Layers of Oudolf plantings in the walled garden
One of the gardens that so impressed us on our 2014 visit that we wanted to go back and have another look was Bury Court Barn near Farnham in Surrey. On this recent visit, we were honoured to be taken around by the garden owner himself, John Coke. I say honoured because while this garden is attributed to two big name designers – Piet Oudolf and Christopher Bradley-Hole – this does not accurately reflect the skills and hands-on involvement of the garden owner himself. It is very much his place.
The front garden was the first to be done and is a walled area. We have seen a number of large scale Oudolf plantings now. Bury Court is early Oudolf but, more interestingly, it is domestic and private in scale and design which makes it very different. The perennial plantings are still big, bold and bouffy but on a scale suited to this environment. I look at the photos and I see how much thought has gone into the combinations and juxtaposition of plants but when you are surrounded by them in person, it is more an experience of being enveloped by the vibrancy.
One of the prettiest of meadows
The meadow is signature Oudolf, I realised when I spotted the Trentham grass rivers. And tactile, evocative, full of gentle movement and startlingly pretty. Again, deceptive simplicity. John Coke wryly noted that to keep it looking as it does makes it the most labour intensive area of the garden. We saw the same hands-on intensive maintenance going into Les Carrés Américains at Le Jardin Plume in Normandy. There are lower maintenance styles of meadow but they won’t look like this one.
Clearly the white wedding border by the functions hall in a converted barn
Bury Court has embraced the wedding and events market, as have many gardens. We have done the opposite and shunned weddings at least, but that is another story. I couldn’t help but notice the brilliant placement of all the event paraphernalia. They do the full shooting box – wedding ceremony, function, corporate events and all but it has been organised so that it does not dominate or dictate the nature of the entire property and the privacy of the home has been preserved by clever design, not barriers. Despite a sophisticated functions set-up, it still feels a personal and private garden.
The techniques of separation of different areas of this garden are both subtle and effective
Considering they started with quite a lot of buildings (oast houses, even!) and the area is not huge, the design skills that underpin this discreet separation are considerable but hidden. As I commented on the perfect Cotswolds garden, the thing about really-o, truly-o good design is that you don’t notice it but it underpins the entire garden environment and experience. As we sat having coffee in the front grass garden, there was a wedding taking place but it was entirely removed from us. I would have asked John Coke about this subtle separation had I thought about it at the time. It was only afterwards that it occurred to me that this was what had been achieved and that it was done by skill, not chance. My guess is that this is the result of a collaborative effort between the designer of the front garden, Piet Oudolf, and the garden owner himself.
The grass garden at Bury Court
I wanted to go back to Bury Court to have another look at the grass garden, a more recent major garden designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole. Despite my initial cynicism (how could a garden comprised almost entirely of grasses be remotely interesting?), I found it nothing short of inspirational when we first saw it in 2014. In the intervening three years, it appears that the flowering perennial count has dropped We worked it out to be about one perennial to eight grasses on that earlier visit but that seems unlikely now that the grasses have matured.
A bold Japanese-inspired summer house and reflecting pool
This grass garden is signature Bradley-Hole, I am told – sharp-edged, geometric design filled with gentle movement and informal plantings. On a second visit, I noticed the level of unobtrusive detail that underpins this garden – how the slight change of ground levels is handled, the definition and the materials used to strengthen the sharp lines of the design, the proportions of the summer house, the pond and the total space. Again, highly skilled design can be so subtle that you are barely aware of it yet it provides the foundation for everything else.
Now I want to see this garden in the autumn when the grasses are all shades of tawny gold and brown.
Again, I have too many photos of this particularly good garden to use in this post so have added an additional album to our Facebook garden page.
Garden owner and creator, John Coke
To set the scene, from memory the owners told us it is an acre in size. It is flat and Pearson took it back almost to a blank canvas. With the typical Cotswold two-storeyed cottage in the local golden stone being on the road side of the site, the body of the garden has four distinct sections, three of which feature water. The first is by a charming stream boundary and centres on a large elliptical pool with restrained plantings. The second is a formal garden built around a canal, with a dining area closest to the house. The third is the most spacious and contains a swimming pool. It was apparently the first garden Pearson had done that included a swimming pool and he was not keen. I can understand why. Pools are awfully difficult to integrate without turning it into the Miami look. But this pool was beautifully executed, though that is easier when you don’t have our laws requiring childproof fencing close in on all swimming pools.
What I call the ‘hidden infrastructure’ of the garden is well camouflaged to the point where it was not apparent at all. Again, attention to detail is paramount. There is no pond lining visible on the elliptical pool. I asked and the pool is made the old fashioned way, presumably with clay lining to remove the need for an unsightly pool liner. I did not spot a single skerrick of plastic anywhere in the garden. No cheap solar powered lights either. There were no visible hoses hanging about, no clumsy afterthoughts of garden edgings. The swimming pool filter was housed out of sight. The motorised pool cover was near to silent and the wiring was hidden. The compost bins and inevitable wheelie bins were discreetly housed. Everything had been thought of. We fall well short of that in our own garden but we admire the impressive attention to detail.
We stayed in another Air BnB place in Camembert – in this case a Norman barn that had been converted to a large apartment. Some of the conversion was a little curious but we did not electrocute ourselves and the opportunity to sleep in an adult-sized cradle created from a half cider barrel may never come my way again.
The fruit of the mandrake! Mandragora officinarum, to be botanical. This is not something one sees often. It is apparently the root that is harvested for whatever purpose one harvests mandrake, but the fruit are certainly eye-catching too. I think it was in the physic garden.
Five years ago, I wrote a piece entitled “But where are the hollyhocks?”. Occasionally a garden visitor sears him or herself on the brain and on this particular occasion, a gentleman came out from our garden and asked that very question, declaring that he could not find any hollyhocks. I have never forgotten because it was such a bizarre question. Until that point, it had never occurred to me that anybody might regard a garden as seriously deficient for the want of some hollyhocks. We failed that test.
But we found the hollyhocks in London. An entire block of them growing wild. This was part of the Olympic Village plantings. Most of these plantings were prairie-flavoured while hollyhocks are pretty much traditional cottage-garden plants. This may be why they were kept separate and all on their lonesome. They made us smile. I am only guessing that the other plants like the mullein and Verbena bonariensis have introduced themselves to the hollyhock party.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 