matrix of plants (veronicastrums,

What interests me is how the garden relates to the wider landscape – the woods and water, the hedgerows and pasture, the bird life and the insect life

thalictrums, sea hollies, dahlias, species gladioli) and cut through with narrow paths that allow her to immerse herself in the planting. To the other is a restful, green border, stocked with mounds of Euphorbia and different colours of Pittosporum and box. “I like mixing the greens together.” She also pays great attention to texture, enjoying subtle contrasts in foliage and relishing the interplay between firm box balls and swishing grasses and “a sanguisorba that is pure Barbara Cartland, with flowers just like pink feather boas.”

There was, originally, another formal garden edged with box in front of the house. “When the hedges fell prey to box blight and had to be removed, we decided not to rush into anything, but to experiment for a year or two – and eight years on we’re still experimenting. I’ve been on many botany trips – to Turkey, Romania, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland and Sweden. I’ve learned so much about plants from seeing where they grow, and the communities of plants that grow together. So the way I like to plant things is slightly by chance: I don’t mind not being completely in control.”

In the lower and damper part of the garden, where a pair of broad borders wind down towards the River Brue, she emulates the effect of a meadow by planting in ribbons, supplementing an array of ferns and bold-leaved perennials such as rodgersias and Rheum palmatum with colourful annuals that she and her long-serving gardener, Selina Crumbie, grow by the hundreds in the vegetable garden. Wildflowers proliferate on the riverbank and around the margins of the four large ponds she has dug over the years. It is perfect pastoral. During lockdowns over the past year, she says, she has rarely ventured elsewhere, and has used less than a single tank of petrol. But with such beauty and serenity all about her, why would she want to go anywhere else?

USEFUL INFORMATION

Find out more about Patricia and Robin’s designer studio at studiolevien.com

The key to good design is to be appropriate, and to relate the garden to the buildings and landscape around it

PHOTOGRAPHS CLAIRE TAKACS

Above The path to the front door is the ideal place for intricate plantings of small and unusual subjects – where both the flowers themselves and the passage of the seasons can be observed in detail. Here Patricia grows delicately coloured verbenas, nerines and sweet Williams (Dianthus barbatus) along with deliciously fragrant Salvia Love and Wishes (= ‘Serendip6’), lavenders and rosemary.

Above With its beds packed with cutting flowers, abundant fruit and vegetables, edgings of star-flowered garlic chives and tangles of nasturtium, Patricia’s enormous, productive garden is as beautiful as every other part of the garden. Here, safe from rabbits and deer, her gardener Selina grows hundreds of annuals each year to supplement the flower borders.

In the beds that curve down to the River Brue, textural foliage plantings of ferns, Darmera peltata and Rodgersia pinnata ‘Superba’ contrast with tightly clipped balls of box. Most years, a sprinkling of hot colour is added to the green in the form of sunflowers, cosmos and nicotiana. A fallen tree trunk is retained to provide a useful insect habitat.

Above The extensive garden flows seamlessly into an orchard, where heritage apple trees thrive and wildflower-spangled grass bordering the mown paths is left to grow long.