Restoration · Henley-on-Thames
The Walled Garden.
Two hundred years ago this quarter-acre fed a household of twenty. When we arrived it was feeding a colony of rabbits and holding up three collapsing walls. Eighteen months later it was a working kitchen garden again, and won us a BALI National Landscape Award.
Location
Near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
Plot
Quarter-acre within Grade II curtilage
Scope
Restoration, design & planting
Completed
Spring 2022 · BALI Award 2022
The brief
Our clients had restored the house; the walled garden was the last unfinished room. The brief was disarmingly simple: “Make it work again.” Not a museum piece, not a parterre for photographs, but a productive garden that could supply the kitchen most of the year and still be a beautiful place to stand in February.
What we did
The walls came first. Working with a conservation officer and a master bricklayer, we took down and rebuilt the failing south and west walls using more than forty thousand bricks: every salvageable original cleaned and relaid, the shortfall made up with handmade bricks from a Sussex yard, laid in lime mortar as the originals were.
Inside, we kept the garden's original four-quarter geometry but relaxed it: wide gravel paths, oak-edged raised beds, a central dipping pool rebuilt on its old footprint, and a long lean-to glasshouse against the south wall where the Victorian one once stood.
Restoration isn't about freezing a garden in time. It's about giving an old idea back its job.
The planting
The walls now carry twenty-two trained fruit trees: espaliered apples and pears, fan-trained plums, a Morello cherry on the shaded north wall. The quarters rotate vegetables on a four-year cycle, with cut flowers and step-over apples along the path edges.
- Pyrus 'Doyenné du Comice'
- Malus 'Egremont Russet'
- Prunus 'Morello'
- Ficus 'Brown Turkey'
- Buxus sempervirens
- Dahlia 'Café au Lait'
- Sweet pea 'Matucana'
- Artichoke 'Violet de Provence'
The rare firm that turns up when they say, builds what they drew, and leaves the place tidier than they found it. The walled garden is the best thing we have ever done to this house.