Sandhill Farm House; a rich tapestry of design and planting

When I came to this garden about 20 years ago, this was a mess. All sorts of plants that nobody had looked after for years. So I decided to make it into a white and green garden. Because it's the first part of the garden that you see when you arrive usually. And white is always a lovely restful color. Here you have two structural plants. Taxus baccata firstidiata, which gives structure all year round. I start off with this cluster of snow drops. And then I follow up with Narcissa. Narcissa is thalia, drying off now, but it's a very bad plant. And then those are followed on by Taxus baccata, Taxotiata, and then all these other ones. And so on. This part of the garden I'm going to tend to the box. The box, I'm going to my non-spray coat. I coat the box with rounded shapes. And then also the box board, I coat the round shapes as well. And with them, unfortunately we have very bad box flies here. So they have to be treated every three months to get box flies. So this is the wooden box. And it's by far my favorite part of the garden. It's particularly good in early spring when you have things like Magnolia Galaxy. You have lots of chamomiles and all sorts of wonderful early spring flowering plants. Here you have a pond, which has quite a lot of wildlife in it. And lots of ferns. Here, this fern actually looks lovely. It's called Matutia strontopteris. And it's the shuttlecock fern. But be warned, it looks lovely, but it can be an absolute thug. So in this part of the garden, when I first came here 20 years ago, it was very flat. Some of it was watered and grassed. So I wanted to have an opportunity to grow root crops. So we raised up the plants by using peat blocks. Very unfashionable nowadays. And lots of extra soil. In the center of these borders, they're about two feet higher than the actual park level. So lots of rare and unusual plants here. This form of Solomon's seal, spotty-dotty here. And some really unusual foliage plants. This is podophyllum spotty-dotty here, which sends out underground runners and appears in other parts of the same border. This yellow-bracked plant here and there, that is Smyrnium perfoliatum, which I'm going to have to keep an eye on because it can be a tremendous thug. But it's quite easy if you keep it under control. Here is a small stumpery, badly needing a weed. This stumpery was made from stumps that my granddaughter and I collected in a wood. And I use it in the early spring for my collection of snowdrops. Coming around here, you have Magnolia jane, which is still out. And this lovely tree, this Malus trilobata, which in the autumn will have lovely tiny orangey-red berries on it. Over here, we have a lot of hostas and other ground cover plants. But to avoid the slugs, we use something called strout. This is strout. It's a mixture of mineralised straw and pot. And it keeps the slugs at bay. If I was a slug, we'd hate to be walking through this. So for me, this is one of the most important areas of the garden. Because when people come to see me, they always come up to the sun porch first. We have terrible soil here. Really awful, thin, sandy soil. So about two years ago, we moved it down to one or two metres, which took a lot of doing. We put in new soil, recommended by Troy of Sissinghurst and also by Moxford. And the new soil took two years to settle down to the right depth. So it was empty for two years. Now we have lots of roses planted here and various other things. So basically, the roses are the same colour of pink as the tulips, which are just about going over. That was a complete accident. Sometimes in life, there are some happy accidents. So the roses are Rosa Olivia Rose Austin, the pink one. And then also a newer addition is Rosa James Austin here, which is a darker, darker pink. And behind, we have this rose here, Rosa Crimson Bengal, which is quite difficult to obtain. But you can obtain it from the Chelsea Physic Garden. And it actually flowers for about 11 months of the year. So it's a very, very useful rose to have. This is four euonymous green hedger, which I planted together, four in a clump, to make a square. So this is the other bit of the front terrace garden. And the designer in me knows that I should repeat what I've done here, over here. I have a plant room which says I want some different plants. So a few weeks ago, I took all the plants that I didn't want out of here. It took me two and a half days, a really hard week. And then after I'd done that, we spread this mulch on top to stop the weeds growing through this year. And in the autumn, we'll dig it out completely, and we'll do the same business with the new soil. This tall plant here, this is Euphorbia mellifera, which is a really good tall plant. And Euphorbia's do very well in my really thin, sandy soil. Other things here, we've again got the wisteria at the back. And on the back wall here, you have a mirror. What happened with that was one of the garden writers rang me up and said, you do have ideas for small gardens, don't you? I thought, I don't have any ideas for small gardens. So I rushed out and bought this mirror, painted around it the same colour of green as the window sills. And a lot of people think that it's a window through into this part of the garage. And all these little aracemas coming through now. Very, very attractive small bract coming up from there. And these pots here, waiting for, normally, my delivery of pelargoniums from Woodens of Wenhaston. But this year, what's the point? Because nobody's coming to see the garden. So I'll have to think again. These were two really big box plants, one on either side, when I first came here. And I couldn't get the mule barrow through. So we decided we'd clip them to this cloud-proof shape. If they were to be bought, they would probably be about 6,000 pounds worth each, which you can do yourself.