‘It’s an opportunity to make the herbaceous borders lighter. The mice won’t be able to hide and Mr Slug won’t like it’
‘Kashmir White’. As elsewhere in the garden, the roses are kept healthy by the liberal application of homemade compost.
The western boundary path leads down a short lime avenue to a whitebeam tree circle. From there a short grass path runs between pollarded Portugese laurels, past the dog kennel and to the hen house, home to a cluster of fluffy, speckled Belgian Mille Fleur hens. Beyond is the woodland garden, at its best in the spring, but filled with softly-coloured Turks cap lilies, Lilium Martagon, in mid-summer. Here, the Mille Fleur scratch in the leaf litter looking for slugs, worms and invertebrates. They have been part of Mary’s life since her childhood on her father’s dairy farm.
Continuing in a circular manner, you reach a young beech hedge beyond, which is a nuttery, planted with different varieties of nuts, including cob hazel and walnuts, which thrive on the poor soil in that part of the garden. Winding grass paths lead you through buttercups and wild orchids towards the bog garden, filled in late spring with Primula Florindae and Postford Whites, rheums and meadowsweets.
Your first glimpse of the walled garden is so breathtaking that you immediately understand why this is the last space on the tour. In front of you there is a layout of box- and brick-lined beds overflowing with plants, frames, narrow gravel paths; the walls are festooned with roses and clematis. Height comes from the apple, viburnum, crab apple and may trees.
Building on the existing box structure and established apple trees, Mark explains that he and Mary ‘sat down and worked out a design for a herb garden to fill one of the quadrants which form the core of the walled garden; we knew that we wanted a circular centre with an architectural feature and that the layout had to be symmetrical’.
The walled garden is filled with herbaceous plants of all sorts, with height coming from clouds of Crambe cordifolia, delphiniums, peonies, campanulas and flowering shrubs, such as Weigela.
A double row of dahlias mark the entrance from the southern gate and the central gravel path, where a large terracotta pot overflows with brightly-coloured annuals. Sweet peas and other picking flowers are grown in abundance together with a productive vegetable bed.
As in many other gardens, the box hedging has been affected by boxwood blight and is slowly being replaced with stone and brick edging. Mark, who retains a characteristically positive attitude, explains: ‘This is an opportunity to make the herbaceous borders wider and lighter. The mice won’t have anywhere to hide and Mr Slug won’t like it.’
The path back to the front of the house takes you past a semi-circular bed and black mulberry, set against an impressive Monterey Cyprus to complement the stump bed with shuttlecock ferns, hebe and nepeta. Rich yellow Rosa Teasing Georgia clambers up the walls behind. The rich blend of flowers, foliage, and form in this bed is a fitting finale to a striking display of skill and hard work.