Malthouse Farm
Sue Marsh reports on our visit to Malthouse Farm in August.
The garden at Malthouse Farm
Malthouse is a five acre garden full to the brim with new ideas and pure soft beauty.
The first part of the garden, hidden by the house from the flower garden, is inspirational in its innovation. From the garden gate to the front door, sarcocca lines the raised edge of a barn – just imagine this in the dull days of January! This part of the garden is a carefully managed series of closely clipped box and yew; balls, squares, a rectangle in which a clay pot is half submerged as if in the act of being swallowed by the green sea. And here and there bright flashes of blue. Glass shafts of light, a blue pot, a blue seat. It is all ineffably elegant.
And then there is the main garden, laid out from the terrace to the front of the house and very beautiful. Helen Keys, our very kind host, gardens on heavy clay and when she and her family moved in some 20 years ago much of the space was concreted, the remains of a working farm. Undaunted, Helen worked from the house outwards.
Today two lawns are generously bordered by the softest of colours, mostly blues and pinks, the Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ so soft on the eye it could be velvet! Linking the first lawn with the four quarters of the vegetable garden is a pond so that the splash of water is always heard. From time to time brighter “pops” of colour enliven the palate; suddenly, beside a greenhouse, a bright red geranium is paired with a zingy agapanthus and a child’s painting of a gardener peers through the windows of a shed!
And then there is the wilder part of the garden. Divided into two halves, that reached from the second lawn is an orchard deep in wild flowers, a blue beehive in one corner, and rendered softer and more lovely by its juxtaposition with a formal space where great half parantheses of hedging either side of a wide path lead to another seat.
A closely planted willow hedge divides this half of the “wild” garden with its neighbour. Here a “henge“ has been created out of wood discarded when the garden was being planned. There is a tunnel of willow, a maze winding its way through a grove of silver birch, even a “snail”! A Victorian idea whereby visitors to the garden could climb round the whorls of the “snail” and view the garden from another vantage point!
But it was the generosity of flowers surrounding the lawns and paths, each border edged with willow cut from their own trees, that so delighted us. In a month usually associated with a dearth of colour, Helen’s garden is joyful with flowering plants.
And it is open under the NGS scheme on 1 September!