We’ve built a bridge. Now we’re creating a new walled garden! By taking the roof of one of our old farm buildings and keeping the brick walls we are making an Italianate style walled garden with soft, romantic planting.
I can see the garden in my mind’s eye. There are roses blooming freely in every shade of pink and white – a rosy heaven. The walls festooned with roses, jasmine, figs and grapevines. The beds and borders billowing with exuberant planting and in terracotta pots grow lemon and olive trees. The whole garden brimming with beauty and a sensual delight. Well – that’s the plan. We are still very much at the building stage but it is so exciting to watch it being built and my mind is buzzing with planting plans and ideas.
This winter has been wet but our snowdrops have not minded in the least. They have sprung up regardless of the weather and I can’t tell you how much joy they are bringing us.
Twenty eight years ago when I first arrived here, Hew and I planted some trees, each the size of a broomstick in an area on the outer side of the moat, to the east of the house, that was nothing but rough grass, brambles and nettles. Over a quarter of a century later these spindly little trees have become a woodland. Over the last couple of years or so I have been planting snowdrops there – hundreds of them – and I will keep adding and dividing until they form a great white carpet. What a wonderful thing to say that I am planting snowdrops in the woodland that I planted when I was sixteen.
I feel very proud. Not only to have planted a woodland, but to know the snowdrops I am planting there will go on reliably reappearing year after year for generations.
Kate Elliott came to Columbine Hall in 1997 when she was sixteen. She is now head gardener but also helps with managing the property generally and in conducting guided tours.