Adventures in Eden by Carolyn Mullet
As Heard on The Daily Gardener Podcast:
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:

Adventures in Eden by Carolyn Mullet
This book was released in December 2020, and the subtitle is An Intimate Tour of the Private Gardens of Europe.
Today, I want to share two fascinating gardens from this magnificent tour of Europe's private gardens.
First, let me introduce you to Broughton Grange in Banbury, Oxfordshire (pronounced "OX-furd-sheer"). This garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, boldly challenges traditional English garden conventions. Instead of the typical hedged garden rooms, it offers a sweeping panorama that Tom describes as "one overall story, with a series of subplots."
What's particularly fascinating is that the garden's stunning parterre design isn't just beautiful - it's actually based on the microscopic cellular structure of leaves from the surrounding hedgerows. It's a brilliant example of how nature's smallest details can inspire grand garden design.
Let me share this evocative passage:
In the rolling countryside of Oxfordshire in South East England is a new walled garden that boldly defies the idea that has dominated English gardens for the last one hundred years: the hedged garden room.
Designed by Tom Stuart-Smith, the one-and-a-half-acre garden at Broughton Grange has a singular sweeping panorama with few structural elements to interrupt the view. "I like everything to be interconnected," he explains, "one overall story, with a series of subplots, not a series of episodes. I want the whole garden to be one malleable entity" (Richardson 2013).
The gardens at Broughton Grange dated from the Victorian era until the current owner, Stephen Hester, asked Tom in 2000 to design a contemporary garden.
Stephen was inspired by the open parterres of the gardens at Chateau de Villandry and a novel he had read as a child - The Secret Garden, written in 1911 by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
In a break with convention, they chose a site that was not connected to the house. In a sloping paddock some distance away, Tom created a destination garden, enclosed on the west and north sides by handsome brick walls. The space opens to the sunnier sides, with views of the surrounding bucolic valley. Within the walls, Tom divided the garden into three spacious terraces, each with its own atmosphere and planting style.
On the lowest level is a parterre of velvety, rounded boxwood in what appears to be an abstract pattern; it is, however, based on an enlargement of the microscopic cellular structure of leaves in the hedgerows outside the garden. Seasonal plantings fill the spaces between the parterre "venation," with a particularly effective display of jewel-toned tulips in spring. On either side of the parterre are paths edged in borders overflowing with nepeta, alchemilla, hardy geranium, astrantia, and phlox. As one walks through this garden, it is easy to admire Tom's skill in creating an artful, modern interpretation of a traditional garden form.
From the parterre terrace, one ascends perfectly proportioned steps to the middle level. At the center is a rectangular pond, with thick stepping stones floating just above the waterline. On this terrace, one can pause at a stone sitting area. The openness draws attention across the water to the gentle, rural vista. On either side of the pond, Tom shows his preference for contemporary, naturalistic plantings accented with topiary. Masses of Rodgersia pinnata, Persicaria polymorpha, and Calamagrostis xacutiflora 'Overdam' spill onto the single path, while shaped beech stand like pawns on a chessboard.
A final set of steps leads to the deep, upper terrace covered in a veritable sea of lemon-, lavender-, rose-, and pearl-colored plants. On this level, Tom created a ravishing plant tapestry punctuated with thin, dark yew columns. It seems impenetrable, but on closer inspection, one discovers narrow one-person paths. Eryngium, phlomis, stachys, and stipa grasses arch over these paths, reminding the visitor to look down and step around a mound of lamb's ears or a cluster of allium. Eventually, one comes to a rill that flows into the pond below, a place of calm in an otherwise intense and near-wild space. From here, the contrasting soft hills, fields, and hedgerows of the surrounding landscape are impossible to miss.
Although the rill, as the garden's water source, seems like the heart of the garden, Stephen notes that, for him, in a counterintuitive way, the heart is the surrounding beautiful English valley. The garden feels at one with the countryside, and yet it is set apart.
With the Walled Garden, Tom brought twenty-first-century design to Broughton Grange. Stephen
has other projects in mind. In addition to the Walled Garden are a new eighty-acre arboretum, fifty acres of parkland, and twenty-five acres of other gardens and lightly cultivated woodlands-plenty of space for more experiments and changes. Is any wonder that being in this special place gives him a palpable feeling of beauty and tranquility whenever he arrives?
Our second garden stop is Bryan's Ground in Stapleton, Herefordshire (pronounced "HEH-ruh-furd-sheer"), where owners David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell have created what I like to think of as organized wildness. Their design philosophy embraces what Vita Sackville-West (pronounced "SAK-vil-west") advocated: "the strictest formality of design, with the maximum informality in planting."
Here's a wonderful description that captures the spirit of this unique space:
In rural Herefordshire, along the sinuous River Lugg that separates England from Wales, is Bryan's Ground, a formal garden with a generous dash of contemporary wildness. Owners David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell made their initial decisions about the garden soon after they moved there in November 1993, when they confidently drew outlines of a design in newly fallen snow.
The property included a handsome 1913 house. It was built in the local half-timbered style, typical of the era's influential Arts and Crafts movement, in which handcraftsmanship was preferred over mass production and gardens harmonized with their houses and the surrounding countryside. These ideas have held
sway over David and Simon as well.The couple's first venture in making the garden was in an area next to the driveway entrance. Seeing
some depressions in the soil, they deduced that, at one time, this had been an orchard, and they immediately decided to plant thirty heritage apple trees of different varieties arranged in a grid. Each tree was placed in the middle of a ten-foot square, underplanted with Iris sibirica 'Papillon', which flowers in soft lavender-blue from May to early June. In February, when the points of the iris leaves are just about to peep from the soil, they are covered in a blue haze of Anemone blanda. David and Simon blithely refer to this successful succession as high tide and low tide.A decade later, they added a shallow canal through the orchard, its brick edges emphasizing the view of the house from the driveway, augmenting the visitor's arrival experience with a year-round feature. If it seems that the pair is particularly at ease with garden design, one can look to their professional lives for the explanation. David is the publisher and editor of the literary gardening quarterly Hortus (which Gardinista called "the New Yorker of horticultural reading" [Wilson 2017]), and Simon is its art editor, who also paints landscapes and designs gardens.
It was Simon who conceived the garden's structure. As a devotee of Arts and Crafts architecture, he believes that the role of a garden is to be an intermediary between the house and the extended
landscape. "The position of every design element is dictated by the design of the house in terms of layout, scale, and proportion," he explains, "and relates directly to landmarks beyond the garden boundary, be it a tree, a hill, or a distant church."From remnants of an earlier garden close to the house, David and Simon fashioned hedged rooms
with topiaries, parterres, fountains, and reflecting pools. The existing kitchen garden and greenhouse
were updated. Follies were built of locally grown oak, larch, and Douglas fir. Paths were created of nearby
quarried stone and gravel, and borders include colorful perennials - some bold, others wispy. On the
kitchen garden wall hangs a piece of slate inscribed with a quote from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night: "In
delay there lies no plenty."Fanning out beyond these formal gardens, David planted a collection of 240 Hydrangea species and an arboretum crisscrossed with straight, mown paths. The arboretum has grown to include more than 1000 trees spread over five acres. In spring, the air iS filled with the sweet fragrance of Rhododendron luteum and the ground glows with thousands of blooming bulbs.
Despite all this serious effort to bring order to Bryan's Ground, the rules of formal gardening are not slavishly followed. Self-seeders are allowed to proliferate. Weeds beneficial to wildlife are welcomed.
Shrubs heavy with blossoms bend deeply into pathways. Roses tumble over campanulas. Teasels
invade lavender and foxgloves. Aquilegia seedlings sprout so thickly that they become groundcovers.One wonders if this insouciant dishevelment is the result of Simon's childhood experience of playing
in a derelict garden designed by Gertrude Jekyll. Or perhaps the couple has taken to heart, more deeply than most English garden makers, the dictum first pronounced by Vita Sackville-West that a successful garden must have "the strictest formality of design, with the maximum informality in planting."Over the years, as the gardens were being made and the outbuildings cleaned up, the couple unearthed bits and pieces from the everyday lives of former inhabitants of Bryan's Ground. Both men feel attached to these mini-archeological finds and display them in clever ways throughout the garden. Rusty bicycles and old shoes hang from trees. Grasses grow through a curving bed frame. A classical bust of a pretty woman sports a rusty chain around her neck. Porcelain fragments are individually displayed in the small compartments of a wooden printer's tray. There's a sense of artful fun in this garden, a place for nature, passion, and serendipity.
As you can tell, Carolyn's garden descriptions are loaded with fantastic information about the creation of these earthly Edens, making it possible for us to follow in their footsteps.
To me, that's what makes this book particularly valuable for gardeners. We have so much to learn from each garden profile. Carolyn showcases the incredible diversity of European garden design while offering valuable insider insights into how these spaces were conceived and created. That's simply incredible.
Whether you're working with a small urban plot or a sprawling country garden, there are lessons and inspiration to be found in each of these fifty gardens.
And the photos of the magnificent Edens are enough to make any gardener's heart skip a beat.
This book is 364 pages of masterful garden design, intimate portraits of garden creators, and inspiration that will have you dreaming of both distant gardens and new possibilities for your own space.
SI HORTUM IN HORTORIA PODCASTA IN BIBLIOTEHCA HABES, NIHIL DEERIT.