Boundaries, meadows and materials

Meadows

Types of meadow

We've got two different conditions with the meadows here, and these each needed to be treated differently at the outset.

First, we've got the old lawns around the house. We turned these into meadows by oversowing them with a meadow mix containing yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor).

• Yellow rattle is an important ingredient – it's semi-parasitic on grass. This reduces the vigour of the grass, giving other wildflowers a chance to establish.

The second condition is the 5 acres that we took on around the new drive. We harvested the topsoil from this field for the walled garden, which had no topsoil. We then sowed wildflower seed directly onto the subsoil.

• Removing that topsoil created a really interesting opportunity, because the best meadows often grow on impoverished ground where grass doesn't grow as strongly. The wildflowers have flourished as a result and these meadows have been fantastically successful.

Maintaining the meadows

Meadows aren't fundamentally different to the lawns around the house: we've just oversown them and put them on a different cutting regime.

• We cut the meadows in mid-August – that allows the late-maturing orchids to seed.
• You can cut meadows from mid-July, but we never cut before mid-July because that's when the yellow rattle seeds. As an annual, this needs to set seed in order to be there the following year.

We always cut and collect the grass, like with an old hay meadow. This takes away the fertility locked up in the grass, creating better conditions for a wildflower meadow, as grass grows less strongly in lower fertility conditions.

• Staggering the different meadows, we cut and collect between mid-July and mid-late August to give a good range of time for plants to seed at different times.
• We also do a late cut, usually in late autumn, so that the meadow goes into the winter short.
• Sometimes livestock grazes the meadow over winter, but we take the livestock off at the end of February to allow the yellow rattle to germinate.

The pond

The previous owners had created a pond, where a spring was channelled into a damp area. We repurposed the spring and made the design altogether simpler.

• We created an oval pond, which brings the sky down to earth and connects to the sea beyond.
• Water comes out of the headwall and falls onto a splash stone, making a lovely sound. This creates tranquillity when the wind is howling, or echoes in the hollow when it's calm.

Planting without stealing attention

I wanted the planting around the house to have a quietness about it, because the views and feeling of open space are so important.

• As soon as you start to use plants that are too ornamental, your eye falls on those instead of looking out, so you stop feeling how important the context is.

Originally, there were curious seaside plants here, like Yuccas, Phormium and bright blue hydrangeas, which shouted for attention and felt very out of place. The choice of plants we've used allows your eye to travel further on to the view, rather than getting bogged down in the planting.

Here at the front, it's really important that things don't jar, and that they sit so they're tonally right.

• These plants generally have very small leaves, which is a great adaptation to the wind, but also means your eye doesn't fall on the textures of the leaves; instead travelling beyond.

It's an entirely different story in the walled garden. That's where we've indulged in plants that you can really savour, because the views are already restricted by the walls.

Carrying existing plants through into new designs

We've re-used some of the plants that were here originally. There were some great bay laurels (Laurus nobilis), which were thriving and a good indicator of what grows well here.

• We've clipped those into large spheres, which are a great juxtaposition with the informal planting and meadows around them.

The colour of those bay laurels and also the evergreen oaks is quite specific, so we went with those shades of green and chose plants that felt right in this very bright spot with high light exposure.

• The lavenders at the front, for instance, look right and feel right because they cope with the conditions and sit well with the sea view.

There are also quite a few evergreens here, which hold the structure together through the winter.

The key is to choose plants that are adapted to the place, but also feel right in terms of their tonality and the quality of their foliage.

Magnolias and evergreen oaks

When we arrived, we did some local research to see what thrives in the gardens around here. This is always a very good and easy thing to do to gain an understanding of the context of a site.

One thing we noticed was that magnolias thrive down here. We're in the south of the country, and given enough shelter, some species can even cope with these tough conditions so close to the sea.

We selected a number of the more robust magnolias to give us key flowering trees around the house.

• One is Magnolia × loebneri 'Merrill' – a brilliant, quite late-blooming magnolia that lights up the front of the house and gives a wonderful continuity of blossom around two sides.

We've also got trees that are adapted to these conditions, such as evergreen oaks, which have become part of the shelterbelt.

• This is a great tree for wind protection, and its grey-green foliage sits well in the environment.

Boundaries and materials

Choice of materials

When looking at your context, one of the important things to establish is what feels right in terms of the materials. The local stone walls are very much part of the landscape here, so I decided straight away that those would be one of our building blocks.

• Drystone walls would be an ideal choice to help us negotiate the site's changes in level whilst fitting in with the context.

The other main material was the crushed concrete from the old farmyard, which became the base material for the drive.

• The lack of a definite edge, and the grass being able to come through down the centre, makes this drive feel very much part of the farm, and stops it from just being a grand gesture, even though it was a big move to reposition it.

Redesigning the boundaries

We re-established the boundaries so that the enclosed area of the ornamental gardens around the house has distinct ripples. The first is the edge of the terraces at the front of the house.

• We made a ha-ha here, which takes you down to the grass lawns.
• Those take you down to another pre-existing ha-ha, which gives way to the field.
• We picked up that second ha-ha with a wall that rises up and takes us down to a damp field of shrubby willows. We made a snicket in the wall flanked by two large stones, which you can just squeeze through, but a cow or larger animal would not be able to get into the garden – a nice little moment.
• Finally, around the driveway, we've just used a simple park railing through which you can look out into the landscape, while the meadow can flow through from one side to the other.

So some of the boundaries are blurred by using ha-has, which allow your eye to travel elsewhere, using a simple park fence has created a boundary that you can see through and that doesn't interrupt the landscape.

Dealing with changes in the level

Changes in level are always interesting, and I wanted to create special moments in negotiating them, whilst keeping the moves simple. We used some big stones from nearby to create step changes, with big boulders allowing you to step over the wall from one space into another.

Closer to the house, the materials are more finely worked. We've got limestone paving, which was the only material imported into the site from further away, but we chose that paving very carefully so that it would sit well with the colour of the slate on the house.

Throughout, we kept everything very robust, so that it all feels farm-like rather than too domestic.