(Left) The archway
is covered in The Garland, a vigorous, highly fragrant, rambler
rose that flowers in late June. (Above) The Gothic
arch in the door leading from the house to the garden frames
an enticing view of pastel-pink roses and pale-blue catmint.
Outdoors, Geoffrey began making a garden. Although inexperienced in garden
design when he began, Geoffrey had a sense of design and an eye for quality. He
set about creating a garden that would be in harmony with the country setting
as well as with the Gothic-style cottage it was to surround. “The challenge,” says Geoffrey, “was to make the most of the setting and to enhance the assets so that the garden
complemented the house. I didn’t want gimmicks or to bow to horticultural fashion. Both Val and I echo Nancy
Lancaster, who loved to quip, ‘Fashion is for those who have no taste.’”
A traditionalist, Geoffrey sought mentors from two giants of literature and
garden design: eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope and Edwardian author and
garden designer Vita Sackville-West. Pope encouraged a picturesque style of
gardening, describing it in a 1713 article as the “amiable simplicity of unadorned nature.” Almost two centuries later, Sackville-West described the ideal English garden
as having the “strictest formality of design with the maximum informality of planting.”
The Cridlands’ garden measures up to those standards admirably. To unite the house and garden,
Geoffrey designed features that echo elements of the house. The front gate features the pointed,
Gothic arches also seen in the cottage windows, and the brick walls within the
garden match the house’s brick. Climbing and rambling roses and the American native Virginia creeper
scramble over the house walls, adding lush softness to the scene.
Hedges and walls surround the two-acre garden and provide support for additional
roses. Within these confines, Geoffrey used hedges and rose arbors to create
walls and thresholds that define garden rooms. Flower-lined paths with
intersecting axes lead the eye to the rolling fields beyond the garden, while a
hornbeam avenue provides a secret, enclosed space. The symmetry and structure
mean the garden looks attractive in winter, but in June it blossoms into all
its glory, with roses galore and other English cottage flowers including
lavender, catmint, hardy geranium, and foxgloves.
After ten years of renting, the couple had the opportunity to purchase the first
cottage; a decade later they purchased the second and united the two into one
home with the two-acre garden. Later they bought the land across the lane from
the house, and there Geoffrey developed a wild garden with masses of narcissi,
cowslips, primroses, and camassia growing under beech and oak trees. The paths
mown through the wild grass are cut at angles, thus leading the eye across the
meadow and up the gentle slope to the horizon where an oak tree provides a
striking focal point and a reminder that in a garden, man improves on nature by
the artful positioning of plants and trees.
Realizing he had a gift for garden design, Geoffrey parlayed his skills into a
business, starting a landscape design company in 1997. Since then, he has
designed both city and country gardens for scores of clients in England and
abroad, and his own garden has been open to the public annually as a part of
the National Gardens Scheme, a tour of gardens throughout England and Wales. “In a world where so much is dark,” Geoffrey says, “a garden should embody and express all that is attractive and uplifting in life
without brashness or ostentation.”
