A Cumbrian garden with an inspired interpretation of the art of topiary
The act of restoring any garden, large or small, can transform your way of thinking, and sometimes the direction of your life. Kate and Nicholas Coulson own one such place, hefted to the side of a Cumbrian fell, where geology and weather can conspire to make life difficult for any gardener. It was a somewhat bleak house when the couple moved here in 2000. By Kate's own admission, her knowledge of gardening then did not extend much beyond her London garden. But she had one big advantage: Kate is from the north of England and knows that gardening here is always contingent upon the weather.
This part of Cumbria - not quite England, not quite Scotland - has been known for centuries as the 'debatable land', its high fells and higher rainfall making the growing season short. Kate had enjoyed an early career at Christie's auction house in London as their manuscripts expert, so appreciated detailed research and sensitive interpretation. Twenty-five years and a huge amount of experimentation and learning later, the house and garden is resolutely modern but perfectly suited to its 16th-century origins. This is particularly striking in winter when its otherworldly atmosphere causes a swift time-slip as you walk through the oak gate.
Reading books about gardening came first as Kate tried to decide what might work and what definitely would not. The designer and plantswoman Penelope Hobhouse was a major influence, as was Gertrude Jekyll and, as is so often the case, books written by people with their hands in the soil came to be as trusted as old friends. On a long piece of tracing paper, Kate worked out a basic plan, but wanting to go further, she enrolled at The English Gardening School in 2008. There, she studied plants under Rosemary Campbell-Preston, now of The Plant School, which Kate describes as ‘completely riveting’. As she recalls, 'I grew up with a mother who was extremely artistic and I always felt a little in her shadow. Suddenly, I realised I was a frustrated creative.' This revelation propelled her towards garden design and the making of a very accomplished garden for her house in France, which was featured in the May 2020 issue of House & Garden.
Kate responded to the geometry of topiary but also its inverse, which involves clipping shrubs and trees that lose their leaves in winter, their bare fretwork creating a ghostly structure in itself. She planted climbing roses up to the first-floor windows, the winter stems of which stand out in charcoal lines against the pink and ochre sandstone. The yellow-berried Pyracantha ‘Saphyr Jaune’, a common enough evergreen winter shrub, is magnificently transformed into something resembling an Elizabethan tapestry by being pruned and tightly layered against the wall of the house.
The style of the Tudor house had already been amplified by some formal yew and box hedging planted by the previous owners, but Kate wanted to add more. She knew that northern winters could make the garden look flat and featureless for six months of the year and that the vertical axis of the topiary was important, acting as lightning conductors to the wide Cumbrian skies. Clipped and whorled yew started to fill the area in front of the house alongside elegant deciduous plum-leafed hawthorn (Crataegus persimilis 'Prunifolia'), its lower branches ingeniously corseted for the first few years to create a dome structure. This means that, in winter, when it is leaf-less, the branches create a tight latticework, airy against the density of the evergreens. Kate has been helped enormously by her gardener Lyn Brunetti, who worked at nearby Levens Hall - internationally renowned for its topiary - and has kept the lines crisp and clean for the last 22 years.
The inner garden wraps tightly around the house and, by the back door, is a neat vegetable garden. Whereas most such plots look dispiriting in winter, here the dark box hedging and the dreadlocks of the leggy purple kale 'Redbor' add a touch of playfulness at a time of year when it's much needed.
Behind the house, on a long terrace, the woven basketry of six tightly pruned stems of Rosa 'Ispahan' wheel round in a vortex contrasting with the calm columns of Irish yew and mounds of box. Drystone walls, a signature of the northern uplands, enclose the formal garden and, in low winter sun, they glint and shimmer with lichen and raindrops. Yew clipped into walls and buttresses leads the eye out to the fell, grazed by sheep, the skyline a tracery of ancient oak, ash and birch, their tops sometimes scribbled by the wild, woody deformities of branches known as 'witches' brooms'.
Yew and hawthorn maintain a rhythm between the inner and outer gardens. The former is espaliered into long, skinny arms against the perimeter stone walls, reaching out to each other almost in supplication against the elements. And within the woodland that surrounds the pond, where the light contained in sky and water work off each other, Kate has taken the humble hawthorn and elevated it into an art form. The scrubby tree is a common sight in upland Britain, often wind-sculpted into knuckles and knots by weather and the livestock that use it as shelter. But here, they are clipped into 'farmhouse topiary', as Kate calls it, in a nod to the more elaborate formality of the inner garden, and happily they are thorny enough not to provide supper for the deer that roam the woods.
The bleakness of the winter fell, the tilting, tipsy chess pieces of yew and the thorny thickets of rose and pyracantha surrounding the fortified house are like the setting for a northern fairy tale. As the daylight increases, the garden takes on more colour, culminating in a peak in late summer of fiery red, deep purple and yellow ochre, which hold their own under cloudy skies, not bleached out in bright sunlight. But in the short days and low light of winter - when a gleam of sudden sun can illuminate the entire landscape for long moments - the garden, especially under a dusting of snow, lends a kind of enchantment to a place that is not easily forgotten.
Eva Nemeth1/3An espaliered pyracantha.
Eva Nemeth2/3Pyracantha 'Saphyr Jaune', which keeps its berries in winter, is layered to striking effect on a wall.
Eva Nemeth3/3Alders surround the pond beyond the formal garden, where an island planted with gunnera creates a display from spring onwards.
