It was a small sepia advert in a Sunday magazine that first caught Delia Broke’s eye 27 years ago. ‘It mentioned a designer called Arne Maynard and I wrote him a letter,’ Mrs Broke remembers. ‘He arrived with three bunches of flowers and told me to shut my eyes. When I opened them, I had to point immediately to the bunch I liked best.’ Almost three decades later, the garden at Holme Hale Hall continues to be a spectacularly successful collaboration, where the colours and tones of the planting scheme are shifting and dynamic, yet remain coherent across every space, and where the relationship between client and designer has been a consistent delight.
‘Our only instruction was that it must stay relaxed, with children, dogs and football,’ says Mrs Broke. An artist and florist, she wanted more flowers to bring into the house, too, and for the foraged wreaths she fashions each month, ‘a way of seeing what’s in the garden: I want to remember it, like painting a picture’. Mr Maynard recalls: ‘Delia initially brought me in to advise on an area where a tree had come down, but I was immediately taken with the walled garden. I’ve always had a passion for them: they offer enclosure, security and, as the edges soften, become incredibly romantic.’
The hall owes its Continental warmth to a visionary previous owner, Robert Farrand. In the early 1800s, rich from grain and fresh from his Grand Tour, he moulded the original Elizabethan building into an Italianate villa and swapped the straight driveway for a sinuous curve through parkland. Farrand added a sprinkle of everything fashionable at the time: brick and slate stables, a laundry, kennels, a pond with wrought-iron bridges and a cylindrical dovecote with his coat of arms.
To complete the scene, he built a walled kitchen garden, but, unusually, decided to attach it to the house. ‘What makes it so special are the low railings chosen so the garden was immediately visible as you approach,’ points out Mr Maynard. ‘It isn’t a garden to be hidden away to grow vegetables, it is one to be celebrated as a major part of the garden as a whole.’ The place had fallen into disrepair by the time the Brokes inherited it in the mid 1980s, but there was a magnificent and enormous wisteria — already well established in an 1873 photograph — clambering over the shuttered windows and the soft yellow render of the walls.
The walled kitchen garden at Holme Hale Hall was originally built by a previous owner, Robert Farrand, in the early 1800s and more recently restored by Arne Maynard.
Mr Maynard’s masterstroke was to divide the walled garden into three compartments, unfolding as an enfilade through clipped hornbeam and crab apple hedges, each with distinct colour palettes and identities. The first is the most classic: a cruciform axis of brick-edged gravel paths, with trained apple trees over an ironwork tunnel down the centre, creates four productive quarters for vegetables, soft fruit and companion annuals, such as nicotiana and cornflowers. Around the perimeter are deep curving beds for shrubs and perennials, where ‘we chose pastels — soft pinks, mauves and lemons — that picked out the colours of the house,’ Mr Maynard explains.
Soft spires of Verbascum (Cotswold Group) ‘Gainsborough’, apricot Alcalthaea suffru-tescens ‘Parkallee’, Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Purpurea’ and creamy batons of Actaea cordifolia ‘Blickfang’ are threaded through repeated mounds of Astrantia ‘Roma’ and Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clark’. Dotted amid the bronzes and buttermilks are silver drifts of Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Valerie Finnis’, A. absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’ and Stachys byzantina. Succisa pratensis ‘Peddar’s Pink’ (a native scabious that grows along a local footpath) scatters itself along the front. Plants are loosely grouped, with outliers drifting away from the main clump, and a few thrown over to the far side of a path so the effect doesn’t abruptly end. The placement is so skilful that it all looks good in every combination around the entire circumference.
"If something isn’t working, we call Arne and ask about a replacement."
The second compartment holds a parterre of L-shaped, box-edged beds designed to reach a crescendo in late summer and autumn, with a hotter slant towards orange, burnt-toffee and plum shades. Digitalis ferruginea and the coppery foliage of Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora ‘Coleton Fishacre’ (also called ‘Gerbe d’Or’) pick up on the orange-eyed blooms of Buddleja x weyeriana ‘Moonlight’. Dahlias, including D. ‘Café au Lait’, ‘Sylvia’, ‘David Howard’ and ‘Henriette’, are added to a vibrant mix of heleniums, eupatoriums, Rudbeckia triloba ‘Prairie Glow’ and many Michaelmas daisies. Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Le Moutiers’ is delicate with dark stems, useful as it runs in sandy soil rather than clumping, threading through its neighbours, and Symphyotrichum ‘Coombe Fishacre’ is another variety that is light on its feet.
Entering the third compartment, Mrs Broke declares, ‘is going on holiday to Provence’. The existing swimming pool was re-tiled in a soft green and encircled by giant terracotta pots full of scabious and pelargoniums, frothed around by lavenders, Mexican daisy and Alchemilla mollis planted directly into the gravel. Espaliered whitebeams create a cool, pared-back corridor, neat box cubes around their feet. A hidden tennis court lies at the very end, the south wall housing both an ancient pear and a perfectly preserved apple store.
The productive area of the walled garden with cabbages and dill, Anethum graveolens.
Mr Maynard planted the garden in 2000, the same year he won his first Chelsea Gold medal. Two years later, he returned to reorganise the front lawn and ‘enhance the sense of place’, adding yew beehives beside the door, copper beech hedging and cloud-pruned, box edged beds filled with a mix of ginger biscuity Miscanthus sinensis ‘Kleine Fontäne’, Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Fascination’ and scattered wild chicory. In 2016, he tweaked the perennial borders, reducing some of the more thuggish astrantias and persicaria, and adding more topiary for winter structure.
‘I still consider this design to be one of my favourites,’ Mr Maynard acknowledges, ‘but the most important element in any garden is the gardener who cares for and continues to develop it.’
For the past eight years, head gardener Chris Marchand has skilfully main- tained that fine balance. ‘The perennial borders are a lot of work,’ he admits, ‘because the crucial part of the job is editing, the constant micro-decisions of what to encourage or take out.’ Every bed is mulched heavily each winter, which ‘doesn’t add much richness,’ says Mr Marchand, ‘but it does add structure’. Although the planting was designed to cope with Norfolk’s dry sandy conditions, he adds, ‘our soil needs to hold water. The trick is to never let it dry out’.
Self-seeding is encouraged; recently, it has been Digitalis lutea that has merrily thrown itself about. ‘Everything is dynamic and you get accidents,’ explains Mr Marchand. ‘You can’t panic and stick things in or grab something colourful to plug a gap, otherwise you lose the overall character’. Mrs Broke agrees: ‘If something isn’t working, we call Arne and ask about a replacement. We develop it, but try to stay true to what he first envisaged.’
Holme Hale Hall, Norfolk, holds occasional openings through the National Garden Scheme — see more details.
This feature originally appeared in the May 27, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.