Having been introduced to garden designer Dan Pearson by the artist John- Paul Philippe, a mutual friend, she was aware of Dan’s nature-led design ethos and decided to approach him for help. After their initial meeting, Dan asked Susan for some notes on what she wanted. The result was a detailed document that included, significantly, a picture of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, annotated with the words: “This is how I feel about the garden at the moment.’ Dan knew then that he had his work cut out. He had to somehow find a way to remove the fear, to make a bridge into nature and to make its owners fall back in love with the place.
The result is a garden of muted colours and quiet beauty that seamlessIv connects the house to the different parts of the plot and landscape beyond. There is an upper area with a cutting garden and orchard, and a lower area with an expansive native perennial meadow that slopes dramatically away from the house, surrounded by woodland walks. Led by the natural glacial erratics that push up through the ground all over the place, Dan designed a series of stone features and interventions at various intervals, starting with a set of wide circular granite steps to connect the back terrace with the meadow.
From here, visitors can take a winding route into the woods, where they will be stopped in their tracks by a beautiful conical stone cairn that appears to float surreally on a carpet of epimediums. In the upper garden at the front of the house, a curious raised stone plinth, devised by garden designer Nancy McCabe, had been added by John when he lived in the house in the 1980s. Part wall, part path, it is a feature that Dan decided to retain, carefully rebuilding it and planting its surface with a mosaic of cushiony thyme, marjoram and garlic chives. This gave rise to Dan introducing another stone intervention at the side of the house – a long and low dry-stone wall that narrows as it moves towards the bosky edge of the garden, playing with perspective.
Dan used stone dug from elsewhere on the site to create a cairn, which appears to float on a sea of Epimedium × versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ in the woodland garden
Andrew Montgomery
With the stoneworks as the guiding beacons, the rest of the design began to emerge. In the lower garden, an initial period of clearance pushed the woods back and the meadow started to take shape. Dan had seen the wealth of native flowers in the surrounding landscape, so he knew that he could encourage these perennials to grow successfully here in the different microclimates that the sloping site offered. Rudbeckia, bergamot, echinacea, eupatorium, baptisia and asters are just a few of the native plants that now thrive here.
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