About the Reclaimed Garden

Sit in this small courtyard-style summer garden and you’re somewhere between a town garden in the Mediterranean and an English country cottage garden.

That door – painted in Colombian Blonde by Pickleson Paint – is a nod to The Secret Garden, it’s salvaged too, almost everything in this garden is. Anchored against old brick, it throws colour across the space. The bench was painted with leftover Pavilion Grey by Farrow & Ball and there’s reclaimed paving underfoot. A milk churn hosts a hop that scrambles upward with the climbing hydrangea and honeysuckle on the wall. There’s a salvaged window frame from a Brocante at Newark Antiques Fair with found horseshoes leaning against it.

The planting is lush, visitors have remarked that it looks sub tropical at the height of summer, what with the canna, verbena, and there’s plenty of moisture-loving plants here like red Geum and Darmera peltata. The shaded corners shelter ligularia, rodgersia, lots of ferns, cow parsley. Herb Robert and maidenhair spleenwort seed themselves into wall crevices. Around the sunken barrel water feature in front of the yellow door there’s a slice of meadow grass – dandelions, buttercups and all – literally rescued from the neighbouring derelict farm before the bulldozers moved in.