Borders brimming with cottage garden favourites and birdsong in the air, the garden at Hookshouse Pottery is the perfect slice of country charm. Yet, when Lise and Christopher White took it on, the garden near Tetbury had little beyond grass and a lone weigela bush.
To begin with, they didn’t do much to the one-and-a-half acre plot beyond some vegetables – part of it was even let to a market garden – but when Lise took early retirement from her teaching job, the garden began in earnest.
“We didn’t have a designer and we didn’t design it,” she says. “It just grew. The children used to come home and say ‘Not another flowerbed, Mum’.”
One of the earliest developments was digging down at the front of the cottage to created a sheltered, sunken area. Here, there’s somewhere to sit and plants – geraniums, Cerastium tomentosum, and anthemis – that spill onto the paving.
The main flower garden has more shelter in the form of trellis on top of the Cotswold stone walls that enclose it. This helps to filter the wind and provides support for climbers.
In early summer, there’s a definite mauve and purple theme to the planting with lots of thalictrum, alliums and tall spires of delphiniums and aconitum.
As befits the garden of someone who loves plants, every available space at Hookshouse Pottery is used with containers filling spots where there’s no soil to plant into.
Elsewhere, a small orchard has long grass under it where they have planted yellow rattle to try to develop a meadow. The biggest problem is the giant hogweed, which seeds from the neighbouring countryside.
The original vegetable area was moved some years ago and crops are now grown in a series of raised beds, sheltered by hedges.
Beans, courgettes, onions, and salad of all sorts are among the vegetables grown – all organically. Christopher has moved over to a version of ‘no dig’ growing, digging just the top four inches to produce a fine tilth where he needs to direct sow seeds.
The failure of the soakaway on their septic tank resulted in an interesting way of managing the household grey water and sewage. The septic tank now empties into a series of cascades that oxygenate the water, before it moves into first one pool and then a second. By the time it reaches the final pool, it’s clean enough to drink and the pond is home to newts and other wildlife.
Digging out for the ponds allowed them to turn what had been a flat piece of land into a more interesting contoured sloping area.
“It was an unexpected benefit of the system,” says Christopher, who runs his pottery business on the site.
Although the couple don’t use the water from the ponds, it has created an area where they can grow interesting marginals, such as the common cotton grass (Eriophorum angustifolium).
It’s an unusual addition to the Cotswold country garden.
Hookshouse Pottery, near Tetbury, opens for the National Garden Scheme with the next open days on Friday May 31 and Saturday June 1, 2024. For details and other dates, see the website.
Enjoyed this? You can read about more of my garden visits here.
Make sure you don’t miss future posts by joining my mailing list.