‘This garden is all about the views – there’s lots of “borrowed landscape”,’ says Bella Hoare. And what views they are. Her 17th-century cottage is perched on top of a north-facing escarpment with a wide sweep of forest and fields beyond: these belong to the Stourhead Western Estate, retained by her family when the main house and garden created by her ancestor Henry Hoare were given to the National Trust in 1946. She can see the house where her father lives, on the other side of the valley, near where Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset converge.
When Bella was given the former estate manager’s billet by her father in 1998, there was little garden save for a flowering cherry that performed for a week before retiring into obscurity, an old vegetable patch and a tumbledown greenhouse. Today, the scene is somewhat different, with one-and-a-half acres of grounds covering a variety of moods and moments – intensely woven herbaceous planting here, topiary and swaying grasses there. Other parts, including a pond and an orchard, are more rustic. But all retain that conversation with what lies beyond.
Yellow fennel, red Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, tawny sunflower ‘Earthwalker’ and red Canna ‘Tropicanna Black’ are set off by the dark foliage of Cotinus coggygria near the thatched former privy.
Dean Hearne
Bella is a partner at C Hoare & Co, the family bank, but also – and increasingly – an artist, painting women, inspired by the colours of the countryside: ‘I am trying to combine femininity and the power of nature.’ She has a studio next to the house, where her art and the garden have a joyously symbiotic relationship: she can look out from the studio to the landscape, or take a break from the easel by stepping through its french doors into the garden. ‘My art and the garden feed off each other, influencing how I think about which shades mix – whether I am doing complimentary colours or analogous colours,’ she explains. ‘So the pinks and the purples are nice, but so is the blue and orange. In the curved border, it got a bit tame, so I am pushing it with peaches and yellows, as well as dark reds and blues. I like trying new things.’
It was not always so. Upon her return from living in Moscow in 2000 with her first husband Boris, who was half Russian, she was working in London during the week, while Boris looked after their young son Tom: ‘For about five years, nothing was really getting done. The lawn was a football pitch.’ An early intervention, however, was to use the earth removed when a kitchen extension was added to form a level plateau at the back of the house, where there was formerly a slope – all the better to sit on and admire those views. (It also had the advantage of hiding the drive and car-parking area below.)
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