Orchard House.

The brief

A family of five wanted a garden that could host a birthday party for thirty children on Saturday and feel like a private wilderness on Sunday morning. They asked us to keep “anything worth keeping”, without knowing quite what that was.

A morning's survey answered the question. Behind a curtain of bramble stood fourteen Victorian fruit trees: eleven apples (including two ‘Blenheim Orange’ and a rare ‘Arthur Turner’), two perry pears and a mulberry with a trunk you couldn't get your arms around. The orchard became the garden's organising idea; everything else was designed to serve it.

What we did

We spent the first winter on renovation pruning alone, taking each tree back to health over careful stages rather than one brutal haircut. The bramble gave way to a shaved-path meadow: the grass under the trees is cut just twice a year, but generous mown paths curve through it, so the wildness always reads as a choice.

Nearer the house, a sawn sandstone terrace steps down to a long oak dining pergola, positioned to catch the last of the evening sun through the orchard. A natural clay-lined pond in the lowest corner takes roof water from the house and barn; it was full of smooth newts within a year.

The orchard taught us the whole design. Our job was mostly to stop clearing and start listening.

The planting

The palette is deliberately quiet: meadow natives under the trees, and generous, blousy borders by the house that echo the orchard's spring blossom in white and soft pink.

• Malus 'Blenheim Orange'
• Leucanthemum vulgare
• Primula veris
• Narcissus 'Thalia'
• Rosa 'Félicité Perpétue'
• Amelanchier lamarckii
• Deschampsia cespitosa
• Astrantia 'Shaggy'