Malthouse Farm, Streat

2pm Thursday 8 August

Richard and Helen Keys’s beautiful garden has been created over the last twenty years but it feels as if it has been there far longer.  When I visited in late summer last year the garden was full of flowers.  (Interestingly, Helen, who took a course in garden design before transforming Malthouse, “Chelsea chops” almost all her flowering plants).

The borders are joyful with colour, there is water and there is sculpture; beautifully designed “garden rooms” and horticultural treats everywhere.  And then one walks into the wilder part of the garden where the hornbeam hedges are pruned to echo the curve of the Downs beyond, there are fruit trees and a particular witty charm everywhere.  A maze winds its way through a grove of silver birch, an arched willow walk woven with branches cut from their own willow trees, a mound in the shape of a snail’s shell so that one walks round and round to gain a higher perspective on the garden – and a henge!   Made of great pieces of timber discarded when the garden was being planned, it looks now as if it has been there for ever!

Helen will tell us how she designed the garden and walk round with us.

We shall be sustained by tea and cake!

£15 per person. For details, see the Malthouse Garden Visit Form.

There is a vineyard next to Malthouse Farm, Artelium by name and delicious by nature, where one can buy, for example, mackerel pate and a glass of sparkling wine made with their own grapes.  Nearer the time I shall write with details as to how to find the place – and the menu and prices at Artelium – so that I can order in advance and we can be relaxed.