Cottage garden design of garden rooms, Oxfordshire UK – comprising prairie garden, traditional herbaceous borders and drought tolerant gravel garden.
This Oxfordshire Manor benefited from an excellent structural backbone with beautiful old stone walls and an abundance of sunshine, but the planting was tired and in many places inappropriate and so a major overhaul was called for. The new scheme for this English country garden design fuses contemporary and traditional elements.
A gently mounding prairie planting was designed as a colourful yet informal compliment to the sweeping gravel drive which approaches this residence in Oxon, UK.
This garden design takes the colour wheel as its theme, rotating through the colours with the seasons. In early summer, the inky stems of Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ lead the eye towards the large globes of alliums that punctuate a sea of Stipa tenuifolia. By late summer, the rich autumnal reds of the Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ pick up on the deeper tints of the distant Hydrangea and soft spires of Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’. The saturated colours of this planting scheme are further tempered by the garden designers use of gentle drifts of pink-spired Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Rosea’. The autumnal brightness of this Prairie garden then mellows to reveal the beiges and browns of dead structure ready to be christened with frost.
In another part of this Oxfordshire garden design - glimpsed through an eighteenth century archway - garden designer Alice Bowe transformed the previously abandoned walled garden into a scented herb garden : shimmering with light inflorescences and textural accents of colour.
The simple quadripartite landscape design recalls moorish gardens and the gravel mulch keeps maintence to a minimum. Long flowering thymes, perovskia and salvias provide evocative scent and warm colour, while mounds of low growing erigeron daisy’s cascade onto intercepting herringbone-patterned paths. The simplicity of the design allowed the planting to shine e.g. Allium Christophii seedheads interweave through the planting, their ephemeral structure contrasting with the dome box balls anchored within each bed.
This Oxfordshire cottage garden design was restored and replanted in stages from Summer 2004 through to Summer 2007
Garden Design Size: 1/2 acre
Construction Value: £15K
