This country garden has been curated over many years by two knowledgeable plantsmen and now their niece
Afully working mixed farm might seem unusual alongside four acres of beautifully tended gardens packed with rare plants, but Stockton Bury Gardens in Herefordshire has a way of confounding expectations. A 500-strong cider apple tree orchard in full, frothy blossom greets visitors in May, who enter through a converted cider press. The garden areas are divided around historic buildings, including a medieval dovecote and barns which are still used for agriculture. Sheep and cattle graze in the surrounding fields.
Mauve wisteria ‘Burford’ clads the old stable walls while the first roses appear, with salmon pink ‘Wollerton Old Hall’ and the pink and lemon ‘Mutabilis’.
Deep borders swell with pom-poms of allium heads, mounds of hardy geraniums, soft swathes of campanula and vivid flags of ‘Patty’s Plum’ poppies.
“This really is a home and a working farm, and the old buildings have dictated the design to an extent,” explains Tamsin Westhorpe, the second generation of her family to garden here and also an author, RHS judge, lecturer, podcaster and regular GN columnist. Her farmer grandfather had little interest in gardening, but his son Raymond Treasure loved horticulture. At five, he created a vegetable patch and at 14, he smuggled blue iris rhizomes home from boarding school. When he met his partner Gordon Fenn over 40 years ago, they transformed the plain pastureland.
Left, sweeping lawns are edged with packed, curved borders.
“It has been done slowly. Raymond and Gordon would make a rough sketch, then map things out on the ground,” Tamsin says. “Gordon is a genius propagator, formerly a plantsman and gardener at Hereford School, while Raymond is a self-taught designer and builder with his own forge in the grounds. They are a dream team.”
A handsome farmhouse sits in the middle of the gardens, surrounded by sweeping lawns and an ancient monkey puzzle tree, said to be the largest in Herefordshire. “The main lawn and the tree are the only part of the garden which was already here,” Tamsin points out. The miniature vegetable patch of Raymond’s childhood is now an orderly, productive
