Stands and delivers

The walled garden, Culham Court, Berkshire The home of Urs and Francesca Schwarzenbach Disciplined design underpins maximal planting to create a garden that stays in the memory, finds Tiffany Daneff

- Tiffany Daneff

WALLED gardens have been given over to any number of uses from those originally intended. Some have been turned into rose gardens or beds for cut flowers, whereas others have ended up acting as sheep pens or horse paddocks. At Culham Court, where the 1771 red-brick villa designed by Sir William Chambers and Stiff Leadbetter, looks out on a gentle loop of the Thames between Hambleden and Hurley locks, the 18th-century walled garden has been transformed into what feels like a three-dimensional artwork. An evolving one at that, where the natural order of things— weather, other plants, the seasons—creates a picture that is always changing.

The walled garden was designed by Tom Stuart-Smith with a specific aim in mind: to provide privacy. This is because the Culham estate is crossed by public footpaths and the house, which sits on top of the rise from the river, is visible from the wide bowl of close-cropped parkland, where herds of white fallow deer graze below the chapel of Christ the Redeemer (COUNTRY LIFE, April 12, 2017).

The previous owners of Culham were living in the garden cottage with the walled garden as their only outdoor space, which is why its main area had been mainly laid to grass by the designer Dan Pearson, with a small earthwork and a few fruit trees. When Urs and Francesca Schwarzenbach moved into the house, they decided to change things around. ‘Francesca wanted somewhere private,’ recalls Mr Stuart-Smith, ‘so my idea was to make the walled garden feel immersive and separate and enclosed.’