The enchanting, dahlia-filled cottage garden of artist Bella Hoare
‘This garden is all about the views – there’s lots of “borrowed landscape”,’ says Bella Hoare. And what views they are. Her 17th-century cottage is perched on top of a north-facing escarpment with a wide sweep of forest and fields beyond: these belong to the Stourhead Western Estate, retained by her family when the main house and garden created by her ancestor Henry Hoare were given to the National Trust in 1946. She can see the house where her father lives, on the other side of the valley, near where Wiltshire, Somerset and Dorset converge.
When Bella was given the former estate manager’s billet by her father in 1998, there was little garden save for a flowering cherry that performed for a week before retiring into obscurity, an old vegetable patch and a tumbledown greenhouse. Today, the scene is somewhat different, with one-and-a-half acres of grounds covering a variety of moods and moments – intensely woven herbaceous planting here, topiary and swaying grasses there. Other parts, including a pond and an orchard, are more rustic. But all retain that conversation with what lies beyond.
Bella is a partner at C Hoare & Co, the family bank, but also – and increasingly – an artist, painting women, inspired by the colours of the countryside: ‘I am trying to combine femininity and the power of nature.’ She has a studio next to the house, where her art and the garden have a joyously symbiotic relationship: she can look out from the studio to the landscape, or take a break from the easel by stepping through its french doors into the garden. ‘My art and the garden feed off each other, influencing how I think about which shades mix – whether I am doing complimentary colours or analogous colours,’ she explains. ‘So the pinks and the purples are nice, but so is the blue and orange. In the curved border, it got a bit tame, so I am pushing it with peaches and yellows, as well as dark reds and blues. I like trying new things.’
It was not always so. Upon her return from living in Moscow in 2000 with her first husband Boris, who was half Russian, she was working in London during the week, while Boris looked after their young son Tom: ‘For about five years, nothing was really getting done. The lawn was a football pitch.’ An early intervention, however, was to use the earth removed when a kitchen extension was added to form a level plateau at the back of the house, where there was formerly a slope – all the better to sit on and admire those views. (It also had the advantage of hiding the drive and car-parking area below.)
Bella blames her sister-in-law Sara for her introduction to dahlias in all their glorious cacophony of colour and form, the gateway plant to an increasing addiction. Things started gently enough with her mother Pam helping her move shrubs around. She also took advice from local gardener and friend Sacha Langton-Gilks, who suggested that she establish yew buttresses in various locations around the house to provide shelter from the east winds that whip along the valley.
Then, in 2008, Boris was killed in a car crash and Tom was badly injured, so Bella spent six months at home nursing him back to health. The garden provided a refuge and a distraction, and she devoured every horticultural book going. Later, taking inspiration from visits to the likes of Sissinghurst and Hidcote, she says, it ‘became an obsession. Beds were a metre wide and then they were two metres wide. And I started that game of moving the edges of things and nibbling at the lawn’.
The garden may appear to be on the brink of happy chaos, but nothing here is haphazard. Bella has a penchant for spreadsheets, and has meticulously researched and planned for every vista, shape and colour combination – and seasonal interest. This approach has been applied at the front of the house, where there is no view further than the beech hedge onto the road. Narrow paths wind through the densely packed cottage garden, opening out to the new forest garden and apple trees interplanted with semi-wild roses in the Sissinghurst-inspired orchard, then onto the wildlife pond, perched at the top of the slope and held there by a dam. A wide herbaceous border edges the curved lawn by the kitchen, while below the house is the ‘Oudolfry’ – grasses and sturdy perennials in the style of Dutch plantsman Piet Oudolf. Bella modified the scheme to accommodate the steep slope, planting it to catch the breezes and sunlight – and to distract the eye from the model railway tracks of her second husband Johnnie Gallop, set up at the bottom.
Bella is happy to admit she couldn’t manage all this on her own and gives full credit to the gardener Jack Clutterbuck, who lives opposite: ‘Jack is incredible. He knows so much more than I do, but is completely accepting of the fact that this is my garden, so he doesn’t do anything without consulting me and then edits what I am proposing to make sure it works.’
One might think that there was enough here to keep Bella and Jack occupied but she has recently extended the studio garden by knocking down a wall and buying an extra strip of land. So Johnnie’s model railway has another loop, and there is a newly constructed bog garden using the overflow from a large rainwater capture system. ‘I’ve been rather busy,’ Bella confesses. The addiction shows no sign of abating.
The garden at Gasper Cottage is open for one day in summer for the National Garden Scheme, and to groups by appointment from May to September: gaspercottage.com | @gaspercottage
Dean Hearne1/3Perovskia ‘Blue Spire’, Lobelia x speciosa ‘Hadspen Purple’, teasels and pink persicaria ‘Rowden Gem’ contribute to the immersive planting at the front of the cottage.
Dean Hearne2/3The vista from the terrace at the back of the cottage, where golden plumes of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’ and swaying stems of mauve Verbena bonariensis contrast with blue Lobelia siphilitica and orange Calendula officinalis ‘Indian Prince’ in curving borders that flank the mown grass path. Buxus sempervirens topiary ‘blobs’ are pruned to echo the shapes of the round, wooded hill across the valley.
Dean Hearne3/3Bulrushes and various sedges thrive in the wildlife pond, seen here at dawn. A wooden bench on the oak decking at the far end offers the perfect place to dry off after a refreshing dip, while watching house martins and swifts swooping low over the water to drink.
