Season after season, year after year, Town Place in West Sussex has been bedazzling its visitors with an all-star show directed by owners Anthony and Maggie McGrath, who are ever conscious of what works for their audience
WORDS MAX CRISFIELD PHOTOGRAPHS MATTHEW BRUCE
For Anthony McGrath – owner and co-creator of the much-fêted garden at Town Place in West Sussex – a garden is like performance art. “You might think of it as installation,” he says with a wry smile, “but it’s really not; it’s very performative.” What seems like a throwaway line, is actually key to understanding Town Place and the playful theatricality that underpins it.
This three-acre garden of interconnecting avenues and rooms is now a living, breathing artwork. But 33 years ago, when Anthony and his wife Maggie were seeking a new project, this 17th-century farmhouse with just over two acres of land was a blank canvas. Aside from a few specimen trees and a pre-war rose garden, it was mainly lawn. Perfect: a clean slate.
Previously, Anthony and Maggie had tentatively gardened a third of an acre at their previous home in Nutley. Both of their mothers had been keen gardeners and both recall childhood trips to gardens like Hidcote and Sissinghurst. So, with some gardening pedigree, a little hands-on experience, and ideas percolating left, right and centre, they simply began gardening, one step at a time.
First priority was the hedging: a line of yew bifurcating the main lawn, copper beech on the southern boundary, and a nascent avenue of young hornbeam standards, which, 30 years on, have become one of the garden’s most iconic statements. This was all achieved in their first winter. The following year they built a walled herb garden. The next, the long borders. A year after, the sunken rose garden got its first makeover. So they continued, year after year, project after project, until slowly the garden began to assume its current identity.
The McGraths’ can-do attitude served them well in the early years, but they soon realised that a little horticultural learning might go a long way. So, in 1994, Maggie enrolled at Plumpton College where she studied horticultural theory and practice, garden history and design. This learning period was invaluable, not only in terms of plant knowledge and practical know-how, but also because the couple were now able to bring Maggie’s
