In many of our client gardens we design them, plant them up, then hand them over and wave goodbye. But others get under your skin. This garden near Ashbourne has been with us for almost two decades, and it started, as the best stories often do, with a small ad in a magazine.
We’d founded Lush Garden Design in August 2007, having only just moved to the area, so we were starting from scratch – no clients, no contacts and no suppliers. Social media wasn’t the giant it is now, and we didn’t even have a website yet, so to get our name out we went old school, relying on leaflets and the odd print ad.
One of those ads went into Derbyshire Life magazine in February 2008. Among the first replies was a couple near Ashbourne, with six acres of established, but fairly blank, garden – mostly lawn, hedging and mature trees and shrubs, together with a stable block and an orchard – all wrapped around a Victorian vicarage.
The owners saw developing and improving the garden as a long-term project, so there was no rush. First on their list was to create a pair of new feature flowerbeds to improve the view out of their study windows. I designed and planted those beds that summer.
A year on, the owners asked us back. Stage two meant reworking the beds around the front of the house and the driveway opposite. The latter was very dark and not much grew there except for large shrubs. I underplanted here with ferns, bulbs and ground-covering plants which added more colour and interest.
Stage three came in 2010 and took us to new corners of the garden. More planting along the driveway, and a freshly built brick planter that ran the full length of the rear patio. Here I installed Box balls for some formality and structure, interplanted with cottage-garden perennials.
This terrace bed is still my favourite border in the whole garden. Penstemon ‘Garnet’ sits alongside Salvia, Anthemis, Agapanthus, Geranium and Hemerocallis, with a daisy bush, Osmanthus, that loves the dry heat and scents the air when it flowers. One summer I even found a pheasant had laid a clutch of eggs tucked into it.
A year later we were asked to design a formal box parterre on one of the lawns, and next to it some raised vegetable beds for a kitchen garden built in the same style, with the whole lot tied together by a wayfarer crushed-limestone path.
The parterre was a labour of love, and for a while everything seemed set against it. Dry, heavy soil, driving wind across from the adjacent fields, shade from a great big sycamore, rabbits and squirrels all made getting anything to settle a real test. The lupins, tulips and original trees didn’t survive. But Roscoea purpurea, Stipa arundinacea, Campanula, ferns, Brunnera, Alchemilla, alliums, geraniums and hellebores have all come good, and are now thriving.
By around 2013 we were making maintenance visits every month to keep the garden in good order. Other jobs from that period included remedial hedge work, lifting turf and sowing grass seed, and putting in irrigation and steel edging.
Year on year, the work kept on coming. When the stables were refurbished, we added a new raised bed in a spot that caught good light, and gave it a hotter palette of reds, oranges and yellows with Persicaria, Euphorbia, Hemerocallis, Hebe, Leycesteria, Stipa and Pulmonaria.
In 2017 came a new long border, and every autumn we’d spend a couple of days tidying and planting bulbs for the following spring.
The grounds also hold an orchard and a beautifully flat croquet lawn. One summer that lawn took a great marquee for a family wedding reception. It was a lovely day – exciting for the family, and a treat for me too, knowing I’d had a hand in getting the garden looking its best for the photographs.
For something like eleven years, we were custodians and unofficial head gardeners. We worked hand in hand with the owners, suggesting improvements and shaping a space that suited the house and the way they lived in it.
But all good things must come to an end. In 2019 the owners told us they were retiring and selling up. The estate agent’s particulars made much of the “stunning landscaped gardens”, so the years clearly hadn’t been wasted. They kindly left our details for the buyer, and a few months later the new owners got in touch and asked us to carry on.
In 2020 the new owners had us relocate and redesign the kitchen garden, and more recently, as they’ve developed the vicarage itself, we’ve designed fresh driveway access.
We’re still there every month, with more improvements in the pipeline. Watching one garden change over the best part of two decades is a rare pleasure, and one I don’t take for granted.