Back garden of the year

Best Established Garden

I have come to the conclusion that exotic gardening is a man thing, done by blokes who want to boast about the size of their bananas. Tim Wilmot has indeed got a perfectly respectable Musa basjoo, but it’s his palms he’s really proud of. And justifiably so.

Tim has been gardening at Yate near Bristol for 18 years. “The garden is mine,” he clarifies. “My wife does the furniture.” The exotic look arrived nine years ago, when Tim requisitioned the quarter-acre garden from its child-friendly stage. Out went the leylandii, in came bamboos and horse manure. Decaying apple trees were cleared, and the lawn shrank to make space for monster foliage. “I still like grass,” says Tim. “It’s a kinder contrast to palms than bark or gravel. But I don’t miss clematis and roses.” Tim and his wife have a software company and he likes precision; he enjoys the tidying up that goes with exotic gardening.

This particular exotic garden is not a wet jungle garden, but a drier environment where hard foliage abounds. It contains most of the palms one might attempt to grow in the milder parts of the UK. There is a fat-trunked Jubaea chilensis, and the grey feather palm Butia capitata, which flowers, and has been growing outside with winter protection for ten years. There is the blue-leaved form of the European fan palm Chamaerops humilis var. argentea from Morocco, and spiny Trithrinax acanthocoma. If the temperature drops below -4C, Tim puts a fleece over it. And seven Trachycarpus, which Tim says are easy to grow. He admits he’s a weather-watcher in winter: “I would love an Eden Project dome to come over the garden at the press of a button.” Some plants do go under glass.

A collection of architectural exotics do not make a good garden – the trick is incorporate them in a good design. Tim has broken up the space well, into glades and short paths through the foliage.

The garden has its softer moments, too. There is a koi pond and tubs of Hedychium gardnerianum to scent the air in September. “Not that I’m into flowers,” Tim says, “but that one’s acceptable.”

Best New Garden

What a recipe for success is sandy soil and a high water table. You can see the proof at David and Elaine Rolfe’s garden near Abergavenny, which was started four years ago and looks as if it has been there 20.

The Rolfes work from home in web design and building computers, and have eight children between the ages of 7 and 19. They are also foster parents; sometimes there are as many as 11 children in the house. ‘‘We wanted a house for eight,” says David. “This was for rent – it’s an old mill – so here we are. But there were no plans for a garden.”

But Elaine started to devour gardening magazines and to visit local gardens. She wanted something other than the rhododendrons favoured by the neighbours. “I imagined something softer and richer, like Abbey Dore in Herefordshire, with winding paths and flowers.” Within months, she was planting a half-acre garden, then a sheep field containing one lilac and two roses. David built the structures – gazebos, arches, seats and a chinchilla cage.

“There are hardly any full-price plants,” says Elaine. “I go for the bargains. Sometimes I buy plants without labels. I feel sorry for them, like orphans. I also got loads of plants from my mother’s garden.”

The result is a garden rich in flowers and at its peak in July when the herbaceous plants are in full fling. It is slightly sunk under the drive and tall walls and outbuildings, except on one side where it borders a field and a stream. It feels like a walled garden, full of grass paths and enclosures topped with swags of climbers.

Down one side is a generous border, passing from deep red through yellow to blue. Blue Solanum ‘Glasnevin’ winds into cardoons underplanted with hostas. Tall alliums shine alongside purple lupins. Bordering the field is a stream bed, where marginal plants thrive – astilbes, candelabra primulas, Libertia ixioides and monkey flowers.

The garden also has plenty of height. There are birches, Prunus serrula, contorted willows and bamboos. It’s the sheer energy of the place that earned it its votes. As in any new garden, time will call for some editing, but what a business-like start. The garden is even open for the National Gardens Scheme, and the children, rewarded with a choice of home-made cakes, help man the gate.

Best Green Space

What could breed greater level-headedness than a career in gardening and horticultural therapy? Robyn Carter has just that. After Kew and professional gardening, she worked for Social Services in horticulture for the disabled and is now a senior manager for the NHS. Her house is in a rural development near York, in the grounds of an old hospital. The garden – north-facing, 35ft by 100ft – sits in the shade of mature Scots pines. No place for gardening, you’d say.

But Robyn has pulled it off beautifully and with the minimum of interference. “I want it to feel as if you are walking through English woodland,” says Robyn, “but embellished, more lush, with the season extended.” And so it is: simple, well thought through and, as the Green Space category requires, sustainable and full of good ecological practice. It’s a real charmer and so close to winning in its category.

“To me, sustainability is fundamental,” says Robyn, “but if you get it right I don’t think you have to compromise aesthetics. You can grow what you want if you recognise which are the right plants for the position; then you don’t need pesticides or artificial feeds. Being organic underpins how I garden, but it’s not stamped on my forehead.”

It’s a sensible approach and one that appeared in all the best entries for the Green Space award. Yes, Robyn has lots of bird boxes; yes, plants are only watered when first planted; yes, there are plenty of native plants, but the garden has not been filled with gadgetry in the name of pest control and water-saving. The style of gardening and the plants used have sprung from the atmosphere of the place as demanded by the pines.

The design makes sense of the space, too. There is a generous patio to stop the house feeling threatened by the trees. But there is no lawn (it would not grow well under pines anyway), only a pine-needle path winding through the trees to the fence, a simple seat and a view of fields. Down the sides are larch-lap fences weathered to invisibility.

But the planting underfoot is good, and right. In sun by the patio are the more flamboyant plants – roses, catmint, phlox, columbines, euphorbias, lavender and rosemary. Further down in the shade are foxgloves, hellebores, white dicentras, hardy geraniums, Anemone japonica, hazel, holly and flowering currants.

Too simple to be a runner-up, you say? Not at all. It’s an attractive, romantic, usable place all season, it interferes minimally with the local ecology, and best of all, it can be looked after with the fewest of resources. By choosing a kind of gardening and a palette of plants that on this site do not need extra feeding, watering, mulching or doctoring, Robyn has created a truly sustainable garden.

NEXT WEEK: TWO CATEGORY WINNERS