A Wiltshire garden with a crisp sense of symmetry
Frances Rasch has done her best over the 15 years that she has been involved in Esther Cayzer-Colvin’s Wiltshire garden to persuade her to include some orange or yellow flowers, but with no success. ‘I’ve failed – even with tulips,’ she says with mock exasperation. Esther, Frances’s former neighbour, is not only her friend but also her client, and the approved palette of perennials and roses features soft blues, whites, purples, pinks and dark reds, with the garden looking its best during the ascent of the year. Elegiac autumnal tones hold no interest for Esther.
‘I’m a tricky customer,’ she admits, though that is hard to believe of this generous soul, who gave the creation of the garden to Frances as her first job as a designer. Having taken on the landscape around Heale House, her own home in Wiltshire, and done a basic horticultural course at Chelsea Physic Garden, Frances needed some professional experience. ‘I’m quite opinionated about design,’ Esther says. ‘But Frances is brilliant at planting. It seemed a perfect opportunity for her to cut her teeth.’
Esther moved into her 18th-century red-brick house in the middle of a pretty village near Pewsey in 2009, with husband Jamie, two young children and assorted dogs. Having added a wing to one side for a drawing room, they wanted Frances’s help to create a sense of symmetry with the garden. This was achieved by aligning its middle section with the main part of the house and establishing a room on either side using pleached hornbeams. With little existing planting to work with, Esther wanted somewhere that would have intrinsic interest in itself. ‘When we lived next to Frances, we were on top of a hill, looking down a valley. But in our new location we were hemmed in, so the only way to create a sense of distance was to make your own views within the garden,’ she explains. Frances adds, ‘It was very much about bringing everything inwards and trying to create a flow through each area, so there would always be a focal point and somewhere to walk to.’
It is no surprise that Esther has such strong opinions on design matters (grasses, too, are a general no-no, though Frances has sneaked in a few). She grew up with her sister Isabella Tree at Shute House in Wiltshire, where the garden was designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe. Her paternal grandmother was Nancy Lancaster, the grand, Virginia-born director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler and a garden maker, and Mary Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire was her maternal grandmother. Esther has decorated the house beautifully, but was less confident when it came to the garden.
These days, Frances is a successful garden designer, with clients all over the country, but you have to start somewhere. The friends laugh now at their rather amateur initial approach and how those who were implementing their plans must have rolled their eyes. ‘We literally did a sketch on the back of a fag packet – it was as basic as that.’ Luckily, they brought in their old friend Mark Fane and his company Crocus to make drawings to scale and work out plant numbers, and it then became more professional. ‘We lined it all up,’ says Frances. ‘Esther would stand at the window, going, “left a bit, right a bit”. We must have driven them mad.’
An early inspiration was a trip to Virginia. ‘Places like the historic district in Williamsburg were built at the same time as our house. The gardens there are very simple but there is a lot of shape. Our swimming pavil-ions are a copy of a garden building we admired,’ says Esther. There are other Virginian elements, too, such as the gates and the white picket fencing in the kitchen garden. ‘We haven’t gone the “full Williamsburg” but it gives you an idea,’ says Esther. ‘I do try to make Frances wear full period costume if she comes to do any work…’
While Isabella is busy rewilding the Knepp estate in West Sussex with her husband Charlie Burrell, Esther and Frances’s approach is more formal. The garden is divided into ‘rooms’ by hedging in hornbeam, beech and yew, though Esther has also planted a wildflower meadow to the north of the house, which is viewable from the drawing room. The first areas to be worked out and drawn up were the terraces near the house, a central lawn and the pond, and the design expanded from there.
One of the last ‘rooms’ to be developed was towards the end of the garden, shaded by multi-stemmed silver birches. ‘This bit was unresolved for years,’ says Esther. ‘Then my mother – Lady Anne Tree, who founded Fine Cell Work – died and, with the money she left me, we were able to do the hedging and work in this area, so it is a nod to her.’ There is a rill, as there is at Shute, and the pebble details bring to mind the paths found around Isabella and Charlie’s house in Greece, where Esther and the family spend much of the summer. Frances has planted three different types of fern, irises, Solomon’s seal, hostas and camassias. ‘It’s so beautiful in spring and one of my favourite parts of the garden.’
All these years on, Frances is in the process of editing out perennials that have got too crowded and trees that are not thriving. ‘Initially, I was trying to get the house sitting cosily and the borders fluffed up. Now it needs some breathing space.’ Esther gives her friend full credit for the garden she has created: ‘I wouldn’t have one without her. It would be a big lawn and maybe some box hedging.’ Meanwhile, Frances continues her campaign to introduce orange plants. She is in it for the long run.
Frances Rasch: healegarden.co.uk
Britt Willoughby Dyer1/3A fruit cage at the end of the vegetable garden, with its woven-willow-edged beds, was inspired by structures in colonial Williamsburg.
Britt Willoughby Dyer2/3The swimming pavilion is also based on a design seen there and brings a simple elegance to the pool area
Britt Willoughby Dyer3/3In the pond garden, borders planted with herbaceous perennials in a cool palette of mauves, purples, blues and white create a restful backdrop to a circular water feature with an eye-catching fern fountain at its centre. It is framed by box hedging from which flat-topped plane trees emerge, providing a rectangular canopy.
