Sophie Conran's garden at Salthrop Manor, and its journey from bare field to Cotswold paradise

'My earliest memories are of the garden. My parents had a cottage in Suffolk when I was tiny, and I remember being in the vegetable garden with my dad and of him digging up potatoes; the day was beautiful blue and he was wearing his beloved navy jumper with holes in it.’

Sophie Conran has her own vegetable garden now in the 70-acre grounds at Salthrop House, a pretty, Grade II-listed Regency manor tucked away in a hidden landscape on the edge of the Marlborough Downs in Wiltshire. It’s an idyllic spot, sheltered by mature trees, with a long open view from the sitting room and over the main terrace, but, other than a few shrubs — a Judas tree, a tree peony and yews — there was no garden other than the stone flagged terraces, when she came here 11 years ago.

Yet, clearly, she has inherited that Conran gene for making places you dream of living in — and doing so apparently effortlessly, as a walk around the garden reveals. The immediate setting helps, with a weathered stone wall curving easily around the environs of the house and scatterings of old outbuildings beyond. In one, cut flowers from the vegetable garden wait in buckets to be brought indoors; another houses the garden office; there’s a potting shed, a shed for the tractor and everywhere are pots and seed trays of annuals waiting to go in.

Miss Conran does have a great team under head gardener Anne Roberts, overseen by Kate Gatacre, formerly head grower at Linley Walled Garden in Shropshire, but the vision is all her own. A copper-beech hedge looked stiff and wrong, so that went, as did the Leylandii, which were replaced by a mixed hedge ‘full of dog roses and wildlife’. She has made a meadow in the old horse field, seeding it with yellow rattle before dropping in ragged robin and Gladiolus byzantinus, both of which reappear each year to light up the long grass with shots of bright pink. Four beautiful Saddleback pigs arrived a few weeks ago and are doing a wonderful job of clearing a nearby area of wild ground—and helping control an area of Japanese knotweed.

The muted blues and pinks and the billowy softness of the planting on the terrace beds outside the sitting room are just the thing to marry the house to the wilder areas beyond. Several rectangular beds — anchored at the corners with box mounds and euphorbia clumps — link the terrace to a small and easy-going lawn, which is there for sitting and drinking in the view.

No hard edges bring one up short, instead, the beds are divided by turf paths partly hidden beneath the leaves of a geranium or Alchemilla mollis; cracks in the paving on the terrace are left for self-seeders, the house beds are brimful of roses in summer and more scramble up the walls. Set out on an assortment of tables, terracotta pots and half pans are filled with flowering plants from the greenhouses. It all adds to the impression of soft abundance. Later in the year, pink Japanese anemones play a similar role in the beds beside the house. Those nearest to the fields are left for naturalistic perennials that blur the line between the gardened and the wild.

Behind a yew hedge and enjoying the deep shade it casts over a rubble-strewn slope (the remains of an old building) is the fern garden. The ferns were already here, but, rather than fighting them, this yew-bounded green enclosure has been given a simple, but confident brush-up by adding stands of the dependable white Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ and, at their feet, the ever-useful glossy green paddles of bergenia.

It comes as no surprise that this isn’t the first garden Miss Conran has made. That was in Australia, where she did a gardening course after moving there in her mid twenties. She dug vegetable beds out of the heavy clay and sculpted terraces. ‘We did all sorts of things and it ended up being lovely and I planted loads of trees that are now proper trees. And then we came back here to a little farm in Dorset and we did quite a lot of work there, turning fields into terraces and putting in stone steps with water running down them.’

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At the heart of the garden here at Salthrop, spiritually if not physically, is the vegetable garden, which is built on the memories of her own childhood. ‘When I was six, my mum and my dad bought a beautiful house that had been turned into a school. There were big walled gardens and all the greenhouses had been smashed to bits, so they rebuilt those and renovated the garden and that was really my playground. I’d go out and eat peas and strawberries and be a fairy or run around looking at things and smelling things. The house was always filled with people from my dad’s work and my mum was writing cookery books and there were my brothers, so there were lots of boys and noise, and the garden was where I could be free.’

The Salthrop potager was made from scratch on ground that turned out — according to a 1747 map that predates the house and was discovered by garden historian Marion Mako — to have been the site of a former productive garden. After generations of mulching, the soil here is rich and fertile, with seams of greensand running through it. On the footprint of the old glasshouse, there now stands a Woodpecker Joinery greenhouse filled mainly with pelargoniums — indeed, they hide the whole of the back wall — together with citrus, streptocarpus and several impressively large money plants, Crassula ovata, that were cuttings from her father, Sir Terence Conran, and are now nurtured by his daughter.

Her mother, food writer Caroline Conran, and her grandmother, both grew pelargoniums, but the memory that sticks in her mind is of her mother, ‘digging these long beds, and me and my friend Susie—we must have been about eight—took all our clothes off and ran up and down the beds in the drizzle and mashed it all up after my mama had spent I don’t know how many days tilling the soil. I think she cried. It’s fixed in my memory: the joy of running in that lovely wet mud’.

The timber-edged growing beds (dug out of the grass, with cardboard laid down before the compost went in) are divided by a narrow row of bricks for easy access. The beds are allocated pretty much half and half to annual flowers for cutting and vegetables. Brassicas are netted, berries fill the fruit cage, the arbour is threaded with sweet peas and gourds and dotted between the productive beds are shrub roses. The

turf path to the greenhouse is framed by heaps of nasturtiums, from which rise giant globe artichokes. To complete the picture as you wander through is the constant noisy companionship of the ducks and chickens —35 chicks hatched this year — and the hum of honey bees from the nearby hives. It is truly an idyll for all ages.

Salthrop Manor, Wiltshire, will host rare plant fairs on May 10 and September 11, 2026 — see www.rareplantfair.co.uk for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life — here's how you can subscribe to Country Life magazine.