Dan Pearson's Somerset Garden Blends Cultivation with the Wild

Prominent landscape designer Dan Pearson OBE describes how he and his partner, Huw Morgan, have nurtured the land on their Somerset smallholding to enrich biodiversity in a garden that deliberately echoes a wild, beautiful setting in south-west England

We had been looking for land for quite some time when we eventually found ‘Hillside’. Around a modest stone farmhouse hunkered into the hill, the land rises steeply behind us to the lane, and descends at a pitch below us to a glinting stream in woodland at the bottom of the valley. The farmer before us had lived here all his life and the tightly grazed fields ran to meet the buildings. A dilapidated set of burns, built mostly from found materials, and a small milking barn that sat just below the house, were all that was here.

The trees had mostly been pollarded and the hedges kept tight, so that nothing would shade the pasture. Immediately to the leeward side of the little barn, and sheltered from the westerly winds that race down the valley, there was a cordoned-off area where the farmer had grown his cauliflowers. He had lived here simply, with 12 cattle and his dog. His parents before him had run a market garden on the fertile, south-facing slopes. A man of few words, he would famously say. ‘You can't live off the view,’ but it was this very prospect that decided things for us. Looking upstream to the line of beech where the sun sets at the head of the valley, our views are open and uninterrupted. The land is parcelled by field hedges, each with a spring running in the ditch alongside it.

The inspiration for the cultivated garden has been drawn from the land that we have ‘relaxed’ and nurtured for enriched biodiversity: soft hedges, the spill from hedgerow and a meadow. Two-thirds of the original pasture has been over-seeded with local wildflower mix that suits our alkaline ground and is now being refined as meadow. 

The fastest running spring has been fenced off from grazing and is being managed as species-rich wetland. The wild angelica and filipendula that grow among the grasses here are our influence, and the cultivated garden is a deliberate echo of this wild place, so your eve can travel from one to the other without jarring. Selinum wallichianum and Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’ help make this transition in the garden.

Though it took five years to plan towards the garden that sits with us now, I set to that first winter in 2010 and walked the land to understand its folds and aspect. It is important to plan carefully for the future and not to rush into things, but it is also important to make a start with those elements that take time to grow. The orchard was planted that first winter, in the fields beyond the barns so that it would provide shelter from the prevailing westerlies.

Below, a nuttery of cobs and filberts was introduced on the edge of the wood by the stream. The first spring here, I extended the farmer’s cauliflower patch with a plot of vegetables and annuals. This temporary garden became the text bed for a trail of plants that would cope with the exposure and helped me to set the tone for what felt right here. And my ark of plants from our precious garden also showed me what our open, south-facing slopes were made of.

I am a great believer that joy is mostly in the process, so I was not concerned about the project extending far ahead of us. This was a chance to engage with the land wholeheartedly, to settle ourselves in by making the place work for the way we wanted to live. We knew we would have to pace ourselves and work within our resources, but it is ultimately our time that has been the greatest measure of what we can achieve. The intensively tended garden, and the places we tend to with a lighter touch, have to be managed at the weekend and in any snatched time in the working week.

Living in the midst of the landscape, we are immersed in the continuous change of the seasons. The cultivated garden enriches this connection and extends our indigenous vegetation to both ends of the year in the shoulder seasons. The plum harvest is the segue from summer to autumn, with pears then neatly taking over, followed by the run of apples.

We watch to get the cobnuts before the squirrels do and we work hard in the kitchen garden to pickle and freeze and store for the coming winter. The autumn months are slowed in the garden. It has reached its peak and though we are still busy planting bulbs and collecting seed to sow and overwinter in the frames, it is a time to take stock and look around. The softened light is held in the grasses, which are high now.

Molinia caerulea ‘Transparent’ hold the centre of the garden, and the Panicum virgatum ‘Rehbraun’ continues a connection out and beyond the garden, while the most ornamental miscanthus is held closer to the buildings. Suspended among the grasses and seed heads of sanguisorba, stand the last tapers of the Verbena macdougalii ‘Lavender Spries’ and the first colour of Vernonia arkansana ‘Mammuth’. The undercurrent of creamy Eurybia divaricata begins the aster season and the relay of autumn bulbs — colchicum and cyclamen first, then hesperantha, which will take the garden through to the end of the season.