The English Garden May 2024 - Sample Issue

Between Two WORLDS

Fantasy and reality merge in the otherworldly garden of The Manor at Hemingford Grey, setting for Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, where rose-spangled borders, sharp topiary and dreamy meadows mingle

WORDS PHILIP CLAYTON PHOTOGRAPHS ANNA OMIOTEK-TOTT

The 900-year-old manor house overlooks a garden that blends formality with relaxed, cottage garden planting.

A maroon-leaved, crimson-flowered physocarpus stands out among silvery cardoons, Rosa ‘Wedding Day’ and Clematis recta

Flying COLOURS

The gardens at Hertfordshire’s Alswick Hall have been lovingly restored and redesigned by Annie Johnson and her garden team to create a colourful confection of flowers and plants to enjoy all year round WORDS

The gorgeously multilayered garden at medieval Alswick Hall features swathe upon swathe of vibrant, jewel-like planting.

At first glance, the splendid garden at Daglingworth House in Gloucestershire appears classically English. After all, there are many characteristic elements: fine parkland trees, including a red oak and a copper beech; a walled garden with a rose pergola; a croquet lawn; herbaceous borders; and formality merging into woodland. But walk around and you soon realise that since they moved here in 1994, Etta and David Howard have created something superbly quirky.

You are greeted by successive surprises: as you round one corner, an artfully placed mirror gives the impression you are bumping into someone else. Stroll into the Walled Garden through the Burma Gate (panelled with six wooden carvings bought in Myanmar) and you plunge into a dark leafy grove from which you are drawn out into the open by diminishing sized paving. Vistas cutting across the garden in several directions constantly distract and keep you on your toes. Nothing is quite as it seems.

Daglingworth House has uninterrupted views of land belonging to the Duchy of Cornwall and the Bathurst estate. Originally an estate farmhouse, it was remodelled in 1800 and now overlooks the main trapezium-shaped garden across the lane to the neighbouring parish church. House and garden are deeply connected: the elegant hydrangea and wisteria-covered house is reflected in the glassy surface of the French-style Mirror Canal, and the garden is best appreciated from the first-floor bedrooms. From there, it seems to be a sea of undulating hedges and topiary shapes, gorgeously fresh and green in spring. “That view has influenced how we have laid out the garden,” says Etta.

Both the Howards have gardening in their bones. David’s mother “was a seriously good gardener”

Left Daglingworth House reflected in the still water of the Mirror Canal. This image On either side of the canal is a line of pleached hornbeams; the large urns are from Architectural Heritage.

Right An ivy arbour in the Walled Garden, with statue, bench and mirror.

who for many years opened her Worcestershire garden for the National Garden Scheme. Etta hails from Strokestown in the west of Ireland but spent much of her childhood in Surrey where her armyofficer father was stationed. “As a baby in my pram, I was pushed round Ramster,” she says. “Those magnificent azaleas must have sprinkled their magic dust over me.”

The garden lacked structure when the Howards arrived. “There were walls, but nowhere to sit,” recalls Etta. “We had no plan: we started in the Walled Garden and finally got onto the woodland about 18 months ago.” Both are equally passionate about the garden, although their approach is different. “David is Mars and thinks only in straight lines, whereas I am Venus and like curves,” says Etta, laughing. “I am more of a plantsperson, while David has endless ideas and the vision to see how things will turn out.” The result is a pleasing balance between sharp lines and ebullient planting.

Early on, David decided to allow a low yew hedge in front of the house to grow taller and be clipped into a zigzag to give style and definition to the foreground. In parallel, across the lane, a hedge of the Rugosa rose, ‘Roseraie de l’Haÿ’ borders the Croquet Lawn, which is large enough for the partyloving Howards to have hosted two weddings and birthday celebrations on it.

The main vista runs across this lawn from a lunette in a boundary wall, under the rose pergola in the Walled Garden to a kinetic sculpture outlined against the sky by a circle of yew above the Water Cascade. Along its course, the vista slips through pleached hornbeam hedges underplanted with drifts of Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’. Framing the Mirror Canal, these hedges are clipped to different lengths to frame the view and cheat the eye.

Picture PERFECT

Mark Bolton has applied his photographer’s eye to his own garden at Bowhay House in the Devonshire village of East Prawle, developing from scratch an exemplary cottage garden that’s a visual feast

A riotous display of cottage garden favourites, among them foxgloves and lupins, in Mark Bolton’s garden.

WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS MARK BOLTON