CORINNE Hewat could teach us all a thing or two about gardening such as that there's no point in having coniptions when your tasteful herbaceous border suddenly becomes spangled with dayglo pink Lychnis coronaria. She knows that plants have their own ideas, and you're lucky if they agree with you once in a while.
"Aren't they bold I never put them there," she says as she surveys the gaudy crimson interlopers rising boisterously above the muted gathering of diascia, achillea, veronicastrum, sidalcea and other well dressed characters. "You can't plan a garden, can you? It just sort of happens."
But in Corinne's rambling three quarter acre, the things that "sort of happen" are often such happy accidents she leaves them be. In a once white area which she blithely calls her Sissinghurst alter the famous white garden at Vita Sackville West's home in Kent numbers of decidedly not white blooms have crept in, notably purplish alliums and a rich plum pink poppy. "But how could you throw that little fellow out?" she says warmly, and the poppy beams back at her, reprieved.
And Corinne's vegetable garden poppies, nasturtiums and verbascum it's hard to pick out the functional crops. But in the midst of all the flowery abandon there are plump broadbeans, sugar snap peas, spinach, broccoli, courgettes, squash, lettuce, rhubarb and herbs.
But lest it all sounds like a terrific muddle, it's not the garden has a good strong structure that maintains a firm grip on the unrestrained plant life. Straight gravel paths divide the space into definite areas, a long pergola, draped in clematis and roses, gives height, and various clipped hedges including a long "box sausage" and a tight beech screen lend an air of near formality.
Many shrubs and trees are here also sumac, maple, pittosporum, golden privet, fuchsia, birch, apple and cotinus. "I was lucky they were here when we moved in. I find shrubs desperately boring," admits Corinne. "I'm just jolly glad that that's there," and she waves at the cotinus the smoke bush whose inflorescences are making a dramatic haze behind her herbaceous border. "The lawn was here already. My husband, Richard, loves it to death. He does all the grass, but nobody sets foot in the flower beds but me."
What is it about men that they like attending to the grass? With out hesitation, Corinne supplies the answer, "They like tidy things and red flowers" And so, for Richard's amusement while he is grooming the grass, Corinne has planted a bundle of red flowers around the lawn the ecclesiastical Bishop of Llandaff dahlia, the bright red potentilla and the delicate fern leaved Aqui legia skinneri.
This is a garden which reflects the immense good humour and sense of fun of the gardener. Who else would have the cheeky aplomb to position two Portland stone greyhounds so often seen guarding the steps of would be grand houses in the middle of a clump of cottage garden Shasta daisies, with ridiculous ivy ruffs around their noble necks?