This stunning garden on the River Stour in Kent is a delight of surprises at every turn. Join owner, artist and garden designer Fiona Cadwallader on this magical tour of a very special space.
The National Garden Scheme gives visitors unique access to over 3,000 exceptional private gardens in England and Wales, and raises impressive amounts of money for nursing and health charities. During the lockdown of 2020 our ever resourceful garden owners created films of their gardens so we could keep the garden gates open online.
Watergate House, a magical walled garden by the River Stour that inhabits and reimagines
an ancient site in a quietly generous way. The garden is a surprise at every turn.
It's completely invisible from the village street and you encounter remarkable horticultural variety
as you walk through. Woodland, formal, secret, pergola, fruit, spring,
wild. These areas reveal themselves in a naturally harmonious flow.
The walls actually slope inwards like this towards the river wall behind us
and in the original arrangement the path followed the line of the walls which looked rather odd in
the house and I wanted to change all that. I wanted a rectangular lawn with a path that was
perpendicular to the house so that I would create a harmonious flow in your movement around the
garden and in particular I wanted to achieve a double border here either side of the main path
in which I could have roses as well as spring flowering shrubs and things that you see here now.
In spring flowering shrubs and tulips emerge from a carpet of forget-me-nots.
Peonies and bearded irises follow. The camellias start flowering in March
and continue right through to early May. This area of the garden is really the best for growing
camellias because I discovered rather to my surprise when we repaired the walls of the garden
we found that all the ericaceous plants really suffered and that's because the lime mortar that
we were using gradually leaches out of the walls and into the soil so the soil in this garden has
actually become more alkaline than it used to be so when it came to repairing these walls I think
you'll see here that I haven't repaired them because I've got so many camellias in this
little area and I don't want to lose them. The ancient walls create an atmosphere of monastic
calm and security. Well the walls which give the garden its framework are the particularly the
river wall that all date from the early middle ages and that when this was the port of Fordwich
all sorts of amazing cargo came through here through this garden including all the stone
As this shows, like all the best gardens, this is a working garden not just a beautiful one.
On a hot day like this, a hot spring day, I use this fleece to cover my seedlings so that they
don't scorch but I also come and have a check on them in the day if I have time to make sure that
they haven't dried out because we have a great sprinkler system in this wall bed. I've also got
some nicotianas coming and oh my cucumbers here and a great many cosmos because I absolutely love
those. The fruit garden is used to grow step over cordons, currants and quinces among other things.
This part of the garden is edged with flowering tucreum as a substitute for box because of box
blight. So far the box in the topiary garden has escaped. Although the garden is teeming with
activity, animal, plant and human, it is also a haven of tranquillity. We've enjoyed making
this film for the National Garden Scheme. Hope to see you again soon.
