Natural flair

Town Place, East Sussex The garden of Mr & Mrs Anthony McGrath Charles Quest-Ritson visits a garden shaped by intellect and clothed in beauty

ANTHONY and Maggie McGrath learned their gardening skills in a small garden-no more than one-third of an acre-at Nutley in the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. After 11 years, they started to look for a house with more space to develop their interest in garden design. It brought them to Town Place not far away, a handsome timber-frame farmhouse, probably Elizabethan in origin, that had been extended and gentrified in the 20th century. They bought it in 1990, together with the flat, two-acre garden that had little to commend itself. There were some handsome old oaks along one of the boundaries, a duck pond and, overlooking it, a stumpy pollarded oak, quite hollow in the centre and reputed to be about 800 years old. But not much else.

The garden was, in effect, a blank canvas, which suited the McGraths: they could plan and plant it as they wished. They decided to create a series of distinct areas and enclosures, each with its own character, some rather busy and others more calm in spirit.