Designer Sue Townsend has blended two cottage gardens into one with meadow-style planting that drifts dreamily through the different spaces
WORDS LIA LEENDERTZ PHOTOGRAPHS RICHARD BLOOM
You could be forgiven for thinking that you had walked into a particularly floriferous meadow throughout much of the garden that designer Sue Townsend has created in the Chilterns. This was entirely intentional. The garden was originally two separate cottage gardens, and part of Sue’s brief was to make the two gardens blend together, as well as out into the surrounding countryside. “It is an amazing spot with hardly any houses around,” says Sue. “To the front of the house is hazel woodland – you can hardly see the house from the road, it’s like Hansel and Gretel – and to the back there are views over a paddock and trees in the distance. I wanted the garden to drift into the woodland and sit well in the landscape.”
To this end, Sue has made extensive use of perennial meadow turf by Pictorial Meadows. The mix, called Purple Haze, includes salvias, achillea and oregano and is longer flowering than native meadows. It’s not just at the meadowy edges of the garden, but drifts right through it, even lapping up against some of the garden’s seating areas. The shades of purple and pink blend in with zones of more traditional perennial planting.
This slightly more structural planting surrounds the house and is what Sue calls ‘contemporary cottage-garden’ planting. “Cottagegarden planting can be wonderfully chaotic. Here we have some of that looseness but there is more rhythm and repetition to the planting.”
Astrantia major ‘Large White’ has lovely cottage garden-style pincushion flowers that float above the borders and that mix beautifully with plants such as Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’, which spills its aromatic foliage out and softens the brick paths with its contrasting soft-lilac spires. Rosa Gertrude Jekyll (= ‘Ausbord’) is planted in several places for scent and pops of bright, strong pink among the pastel shades.
Other plants are used for a woodland feel towards the wooded edges of the garden, alongside ferns and foxgloves. Cenolophium denudatum is a summer-flowering, white umbellifer that gives a vertical accent, lightness and a slightly wild feel to perennial plantings in dappled shade. Acanthus mollis was chosen for its strong spires of white flowers, 1.5m high. It has been planted beneath a huge magnolia tree near the house, where it creates a lush feel and bridges the gap between dappled shade and full sun.
All of this soft and slightly wild planting works so well here because Sue has used
