IF you’re an Englishwoman at 50, you either get God or gardening—I got gardening’ is Patricia Elkington’s characteristically self-deprecating explanation for the garden she has created over the past four decades. Yet behind the breezy humour lies a story that mixes chance and good fortune, as well as the development of a particular talent common to so many British women gardeners. Mrs Elkington creates gentle, understated and inherently domestic gardens, where plants are the personalities and encouraged to give of their best and in which everything is included, from the trees that provide shade to the wildlife and the countryside beyond.
It was pure chance that the opportunity to create the garden at Little Court arose at all. In the early 1950s, Patricia’s father spotted that the house was coming up for sale at a local auction. ‘I’ll just go and see what it goes for,’ he reassured his wife, who, not surprisingly, was rather unprepared when he returned home its proud owner. Patricia’s mother was a flower arranger and began the garden, but its creation really dates from 1975, when Patricia and her husband, Andrew, a distinguished opthalmologist, succeeded her parents and moved into Little Court.
The garden is arranged in seven adjoining areas, some of them divided by old flint walls —mostly low, but higher around the walled kitchen garden—all of which appear on a map of 1837. Other than the kitchen garden, however, there is no real sense of division from one area to another and part of Little Court’s charm is the glimpses one gets of one area from another, especially early in the year before the trees have come into leaf.
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