An abundant country garden rationalised and revitalised by its new owners

There are many factors that draw us to a house: its architecture, its proximity to appealing places, perhaps the way light filters in through a window. For Keith Johnson and Glen Senk, whose handsome country house on the Wiltshire-Somerset border features in our May issue, it was the garden that clinched the deal. Sitting amongst 60 acres of grounds in idyllic countryside, the garden sprawls across 15 acres and surrounds the house on all four sides. ‘We’re American and were used to having a very enclosed garden in New York, so the idea of a great expanse was completely captivating for us,’ says Keith, who spent 25 years as Anthropologie’s buyer-at-large and bought the house with Glen, the former CEO of the Urban Outfitters Group, in 2018. A walled kitchen garden sits at the heart of the garden, with more formal box close to the house and a string of rustic outbuildings dotted throughout, including a threshing barn and a beguiling apple store.

When Keith and Glen came to it, though, the garden was in need of rationalising. The walled garden was a tangle of brambles with an understory of rapacious couch grass, while a dense screen of trees, intended to provide privacy, was in fact blocking the views of the surrounding landscape. ‘We wanted it to feel more open,’ explains Keith. ‘It wasn’t that we wanted a totally open-plane, but we wanted to create visual rewards and vistas as you walked around.’ An overgrown hedge, butted right up against the kitchen window, was removed and after the radical pruning and careful repositioning of some trees, the view across to nearby Cley Hill was opened up. Now the garden peters out into the surrounding countryside. ‘It was a real revelation to see the hill in its full glory from our kitchen window,’ says Keith. Outside the kitchen, a stone wall with a series of fountains and a rectangular koi carp pond was also added. ‘We wanted the sound of water while we were in the kitchen,’ explains Keith.

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Three gardeners on their first gardens

Getting the walled kitchen garden into a beautiful and productive state was one of the couple’s first priorities. One corner had become what head gardener Jo Downes, who joined Keith and Glen in April 2019, describes as a ‘plant cemetery’, where various shrubs had been heeled in and forgotten about. After clearing brambles, the first challenge was to get some goodness into the soil by bringing in 15 tonnes of compost. ‘In my first year, I didn’t find a single worm and the soil was like dust when it was dry and clay when it was wet. Our priority was to improve soil health by bringing in organic matter and, in turn, improve biodiversity.’ In this vein, a section of lawn at the back of the house became a wildflower meadow, sown with a mix including yellow-rattle, cornflowers, poppies and oxeye daisies. ‘It’s a real learning curve for us, as it takes about five years to settle in but it’s honestly one of the best decisions we’ve made,’ enthuses Keith. ‘We add bulbs each autumn and the hope is that it will offer something different every year,’ adds Jo.

In the walled kitchen garden, Jo divided it into a patchwork of eight squares – two fruit beds, a rose garden, a herb garden, two cut flower beds and two vegetable beds. For the flowers, one bed is annuals and the other, with paths woven into the bed to create a more immersive experience, is perennials – tulips in spring, delphiniums and peonies in later spring and summer, and rusty orange chrysanthemums in the late summer and early autumn. ‘I’m constantly trying to think about extending the season as much as possible,’ explains Jo. There is a dahlia bed too, where the peachy tones of ‘Penhill Watermelon’ are mixed with frothy Panicum capillare ‘Sparkling Fountain’. Elsewhere, Nepeta nuda ‘Romany Dusk’, Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ and Linaria purpurea ‘Canon Went’ combine to create a delicate, ethereal scene. ‘I try to go for large, dramatic flowers that will look good in vases in the house and balance it out with more floaty flowers too,’ Jo explains. The entire garden is organic, so Jo relies on companion planting to keep pests at bay. The vegetable beds, for instance, are interplanted with nasturtrium, marigolds and Calendula.