Farringford garden

WEST WIGHT’S SECRET GEM

There’s something about being in a walled garden that makes you feel totally at home, like one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s honoured guests

Words and Pictures Roz Whistance

Farringford Garden feels as if it’s been here forever. Pinky drifts wave into deep pink echinacea, merging and blending into dusky hydrangea. Old-fashioned roses hug the walls of the enclosed garden and madly long squashes hang from bamboo arches. The Garden at

Farringford invites you to waft through with the breeze.

It is impossible to believe that this garden is just four years old. It is the remarkable achievement of a young couple, brought in to turn a field of flattened holiday huts into a garden befitting Farringford, the house of the great 19th Century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. “We did pause when we were asked,” says garden designer Ellen. “But how often do you get the chance to create a garden from scratch?” With no surviving plan, Ellen’s design was based on hints in the poems, Emily Tennyson’s journals, and from contemporary paintings by Helen Allingham. “So I took artistic licence,” grins Ellen. “It was said ‘there was as much ground to flowers as to vegetables’. A fig, contorted and gnarled, was mentioned, and from the poems we’ve included lilies, and a passionflower at the gate. A guest described tobacco plants seven feet tall! We haven’t managed that this summer!” Indeed, the winds off the nearby Needles can be fierce, but you’d never know it. The playfulness of the central beds with wafting salvias and drifts of daisies leads to the calm vegetable plot and up to a summerhouse, a replica of Emily’s in the Allingham paintings. The greenhouse houses stunning Salpiglossis, said to be Tennyson’s favourite flowers. Beyond the walled garden is a short woodland walk and a chance to admire the house, currently being prepared for the public. The Restoration Exhibition gives fascinating insight into returning Farringford to the home Tennyson and Emily loved. Farringford Garden has proved a sanctuary during this turbulent year, and at £3.50 or £15 for a season ticket, invites frequent returners to stop, breathe, and marvel at this new, historic creation.