‘One of the most important (and enchanting) of modern gardens – thoroughly recommended.’
Royal Horticultural Society
‘Bryan’s Ground is a plant-filled, beautifully executed garden, made with liberal doses of humour as well as plantsmanship.’ BBC Gardeners’ World Garden Lovers’ Guide to Britain
Bryan’s Ground, superbly poised above the River Lugg, occupies some thirty acres of cherished pastoral land on the border between England and Wales, with meadows to the south and low protecting hills to the north.
When built in 1911–13 it was graced with a three-acre formal garden comprising several of the period’s Arts and Crafts signature components: sunken garden with circular water-lily pool and four surrounding flower beds, nascent yew and box topiary, a lengthy pergola for roses and the obligatory country-house tennis court.
Photograph ©Clive Nichols
‘. . . this idyllic, quintessentially English garden is filled with horticultural delights, wit and style...’
BBC Gardens Illustrated
The three-quarter-acre kitchen garden, walled on two sides, provided abundant fresh produce, a large greenhouse was used to raise colourful bedding-out plants, while gas – made from acetylene crystals and water in the two-storey Lighthouse – was pumped through underground lead pipes to the house until the installation of electricity in the 1930s. The Motor House incorporated stabling for two horses, a garage with inspection pit and a chauffeur’s sitting room; its large attic was kitted out with racks for storing the orchard’s abundant crop of apples and pears.
Photograph ©Clive Nichols
Many of these earlier delights and curiosities were extant when David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell first saw the property on a sweltering summer’s evening in 1993. With their two dogs and three cats they eventually moved in on 25th November that year.
Overnight they were blessed with a light fall of snow, enabling them during the following few days to draw lines on the ground that would form the basic plan for their own ambitious transformation of the formal garden.
©Claire Takacs - David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell
‘Home of Hortus, the widely acclaimed quarterly magazine, this garden is a feast of horticultural delights.’
The Good Gardens Guide, 2003
‘This is my kind of garden.’
Monty Don, The Observer
More than twenty five years later Bryan’s Ground is now a place where Nature and serendipity also play their part in the overall scheme of things, resulting in the prolific self-seeding of certain plants and the presence of ‘weeds’ beneficial to wildlife, a model best described by Vita Sackville-West, who proclaimed that a garden should have the strictest formality of design with the maximum informality of planting.
Photograph ©Marianne Majerus
‘It’s worth your life to get to a great garden in England . . . I was headed to the northwest corner of Herefordshire, to a garden called Bryan’s Ground . . . Not just some Sissinghurst or Hidcote, where the designs now seem cast in stone.’
Anne Raver, New York Times
Simon Dorrell, Bryan's Ground sketch
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