‘Upcycling vintage finds for our garden together is a creative outlet’
RHS award-winning garden designer and former Highgrove Gardens creative director Kate Durr, 54, and her husband (the ‘Casualty’ actor Jason Durr, 55) live in Malmesbury in Wiltshire with their eldest daughter Blossom, 17, and their twin 12-year-olds, Felix and Velvet
We moved into an old farmhouse surrounded by six acres of fields in 2012. Initially, we began looking for secondhand materials and objects to create the contemporary cottage garden look we wanted on a tight budget, but we soon found how much fun there was to be had finding treasure in other people’s rubbish.
We love seeking out upcycled, vintage finds sourced from car boots, Facebook Marketplace, Freegle and eBay, while being careful not to fill the garden with too much tat. Over the past decade, we’ve divided the garden up into different areas with high hedges and pleached hornbeam and Portuguese laurel trees, including a terrace for entertaining and spaces for my children to gambol about in.
Our very tall iron gates were given to me by someone who had taken over a shop and no longer wanted them. I immediately said yes when they were offered, knowing they could be useful to us. They would have cost thousands to buy new. Columns of reclaimed bricks either side are strewn with climbing roses, and they lead to the bottom of the garden, where we play with our set of vintage wooden bowling pins.
Leading to the vegetable plot, Jason has fashioned a smaller gate with old, broken garden tools bought for pennies. It’s more whimsical than a bogstandard gate, and inspired by a similar creation in the Norfolk garden of garden designer and sculptor George Carter. We’ve teamed it with a metal archway unearthed in an architectural salvage yard.
There are so many people in the countryside with sheds full of old tools they don’t want. To find what we wanted, we put shout-outs on online groups in the villages local to us. There’s something so rewarding about the process of finding things together and then creating something new out of them which is inherently practical, but also aesthetically pleasing. The gates are particularly handy for keeping our flock of bantams and our five Zwartbles sheep out.
Jason has an amazing eye for a find – he was torn between drama school and art school – and the process of upcycling vintage pieces for our garden is a creative outlet. We both like the fact that old objects have a human history, and that others used them before we repurposed them. In the tools in the gate, you can see the grooves in the wooden handles where they’ve been worn and perhaps repaired over the years.
Recently, I’ve been looking for garden furniture. Woven plastic PVC furniture that looks like wicker is everywhere at the moment, enormously expensive and sometimes lacking in charm. On Facebook Marketplace, which I watch like a hawk, I found a local couple who were getting rid of their 1960s woven conservatory furniture. It’s boho and fab, made of bamboo, cane and wicker and painted white, and they didn’t even want any money. They’d had it for years, but wanted to switch for something upholstered.
There’s wonderful stuff out there that has had a life before that we can continue to use
Their grandchildren used to jump around on it, and you can see where they’ve already repaired it. It doesn’t detract from it: there’s beauty in the imperfection.
When Jason is away for work, I change my search area on Facebook Marketplace or eBay so he can pick things up (with collection-only items, there’s no postage or fuel costs). Recently, he collected two dolly tubs in Yorkshire. Made of industrial galvanised steel, they make for a striking vintage garden accessory. If you go to a very swish antique shop, they’ll cost you an arm and a leg, but we got them for £25 each. I’ve filled one of them with an Elizabethan ruff of daisylike, romantic Mexican fleabane, which blooms from April until the first frost, interspersed with deep purple-blue Salvia ‘Amistad’, a bee magnet. In spring, I plant tulips in them (I like ‘Spring Green’, ‘Bleu Aimable’ and ‘Negrita’), and in winter, Helleborus x ericsmithii ‘Ivory Prince’. I also collect old apple crates for container gardening.
Star plants elsewhere include romantic old-fashioned roses such as ‘Albertine’, yew and bay topiary and perennials including Iris ‘Jane Phillips’.
Seeking out finds is a great way to meet your neighbours and to encounter interesting people. When my children were smaller we found a climbing frame on Freegle. When Jason went to collect it, the previous owners turned out to be the musician Julian Cope and his wife.
There are two sides to my appreciation for vintage garden finds. One is simply that I love the worn patina and the history of old things, and setting off on an adventure in our old Land Rover to find them. It’s fun, saves a fortune and softens the feel of the garden, giving it a sense of timelessness. The second is that I find rampant consumerism and our obsession with buying new stuff quite nauseating, given how we’re plundering the Earth’s resources. There’s wonderful stuff out there that has had a life before that we can continue to use. It seems to me almost unforgivable to keep buying new, rather than making do. I think most people are thinking more carefully about the choices they’re making as consumers. For me, that ethos extends beyond the garden, and I often wear charity shop clothing too. There’s a brilliant vintage clothing and jewellery shop in Tetbury called Constantine Rex.