Three Part Wonder Garden

Buying their house from garden designers over thirty years ago, James and Coralie have spent three decades enhancing what they inherited. Their sprawling three part garden includes floral borders, shaded beds, a pond and a large and productive vegetable and fruit patch that could feed a multitude!

Coralie says: We have a large front garden with borders that include roses, alliums, hebes and dahlias. The middle garden has a shady bed with hellebores etc and the bottom third, which used to have a climbing frame and trampoline for the children’s play area, is now a vegetable garden with raised beds. We are growing cabbages, parsnips, swede, spinach, runner beans, turnips, squash, sprouting broccoli, rocket, salad leaves, beetroot, kale, chard, French beans, rhubarb and the fruit cage has raspberries, gooseberries, whitecurrants, redcurrants and fennel! There’s a beautiful acer tree that we planted when we got married 17 years ago and is now rather large.

I treasure the garden furniture that was all given to me when my first husband died and all the parents in my children’s class clubbed together and gave them to me in memory of him. I also have various roses that have been given to me by pupils when they stopped learning piano with me. We enhanced what we had inherited as the previous owner designed gardens. We put in the pond when the children were a sensible age and added stepping stones. It had fish but unfortunately the heron ate them. I tend to mow the lawns, weed and plant the seeds and my husband tidies up plants and looks after the vegetables.