“I wanted it to feel like you are lost in the woods and you stumble onto a magic glade bursting with flowers, with flower fairies hiding round every corner,” says Bruce of her inspiration for the rose garden. “I thought, how am I going to make a garden that feels like that? For me, it was a badger trail through the woods, then you come around the corner and there’s a glade with the sun shining on it.”
She recreated that feeling by creating narrow paths that wound through an abundance of flowers in sugar-almond pink, mauve, blue and white. Out of necessity, she uses rose cultivars here, packed in among self-seeding shrubs including weigela, hibiscus and viburnum, and a thriving understorey of perennials. The roses are pruned and trained annually, and of the more than 80 varieties planted, to date she has lost six to silver leaf.
“In 2022 there was a heatwave and a hosepipe ban and the rose garden was completely untouched. It was astounding to see; nothing wilted,” she recalls. “The reason was because anything that couldn’t cope had already died out, leaving the strongest.”
As with the rest of the garden, when a plant dies, the roses are not replaced.
The yellow garden
Bruce located this part of the garden out of the sight line of other areas, to avoid what she felt would be a colour clash. Here, she has teamed yellow roses with yellow and white foxgloves, geraniums, Alchemilla mollis, phlomis and centaurea, creating a tranquil space in which to relax.
The pastels garden
Here, she deviated from her instinctive response blueprint, and she now rues her decision.
“I thought, it’s near the house so I’ll act like a normal person and plonk some beds round the lawn,” she says. “I was experimenting, but it was a big mistake. It doesn’t have the same feel or psychological impact at all.”
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