USING PLANTS FOR ATMOSPHERE

The owners of this designed garden wanted an escape, a place of sanctuary and privacy that would be both embedded in the local landscape but also possessed of its own character – with more than a soupçon of Englishness about it. Designer Stuart Barfoot instilled all these characteristics by means of big, shrubby plantings – with roses to the fore– almost as if to cocoon the house.

Rosa ‘Scharlachglut’ is a key plant that works well in a large-scale context, Stuart says. “They are early into flower so they are never out-competed, and you get lovely reflections in the swimming pool. The huge, shiny red hips are a bonus in autumn, offset by grasses and asters.” Species roses have been added to bolster the ‘wild’ atmosphere of the garden, which is surrounded by what Stuart calls “ornamental thickets”. Rosa forrestiana is a vigorous and healthy wild rose with a cascading habit, smothered in rich-pink single flowers beloved by bees. It has small but attractive hips in the autumn. Stuart uses it to “provide height and create pools of density against which to work the softer, more ephemeral herbaceous plantings”.

Below the shrubs are perennial plants that provide colour and softer textural variation. Wild red clover (Trifolium pratense) is used in areas set aside for rewilding and meadows. “Apart from its beauty in habit – gently weaving though the wild grasses – it also provides a haze of colour here and there, which changes depending how much is flowering,” Stuart says. Several cultivars of cranesbill geraniums augment the cottage-core feel of the planting style; Geranium himalayense ‘Derrick Cook’ is favoured as “a gentle grower but strong, with soft blue-white flowers and pale veins”.