Tillmouth Farm - English Country Garden - 2019 - 2026
From design to established garden..
The catalyst for the complete redesign and implementation of the garden you see at Tillmouth Farm today was, in fact, the wedding of the owners’ daughter.
Again, the owner of this garden approached me with plenty of time to plan.
The brief was to create an English Country Garden, including roses, lavender, rosemary, sweet peas, tulips, agapanthus, alliums, iris, geraniums, clematis, campanula and salvia. All plants were to be pink, blue and white, with a quintessentially English feel. The garden also needed to have something to offer for most of the year and, most importantly, be looking close to its best by 4th July 2019, the date of the wedding.
The scale of the garden called for planting schemes of substance, without blocking the newly exposed view. A cacophony, although not chaos, with strong structure and layered texture.
We started by removing most of the existing central garden planting. Just one lovely variegated holly lollipop tree remains! The existing mature evergreen shrubs and trees around the boundary of the garden provide strong structure and maturity to what is now a predominantly perennial planting scheme.
I came up with a completely new hard landscaping structure and planting scheme, which was built by the owners’ own builder, with the details overseen by me. All soil preparation, planting and additional metal edging for the lawn were commissioned and fitted by us.
The garden was, of course, also intended to be an ongoing pleasure for the now-growing family, and especially Jacqueline, whom I consult with at all times regarding new planting ideas. It has been a very successful collaboration between us and has allowed this garden to evolve so beautifully.
Over the last seven years, I have greatly enjoyed being able to establish and add new layers of planting, introducing new colour lines into the garden and making it feel much more evolved.
So it was wonderful to see the garden play host once again to the wedding of the owners’ son in July 2026. I very much enjoy the discipline, dedication and planning required to meet a particular deadline, rather akin to the opening night of a stage performance! One just hopes that your best-laid plans and the sun all come together. They did, and the garden looked stunning.
This timeless English Country Garden holds many of my favourite planting schemes to date. It is all about the plants and bringing in the surrounding landscape. The hard landscaping is there simply to ‘house’ the planting, never to compete with it. The garden is accented beautifully by carefully selected furniture chosen by the garden owner, Jacqueline.
The more established the garden becomes, the more time is required to maintain it and troubleshoot along the way. It is this understanding and generosity from the owners here at Tillmouth Farm that allows the garden to seemingly evolve and flourish effortlessly.