The orchard and productive garden

The Orchard and Productive Garden

Some bold landscaping moves and capitalising on microclimates in this difficult site allowed us to create a rich and varied fruit and vegetable garden, which is beautiful and biodiverse as well as productive.

Removing two barns from behind the house liberated that high ground for an orchard. To extend that into a dedicated space for growing to eat, we re-contoured the ground and made a series of terraces to negotiate the change in level. On those, we created a productive garden.

• This area is hunkered into the landscape a bit to provide some extra shelter, making it ideal for growing edibles. The walls and orchard also help to shelter and protect the plants in this area.
• After removing the original barns, we built two new barns specifically purposed for the garden.

Context in the Wider Garden and Landscape

We flooded the orchard with a wildflower meadow to bring the meadows right the way around the site. The orchard has paths running through it – a hard path for mini tractors and barrows, and then informal paths mown into the meadow that weave between the trees.

• So we gradually worked inwards from farmland, to meadow, to productive garden and orchard, and eventually to the inner sanctum of the walled garden, which is the most ornamental.

The kitchen garden is a functional area that provides for the family, but also for biodiversity, whilst looking beautiful too.

Herb Garden

The herb garden sits below the kitchen garden. It's in a sheltered spot with very free drainage and plenty of sunshine. Most of the herbs are from the Mediterranean, so they love these conditions.

The herb garden is mostly shrubby herbs, with the annual herbs grown in rows in the kitchen garden.

• This allows the herb garden to be slightly more ornamental, with a structure that holds it together in the winter months and when it's not in production.
• We've used shrubby plants with good form, such as rosemaries, sages and myrtles.

Finding and Creating Microclimates

Every garden has a set of different microclimates – specific conditions within particular areas that may, for example, be created by the shade or shelter of walls, trees or hedges.

• Here the microclimate is made more acute by the clifftop location and strong sea winds.
• This meant finding the microclimates was really key during the initial investigations of the site.

Sometimes microclimates just encompass a few metres close to a wall or building. Over time, new microclimates develop around the plants you've used to provide internal structure as they grow. The evergreens and large euphorbias, for example, have started to develop sheltered areas around them.

As a garden matures, it will develop a different set of microclimates to the garden you planted on day one. This means you constantly need to look at the way a garden is evolving and adjust the planting according to the ways the environments change.

Materials

I wanted the materials throughout the site to be really consistent, therefore:

• We used exactly the same stone for the paths as we used for the retaining walls.
• The paths are made from stones that have been carefully laid on edge and are relatively even and easy to walk across, but echo the materiality of the walls and roll with the land to negotiate the contours.

When drawing up the site, we made a real effort to identify the lines of desire, but making those lines as elegant as possible, so that you've a feeling of moving through something that's a joy to walk on.

When choosing materials, it's always best to keep your palette really limited. As a general rule, we only use three materials within any one area of a garden. Here, we've got the wood of the barns, the recycled concrete for the areas immediately around the barns, and the stone on the paths.

Limiting the number of different elements to using just three materials helps maintain a sense of calm in the landscaping, and also makes decision-making easier thanks to the simplicity.

Palate Cleansers

Garden areas are often divided by walls or hedges. However, you can also create distinctions between spaces using planting. I often use very simple, bold moves in plantings to facilitate a transition.

• For example, a sweeping line of lavender facilitates the transition between the orchard meadow and the much more complex, ever-changing productive garden. It then wraps around the un-walled side of the walled garden to separate it from the parking area.
• We've also used a group of large clipped evergreen forms as a palette cleanser, allowing us to have different things happening on each side.

Those big, bold moves are really worth incorporating. Like with the hard landscaping, keeping things simple allows for detail to come in from elsewhere.

'Places to Be'

An early study to make on a new site is to think about where you actually want to be, and what can be made into something particular and inviting. Such 'places to be' are important – they are often the elements that allow you to connect one space to another.

• They might be where you find morning or afternoon sunshine, midday shade or shelter.
• They may have a very practical purpose, or may be entirely aesthetic – e.g. where you want to sit to enjoy a particular view.
• The places to be in don't need to be complicated – it could just be a perch on a log, or something more formal, like a bench against a wall. Either way, it creates a sense of destination.

Up here by the barns, the 'places to be' each have very distinct moods:

1. Some very informal seating at the edge of the orchard meadow.
2. A bench against the sunny wall in the herb garden, with a formal backdrop of espaliered pears.
3. Very close by, a place to be in the shadows next to an ornamental pool.

'Places to be' create a sense of journey and a narrative in which each place has a different purpose, and highlight the various reasons for being in different parts of the garden throughout the day.