Manor Garden Design
This large Suffolk manor garden design offered so many wonderful design opportunities to create areas with different uses, moods and styles – a garden designer’s dream garden. From traditional to contemporary this garden has a wealth of interest.
An arts and crafts inspired oak pergola laden with scented roses, wisteria and underplanted with quintessentially English country garden planting, leads from the main terrace to a bridge across the moat and then on to the pinetum and wider parts of the garden. Long hot borders enclose the lawn to the front of the property, sizzling with colour well into the autumn. Tucked away at the edge of the front lawn is a secret seating area over looking the vibrant borders – in winter this area has the heady scent of winter flowering shrubs.
An enclosed, secluded contemporary courtyard with a rill nestles to the side of the house and provides the perfect place to entertain friends. An archway through the courtyard leads to a terrace with views over the wider garden. A few steps up from the terrace through textural and colourful prairie planting is the swimming pool which is sheltered from the wind by grasses and a yew wave hedge. Beyond this is the orchard, the kitchen garden and then the wilder side of the garden with paths mown through long grass and statuesque mature trees.
In January 2015, I was delighted to win the SGD Planting Design Award 2014 for this manor garden design.
Photographs copyright Marianne Majerus & Sue Townsend
The designer displays complete control of spatial design through the use of texture, colour and form of plants. The character of spaces range from classical simplicity at the entrance, intense intimacy in the courtyard, terrace and orchard, through to structured woodland, a moat and meadow, before leading back to the wild formality of an arts and craft pergola. It is rich with variety.