An idyllic garden on the Hampshire Downs brought to life by Kim Wilkie and Pip Morrison

On a clear day, from the top of the spiral mound at Franklin Farm, you can just about make out Tennyson Down on the Isle of Wight. Home to landscape architects Kim Wilkie and Pip Morrison, the 15th-century farmhouse and its collection of wood-and-flint barns sit in perfect isolation at the end of a long and bumpy track in the Hampshire Downs. Cocooned by 35 acres of land, the farm is surrounded by garden and meadow, with a herd of grass-fed Longhorn cattle and a flock of free-range chickens roaming around within shouting distance of the house. Both Kim and Pip run their businesses from here as well as tending to the day-to-day work of their smallholding. The garden, as one might expect, is idyllic, with cottage-style borders and intimate courtyards to explore – yet it is modest in scale, deferring entirely to the wider purpose of the place as a working farm.

The farm has been in Kim’s family since 1961, when his parents bought an old, abandoned property with an acre of land while living overseas. Kim remembers roaming the derelict farmstead as a young boy in school holidays, which has given him a profound sense of connection to the place. The house was eventually restored and he spent his teenage years here, returning again in his late twenties to live in a converted barn.

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In the early Nineties, Kim bought back some of the land that would have belonged to the original farm and gradually the garden and landscape started taking shape. He began the dedicated task of planting trees – more than 4,000 of them – creating a new 10-acre wood that follows the gentle contours of the land. Oak, beech and field maple trees form the backbone of the wood, and carpets of woodland flora have gradually established themselves as the trees have matured.

After clearing the new land at the back of the house, Kim designed a sunken spiral landform to display a sculpture by the artist Simon Thomas, using the spoil from this excavation to create a spiral mound in the field behind. Kim restored the circular dew pond, which sits charmingly close to the house, and built a serpentine ha-ha that curves sensuously through the long grass, separating the grazing land from the garden. This and most of the paths, walls and landscaping elements were made from flints dug out of the soil, knapped with a chisel and hammered into place like a 3D jigsaw puzzle.

While Kim has built the framework of this garden, Pip, since his arrival in 2003, has been colouring in the detail, adding more plants and expanding the vegetable garden. ‘Pip is the real plantsman,’ says Kim. ‘I enjoy making earthworks and paths, and looking after productive land.’ A pair of exuberant borders in front of the house has been expanded and replanted by Pip with a froth of colourful cottage-garden flowers. Towering hollyhocks and delphiniums lean over the boundary wall, tangling with phlox, roses, penstemons, ammi, poppies and other self seeders to create a mass of flower and foliage that, by July, is tumbling over the zig-zag edges of the flint path and flowing around the pond. ‘It’s very haphazard. But I like the idea of a wild farmhouse garden that is quite relaxed – I don’t want it to look too designed,’ says Pip.

The first area of the garden he and Kim designed together was a courtyard behind the threshing barn, known as the moon garden. Based on a plan they sketched out on the back of a paper bag on an aeroplane, the courtyard has a terrace of contrasting flint and brick, with a sunken flower garden arranged in a geometric pattern of nine beds. The planting is all cool greens, creams, silvers and pale yellows, with hostas, eryngiums, pale yellow daylilies and Veratrum album ‘Lorna’s Green’ – a rare green form, which has amazing pleated leaves and lime flower spikes. Evening primroses and white valerian have seeded themselves into cracks in the paths and walls.