New for old

The gardens of Pembury Hall, near Tunbridge Wells, Kent The home of Mr and Mrs Paul Hilgers

An overgrown garden has been reinvented for a new generation, writes Tiffany Daneff, with a new pool house and ingenious reuse of a derelict wing as an outdoor eating area

AFTER living abroad for several years in Sydney and Amsterdam, Mr and Mrs Paul Hilgers were looking for somewhere to settle and bring up their young family when they discovered exactly the place they were looking for in a quiet rural valley within easy distance of Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

In 2019, they moved into Pembury Hall, which had been built in 1803 and was home for 170 years to the Woodgate family, three members of which were vicars of the 14thcentury old parish church of St Peter's a few minutes' walk away. Push open the gate at the far end of the main lawn and a rutted track leads through a dappled tunnel of coppiced hazels and snaking rhododendrons-the same path the clergymen would have taken on their way to morning service. A yew treeechoing many in the garden overhangs the iron gate that leads into a small churchyard.

When Hilgers moved here, however, all was overgrown. The gardens and grounds had been neglected for many years with the usual results: 19th-century plantings of Cupressus leylandii and rhododendron had become overgrown, knotweed and other persistent weeds had taken hold in the gardens and tree shaving been left for decades unchecked-completely blocked the best view over  meadows to the distant tree line beyond.