'I’m not after perfection; I’m after feeling. If people walk through here and feel joy, I’ve succeeded’: Matthew Rice on his gorgeous garden at Ham Court

'When people say “there was no garden here when we arrived”, usually you still find a philadelphus, a lilac, apple trees, roses lurking about. Here, there was nothing.’

All Matthew Rice discovered among the scattered 1960s and 1970s agricultural buildings and concrete working yards surrounding his home, Ham Court in Oxfordshire, was a lonely orange hybrid tea, a limp wisteria still tied to its bamboo cane and about 30 lily of the valley by the front door. Rice, whose architectural illustrations appear regularly in Country Life, has been rectifying matters ever since.

For someone who loves buildings, it had been impossible to turn down the chance of living in the remains of a partially moated late-medieval castle. It was also a bold move that he and his then wife, the potter Emma Bridgewater, nearly regretted. Bampton Castle, as it was originally called, had been built for Aymer de Valance, Earl of Pembroke, from 1315, when he was granted a licence to crenellate and, although only ‘a short stretch of curtain wall, about 24ft high and 6ft thick, crowned with battlements’ remains, the whole place was thick with history — as explained in Country Life in May 2021.

It was also ‘a wreck’, with all the brutish elements of a working farm plonked among the historic buildings, and the romantic-sounding moat had almost entirely disappeared.

‘The agents had photographed the depressing Victorian wing,’ recalls Rice of when he first saw the sales particulars. ‘It put people off, but we saw its potential.’ That was why, in 2011, he and his wife took the plunge and bought the house with two acres of yards and outbuildings, together with another 30 acres of land.

They had their work cut out. ‘There were barns built right up to the kitchen, endless concrete yards, builders’ waste, rubble, slurry lagoons — nothing nice,’ remembers Rice. In those early days, they worried they would never have the means to do all the hard work needed to turn it into a home with its garden, but time and energy, much of it supplied by Rice’s then brother-in-law, Toti Gifford, of Giffords Circus fame, have overcome the many obstacles.

There is now a gravelled courtyard with places to sit against the buff-coloured limestone walls of the house and look out towards the castle yard (the former cattle yard) with its fine 17th- and 19th-century barns now cleared of rubble and fully restored. Raised beds run around and a collection of terracotta pots is filled with cheerful pelargoniums, vermilion flowers of Fuchsia ‘Thalia’ and the orange-red foliage of coleus and plectranthus.

Rice almost apologises for such jollity. Such plants are banished from some gardens for being too popular and too colourful, but here, massed in a large collection, they deliver a focal point close by the front door exactly where it’s needed. In any case, rejecting plants purely on the grounds of taste is not in his nature.

‘I’ve tended to go for bright, cheerful, annual-heavy planting,’ he says. ‘Lots of colour, lots of energy. I’m not precious. Because nothing here was ancient, I feel free to remove or change things.’ That said, he is adding some more refined plants alongside the bright ones. ‘I admire people such as Mary Keen, who have beautifully subtle planting. Still, I enjoy the freedom of experimenting — whether it’s with unusual geraniums from Tangiers or coleus varieties from nurseries.’

Rice’s early training in theatre design helped to make sense of the two acres in front of the house by drawing attention to the important areas and downplaying the rest. The removal of the ugly outbuildings highlights the historic barns, in the larger of which he holds annual Tulip Days for the local Bampton Gardening Club of which he is president. Instead of a slurry pit, there’s now a green mound — best of all, the house itself can breathe, freed from encumbrances. ‘Sightlines,’ as he writes in his forthcoming book A Year in the Garden, ‘are all important.’

At Ham Court, he drew out the key axes and laid them down in gravel. The first runs from the old gatehouse to the village and is the road by which the visitor arrives. A second lane cuts across this, linking the main road to the new farmyard and all is bordered by the moat. Most of the latter had become silted up by the 17th century, but archaeological investigations revealed that it had described a square around the castle site, its width varying from 16ft to an impressive 50ft in parts. Now cleared of silt and planted with willows and rushes, its watery arms hold the garden in a tranquil embrace.

Clearing the moat was one of the early tasks, although the very first was planting 10 acres of trees to shelter the grounds from the road and its noise, as well as from the wind. Help with the heavy machinery came from Gifford, who had ‘a fearless approach’ to moving earth and reshaping the land. ‘We built hills, dug moats, planted hedges and moved tons of soil.’ Mistakes were made, such as not putting in proper drainage (now rectified), but the garden is, as Rice puts it, turning into a proper garden. The design for all the new garden areas within the moat is based on his early-morning walk. Like sheep that make permanent tracks through fields, he defined a path that links the whole together; house, courtyard, kitchen garden, orchard, greenhouse and moat.

Late summer and early autumn feel like Ham Court’s rightful seasons, ripe with pickings and swelling gourds, contented pigs and sun-blistered barrows heaped with dahlias. Generous and golden-tinged, this is a garden for living in, rather than one to be viewed from a tidy distance. A place that reflects its owner. ‘Because I’m a painter and designer, I always think about how it looks — what it feels like to walk through, what the perspective is, what happens when you turn a corner. Some gardeners think only about plants, but I think in terms of composition and experience.’

Here, the experience is one of endless surprise and delight. At every turn, there is a new treat, pigs nosing happily in their pens overlooked by stands of colourful sunflowers, fairy-tale-red apples hanging in the orchard with hens scratching around below. The planting is strong. Beds against the west wall of the house are filled with nothing but dahlias in yellows and oranges and pinks of every shade and shape that stop you in your tracks — first because of the sheer glorious mass of colour, then to look for your favourites. This is planting for painting.

‘I love plants that are good for cutting. Things such as cosmos, antirrhinums and bedding chrysanthemums. I enjoy having vases full of colour indoors. The pink chrysanthemums, for example, light up the garden into November.’ He takes many cuttings each year rather than keeping old stock, which are housed in his enviable greenhouse. ‘I grow for cutting, for eating, for beauty, for scent. The doing is the thing. Painting, building, planting — all of it is creative. I want this place to be generous, to give pleasure, to feel alive.

‘I don’t mind the incompleteness — it gives me energy. I’m not after perfection; I’m after feeling. If people walk through here and feel joy, or surprise, or peace, then I’ve succeeded.’

‘A Year in the Garden’ by Matthew Rice was published on September 24 (Frances Lincoln, £25).

Ham Court gardens are open via the National Garden Scheme on selected dates — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.