At Pine House in Leicestershire, this kaleidoscopic dream of a garden has been developed and honed over 46 years by Sue and Tim Milward
WORDS SUE BRADLEY PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS
The gentle caress of spring encourages a kaleidoscope of colours to shine brightly through the garden at Pine House. There’s an exuberant ‘Rudolph’ crab apple, resplendent in its coat of pink blossom, and the walls of the old coach house are daubed with the contrasting yellows and blues of Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’ and Ceanothus ‘Concha’. There’s the chartreuse zing of Smyrnium perfoliatum racing around the borders, the jewel-like goblets of tulips rising up from eye-catching blue barrels, and a froth of cow parsley drifting beneath clouds of verdant tree foliage in the spinney. There’s joy to be found around every corner of this much-loved garden in the Leicestershire village of Gaddesby.
Sue Milward has overseen the creation of an outside space that’s fun, interesting and, ultimately, lovely; applying ideas from famous gardens and being prepared to experiment with different plants to turn what she sees in her mind’s eye into reality.
Pine House dates back to the 18th century and takes its name from a copse of towering trees planted during Victorian times. Sue and her husband Tim have lived here for 46 years, choosing the Georgian-fronted property to be their family home after spending their early married life in London, Glasgow and the United States.
Initially, the two acres surrounding the house weren’t much to write home about, with some parts frighteningly overgrown, but Sue, a mother of four, was up for the challenge. “When we arrived there were practically no flower beds, apart from three rose beds on the front lawn. The spinney was a total wilderness and the back garden was mainly grass,” she recalls. “There was an old glasshouse, built during the Victorian era, which was in an advanced state of dilapidation. The garden is an interesting shape, almost like a triangle, and we were pleased to inherit excellent structure created by several mature trees, including a beautiful copper beech that’s more than 250 years old, pines, wellingtonia and oaks. I was attracted to the house right from the very start because I could see the potential offered by its south-facing garden.”
Sue says there wasn’t any kind of masterplan for what would emerge over the years and decades to come; indeed, back then, her experience of gardening amounted to what she had gleaned as a child, but she was willing to learn and has had a willing teache
