'If you garden like this, it is almost impossible to get help — it’s more akin to doing a painting or an embroidery': The exotic and wonderful Copper House garden in Kent

The High Weald, an area stretching across much of Kent and Sussex, is an interesting place, distinctive enough to have earned the status of National Landscape. Characteristically composed of wooded, rolling hills, patchwork small fields and a network of narrow, tree-canopied lanes, it is quite easy to get lost between timeless, scattered farmsteads.

The heavy, iron-rich Wealden clay ground that characterises much of the area reveals itself in the brickwork of those old farmsteads and in their steeply pitched, brown roofs of handmade Kent peg tiles. These local materials also provide the picturesqueness of famous Wealden locations such as Great Dixter and Sissinghurst Castle, places that long ago exploited the potential richness of the clay soil to make world-renowned gardens.

Indeed, the region is peppered with great gardens and many more modest ones, lovingly tended by their owners and with much to interest the visitor. One of the latter, recently created, is at The Copper House, a confident, Modernist villa, crouching long and low in its agrarian landscape. Tucked away down a narrow lane, The Copper House was built in 2015, to replace a 1960s bungalow. It is clearly a departure from the local vernacular, but surprisingly in sympathy with it.

‘The brief we gave to the architect was that the house was to be a viewing box in the landscape and it was to be discreet,’ says owner Eleanor Cochrane. ‘We were going to clad the house in wood, but the architect showed us something different — it’s a copper alloy, so it won’t rust and it won’t go green. It will stay this colour and it exactly matches the Kent peg tiles in the area; the same patina, the same colour, everything.’ Its subtle, earthy tone is certainly complementary to the surroundings, providing a calm, unobtrusive background to the lively greens and vibrant flowers that Cochrane has planted intensively for year-round effect.

Within a plot of some seven acres of sloping meadow and woodland, the planted garden occupies only one-third of an acre, organised around the house in a series of contiguous rectangles that enable different views from behind mostly glass walls.

Such a disciplined layout recalls an Arts-and-Crafts approach, with central paths through the flower gardens, a contrastingly open lawned area, a rectangular pond and two terraces for seating and entertaining. Separations are made with hedging and a green-and-white-themed long walk north of the house provides further planting opportunities beyond the garage. A white border sits at the front entrance and Cochrane points out a nuttery of Kentish cobnuts, ‘really at its best in spring, it’s our homage to Sissinghurst’.

This new garden, which lies equidistant between Sissinghurst Castle (to the north) and Great Dixter (to the south, over the border in East Sussex), draws upon and successfully reinterprets influences from both of those great places, albeit scaled down and with a contemporary twist that complements the modern home.

Cochrane concentrates on the flower garden and adjacent productive beds and nursery area, leaving Mr Cochrane, when not at work, in charge of everything else, including the grass, wildflower meadows, orchard, woodland and composting. It is great teamwork.

The flower garden itself is exceptionally hard working. ‘Since my children were tiny, I have always volunteered at Great Dixter, so I had the opportunity of learning from the people in the garden for a few years, although later I ended up working in the office,’ says Cochrane. ‘At Dixter, I learnt how to plant successionally and that’s been my overriding interest in planting the garden here.’

In its ornamental sense, the succession planting in any given area is often to do with bulb or annual planting among seasonal shrubs or emerging perennials, whereby the bulbs can be left in the ground as another show of flowers (or foliage) takes over. The layered effect achieves a continuous show of new things coming through as earlier performers retreat.

Cochrane points to the white border, with its thematic mixture of shrubs, grasses, perennials, herbs and bulbs. ‘I’m a big fan of the white comfrey, Symphytum orientale, which runs all through the border, where we also have lots of ‘Thalia’ narcissi and tulips, including ‘White Triumphator’ and ‘Spring Green’.’ Later effects are achieved with dainty white Geranium sanguineum ‘Album’ peeping through the ground-covering foliage of Houttuynia cordata and again with white-themed hydrangeas joining vertical eruptions from perennials such as the ferny-leaved milk parsley Ligusticopsis wallichiana (formerly Selinum wallichianum) with its purple-washed stems.

Succession planting is at its best in colour-themed and tonal arrangements, of which there are several examples here — Cochrane has a remarkable eye for both colour and form. In less discerning hands, the results can lead to discordant jumbles, all hugger-mugger, with plants far from comfortable together. ‘The more you study and visit places, the bigger the plant palette. If you garden like this, it is almost impossible to get anyone to help you because it’s more akin to doing a painting or an embroidery. If you were creating a painting, you couldn’t say to somebody else, could you do that painting for me? That’s how I feel about the garden.’

The Copper House Garden, Kent, opens for talks by appointment and for the National Garden Scheme.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.