Close House
Garden Designs
We took this place on in 2016 and spent six mad years there. I was chasing my dream of having a big garden – which I’d been hankering after since I was about 16 years of age – wanted to set up a garden school and Mrs Frost thought it would be fun.
The garden, which wrapped around an old Georgian farmhouse with barns and stables, extended to 2.5 acres or so. The soil was clay on a limestone bed and it’s a very dry part of the country. There were lots of mature trees that lent the garden structure, along with big taxus hedges that divided spaces. It had been very much simplified by the older owners so this wasn’t necessarily a case of putting in a masterplan but rather about bringing the garden back to life.
As with most projects, I spent much of the time working things out on a drawing board but unusually I also spent a lot of time in the garden working out where the light needed to filter back in and physically lifting canopies of trees.
This was the first time I’d been able to get my hands on a big space and really play around with lots of types of plants. There were various different areas with specific conditions and we ended up with an orchard, woodland area, big herbaceous borders, a kitchen garden, lawns, a gravel garden, a dry garden and a little nuttery.
Looking back, this garden was just one huge experiment and the perfect way to develop my plantsmanship. I learned a lot from that garden and it was a great reminder that gardening is a craft.
