Picture perfect

Mark Bolton has applied his photographer’s eye to his own garden at Bowhay House in the Devonshire village of East Prawle, developing from scratch an exemplary cottage garden that’s a visual feast

Often described as being at ‘the edge of the world’, East Prawle is a small coastal village in south Devon with a scattering of houses and farms, a duck pond and a village green. There is also a well-known pub, The Pigs Nose Inn, that is the heart of a thriving community. We moved into Bowhay House in the centre of the village about three years ago, from another house just down the road, and although it was slightly run-down, it had a sheltered rear garden with, joy of joys, a rickety old potting shed. And, looking closely at the rather tired borders, I could see that a selection of roses and other shrubs pointed to a former owner who had clearly once loved the garden.

I have been a garden photographer for nearly 25 years now, and I’m getting tired of the long drives at three o’clock in the morning for dawn shoots in gardens here, there and everywhere. My resolute plan had been to build a small, easily maintained ‘outdoor studio’ where I could photograph through the seasons at the drop of a hat – and save myself some petrol too.

I decided that the work needed in the garden was more important than anything inside the house – a 200-year-old cottage with a defunct Rayburn range, no proper heating and an internal garage without a working door. So I set about redesigning what would have been a basic cottage garden, cutting four triangles into the rather careworn lawn, its borders crossed by simple grass paths. I’ve always loved photographing cottage gardens, and their simplicity, informality and homespun charm is in tune with my other interests: landscape, nature and a love of wildlife. I have, over the course of my photographic career, shot many gardens, from the formal gardens of Villandry in France to tiny modern masterpieces in London, via wonderful prairie plantings in the Netherlands, but a simple cottage garden is all I wanted here. A patch of wildlife-friendly, self-seeded, informal photographic heaven in tune with the house it surrounds.

Work on the garden has been helped along by the added impetus of producing a book about the project. I’ve taken photographs for books about other people’s gardens, and the publishers I’d work