Thirty years of planning, planting and waiting have paid off, and while maintaining the now-mature topiary in this Suffolk garden is a relentless task, on a crisp morning John and Jenny Brett feel it’s worth the effort
WORDS BARBARA SEGALL PHOTOGRAPHS RICHARD BLOOM
Vision, optimism, patience and hard work are among the virtues that so many gardeners harness as they create their gardens. In the two-thirds-of-an-acre garden around the former village church that has been their home since 1993, John and Jenny Brett have tested theirs to the limit. When John first drew up the plan for the garden he and Jenny have created, he hadn’t really considered the long-term energy and effort it would require.
The couple viewed many properties in rural Suffolk when they decided to move out of London in 1993, but they both remember the excitement of their first glimpse of the derelict and overgrown garden that had thrust itself up around this decommissioned Victorian church. “We just fell in love with it,” Jenny recalls. “The garden was full of bramble, nettles, and snowberry. You couldn’t walk around the whole building and self-seeded willows were growing out of the foundations. But we saw it in June on a beautiful day when the wild roses were in full flower and we thought it was very romantic.”
Somehow, they saw through the weeds and difficulties into a future where a sunken lawn, lines of pleached hornbeam, stately yew hedges and shapely topiary would offer year-round architectural attraction. At first, they spent weekends clearing the ground and working on their living quarters within the church. Soon they realised that if they were to have any impact on the property, they needed to be there full time, and so in December 1998 the weekends became weeks.
“John came up with a scheme to give us structure and something attractive to look at all year,” says Jenny. This blueprint detailed individual flower beds bordered with box hedging and box parterres. The pièce de résistance was the lowering of the main part of the garden to create a sunken lawn with a hornbeam walkway on two sides. Yew hedging was added to create vistas, as well as to ensure privacy.
Work began on the garden in earnest in 2008. “A man with a digger dug out the lawn to a depth of one metre. What was taken away was a mixture of clay, rubble from a former school on th
