If you garden in rural West Dorset, as I do, you soon learn that the quality you require most is humility. The best-laid plans can be overturned in minutes by badgers, rabbits or deer, or the fierce southwesterlies that roar in from the sea.
Above all, you cannot out-compete the rolling hills and emerald fields of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex (the fictional setting of Hardy’s novels, but clearly recognisable as this part of Dorset). Whatever requirement you have for your garden, it will never be comfortable if it does not honour the ancient landscape around you.
You may also like:
- An Australian garden with a magpie approach to planting
- Gardens to visit in Dorset
- A stunning perennial garden near Melbourne
- A gravel garden in Dorset
This is something that designer Hugo Bugg, who grew up on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, has known since childhood. So when, in the afterglow of his first Chelsea Gold medal at the absurdly tender age of 27, he was approached to work on seven acres of garden and pasture in the heart of the Dorset National Landscape, he felt well equipped for the task.
In brief
- Name Little Benville House.
- What Exquisitely finished contemporary garden with key elements designed by Harris Bugg Studio, reaching out to its setting within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
- Where Dorset.
- Size Almost two acres of ornamental garden within a total of seven acres.
- Soil Slightly sandy, clayey silt, pH 5.5-6.0.
- Climate Wet and mild.
- Hardiness zone USDA 9a.
But he also needed a certain amount of bottle. His clients were an architect, and all architects are hot on the detail, and her solicitor husband.
Happily, they proved to be committed hands-on gardeners, with a similar respect for the historic landscape in which they lived. And they weren’t in a hurry. So the relationships that have created this remarkable garden – between the clients, a roster of gifted gardeners, and the team at Harris Bugg Studio – have been evolving for more than a decade, with all parties understanding that truly satisfying gardens can’t be hurried, that they develop over time, subtly adapting to changing conditions both in the surrounding environment (which here means planning succession tree-planting in the light of ash dieback disease), and in the lives of the people who use them.
The first task, however, was clear enough – the need to reconnect the garden with the surrounding landscape. From 2017, when Hugo joined forces with designer Charlotte Harris, the pair began cautiously to dismantle great thickets of rhododendrons that had grown up over the past hundred years.
We wanted wide, wide views, to enjoy the historic hedgerows and to draw the rolling Dorset landscape right into the garden
“It felt like the garden was cut in half,” recalls Charlotte. “There was this impenetrable, solid mass of evergreen, disconnecting the meadow on one side from the rest of the garden. There was a view down the centre of the lawn, but it felt like a corridor: if you looked 45 degrees to left or right, your view was cut off. There were some beautiful old oaks, but otherwise little life in there, no opportunity to grow herbaceous perennials, not much seasonal interest. So over a period of six months, we lightened it bit by bit. If you overdo it, you can’t put things back.”
Gradually there emerged a broad woodland border, one of a pair of sumptuous borders that define the central section of the garden.
“We wanted wide, wide views,” continues Charlotte. “We wanted to enjoy the historic hedgerows and the beautiful hedgerow trees, to visually draw that rolling Dorset landscape right into the garden.” Their way of achieving that was to create, on the far side of the woodland bed, a sequence of understated orthogonal spaces intersecting at different levels.
What enchants about this garden is the way it breathes and changes, uniting the vivid cycle of the seasons with the slow march of time through the enfolding landscape
The lowest is a tennis court, cleverly concealed from the house just beneath eye level, and separated by a deep stone wall from the surrounding pasture. (It is, in effect, a modern ha-ha.) So a square of velvety mown lawn drops into an area of cultivated meadow, which in turn seems to float above the surrounding wild grassland; each step in the progression marked out by clean, sharp lines of pale paving, crisply repeated in coping stones and steps.
The choice of materials is bold, taking its cue from the sleek modern extension the clients have added to a listed stone-built farmhouse. It might seem an odd decision, to insert geometry into a Dorset landscape where there is nary a straight line. Yet the clarity of the design creates an extraordinary sense of spaciousness: these calm, expansive spaces feel completely at one with their pastoral surrounds.
While there is a certain formality in the sequence of terraces that skirt the house, albeit softened by Charlotte’s exuberant planting, there is a gentle descent into looseness and wildness towards the lower fringes of the garden.
Paths mown through areas of long grass meander past romantic features that have been there for decades – a pergola swathed in roses, a mossy orchard, a rotating wooden summer house that serves Joanna as a studio.
Trios of truncated yew pyramids mark the way, bringing a suggestion of unity to this series of disparate spaces. At the foot of the garden, a path leads over a stream to reveal the very antithesis of Hugo’s polished terraces. Here lie the remains of a medieval moat, still part- full of water, a muddle of sedges and marshy plants, busy with frogs and dragonflies. (It is not known what it once enclosed – probably an orchard or productive garden.)
the formal parts of the garden to the wilder areas beyond, waymarking the route to orchard, damp meadows and moat. © BENNET SMITH / MARIANNE MAJERUS GARDEN IMAGES
Other than thinking about boundary planting, Hugo and Charlotte have made no attempt to interfere. “There’s something important about not touching things,” insists Charlotte. “Nature is the best designer.”
Back in the main garden, a controlling hand is clearly visible in the immaculate vegetable plot, cloud-pruned shrubs and pleached trees. It appears more subtly in the two contrasting borders that frame the long view to the south. One is a soft-toned zone of dappled light, the dismal shrubbery now replaced by tens of thousands of bulbs and richly textured perennial planting. Here swathes of Dryopteris wallichiana are set off by clumps of iris and columbines, thuggish but beautiful Euphorbia griffithii ‘Dixter’, and the crinkled emergent leaves of Rodgersia pinnata ‘Chocolate Wing’.
seamlessly with the pastoral scene beyond, seeming to call the countryside into the garden idyll of your dreams © BENNET SMITH / MARIANNE MAJERUS GARDEN IMAGES
The opposite border, by contrast, is warm and exposed – exploding with colour as it hurtles towards summer. Certain key plants reappear in both borders to create a visual bridge between the plantings: spring blossom from amelanchiers and crab apples, followed by geraniums, crocosmias and wide-spreading Viburnum plicatum f. tomentosum ‘Mariesii’. “They have a dialogue at certain points of the year,” explains Charlotte. “Then at other times the hot border becomes much more flamboyant. It feels quite uplifting in its energy.”
What enchants about this garden is the way it breathes and changes through time, uniting the vivid cycle of the seasons with the slow march of time through the enfolding landscape.
It shows how a garden can be entirely of the ‘here and now’, serving the needs of a modern family, yet can simultaneously embrace the generations who created its distinctive character, who dug the moat, tilled the fields, laid the hedges, planted useful oaks along the hedge-line. Every morning, as a watery sun gilds their magnificent silhouettes, there is a moment when time stands still.
Plants from Little Benville
Euphorbia x pasteurii
Rodgersia pinnata ‘Chocolate Wing
Amsonia hubrichtii
Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’
Dryopteris wallichiana
Camassia leichtlinii subsp. leichtlinii
Iris ‘Tropic Night’
Useful information
Address Little Benville House, Benville Lane, Corscombe, Dorchester, Dorset DT2 0NN.
Find out more about Harris Bugg Studio at harrisbugg.com