Summer Cottage, Turville Heath in Buckinghamshire

 This beautiful old brick and flint cottage had a reasonable area of land but was surrounded by mud and weeds. The owners had to wear wellies to get from the car to the house and much of the garden was under six feet of brambles and thistles. The narrow main garden was empty apart from a beautiful mature Magnolia and was blocked off from the rest of the garden by a huge hawthorn hedge.

Babylon Design came up with a new layout for the garden removing half of the dividing hedge and planting a new yew hedge to create three areas of garden and flipping the main axis of the garden by 90% so that the windows from the living room faced into the new larger back garden. The shady areas were planted with a mixture of shade loving herbaceous plants and shrubs and a grove of birches acted a focal point.

The “old” back garden was then laid out as an apothecary’s garden and entirely filled with herbs and medicinal plants as the owner had more than a passing interest in alternative medicine. Old bricks were used to lay out a pattern that could be walked as a form of meditation.