8 inspiring ideas from a stunning English country garden (2024)

July 10th, 2016
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If you want inspiration, visit an English country garden. The romantic mix of colour, abundance and formality appeals to people everywhere.

Parham House & Gardens in Sussex holds the annual Parham Garden Weekend on the 7th and 8th of July 2018, with talks, plant and garden stalls and a chance to see the gardens at their best.

Tom Brown, the head gardener, invited me to find out what Parham has to offer the middle-sized gardener.

Dating back to Elizabethan times, the Hon Clive Pearson bought Parham in 1922. He and his wife Alicia restored the house and gardens. Although it is now a charitable trust, members of the family still live there.

Parham was one of the first gardens to open to the public. The Pearsons opened it in 1948, with Alicia Pearson saying ‘Parham has a beauty so essentially English that it is a delight to show it…’

It is an exceptionally beautiful garden, and is hardly middle-sized. But it does have lessons for us middle-sized gardeners.

Focus your gardening ideas with one word

At Parham the word ‘tapestry’ means alot in the house and garden. Inside, each floral arrangement sits on its own colour-co-ordinated tapestry mat. These were sewn by the Pearson’s daughter, Veronica Tritton. In the garden, the word ‘tapestry’ directs Tom Brown and his colleague Henry Macaulay when they’re planning new beds or filling gaps in older ones.

You can have flowers for the house and the border

Many domestic gardeners struggle between wanting to have vases of flowers in the house, but not wanting to strip the borders of colour. There is a tradition of having wonderful flower arrangements in the house at Parham – always supplied by the garden. But it’s also a garden open to the public, so the borders have to look good too.

Tom manages this by a certain amount of rationing – the flower arrangers can have lots of cut-and-come again flowers. Special blooms, such as spikes of delphiniums, are doled out carefully. There’s more about the gorgeous flower arranging at Parham in this post here by Amicia de Moubray of Doddington Place Gardens blog.

He also slips flowers for cutting into beds everywhere – even the vegetable beds. ‘Every bed needs to supply a basketful of vegetables and a bunch of flowers for the house each week,’ he says.

Sometimes you just have to start again

We all have bindweed. It is comforting to know that Parham is no exception. Last winter, they made the decision to dig up the whole of the blue border and pick out every bit of bindweed root they could find. Tom and Henry then replanted the border from scratch in the spring.

Make your borders extra deep

As you can see from the above photo, Parham’s borders are extra deep. Tom says that it’s useful advice even for much smaller gardens – ‘make your borders deeper and they’ll look much better.’ (In fact, we did this a few years ago and he’s right – you’d be better off having one deep border than two shallow ones.)

Plant in drifts

He advises you to thread planting through borders rather than planting in rows or clumps.

(Another great country house garden with wonderful borders is Great Dixter, and there are useful tips from Great Dixter’s professional gardeners in this post here)

Borders need to ‘speak to each other’

‘Borders need to relate to each other,’ explains Tom. You can’t plant them in isolation from each other.

I have two borders on either side of a bench. It looks to me as if they don’t ‘speak to each other.’ But if I plant similar or the same flowers in both borders ,or repeat patterns, this should change.

How to settle things between you

The newly replanted blue border at Parham was created by Tom, working with Henry. ‘Because there are two of us, there’s always a struggle to arrive at a consensus,’ says Tom. They each allowed each other one ‘must-have’ plant.

I suggested that this strategy might be useful for a husband and wife trying to re-design a border. Tom said that he is often called in by friends to settle gardening disputes between couples. ‘It can be very difficult,’ he says.

How to deal with greenhouse envy

You will want a greenhouse if you go round Parham. If you already have a greenhouse, you will want a different greenhouse.

Seriously though – if you don’t have space for a traditional greenhouse, the Parham long narrow one is effectively a lean-to running along one garden wall. The style is highly practical and could easily be adapted to a middle-sized garden.

Edit, edit, edit

When Tom and Henry set out to plan the new blue border, they soon had a list of about 50 plants. ‘We then had to scale it down to around 20-30,’ says Tom. ‘It’s better to repeat plants rather than have lots of different ones.’ He suggests that a domestic (middle-sized) border might be best with only about five different plants in it.

The best time to visit an English country garden is when it’s raining

It was pouring with rain when I visited Parham, but that made the visit even nicer. We don’t, in fact, get enough rain in this part of England, so you can’t plan for it. But if it is raining when you plan a garden visit, don’t cancel it! There will be hardly anyone else there. You can have vistas and views uncluttered by other people…

Check the calendar for other events at Parham over the year. The house and gardens are open Wednesdays to Sundays (except Saturdays) throughout the summer.You must go, especially if it’s raining….and do please share this using the buttons below so that people who love English country gardens can put Parham on their ‘to visit’ list. Thank you!

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