Garden TOUR
This six-acre 19th century garden has been restored to its former glory with added contemporary touches
Come midsummer, and the gardens at Westbrooke House dance with a troupe of scintillating perennials, choreographed to an otherworldly tune by the owner Joanne Drew.
It is no surprise that there is something dream-like about wending through the giant-sized oak frames straddling the path in the lower garden. “As you approach each picture frame, it feels like a journey during which a series of views are unveiled, and your pace inevitably slows,” says Joanne.
It is almost a decade since Joanne, a dance teacher and examiner, and her husband, Bryan, drove down the avenue of limes and giant redwoods, which were planted when Westbrooke House was built in 1887 on the outskirts of Market Harborough.
The house rests within a six-acre plot overlooking Leicestershire countryside, to one side a south-facing lower garden and to the other, a walled garden, a former tennis court. “It is the walled garden that brought us here,” recalls Joanne. The couple envisaged restoring the three-quarters-of-an-acre walled garden as a Victorian style cutting garden and, guided throughout by garden designer Rebecca Winship, subsequently created a contemporary lower garden inspired by a visit to the Great Broad Walk Borders at Kew Gardens.
“I liked the planting on a diagonal, with blocks of colour in blues and oranges, purples and yellows,” explains Joanne. Rebecca planned a contemporary design with prairie-style planting that would create beautiful views from the house. “Rebecca’s first design placed the summerhouse across the diagonal, but we wanted it parallel to the steps, to screen us from our neighbour,” says Joanne. Asinuous path, made from Breedon self-binding gravel, leads through
