A country garden perfectly at home in a sleepy, steep-sided valley

Driving along the leafy Somerset lanes to Batcombe, the clock winds back to another era. This sleepy rural community stretches itself out along a beautiful, steep-sided valley with ancient trees, wildflower meadows and a meandering stream leading to the River Alham. Sheep graze the valley sides, as they have since medieval times when the area was known for its wool production, leaving their mark on the hillside in the form of stepped striations that follow the contours of the valley. When Libby Russell discovered Batcombe House, a seventeenth-century rectory with Georgian additions, she fell in love. ‘The valley has a sort of timelessness about it and a strong sense of natural beauty,’ she says. ‘I wanted to make a garden that relates to its landscape, so it’s all about the animals in the fields around and how you connect one side of the valley to the other.’

With an MA in landscape architecture from the University of Greenwich, Libby worked with Arabella Lennox-Boyd for many years before setting up her own practice with Emma Mazzullo in 2014. She has been working on her own garden since 2003 and, although the landscaping has been carried out in stages and the garden continues to develop, she designed and planned it just as she would for a client, with everything mapped out first on paper before she started. ‘It’s almost more difficult designing a garden for yourself,’ she says. ‘You have to live with it forever and it is easy to keep changing your mind. And, of course, you have to pay for it!’

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The scheme that Libby devised – and has stuck to – divided the garden into two contrasting halves. On one side, a series of terraces was made with large herbaceous borders, an ornamental kitchen garden, a swimming pool and tennis court, an orchard and a wildflower meadow at the top. ‘This side is all about colour and productiveness,’ says Libby. ‘There are flowers, herbs, fruit and vegetables. It’s where everything happens. We swim here or play tennis. It’s all about life.’

The other side of the garden is quieter and calmer, with a definite feeling of open space. The slope here is gentler, bending round into a bowl that has been contoured into a contemporary amphitheatre with curving banks that echo the sheep paths across the valley, or the strip lynchets (ancient agricultural earth terracing) found in nearby landscapes. At the top of the bowl, a series of rounded borders draws the eye and lures you up the slope. ‘There are different views depending on where you are in the garden,’ says Libby. ‘Lower down near the house, you feel more enclosed, whereas further up you can look outwards to the landscape.’

A contemporary amphitheatre has curving banks that echo sheep paths across the valley. Overlaying this carefully considered design is a wonderful profusion of plants to give the garden interest throughout the year. These are Libby’s passion and, as a member of the RHS Herbaceous Plant Committee, Libby is constantly discovering and trialling new varieties. ‘What I love is to seek out the best cultivars of well-known plants – the varieties that do whatever you want them to do, whether that’s flowering earlier or later, longer, brighter, bigger or smaller. Often, it’s a case of growing them yourself to get the plants you want.’

At this time of year, the kitchen garden and herbaceous borders are full of colour with masses of dahlias and tender salvias, plumbago and plectranthus. With help from her gardeners, husband-and-wife team Shaun and Natalie Froude, Libby grows salvias from cuttings, mostly in pots that can be moved inside when the weather gets cooler. The cultivars ‘Amistad’, ‘Phyllis’ Fancy’ and tiny-flowered ‘Blue Note’ are favourites, as well as the larger Salvia involucrata ‘Hadspen’, which, with its lipstick-pink flowers, adds what Libby describes as ‘a shot of madness’ to the kitchen garden, clashing beautifully with the pink and purple dahlias.