The Brutons bought this lovely old property a couple of years ago and with the help of an excellent team of builders renovated the house with stylish and flair and talent – it looks wonderful, and feels like home. As for the garden, it had been turned into a dumping ground for leftover and half-used materials, a mixing ground for concrete, and after nearly a year of building, energy was flagging.
My brief was simply to provide a masterplan to give inspiration for them to work on the garden themselves, a vision of what it could be, for people whose first love wasn’t plants. There were the usual issues to consider: how best to create a flow from indoors to outdoors; where to park; which plants to keep and where to add more; how to create privacy without too much shade; how to make changes of view where at first all could be seen in one sweeping glance; and how to disguise some ugly drains!