Designer Katie Guillebaud updated the Cotswolds garden of a garden photographer to make it picture perfect all winter
WORDS LIA LEENDERTZ PHOTOGRAPHS JACKY HOBBS
On a winter day, the entire view from Jacky Hobbs’ window shimmers with grasses and perennial seedheads. “Many of the plants are huge, they tower over us and fill the windows,” she says. “I love the fact that these plants stay up all winter. It is wonderful if we get a frost. I go to the bottom of the garden in the morning and look up and it’s backlit and it’s like everything is just sprinkled in diamonds. It’s magical, like a fairyland.”
The view wasn’t always so special. For many years, Jacky and her partner looked out from their 17th-century, Cotswold-stone farmhouse on to cars. “There was a York stone dining terrace outside of the house and then a parking area right next to it. You just looked out of every window at cars.” Then, after 13 years of dividing their time between here and London, the coupled decided to move to the Cotswolds full time, and Jacky felt it was time to do something about the garden.
Jacky is a garden photographer, writer and stylist, and so spends a lot of her time visiting gardens and garden shows, but this had left her feeling a bit overwhelmed with ideas. “I’d seen so many wonderful gardens. Every one I went to was my favourite for that week. I just couldn’t sieve through all of the ideas to reach one coherent style.” After dithering for a year, her partner Simon (who “knows little about
Jacky’s request was for a garden that worked all year, so designer Katie Guillebaud chose spring bulbs and winter-flowering plants such as hellebores. She planted them among multi-stemmed Amelanchier x lamarckii, a bit of a signature plant for Katie, as it offers beautiful spring blossom, good autumn colour and a strong multi-stemmed winter structure. In spring, the perennials come through alongside the bulbs.
At Katie’s direction, Jacky never feeds nor waters the drought-tolerant planting, and that has contributed to the plants being strong and stocky, and needing minimal or no staking and supporting. In early summer, the earlier perennials start flowering and the garden is dominated by a great many old roses that pre-date the redesign, and that blend in well with newer rose plantings that Katie has incorporated. As summer goes on, the herbaceous perennials begin to fill out.
In autumn, the grasses come into flower, and September to February is when the garden is at its peak. “After tha
