Tour this gardener's charming Sussex cottage | Country Living UK

I don't think I'll ever get bored looking out of the window because there's something changing every day around you, but when you know the walks and you know every tree, literally every tree, you sort of have a relationship with them in an odd way. I'm Nina, I'm a gardener, and we're here at my home in West Sussex. I run gardening workshops, people come down, spend a morning here, and then we go outside and have really hands-on learning. Gardening is very practical, we go out and do lots of stuff. My husband's from Scotland and I'm from Wales, so really beautiful countryside was really important. We love being in the city, but with our kids, we were just more and more wanting to be doing things outside. There's a river at the bottom of the garden, which also sold it to us, so the River Ouse starts just over there, and we just thought, yeah, this place, we can give them a childhood. We saw this house advertised and I came to see it the next day to rent. I knew roughly where the village was, but I had no idea where the house was, and as we came down the lane, sort of always full of expectations to another house that we were going to go and see, but I got round the corner of the lane and looked through the fields and I thought, I think that's it down there, that must be the house, and I was like, wow, this is sort of nestled in these hills and it just felt like a big hug. It just sealed the deal for us and we were like, yeah, Sussex is where we want to be. So we were told, don't fall in love with this house because they'll never sell it, and of course we fell in love with this house, but then the amazing thing was that the owners have owned it for years and years, it was owned by her grandparents and all the rest of it, and she came over and she saw a whole load of brightly coloured old knitting needles that I had and lots of tiny riding boots everywhere and the children running round and I think she said, we want a family to live in this house and would you like to buy it? So we were really lucky. So originally it was two farm workers' cottages that were one up, one down, and at the turn of the century it was extended. We thought, well, could we somehow make it a little bit bigger? Could we somehow add our family into this as well? So the thing that was weird was that all the views around were just absolutely stunning, but when you were in the house you were slightly disconnected from the countryside and we found this brilliant architect and said to her, Rosie, we want to feel like we're outside even when we're inside. So when you walk through the front door all you could see really was the underneath of a staircase going straight up and we realised it was blocking this lovely old aureole window so we really wanted to open that up. So we flipped the staircase round and put it up the other way so that then you could really enjoy the aureole window. So I'm always looking over my children's heads at the gardens or the landscape outside. We sit around this kitchen table a lot and those oak trees at the back are sort of the frame. We look at them all day, all evening, all weathers, and those oak trees, I sort of feel like they're kind of members of the family, they're just always there and in this kitchen. I chose the colour in the hallway, it's green, and it's called Willow, which is the name of one of my kids, so I kind of pretty much chose it because it was green called Willow. Yeah, I really wanted green in the hallway because it's sort of, it's like, it's the centre of the house because you can look the whole way through this house. Having it in the middle of the house felt like it was green outside, green inside. End room's pink, so you've got pink, blue, green, and this is kind of yellow but it's sort of butter yellow exactly. I love old things, I love things that have a story, and even if you don't know the story, I love thinking of who else might have had that thing. So we've sort of collected bits and bobs over the years. What I didn't want to do was to just dress a room. I knew I really, really wanted a Welsh dresser, that was really important, coming from Wales, we've always had a Welsh dresser so I knew I wanted one. So we've got this amazing antiques fair at Ardinglae that comes about every six weeks and I've found so many wonderful things. That's where I got the doll's house from, which I just couldn't resist, but I kept it in the car for three days before I admitted to my husband that I'd bought it because I wasn't sure if it was even going to get through the front door. And then the chandelier in our bathroom we got years and years ago when we were first married. I used to work off Portobello Road and down the bottom at the Goulbourne Road, there was a man, an old man there that used to sell in a really random old shop, he used to find these old chandeliers and paint them. It used to be quite a lot bluer than it is now, but he added all these really kitsch roses onto it which I kind of love. I didn't want to have a home where you had to sort of be worrying all the time about dirt and mess. These really big kitchen doors, they're always open. The front door we don't really close, which is lovely until the dog wanders off. We had to be sort of stone floors and hard wearing floors that people could walk their muddy shoes across. It's brilliant having a boot room where you can just dump everything, but actually we've got doors and access all over this house so we usually have mud in the kitchen as well. I love the seasons, it's what makes the world spin round for me really. And with gardens, of course they change so much as the seasons change. I think this house is kind of tied into it as well really. And in the summer, doors open, all the windows are open, I have to sort of force myself to shut it all up, just want the air going through the house the whole time. But then I love it as it actually gets to this point in the year and you sort of think Oh yeah, it's starting to rain, it's starting to get cold and that can be really cosy. I love autumn, I love autumn. All the colours then go wild and at the end of the summer it's reached its maximum growth and the garden is chaos and you sometimes feel a bit overwhelmed by that. If you just go with the fact that there's nothing you can do, just let it do its own thing. I love that about gardening. In the winter, in the autumn, even on a day like today, it's pouring with rain, but actually then I love looking through the window and it just feels cosy inside and you sort of work out at what point you're going to turn the agar on. That's always a bit of a big moment. It was really exciting to have this whole sort of project because there was an existing garden but it was very small and it was all on a slope because we've got the hills all around us. We wanted to create a kind of landing point so we made this flat lawn and then all the beds sort of were kind of woven around that and they all wrap around the house, but basically it was a completely blank canvas because we cut and turned to make the flat lawn and that meant that I had totally blank beds. We added a bit of topsoil into the beds to try and enrich what was there, it was clay, which is sort of good and bad, obviously it's got a lot of nutrients, but we added some topsoil as well and lots and lots of manure all the time to keep enriching it. I'm kind of obsessed about adding mulch. We had nothing there, which meant I could sort of dream up all the planting schemes and learn. I mean, I've learnt so much through this garden. Just made so many mistakes, chopped and changed so many things and that's the thing about gardening is it's just not a permanent thing, it's a constantly changing, evolving thing and I actually found that incredibly grounding and really important for me because in life you're always trying to have something perfect or you've got sort of high octane, things need to be just so the whole time and you just can't do that with gardening. You just have to let something else take over, try as you might. You have to work with nature and some years this will be great and some years it won't. It's constantly changing and evolving and that sort of means you have to kind of let go of any idea of something being perfect. It also encourages you to connect with moments that are really transient and fleeting because something might look as close to perfect as it could ever be, but it might be just that moment with the light coming through and just because that plant has grown to the right height and something else is just, that might only be there for a day or even ten minutes with the light and then it's gone. It encourages you to just appreciate those moments. The front garden is really bright colours, I kind of went for purples and even oranges and yellows, colours I've never liked actually. It's east facing so you get that gorgeous morning, wake up, start the day and at the back I really wanted a more muted palette that's just more silver and blues and soft pinks and increasingly adding sort of lemon yellow now which I'm enjoying finding ways of putting that in. So we've got a cutting garden and we've got a kitchen garden, it's not massive but it's incredible how much you can grow and eat from just a few beds actually. I grew up in a house where my mum and dad were constantly picking and growing and flowers in every room and on every table and I really wanted to be able to do that. I think the thing I love about doing the workshops, it happened in a really organic way because I came down here and I was constantly outside and in people's gardens and talking to people and I often found that people really sort of wanted to garden but they didn't know how to connect or they felt some sort of disconnect even and I just love trying to encourage people to get into their gardens and for them to find that same sort of pleasure and joy in those things. I love it nothing more when people send me pictures of what they've done really proudly and you know, this dahlia that they've got that's now flowering and now I'm loving bringing them all into the kitchen and I've got the house filled and that's why I do this, I love it. I really love that sense of connecting people with their own space and outside. I think the countryside can help you just to appreciate things on a daily, minute basis that you maybe don't get the chance to do when you're in a city. I love cities, I love going to cities but it's like a sort of constant sense of appreciating the things that are there that you don't have to look hard for, they're just quietly there without shouting and I love that.