Hampnett House: A Gloucestershire garden where an empty, squelchy lawn has been replaced by 'gorgeous flowery generosity'

On a hot summer’s day, the herb garden just below the main house — a Victorian rectory in the Cotswolds — is busy with activity. Apart from the honey bees, hoverflies and bumblebees that provide a reassuring hum under a cloudless sky, Mansi Amin and her daughters are busy picking calendula flowers and sage leaves. The flowers are for a picture, the leaves will be used to make a sage honey.

Wild strawberries have self-seeded through the gravel edges of this small terrace, where a mulberry tree drops its midday shade on drifts of lemon balm, rosemary, mint, thyme and catmint — the latter will be used to produce an insect repellent. There are currants for picking and Cistus ladanifer, which thrives here. Ms Amin uses the herb garden assiduously to produce tinctures, oils and potions for the family. Anaya and Liyana are concentrating on the calendula design, working at the impressive stone table (of which more later) and from where one begins to understand the layout of the property.

The 1872 stone rectory dominates the top of a fairly steep slope that drops in stepped terraces providing dramatic views, firstly over the formal flower garden, then the meadow beyond to the tawny hedge-fringed fields and distant woods. The Victorian builders had managed the slope by constructing two dominant stone bastions, upon one of which the herb garden rests. (Hence the splendid view.)

The formal areas around the house — which also include lawns and a swimming-pool garden with clean lines of flagstones — only take up two acres, leaving the much greater part of the land — five acres — to an orchard, an area of woodland surrounding a lake at the side of a sweeping meadow dotted with trees and a wildflower meadow. This naturalistic treatment makes complete sense here. It reduces the amount of regular maintenance — there is one full-time gardener — as well as merging into the soft folds of the Cotswold landscape that wraps around the property in an easy and familiar relationship.

Herbs, old roses, single-flowered annuals and airy perennials in a soft palette of dusty pinks and grey-purples flow easily across the terraces that carry the planting down the slope. Here and there are hot pinpricks of cerise Rosa odorata ‘Mutabilis’ and deep-burgundy buttons of Knautia macedonica. All this has been dreamed up by the designer Jinny Blom, who was brought in by the family a couple of years after they first moved here from a three-bedroom flat in London in 2017

The garden she first encountered was very different from the one the family enjoys today. It had been created for the former owners by an international designer who had laid out a bold conceptual design that had required a huge amount of hard landscaping and was underpinned with architectural box hedging. Apart from some lavender, there were no flowers, no colour, nothing soft or anything that complemented the gentle quality of the landscape. The new family, however, had moved from the city in order to be in the country: ‘We wanted areas left for wildlife and foraging and for the health of the land,’ recalls Ms Amin. ‘We wanted to bring Nature back into the garden to encourage more wildlife.’

When Ms Blom first saw the garden, the box and lavender had died. ‘There was only hard landscaping; it was windswept and bleak.’ A plan was made to retain as much of the hard landscaping as possible — why waste well-laid, good-quality materials? For the same reason, the decision was made to keep the large stone table, which had been cut to order in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, before being shipped to the Cotswolds. Other than rearranging some of the spaces and making flowerbeds where there had been none, the bulk of the work would be planting — after a gargantuan amount of clearing. ‘We carted off 2,000–3,000 cubic metres of builders’ rubble and spent two years clearing the box and carting away the muck,’ she remembers. ‘It was a massive job, but the rubbish soil has now been replaced with good soil and proper organic manure.’

Counter-intuitively, it was necessary, also, to add more hard landscaping around the swimming pool as that had been set in grass. ‘Grass is hopeless in England — it squelches — so I paved it and made a gravel garden around the pool.’ She also replaced the grass around the house with gravel paths softened with planting in beds and on the house walls. ‘I envisaged covering the house in climbers rather like Miriam Rothschild did at Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire. I wanted to make it sing, to make it very romantic, a bit Gilbert White meets Ashton Wold.’

Since moving to the Cotswolds, Mr Shah has become as much an enthusiast of the garden as his wife and, determined to understand the garden they would be making, he devoted a year to studying horticulture at Capel Manor College in Greater London. As gardens should be, this one is always evolving. ‘We try to work on two or three projects every year,’ he says. He has added more trees to the orchard that has been planted in the top field above the house and more than 100 heritage fruit trees have been set in the limestone brash that lies beneath the field. They have prioritised Gloucestershire varieties whenever possible and otherwise chosen heritage trees, pears, cherries, quince, plums, damsons and many apples. The vegetable garden is tucked away at the back of the orchard where it is more sheltered. To avoid chemical sprays, plants are mulched and given regular seaweed sprays from mid March to midsummer.

The north-facing courtyard at the entrance to the house — once bare gravel and little else — has been softened with climbers and new beds by the walls, now filled with a combination of bulbs, shrubs and perennials, including Rosa rugosa, sweet box Sarcococca ruscifolia and clumps of Euphorbia wallichii with ferns, all punctuated by dark yew columns. These echo the huge yews on the bank at the other end of the house, which started life as a Victorian hedge. Dozens of snowdrops have been planted along the bank and will gradually spread themselves under the yews.

The steep bank that drops from the driveway to the meadow, now clear of the old dead lavender, is much more happily filled with masses of English roses in shades of pink and white, with scent that is caught in the warm air and draws in the honey bees from the four hives in the woodland. From here, one walks into the meadow, where mown paths lead through the long grass. There are some mature trees, such as the Wellingtonia, but Ms Blom has planted relaxed groups of flowering natives that are settling in nicely. It is hard to believe that all this was once empty lawn, but then it is even harder to believe that there had previously been none of the gorgeous flowery generosity that is now the most enchanting feature of the garden.