It’s a huge stand of Verbena bonariensis that offers the first clue about what kind of garden lies beyond the five-barred gate. 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. 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. This tension between form and free-for-all is what makes retired farmer Marilyn Godden’s garden such a thrill.
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. It took three weeks to trim the riotous hedge, then she started work on a little bed under the kitchen window. 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. The farmhouse has required much time and energy, too. “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.
One of Godden’s first projects was reviving and reshaping the mangled, dying box. 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. 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’.
“I just play,” Godden says modestly of her eye for colour and form, no doubt reflected in her college training as a potter. Close by is an outdoor dining area, but Godden admits she doesn’t really use it. “I never sit down. I don’t know any gardeners who sit in their garden.”
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).
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. 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. “Anything that’s going, we shove on,” she says.
Beyond the topiary and laurel hedge is the orchard, a wild and glorious place. 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. Several specimens of the scented white rambling rose ‘Kiftsgate’ have grown so rampant they killed the trees they enveloped; a pink-flowered ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ reached 50ft tall before it had to be cut back. Godden doesn’t mourn the loss of the apples, walnuts and sweet chestnuts, some of which she planted specifically as host trees for the roses.
Although the focus is on flowers, in one section of garden bounded by a beech hedge are fine fat celeriac, beans, and stepover apples and pears in among a riot of sweet peas, nicotianas, annual clary sage (Salvia viridis) and cosmos. Self-seeding plants are given free rein, migrating to places where they are happy. Set against the hedge is a metal bench around which grows an arch of what appears on first glance to be a fresh green climber grown for its foliage, but sit down, look up and – oh! – the most welcome surprise. Hanging down are ruby clusters of redcurrants, just the right height for picking. There have been disasters – many tears at the trespasses of wayward cows into the garden, and the onslaught of nibbling by deer and rabbits, although you couldn’t tell from the abundance of beautiful foliage and flowers on display: it seems there is enough for all.
There are other fantastic ideas to pilfer for your own garden. Vintage farmyard equipment is put to great use, with a farm gate and a metal fish pond cover both repurposed as trellis for the numerous viticella clematis varieties, and a galvanised watering can standing sentinel atop a plant pot holder. And there are many inspired planting combinations, such as a bed of feathery herb fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) teamed with purple lollipops of round-headed garlic (Allium sphaerocephalon), catmint (Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’) and the buff-coloured trembling seedheads of annual greater quaking grass (Briza maxima) next to pale pinky lilac spires of biennial clary sage (Salvia sclarea var turkestanica).
Amid all this bounty, it’s hard to imagine how Godden could spend her retirement more profitably than simply enjoying the beauty of this place. Her one regret? That she didn’t insist on grubbing out that laurel hedge 37 years ago, rather than putting up with its moisture-sucking ways for all those years.
