In rural West Sussex, Chris Moss has created a sustainable, rustic-chic garden that hums with wildlife and shimmers subtly with modern cottage-style planting
WORDS PAULA McWATERS PHOTOGRAPHS ÉVA NÉMETH
When you live in a chocolate-box country cottage, there is something of an imperative to create a suitably picturesque garden to complement it. But if you are a well-established garden designer and avid plant collector who is creating their own private garden, there are other priorities at play, too, such as having a place to experiment, creating a tranquil bolt hole and avoiding cliché.
Landscape designer Chris Moss arrived at Ivy Cottage four years ago. Its position is delightfully rural, backing on to ancient woodland that is part of Ebernoe Common, managed by the Sussex Wildlife Trust, and the immediate area hums with insects and wildlife, including nightingales, goldcrests, buzzards, countless bats and even glowworms. Built in 1780, the pretty tile-hung cottage is diminutive in scale, so Chris’s aim has been to literally “engulf it in plants”.
“As the summer progresses the planting gets higher and higher,” he says. “I plant very densely so the need to weed is largely dispensed with.” This is a rented property (Chris rents it from a client who is happy to give him free rein), so hard landscaping has purposefully been kept simple. A gently curving path made of locally made bricks, left unpointed, runs between several planting beds to the front porch.
There are four of these beds, set into grass. “I planned the first two by the gate to feel as though you are approaching the cottage through a meadow. Initially, I put in plug plants of natives including common yarrow, lesser knapweed, ox-eye daisies and field scabious. They’re designed to be mowable at the end of the season and they have a loose, informal feel to them.”
Nearer the house, the beds are frothy and billowing. Tall Erigeron annuus lines the path either side and mingles with Ammi majus, Cenolophium denudatum, white sanguisorba and magenta-pink Dianthus carthusianorum. None are deadheaded, so the effect of the seedheads is long lasting and romantic. Chris’s discerning plant choices give it an edge over more traditional cottage-garden planting such as hollyhocks and lavender. Structure comes in the form of carefully selected trees and shrubs. Osmanthus mounds sit beneath a multi-stemmed hawthorn, Crataegus coccinea, which offers white blossom in spring and large berries in autumn. There is also a bay ball by the house, and in the back garden he has planted three multi-stemmed hornbeams to reflect the native woodland just beyond the
