The English Garden – September 2019

SEPTEMBER 2019 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 41

parents, who grew all their own

vegetables. But making our first

garden together in London changed

everything.” The couple then

moved to Herefordshire in 2008

and found themselves with three

acres of land; two they fenced,

leaving the other for the local deer.

This is a magnificent setting,

with a wooded hillside to the rear,

but extensive views from every

other angle. “I needed to plan the

garden on a scale that would fit in

with such a wide outlook and blend

into the natural landscape as well as keeping to the

scale of the existing large and overgrown pond,”

says Jo. “I have always been into creating gardens

not just growing plants. This is an old industrial

area with old quarries and lime kilns up on the hill,

so the soil is a mixture. It’s definitely fertile and

generally a good loam, but some

of it is quite heavy, there’s some

exposed subsoil around the

pond, and in other places some

of it is quite thin and chalky.”

A plan was decided on and

most of the trees and hedges

were planted early in 2011.

Now there is everything you would hope to find in

a country garden: a vegetable garden with an edible

hedge made up of berry-bearing plants, an orchard,

a pond, roses growing informally in long grass, a

hazel copse and some formal planting. But it wasn’t

always like this.

“The site was a blank canvas,” says Jo. “It needed

a strong structure and we wanted to divide it into

dierent areas, without the expense of changing

levels.” The couple also wanted to be able to

concentrate their maintenance eorts in clearly

defined areas. Their solution was to use trees and

shrubs to create patterns, while leaving relatively

large swathes of unmown grass with paths cut

through to create a graphic sense of order and make

it clear that the lack of mowing was deliberate. “We

put in hedging to create big curves that reflect the

natural landscape here,” explains Jo, “and arranged

the orchard on a grid pattern with mown paths criss-

crossing through it, as well as planting an avenue

of small flowering trees.” This avenue consists of

varieties of malus and sorbus and creates a sight-line

through to the big border at the end of the garden.

The formal garden closest to the house has a red,

pink and green colour scheme, and is clearly the

heart of the garden. It features lots of big robust

perennials, with lines of Calamagrostis x acutiflora

‘Karl Foerster’, and blocks of miscanthus, which

Top Stipa tenuissima
spills over the path at the
front of a border with
cotinus and spiraea.
Above Jo Ward-Ellison,
who has created the
garden from scratch.

“We put in hedging to

create big curves that

reflect the natural

landscape here”