Freeze frame

Bryan’s Ground, Stapleton, Herefordshire Helena Attlee recalls how a fresh fall of snow helped the then new owners of this famous Arts-and-Crafts garden to understand the underlying geometry of the land and so begin the property’s restoration

- Helena Attlee

THE garden at Bryan’s Ground was born in the winter of 1993, when David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell moved into their new home on the border between Herefordshire and Wales. Waking early on the first morning, they saw it had snowed during the night. They went straight outside and began to pace out the structure for a new garden, their footsteps confident and unhesitating in the fresh snow.

Bryan’s Ground was built between 1911 and 1913 for Elizabeth and Mary Durning Holt, the youngest daughters of a wealthy Liverpool cotton broker. It was designed in the Arts-and-Crafts style so fashionable at the time, with a small orchard in front of it, almost an acre of kitchen garden, a grass tennis court and, that quintessential element of every Arts-and- Crafts landscape, a sunken garden. By the time David and Simon saw the house for the first time, however, the orchard had been felled, the kitchen garden was derelict and the tennis court abandoned. The only true survivors were a terrace running the length of the sunny south façade, and the sunken garden with its lily pond and four parterre beds around it.

With its original garden derelict or missing entirely, Bryan’s Ground seemed to float unmoored, like a ship in a sea of grass.

‘Although we arrived 80 years after it was built,’ Simon explains, ‘the house seemed to have no relationship to the landscape around it. It was as if it had never put down roots.’

They already knew what they must do on that snowy morning. ‘We had to make a garden that would strengthen the bond between the house and the landscape surrounding it,’ he says. ‘That’s what our new garden was for.’ They also acknowledged that any new design must sit comfortably with the Arts-and-Crafts style of the house.