Cooks Farm: ancient woodland and flower-rich meadows

By Daisy Bowie-Sell

Published: Monday, 08 November 2021 at 12:00 am

It is nearly 20 years since Cooks Farm last featured in Gardens Illustrated (issue 83). “The garden has evolved somewhat since then,” laughs its creator, Patricia Stainton. “As have I…”

In those days, Patricia was at the forefront of a new style of perennial planting – loose, naturalistic and wildlife-friendly – that was then very novel in the UK (less so in Germany and the Netherlands), but has since become ubiquitous.

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The rich, jewel-like colours she favoured – claret and crimson, deep purple and all-but-black – at a time when gardening fashion dictated ladylike pastels, have since been picked up by the likes of gardeners Sarah Raven and Monty Don, and are now widely admired. (Meanwhile Patricia has been saving the seed of her darkest and most sumptuous flowers every year, to produce poppies, astrantias, antirrhinums and sweet Williams in ever deeper and swoonier shades.)

Today, everyone understands the value of shrubby salvias to deliver long months of late-season colour. Back then, they were collector’s plants. Above all, the idea of selecting planting to sustain populations of bees, moths and butterflies, once seen as mildly eccentric, if laudable, has now become mainstream. Read on for more about Cooks Farm

© Claire Takacs

The area in front of the house was originally a dwarf box parterre enclosing softer planting. It has since evolved into an intensively planted area where Patricia enjoys the dynamic nature of gardening, relishing the changes of colour, mass and texture that occur through successive seasons.

In Brief

Name Cooks Farm. What A garden awash with scent and sumptuous colour, dissolving magically into its surroundings. Where Somerset. Soil Heavy Burtle clay, in need of constant improvement, wet in places. Size Two acres of garden set among 40 acres of conservation landscape. Climate Relatively sheltered, but a frost pocket. Hardiness zone USDA 9.

© Claire Takacs

The path to the front door is the ideal place for intricate plantings of small and unusual subjects – where both the flowers themselves and the passage of the seasons can be observed in detail. Here Patricia grows delicately coloured verbenas, nerines and sweet Williams (Dianthus barbatus) along with deliciously fragrant Salvia Love and Wishes
(= ‘Serendip6’), lavenders and rosemary.

Along the rill are pots of Eucomis – deep-red Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’ and fresh-green Eucomis bicolor – along with Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’, and several different types of agapanthus. The dark tones of the succulents are picked up by two towering specimens of Phormium ‘Dusky Princess’ at the far end of the rill.

In these borders behind the house, Patricia’s romantic, blue-to-purple schemes give way to hotter, more intense colours, employing plenty of orange, purple and red. Here she uses sunflowers and heleniums (especially Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’), deep-red dahlias and purple gladioli, set off by elegant Kniphofia ‘Little Maid’ and different colours of box. Cercis canadensis ‘Forest Pansy’ provides a splash of reddish purple in the background.

In Brief

12 key plants from Cooks Farm