La Dolce Vita
in Cumbria?!

Fittingly, I find myself revisiting Yewbarrow House on Valentine’s Day. I’m tempted to ask its proprietor Jonathan Denby, whether he and his wife Margaret spent their honeymoon in Italy, as this most romantic of gardens has as distinct an Italian flavour as a good Chianti. Why, it even has its own olive trees, which at this time of year, incredibly, sport a ripe crop.

It turns out Jonathan has more prosaic reasons for his garden’s style  - he simply wanted a garden which could be enjoyed all the year round, well-furnished with evergreens and affording delectable views from his home’s windows. I had first visited the garden on its National Garden Scheme Open Day in August last year, as the last mortar dust had only just been swept from its new terraces, so to experience a garden in its Sunday best and then revisit in deepest February is to expect just a little less polish. My expectations were, gladly, mistaken, as this is a garden absolutely full of clever planting, design and high-octane glamour despite most of it being only 3 years old. And it’s organic throughout.

 Yewbarrow’s main garden, around 2 acres of a 4.5 acre site sheltered by woodland, sits in a stunning steeply sloped location overlooking Morecambe Bay in the genteel Victorian town of Grange-over-Sands in South Cumbria. The area’s climate is, by Northern Gardener’s standards, mild (until recently a National Collection of Phormiums was kept next door) with limestone pavements, a certain high-Victorian formality, and generous rainfall informing much of the town’s horticulture. Yewbarrow’s front garden, in some places a 45 degree slope, looks as if abseiling may be the only planting technique feasible, and Jonathan tells me he plans to continue to tame the dense canopy of trees and shrubs into allowing him a view of the sands, and to replant with box which he will (vertigo allowing) shape into cloud-like pillows.  This area also hosts a large fern collection including Woodwardia radicans (which propagates itself by ‘layering’ its own fronds into the soil around it) and a group of sentry-like tree ferns, unprotected this winter, as Jonathan puts it, “I want the garden to look good in winter too, and no one would say a wrapped tree fern looks good !”.

 Most of the garden rises steeply from the rear of the house, and had previously been almost entirely unleveled and grassed over  “It was all so inaccessible before – you couldn’t actually get anywhere!” says Jonathon as we walk through a charming area planted with hellebores on an intimate scale “Stupidly, I planted most of them on the lower terrace though, meaning you can’t see their flowers!”  

By the house, the garden is dominated by the kind of formal lawn which begs for an elegant cocktail party. This is the only level part of the site, and the only area with which Jonathan had a little help from a designer - Christopher Holliday. It is flanked on one long side with cardoons and formal evergreens, and on the other an immense limestone pavement, excavated from below what had part of the sloping lawns which had dominated the garden previously. On top of this is a bank of hebe parviflora x gustifolia, offering a fantastic contrast to the stone with its ferny evergreen foliage.

In the lawn’s centre is a tall palm, which like so many in the UK, flowered in last summer’s heat  “For years I had kept a picture I’d taken of an old Italian-style garden in Ireland with a palm tree instead of a sundial in the middle of a lawn,”. Clever textural juxtapositions of bamboos, grevillia (in flower during my February visit) and low-lying osteospermum give this area a curtain of greenery dividing it from a parking area. Throughout, extensive slate and limestone has been used to create high and low walls, terraces, a gazebo and paths, all integrating stylistically with the house and remains of a walled garden at the top of the site. Jonathan even has a disassembled stone bridge, waiting to be rebuilt as a folly.

 Moving upwards, we pass more lavish beds of palms, still looking as smart as they did in the summer, and some splashes of colour by way of chaenomeles and even a brave little osteospermum, interspersed with more evergreens and foliage plants such as the grey-leaved peanut-scented melianthus major, only just showing a little frost damage.

The extensive terracing has been planted with tulips, but in summer is host to an exuberant display of cannas, presently over wintering in a cold greenhouse to bring on an earlier flowering though Jonathan concedes that “they ones we left in the ground the winter before did much better, but they did flower 8 weeks later”.

At the top of the site we reach a cutting garden, which last year provided Jonathan’s hotels with thousands of cut flowers all summer for a mere £55 spent on seeds, and a sheltered walled area of tender plants such as echium pinanana, agaves and melianthus villerosa, many swaddled in bubble wrap. Alongside, we reach a breathtaking vegetable and fruit garden which benefits from old, high walls and even the odd productive but elderly fruit tree. In my summer visit, this was swarming with appreciative visitors admiring the large ‘vegetable parterre” edged with box and fruit cages, which also supply Jonathan’s hotel with produce. In February, it is an immaculate series of expectant beds, double dug by a local gardener who augments Yewbarrow’s 2 regular workers Kate and Jack Parkinson.

Nearby, recently planted espaliered apples are to be bordered by golden box hedging, and to the rear the large polytunnel is to be replaced by an orangerie.

After all this luxuriant formality, it’s almost a relief to come across the garden’s ‘utility area’, with its impressive 50 tonnes of well-rotted horse manure waiting to be used as mulch later this year. Jonathan gets it from a local stable ‘It’s quite an operation – tractor loads coming and going all day”. He confesses to being rather a ‘hands-off’ gardener, blessed with good staff and access to good nurseries, but his architectural eye is in evidence throughout and it’s rare to see such confidence of scale and design in a domestic garden, unless a professional designer has been heavily involved.

But despite its lavishness, there are lessons in year-round planting at Yewbarrow for even the smallest of gardens.

Jonathan Denby recommends these nurseries for unusual plants:

Reginald Kaye Ltd
Waithman Nurseries 36, Lindeth Rd Silverdale
Carnforth Lancashire
LA5 0TY
Tel: 01524 701252

Crûg Farm Plants
Griffith's Crossing
Caernarfon
Gwynedd
LL55 1TU
Tel (44+) 01248 670232
http://www.crug-farm.co.uk/

 Inglefield Speciality Plants
Windermere Rd Staveley
Kendal Cumbria
LA8 9LY
Tel: 01539 821142

 Yewbarrow House, Hampsfell Rd, Grange-Over-Sands, Cumbria opens as part of the National Garden’s Scheme
www.yewbarrowhouse.co.uk

Private visits welcome by appt. 015395 32469

Copyright Karen Guthrie, 2003
This article was first published in The Northern Garden magazine