NATURAL ABUNDANCE

The revitalised gardens at Newton House celebrate Robin and Jane Cannon’s desire to decorate outdoors with thousands of May-flowering bulbs and rhizomes.

- JACKY HOBBS

Set among quintessentially English parkland, dissected by a meandering half mile of the River Yeo, the gardens of this Grade I-listed Jacobean manor in Somerset have been reclaimed and redesigned by owners Robin and Jane Cannon. ‘Everything was in an absolutely hideous state when we arrived, the gardens were impenetrable, totally overgrown, untouched since the 1960s,’ Robin recalls.

Drawing on years of visiting the finest gardens and using the fragmented infrastructure of the Victorian walled gardens and outbuildings they have found, the couple have comprehensively reshaped their garden. They planted over a thousand trees, creating avenues and vistas linking the landscape to the house. On the eastern side, flowering cherries and walkways of copper and green beech trees lead down to the river.

The borrowed parkland landscape offers a fitting backdrop to the part-walled Formal Garden. Open-ended, it is occupied by seventeen geometric box parterres, which pivot round frame-pleached limes – Tilia platyphyllos – centred by a hamstone obelisk. ‘The design of the obelisk is an enlarged representation of the finials that sit on top of the roof of Newton House,’ explains Robin.