Looking down on Salthrop House from the winding entrance track, it appears to be enveloped by its garden. Walls are cloaked in plants, and the substantial 200-year-old manor house is dwarfed by mature trees while letting some lawns grow as meadow gives the appearance of countryside reaching the doors.
Move closer, and the careful orchestration of this picture becomes clear. Colours are beautifully combined in borders, there’s enough clipped lawn to prevent a descent into unruliness, and outside tables, steps and terraces are dressed with themed pots of plants.
These finishing touches are hardly surprising given that Salthrop House is the home of acclaimed designer Sophie Conran, who has designed products as diverse as crockery, wallpaper, and garden tools.
For the team at the garden near Royal Wootton Bassett the remit is simple: make a beautiful garden.
‘When I came to Salthrop, there were great bones to the garden, however it was really in need of much revitalisation,’ says Sophie.
Among the changes were adding to the hedges, re-digging the pond, restocking borders, and improving the soil with copious amounts of compost.
‘I really want the garden to be a place for people to enjoy and to create a special atmosphere. We spend a lot of time outside, in the woods playing and eating on the terrace, sitting and chatting surrounded by the buzz and twitter of nature.’
Around 15 acres of the 77-acre estate are gardened with the more formal areas near the house, moving out to informality as the garden meets countryside. Trees and shrubs, including syringa, Cercis canadensis and philadelphus, are set into long grass, blurring the line between garden and woodland, while a wildlife pool and bench is the perfect place to linger.
On the south-facing rear of the house, rectangular beds are filled with pastel shades – white, mauve and pink – and classic herbaceous favourites, including salvias, peonies, geraniums and aconitum. Clipped box adds structure and alliums, delphiniums and Crambe cordifolia provide height.
These beds, set into mown lawn and alongside a shaped yew hedge, provide a buffer between the deep terrace, the rest of the garden, and fields where Sophie grazes her rare breed sheep.
The terrace is home to benches and tables designed for outdoor living. Each table has a container, the pots mainly terracotta and their contents echoing the colours and plants of the borders.
It’s a display that changes with the season – winter means small Christmas trees and my visit overlapped with the last of the tulips – and it’s constantly refreshed. As things look a bit tired, they go off for a rest and then come back.
At the rear of the house, the potted display is mainly pinks, whites and blues but the front entrance containers are strictly white with Nemesia ‘Wisley Vanilla’ a summer favourite.
At the front, a wall provides shelter and a backdrop to the biggest border at Salthrop House. It’s a glorious mix of shapes and colours with structure from shrubs, such as kolkwitzia and osmanthus, kiwi, wisteria and roses scrambling along the wall, and white hesperis, pale yellow iris, nepeta, and alliums mingling together.
Although the summer show is mainly pastel shades, this border will develop brighter colours as the year progresses with things such as hemerocallis and crocosmia bringing fiery tones.
These seasonal differences are repeated throughout Salthrop, creating a garden of many characters, which frequently changes.
If containers are used to set the scene at the front and rear of the house, along the west side they are set into the border, adding height and substance, a counterbalance to the huge Magnolia grandiflora. The large pots are filled with tulips for the early season, which are replaced with salvias or lilies to continue the display.
Here, as in other areas, wild red campion (Silene dioica), often considered a weed, is allowed to grow alongside the honesty, roses, geraniums and sweet rocket. It’s used a lot in flower arranging with regular cutting preventing it from getting straggly or compromising other plants.
Growing flowers for the house is a huge undertaking with 15 to 20 buckets of flowers picked weekly to fill around 25 vases in the house, including a row of small vases down the dining room table.
‘We grow all the flowers and plants for the house, bulbs and flowering pale pelargoniums throughout the winter months and armfuls of blooms throughout spring, summer and autumn,’ says Sophie.
‘I think it’s wonderful to bring the beauty of nature in doors and they provide life, colour, scent and a focal point that changes with the season.’
As well as picking from the garden, the team force bulbs, putting them in a range of temperatures and light levels to ensure weeks of flowers. Tulips from containers go back into the garden, often grown on in pots so that they can be dropped into borders to plug gaps in spring.
Each year, there is a basic list of bulbs they know work well together and to this will be added a few new things to keep the display fresh.
A lot of the flowers for cutting are grown in the vegetable garden, an area that’s been protected against the local wildlife.
Neat, wood-edged beds are set into grass and filled with flowers and crops ranging from squash and potatoes to beans and brassicas. A willow arch spans a path and supports sweet peas, runner beans and the Italian ‘Tromboncino’ squash. There’s sweetcorn, cardoons and American landcress.
The flower beds are a mix of colours: fiery Californian poppy Eschscholzia californica 'Apricot Chiffon'; the smoky purple of cerinthe, and the dainty Dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’, which, despite having delicate flowers, will fill a room with scent.
At the heart of the vegetable garden is the glasshouse containing Sophie’s collection of pelargoniums.
Candy pink, cerise, purple and red, they pack the benches with colour and scent. Meanwhile, the back wall has been replanted with a climbing variety, mixed with jasmine, plumbago, bougainvillea and trachelospermum. Keeping bowls of water in there and regularly washing the floor helps regulate the temperature.
A complete contrast to all these colourful, flower-filled areas is the green tranquillity of the fern garden. Shaded by Prunus avium and backed by the yew hedge, it’s a wonderful place of retreat on a hot summer’s day.
The sloping ground is terraced with ferns, including Matteuccia struthiopteris, the shuttlecock fern, disguising the levels. Spring sees yellow tulips in here, followed by wild garlic and camassia, both blue and white, and there’s more red campion. Later still there will be Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ and pink Japanese anemones.
Like the rest of the garden at Salthrop House, it’s an area that refuses to be confined to one season or one style.
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