Bramdean House

The Mirror Borders at Bramdean

After Sandhill Farm House, another plantsman’s garden at Bramdean!  Here the overall impression was quite different, the kindness and generosity of the Head Gardener and the Administrator of the estate the glorious same.

You walk round the house and there are the famed double borders!  Wide and rising in all their colour from the surrounding lawns, they are as beautiful as promised!  They had been designed by Victoria Wakefield, the mother of the current owner, and the respect that  Gabriella Nemeth, the Head Gardener and only in post since late autumn 2024, is evident throughout the garden, not least in the second garden of this great panoply.

Mrs. Wakefield had made no plan for this, the vegetable garden, nor for any other part of the wider estate.  She travelled widely and came home with seeds from many parts of the world, perhaps most famously for some 40 varieties of sweet pea.  Rather than dig up the vegetable garden and replant with the smartest of brassica, Gabriella has allowed the seeds hidden in the soil to  bloom so that she can see what is there and honour Mrs. Wakefield’s legacy.  There are little gauze envelopes tied to the seedheads of the sweet peas, each one labelled, so that Gabriella can have these identified and, in order to enliven the inevitable blank patches in this great endeavour, Gabriella has planted sunflowers.  Everywhere one turns there are new colours and new plants to identify.  It is a magical space, so much so that one almost expects to come across the Mad Hatter’s tea party and be told there is no room as the dormouse is stuffed into the teapot!

And then, in the very centre of the space and anchoring the sweep of the resurrecting vegetable garden, we come across a wide ring of Eryngium giganteum, known as Miss Wilmott’s Ghost, on which a Red Admiral butterfly and an armada of bumble bees were feasting.  (Do look up Ellen Wilmott in the Garden Museum’s series on “Gardeners you should know”).  This, we felt, must have been part of Victoria Wakefield’s original design.

Beyond this there is an orchard, a tennis court and a charming pavilion with a clock tower and espaliered rosemary against its walls!  This innovation, still so delicate, surely that of Gabriella.  Trained in her native Hungary and student (with Tom Coward of Gravetye) of Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, it seemed to us that Bramdean is as blessed by her insight and respect as we were in our visits this July.