The gardens at Benington Lordship really are a gentle balance of formal planting combined with more nauralistic touches, having to pay homage towards the architectural heritage from the historic site, however with nods to modernity.
Springtime has much to provide within the gardens, with blossoms of magnolia, cherry, crabapple and quince presiding over naturalized carpets and much more formally grown beds of springtime bulbs and native wildflowers.
There are lots of training that may be learned and brought out of this garden and put on a smaller sized scale for your own personel backyard ideas.
The gardens get up on the improved site of the Norman motte and bailey castle in Herts. The first 1700’s, brick-built manor house has 1800s, neo-Norman embellishments, its entrance courtyard covered with a turreted gatehouse, folly and curtain-wall.
Susanna and Richard Bott are fourth generation custodians of the home and gardens.
Richard’s great-grandmother, Lilian, a separate gardener, together with her husband Arthur Bott, an experienced engineer, enlarged and landscaped the gardens. Successive generations have maintained the integrity of the Edwardian blueprint, whilst embracing nature and wildlife with wildlife garden ideas.
An extensive, eco-friendly carpet of lawn rolls out prior to the south-facing side from the Grade II* Listed manor house. Inside a central space sits a minimal-maintenance boxwood parterre, decorated with pink hued tulips, with youthful weeping pear Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’, each and every corner to include height.
It was a redesign by garden designer Julie Wise, grown in 2016 around the footprint from the flagging, former rose garden.
‘Wary of planting new roses over old, essentially, we inverted the look, flipping the prior hard landscaping to produce planting plots, covering old rose beds and widening pathways using the displaced stone,’ explains Susanna.
This shown creativity when thinking about garden ideas, not feeling associated with the present designs or layouts.
Around the lawn’s western edge, Susanna embraces the structural ‘wonkiness’ of overgrown yew support beams and it is presenting more enjoyable movement and modernity with plantings of euphorbia, calaminta and gentler swishes of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light’.
Beyond this elevated high-point, your garden shears away, suddenly, with magnificent westward views over open parkland, cascading lower broad, grassed terraces, to some spring-given pond below.
Keen to balance the gardens gentle formality with wilder touches, Susanna utilizes the gardens inherited topography to inspire thriving colonies of untamed flowers and naturalized bulbs.
‘Enhancing nature but allowing the landscape to talk by itself,’ she explains.
Elsewhere the gardens banks spill with species Narcissus poeticus and Fritillaria meleagris threaded through common cowslips, Primula veris.
Wood anemones entwine with cyclamen and, underneath the eaves of the old carol, a pleasingly accidental throng of accelerating hellebores and primroses is became a member of by new clumps of arching, evergreen grass snow hurry and daffodil ‘Thalia’.
‘Like nature, planting is slow, transformative. I introduce bulbs and plugs each fall, initially trialling around 100 examples, I do not plant more until I understand they’re happy there,’ states Susanna.
Reflective waterside planting of blossoming cherries redoubles their effect, while utilization of bold and vibrant marginal skunk cabbages and marsh-marigold, helps create both impact and improves wildlife habitats for pond dwellers, one of many pond ideas.