The place

Dan started work at Home Farm in 1987 and continued to develop the gardens there for 14 years. Working closely with the client the project was fundamental to Dan’s development of his own practice of sustainable, naturalistic planting.

The brief

Dan and the client both shared a belief in the ‘right plant, right place’ philosophy of Beth Chatto, while Dan’s overseas scholarships to study wildflower communities in India, Israel and Europe had educated him in the way that plants grew together naturally in the wild. Home Farm was the place where both of these ways of looking at gardens were combined to create a new kind of English country garden, where the boundaries between garden and landscape were blurred.

The design

The site had a very strong sense of place, surrounded by medieval ridge and  furrow fields and ancient woodland. Dan created a series of gardens that responded to a range of different conditions across the site. A woodland garden in the shade behind the house, a wind garden of grasses and hardy perennials on the site of an exposed front paddock, a hot, sunny Barn Garden, enclosed by the stone walls of the original milking yard and a walking circuit through newly sown wildflower meadows around the site boundary to connect to the surrounding landscape and leading to a new wildlife pond and wood.