The English Garden – September 2019

F

irst impressions count. Especially in a

landscape as generous and beautiful as the

Wye Valley where Herefordshire meets

Gloucestershire. Jo Ward-Ellison and Roy

Smith’s cottage sits hidden in a dip on a

wooded hillside. Enter the garden from the house and

your eye will inevitably be drawn up a grassy slope, at

the end of which sits a rather impressive border, filled

with big grasses and perennials. At first it isn’t obvious

that it belongs to the cottage, but the mind quickly

makes a connection with a strong showing of grasses in

the more formal area near the house.

“Originally,” explains Jo, “we were going to put

some traditional clipped planting close to the house,

integrated with shrubs and filled with perennials, but

instead we have used grasses to take the place of the

evergreens, which seemed to fit better with our plan to

create a modern country garden.” The use of grasses

is not surprising, since Jo recalls a pivotal experience

in her life as a gardener being a visit to Bury Court

in Hampshire: “The Piet Oudolf design gave me that

lightbulb moment... it showed me how a garden could

look and feel very dierent to gardens I had visited

before. I still remember it so clearly,” she says.

This inspired Jo to take a course in garden design at

Merrist Wood College in Surrey in 2002, and she has

worked as a designer and garden manager ever since.

But she hasn’t always been a gardener: “As a youngster

I avoided it, but Roy had grown up gardening with his

Above Grasses act as the
‘evergreens’ in this big,
banked border, with a
frothy mass of Alchemilla
mollis at the front.
Below Bronze fennel
seeds into and around
a gravelled seating area.