Herman is also especially generous with the details, like a friend offering insightful advice. For example, here’s her precise description of her pool: “The pool measures 12 by 24 feet, mirroring the dimensions of the original gamecock house, now a dining pavilion. Three inch-thick, rock-faced bluestone coping edges the pool, which is finished in a French gray plate.” Likewise, her notes on plants are conversational and useful, like when she describes Orlaya grandiflora, Herman tells the reader, “It self-sows easily, making groupings achievable, but is not problematic or invasive.”
Above: Herman is especially fond of umbels like the vibrant Zizia aurea. Photograph by Neil Landino, from A Moment in Time.
Herman is clearly a devoted plantswoman. The book features many hero shots of specific plants (all helpfully labeled). Of those close-up moments, she tells us, “I think it’s really important to have that sense of intimacy, paired with big, broad shots for context.” Herman says there easily could have been more, noting “it is about all those individual pieces that make up the greater whole.” Herman has included a Resources section at the back of the book with all her favorite places to buy plants, seeds, and garden ornaments, which will be of particular interest to gardeners in her region.
Above: Peony ‘Sarah Bernhardt’ is paired with the deep pink of Tanacetum coccineum. Photograph by Neil Landino, from A Moment in Time.
This book will appeal to anyone with an appreciation for formal, English-inspired gardens, but is also a surprisingly intimate book that any seasoned gardener will relate to.
Above: A Moment in Time: Designing a Country Garden by Kathryn Herman is available wherever books are sold including Bookshop.org.
All week, we’re revisiting the most popular stories of 2025, including this one from May.
A transportive garden can owe as much to a magical setting as to the plantings. At the garden of brothers and award-winning garden designers Harry and David Rich, the surrounding landscape ramps up those feelings before a visitor even sets foot in the garden. Nestled deep in Welsh woodland, this is a fairytale cottage fully immersed in nature—including roving herds of sheep—where access is possible only by bridge over a stream, a tributary of the River Wye.
The atmospheric garden is one of 18 featured in my new book Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home, in which I explore the private spaces of leading landscape designers, revealing how their own homes become testbeds for their professional projects; these are spaces for the slow evolution of ideas, schemes, and plant combinations, as well as private idylls where they can retreat from the world. Some are grand projects created over decades, but many, like Harry and David’s cottage garden, are hands-on gardens created with limited resources in the past few years.
Photography by Éva Németh.
Above: A run of pleached crabapple trees dissects the space and creates a link from the building to the garden.
Harry relocated from London to the secluded cottage just north of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, where he now lives with his wife, Sue, and their two children. But the garden has always been a shared project between the two brothers, who together became the youngest winners of a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012, when Harry had just formed his landscape architecture firm and David was still at university. They went on to create two more gardens at the show, winning another gold medal in 2014.
Above: Plantings are taken right up to the cottage walls, increasing the sense of full immersion in greenery.
When Donald and Charlotte Molesworth first arrived at their small Kent cottage more than three decades ago, there was a derelict house and an almost totally blank canvas. The plot had once been the kitchen garden of an estate that belonged to “Cherry” Ingram, the great Victorian plant hunter. It may have looked like a wasteland, but it was one with fertile soil that had been improved over centuries.
What the couple have created since then is nothing short of extraordinary: a flourishing garden that centers around Charlotte’s awe-inspiring topiary and a cluster of small buildings (including a holiday cottage to rent) in the beautiful Kent landscape. On a rainy day we joined Charlotte for a tour of Balmoral Cottage:
Above: The house and garden is almost entirely hidden from view, which makes the magical entrance under an arch of hornbeam and down a path of ball-topped boxwood, even more tantalizing.
Balmoral Cottage is down an unmade track and tucked away behind St George’s church in the picture-postcard village of Benenden. Charlotte insists there was no masterplan when they began the garden. They requested yew seedlings as their wedding gifts and they planted them all before transplanting them at a later date.
Above: All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.
Charlotte’s horticultural talent is in her blood. Her father was a farmer on the nearby North Downs and her mother was a plantswoman who grew and sold primulas and had a love of yew. It was her aunt, another talented gardener, who first planted the seed, of training topiary. Charlotte’s skills and her garden have grown organically.
Above: Charlotte’s advice for those starting a garden is to think vertically: “When you start a garden, I think it’s the one thing that you often don’t think about, yet it’s this structure that is so valuable in the garden.”
Almost everything here has been grown, recycled, or rescued (“We are great scavengers,” admits Charlotte). The greenhouses have been built using unwanted materials destined for the scrap heap; the polytunnels were rescued. Even some of the garden’s most beautiful trees (including some stunning Malus Huphensis) were picked up as tiny seedlings on walks through the next-door estate many years ago. The large Pinus radiata and Scot’s pine that edge the garden also contribute to a wonderful borrowed landscape.
Above: The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.
She’s very picky about plant hygiene as her garden is currently untouched by the ravages of box blight. She uses an organic treatment of effective microorganisms to keep the plants healthy and she is fanatical when pruning, sterilizing tools as she trims with a bleach solution. When she works on other people’s gardens, she will not only sterilize all her tools when she gets home, she will also wash all her clothes and take a shower, to ensure that no disease or harmful blight spores can travel with her.
Let us count the many reasons we love Butter Wakefield, the Maryland-born, London-based garden designer who has won numerous prestigious awards for her exuberant projects (twice at the Chelsea Flower Show!). 1) She has no fear of color (her home is as bright and joyful as her gardens). 2) No outdoor space is too tiny for her—in fact, small city backyards are her forte. 3) She designs gardens as one would design interiors, that is, with attention to texture, palette, balance, and comfort. 4) Then, of course, there’s that ridiculously charming name (a childhood moniker that has blessedly stuck). Is there any question we’d be fans?
Read on to learn the pros who inspire her (it’s a who’s who of British designers), the dreamy garden object on her wish list, and best of all, images of her own compact West London backyard. And if you find yourself wanting still more Butter in your life, be sure to sign up for her just-launched online course on “Small Garden Design” with the Create Academy.
My maternal grandfather had the most spectacular gardens in the gorgeous countryside outside of Philadelphia. They were gloriously flower-filled and curiously very English in style and design. I loved wandering around and through them as a girl, and loved the colour-rich tapestry he created.
Above: Don’t have space to plant a tree? Consider a potted tree.
Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:
Working for friends is often so much more difficult than one ever imagines.
Favorite gardening hack:
Plunging small pots in large buckets of water through out the summer, it’s the quickest best way to water them.
Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.
Above: Potted roses.
Growing a range of reliable cut flowers in pots is something I always try to include in every scheme. It’s a hugely joyful undertaking to step outside, cut flowers and bring fresh blooms indoors. It is certianly my favourite way to start the weekend.
Just when we were learning to live with box blight, the box tree caterpillar is laying waste to the remains. On the Royal Horticultural Society’s web page ‘Box: Problems’ it is clear that there are many other sap-sucking insects queuing up to destroy anyone’s dream of an English country garden.
The solution, unsurprisingly, is to plant something else. There is no consensus on what this should be: Ilex crenata, a boxwood lookalike, is often put forward, though it is less easygoing about soil conditions. Other common suggestions for small-leaved, easy to clip shrubs include Lonicera nitida, Teuchrium chamaedrys, and Euonymus japonicus. We visited the RHS headquarters at Wisley, Surrey (an hour from London) and found a few surprises. Let’s take a closer look:
Ed. note: These suggestions are meant for UK gardens–some of these plants are categorized as invasive in the USA, so use caution.
Dwarf Yew
Above: Above: The most surprising discovery was that a walled garden, divided into beds of low hedging, could be so lively and colorful in winter.
Waves of shrubs interweave into informal knots, yet every plant is sign-posted and on trial. The most interesting boxwood alternatives in this trial are not imitations, like a vegetarian burger; instead they bring a new perspective altogether.
All of the parterre beds in the garden are edged with the dwarf yew Taxus baccata ‘Repandens’. Already carrying an RHS Award of Garden Merit, it is moderate in size compared with regular yew, with a shorter growth rate. “I think it has great potential,” says Matthew Pottage, the young curator at Wisley.
Berberis
Above: Red, orange and purple berberis are a standout in autumn and early winter.
Of the deciduous varieties, orange Berberis thunbergii ‘Erecta’ is shown here, mid-drop, while its red counterpart Berberis thunbergii ‘Orange Rocket’ competes for attention. An evergreen type is Berberis thunbergii ‘Compacta’, which the trial manager Sean McDill is very happy with. “I like this berberis,” he says. “It has a nice, compact habit and after a couple of clips it has a dense, dark green surface.”
