Kate's Garden

Set in the middle of the Ashdown Forest, where the soil is ferociously acidic and the rhododendrons and azaleas thrive, Kate has created her garden at Hindleap piecemeal - in other words she has done it exactly how you are not supposed to. There has been no excellent design scheme to work from nor any carefully thought out planting plans - such luxuries have been reserved for clients!

Hindleap has primarily been a home and so has developed and grown with family life - metamorphosing, for example, the large much-used sandpit, through a productive salad and carrot bed stage on to a smart gravel garden. Scruffy chickens, noisy ducks and cuddly guinea pigs took precedence for many years over flowers.

Children may come and go at Hindleap but the trees - many of which are 100 years old, having been planted when the house was built - give the garden a mature and timeless quality. That said, many were lost in the great storm of October 1987, but their dramatic demise opened spaces that were previously damp and shady, and so prompted the natural development of the present layout.

A mini tour around the garden now, takes you via the imposing boundary beech hedge arch into the first of three circular gardens. The first is bordered by a deep bed of mixed planting framed by mature shrubs including Hamamellis, Viburnum, Cotinus and Syringa. The impression is colourful and at times higeldy-pigeldy!

A certain restraint calms one however in the second circle where a striking box parterre features alone. The design, taken from the central motif of a Chinese carpet, translates well into the neatly clipped mini-hedges of 250 Buxus semprevirens. The evergreen maze has many personalities: mysterious in mid winter when covered in snow, enchanting at early dawn with dew-kissed spiders' webs, and precociously green in spring as the new growth begins.

A traditional wooden swing hangs from one of the branches of the old yew tree which you walk past to reach the final circle where a spiral twists down, then up, onto a gravel circle surrounding the bright blue ceramic compass. The small walls drip with a riot of colour from the eclectic collection of alpines that tumble over the sandstone which has been excavated with the digging of new beds.

In addition there is a sunken garden (previously known only as the guinea-pig lawn) which was in fact the only part of the garden with any flower beds when Kate and her family moved to Hindleap. Now apart from a few tiny graves under the cluster of sumachs, the lawn is bathed in dappled shade from a vigorous Tulip Tree, and shapely Magnolia.

A productive vegetable garden, a small wood of birch saplings, a gravel garden, a pond bursting with iris and waterlily, rough grass filled with spring daffodils, and a terrace garden designed to accommodate a collection of beautiful handmade stoneware pots by local potter Chris Lewis all contribute to 'rooms' or spaces that have developed over the years.

Variety and colour and impulsiveness surround one, all of which seem to characterise Kate's general upbeat outlook on life!

She welcomes visitors to the garden (by appointment only), particularly in the spring and early summer when the rhododendrons and azaleas are most spectacular.