Natural beauty

The joyful cottage garden surrounding Geoff Davies’ home is a riot of colour in summer

Life moves to a different beat in Ilmington, a village of honey-coloured stone cottages and quiet back lanes; a place in which neighbours know each other and a sense of community thrives. Geoff Davies’ cottage, Meadow View, is seemingly one of the village’s more ‘modern’ dwellings, with its smart brick Victorian frontage. Yet the stonework extending behind the property hints that the history of the building is not as straightforward as it might seem. ‘The cottage was actually relocated: it’s one-and-a-half sides of a house that used to stand elsewhere,’ he explains. ‘In 1860, somebody bought it and moved it to where we are now. They used all the stone at the back of the house and built a posh brick frontage: back then the bricks would have been more expensive than stone.’

Meadow View was a bit smaller when Geoff first moved to Ilmington in 1997 and certainly wasn’t surrounded by the flower bedecked garden that has emerged in the years since his arrival. Indeed, the retired education administrator with Birmingham City Council says he was quite content with his two-up, two-down home, which he shares with his dog, Barney, and that it was only through being in the right place at the right time that he had the opportunity to extend both the building and the space around it.

‘There was just the front garden and a metre of ground at the back of the cottage when I first came here,’ he explains. ‘Over time I managed to buy

a bit off the lady next door, followed by two pieces from the manor behind: the first allowed me to extend the cottage, and get rid of the bunker of a concrete-roofed bathroom that was there, while the other enabled me to create the garden at the back.

‘It was nice because it meant being able to have flowers all around the house. In addition, I get to have a bit of variety as the back garden is cooler and slightly shadier, which means I can grow different plants there,’ he adds.

Over the years, Geoff has taken the cottage garden style and pushed it to its limits, with perennials and self-seeders of all shapes, sizes and colours jostling for position within the loamy soil. All of the old favourites are present and correct, from the tall spires of foxgloves and king’s spear to voluminous peonies and oriental poppies, starry daylilies, obliging aquilegia and bold iris, bringing a double helping of delight with both its velvety blooms and sword-like leaves.

The sunny front garden also supports Mediterranean plants, such as rock roses and the neat Turkish sage, Phlomis russeliana, the spent flowers of which continue to look good as summer fades into autumn.

Holding their own within this wild sea of colour are majestic roses, including the climber ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ that joins a wisteria in festooning the front of the house, and the deep red blooms of a shrub cultivar, its name lost in the mists of time. Most of the roses also carry delicious fragrances, an attribute picked up by other flowers, such as pinks.

While the overall feel of the garden is one of floral exuberance, Geoff underpins his planting with structural elements, including box balls, some of which were created from an existing hedge and others grown from cuttings. There are also mounds of clipped yew grown from foot-high saplings, various trees and attractive mushroomlike staddle stones, used in years gone by to lift granaries and hayricks off the ground to protect against vermin and dampness.

‘The garden is planned, but very loose in its planting,’ Geoff explains. ‘I stick things wherever I feel like, rather than worrying about which colour goes with which. I just let it happen; I don’t want it to be too organised. There is structure in the form of the paths and the odd tree or box ball – the rest can do what it likes,’ says Geoff with a smile.

Later in the summer, colour is provided by dahlias, which keep blooming through to October and sometimes later. ‘I grow them so that I can pick them and give them away,’ he adds.

Such is the array of colourful blooms at Meadow View that anybody coming across the garden might imagine Geoff to be a man who spends a lot of money on plants, a notion he finds amusing. ‘I give a few bits of my plants to people in the village who enjoy gardening and they likewise share plants with me,’ he explains.

‘Some flowers, like the iris that came from my Aunty Elsie’s garden, are inherited and occasionally people give me plants as gifts. I could go out and buy plants, but what is the point when a walk

around the village can result in lots of new things to try? Most people are generous and the big advantage is that you can see the environments in which certain things grow happily and think about whether it is possible to offer the same conditions in your own garden,’ Geoff adds, who is well known throughout Ilmington due to the many years he has served on the parish council.

As well as watching his pennies with plants, Geoff has saved money by doing all the hard landscaping work himself, whether that has been moving the front path away from his front windows, or building the dry-stone wall between his garden and fields beyond. ‘Relocating the path was one of the first things I did,’ he says. ‘I made a new gateway in the wall, with a wiggly brick path leading to the front of the house.

‘I enjoyed building the stone walls – I worked hard to build them. I help to maintain the field behind the garden, too. I always need to have a project,’ he says.

Much of Geoff’s eye-catching front garden can be seen from the lane that passes his cottage, although he has managed to create a small ‘secret’ area within this space, in which he can sit and enjoy a cup of tea.

Meanwhile, the more private section behind Meadow View slopes away from the property and combines beds and borders with verdant lawns. ‘I’ve avoided putting in anything too tall behind the house to avoid blocking the view.’

Geoff has loved gardening since he was a child, and as a teenager earned money helping others with their horticultural tasks. While the space around his home does not feature produce, he has a plot across the road on which he grows enough vegetables to feed himself and an elderly neighbour for at least six months every year.

‘If things had been different I would have liked to have done gardening as a job throughout my working life,’ he says. ‘I love the garden around my home. It makes me feel peaceful and contented working in it, although I don’t like sitting still for long as there’s always something to do. That’s the real pleasure: the doing rather than the watching.’

Perennials, climbers, shrubs and trees come together within Geoff Davies’ colourful cottage garden. Staddle stones – used in years gone by to lift granaries and hayricks off the ground to protect against vermin and dampness – add structure to his exuberant planting

Left: A pathway acts as a link between the lawn and the cottage garden surrounding the house. The pink ‘Cécile Brünner’ climbing rose clads the end of the cottage with sweetly fragrant double flowers. The height of plants behind the house is restricted to avoid spoiling the picturesque view of the field beyond Above: A dry-stone wall, which was built by Geoff, and an artisan-made gate surround this garden of delights Right: Geoff has gradually extended and created his garden over many years

Clockwise from left: The honeycoloured stone of St Mary’s Church is reflected in the extension at the back of Meadow View. A low stone wall is the perfect host for the purple flowers of aubrieta; the flowers of the daylily last just 24 hours but keep coming throughout the summer – the yellow Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus forms clumps of yellow flowers; box balls, a structural device championed by the late garden designer Rosemary Verey, are the perfect foil to byzantine gladiolus, Nectaroscordum siculum and aubrieta; look for variegated plants to enjoy the double delights of interesting leaves and flowers – this Euphorbia characias subsp. characias ‘Burrow Silver’ has a compact, neat habit

Clockwise from right: Geoff encourages self-seeding plants, such as aquilegia, to fill in the gaps around perennial plantings and structural features including box balls and staddle stones; Turks cap Lilium pyrenaicum produces heavy heads of bright yellow flowers with rust-like spots and a musty perfume; nectar-rich valerian is a cottage garden favourite that grows prolifically in well-drained soils and is a magnet for bees and butterflies; a mound of clipped yew, originally a sapling from Geoff’s previous home, is mirrored by cascades of matforming perennials, such as Mexican fleabane and aubrieta, which thrive with their roots in the crevices of walls; tall flowering plants such as foxgloves and king’s spear add height to the cottage garden; oriental poppies are star performers in summer, such as ‘Prinzessin Victoria Louise’ with its salmon-pink flowers