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• #A MAGICAL GARDEN SERIES#

Sheep toddle in to keep the grass in check and a path is mown through for anyone wanting to admire the blooms, though fruit trees serve only as structures for rambling roses to conquer. “Anything that’s going, we shove on,” she says.īeyond the topiary and laurel hedge is the orchard, a wild and glorious place. If you’re wondering how the abundant box stays so healthy at a time when so many other gardens are falling prey to box blight, Godden doesn’t boast a secret weapon against the disease, although she does stress how well the topiary is fed – Q4 (a proprietary fertiliser from Vitax), manure, mushroom compost. Marvellous as it looks in high summer, the garden’s strong backbone of topiary means it stands up well to scrutiny in the depths of winter, particularly in snow. There’s more clever use of topiary along another side of the house: a row of box “cupcakes”, as Godden calls them, marching towards the house, framed by columns of yew and a pleached hedge of Caucasian lime (Tilia × euchlora). I don’t know any gardeners who sit in their garden.” Close by is an outdoor dining area, but Godden admits she doesn’t really use it. “I just play,” Godden says modestly of her eye for colour and form, no doubt reflected in her college training as a potter. She planted and trained yet more box to create an array of olive and globe shapes, set against the softer outlines of other plants, including fuzzy grey lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina), a purple-leaved smokebush (Cotinus coggygria), silver-spiked Miss Willmott’s ghost (Eryngium giganteum) and towers of the pale lilac Clematis ‘Prince Charles’. She nurtured and clipped it into a fantastical bit of cloud pruning inspired by the silver spheres and rods of the Atomium building in Brussels. One of Godden’s first projects was reviving and reshaping the mangled, dying box. “The house dates from 1692 but it’s older than that – they did a refurb in 1692, the chimney and inglenook were Tudor,” she explains. The farmhouse has required much time and energy, too.

#A MAGICAL GARDEN SERIES#

Over the subsequent decades, Godden gradually turned the moisture-retaining clay-heavy pasture into a series of beautiful garden rooms, with the helpful addition of manure – freely available from her herds of beef cattle and sheep. It took three weeks to trim the riotous hedge, then she started work on a little bed under the kitchen window. When Godden and her husband moved into this Buckinghamshire farmhouse in 1980, there was little more than a 40ft tall laurel hedge and some mistreated box topiary to call a garden. This tension between form and free-for-all is what makes retired farmer Marilyn Godden’s garden such a thrill. Above the froth, the eye is drawn to the horizontal line of a grapevine trained along the eaves and a tightly clipped specimen of potted topiary at one end. The verbena’s spindly stems topped with tiny lilac pompoms like a map of the stars have colonised one side of an ancient open-sided barn with an undulating roof of rust-red tiles. It’s a huge stand of Verbena bonariensis that offers the first clue about what kind of garden lies beyond the five-barred gate.