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Spring brings the start of the garden-visiting season for us. This year, one of our first visits was to Columbine Hall, a timber-framed house built in about 1390. It was originally the gatehouse of a medieval manor-house and stands beside an even older defensive moat.
This attractive historic home had its gardens open to visitors as part of the ‘Great Garden Trail’ in aid of Suffolk’s St Elizabeth Hospice. The gardens here were begun by owner Hew Stevenson and his late wife, Leslie Geddes-Brown and developed with the aid of their head gardener, Kate Elliott.
Columbine Hall’s gardens have a dreamy air. The ancient house is surrounded by its moat and gardens (which are a mix of formal and very informal), with views to open fields and the Suffolk countryside.
Traditional lawns surrounded by tall clipped hedges (above) provide calm, quiet spaces which contrast with the wilder, nature-inspired parts of the grounds. I particularly loved the area in the below, right-hand photo. Here white and ‘Spring Green’ tulips mingled their way through cow parsley, below rows of pleached limes.
There are a number of different areas to the garden. A parterre provides a formally-structured area near the house, with rows of pleached trees, clipped cubes of box, and climbers on obelisks. In summer it will be full of flowers, including irises, alliums, hardy geraniums, lavender and Alchemilla mollis.
Nearby, the planting gradually becomes wilder and less formal as it gets closer to the edge of the moat. In a couple of weeks or so, the cow parsley in this area will have reached its full height and its mass of tiny white flowers will create a wild and romantic froth.
Outside the space encircled by the moat are other gardens. There is a bog garden, where moisture-loving plants grow, and a walled kitchen garden which, in summer, will be full of colourful vegetables, roses, dahlias and sweet peas. There is also an orchard – which was in full of blossom when we visited – and a Mediterranean garden. (You can see part of both in the photograph above.)
A few weeks earlier the garden’s collection of Engleheart daffodils would have been in flower. (Columbine Hall holds a part of the National Plant Collection of daffodils bred by Rev. G.H. Engleheart in Victorian times.) Now though, it’s the tulips that demand attention in this garden. (Thousands of tulips are planted every year by Kate Elliott and her assistants.)
There are tulips of a wide range of colours in the garden, even in the vegetable garden, where white tulips look very well with the bold silvery leaves of cardoons. My own favourites amongst the tulips were the dark, reddish-black ones, which you can see below. (I have ‘Black Parrot’ and ‘Queen of Night’ in my garden, as well as the white and green ‘Spring Green’.)
My visit to Columbine Hall was thoroughly enjoyable and it gave me both inspiration and food for thought. Seeing the gardens there has encouraged me to wonder how I can combine wild and cultivated plants in my own garden. It would surely make it more appealing to wildlife if I did. I wouldn’t have thought that tulips would look so at home with cow parsley, but it works and looks really lovely. At the same time it provides a better habitat for wildlife.
I hope I’ll get the chance to visit Columbine Hall again. It would be very interesting to see how it looks later in the year. I’m sure it will be beautiful in summertime. I’ll be keeping a lookout to see when their next garden-opening is!
Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature 
I love this
What a wonderful garden! The mix of formal and informal areas, along with the tulips and cow parsley, provide a dreamy and romantic atmosphere. It’s inspiring to see how wild and cultivated plants can be combined to provide a better habitat for wildlife.
Eamon O’Keeffe
Easy Landscape Gardening
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That’s just how I felt too, Eamon. It’s a lovely place and shows that there can be a place for wild plants in our gardens. (I’m trying to garden for wildlife, so that’s a great thing for me to learn.)
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White tulips would indeed look fabulous with cardoon foliage, that’s a great combination. A garden where you can really stretch your legs and have a great wander.. perfect!
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It was a wonderful place to spend some time – could easily have stayed for much longer! Hopefully they’ll be doing the open gardens again next year so I’ll have the chance of another visit. 🙂
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You must be happy indeed to begin touring gardens again.
Even after some online searching, this American is having trouble understanding exactly what a gatehouse range is. You also sent me to the dictionary for “pleached”.
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I loved it Steve! A gatehouse range is a group of buildings that act as a secure entry point to somewhere much grander. There would have been a substantial medieval building by it long ago, but that has entirely gone. ‘Pleaching’ is a way of pruning the lower branches from trees and shaping the upper growth to produce something that looks a bit like a hedge on stilts – it’s an old formal garden feature. 🙂
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This was such an amazing garden.and such an historic house . Thanks Anita
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Thank you Anita – it was a great place to visit! 🙂
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It looks like a wonderful space to visit. But it might be dangerous, too, as trying to copy it in your own garden might cost you time, nerves, and money! 😊
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LOL, true! But copying anything would be severely limited in my small space! 🙂
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What a marvelous garden. Your photos have really captured so many aspects of this special place. I LOVE the first photo with the reflection!
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I could have spent a lot longer there and taken more photos – so I really need to go back! 🙂 The house itself is exceedingly photogenic.
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Yes!!
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I’m familiar with gatehouses and coach houses, but ‘gatehouse range’ made no sense to me at all. Then I bumped into ‘parterre’ and ‘pleached.’ At first I thought ‘pleached’ was an example of spellcheck run amok, and that you were talking about peach trees. Even better, ‘clipped cubes of box’ evoked a pile of cut-up cardboard boxes! I think I’m all straightened out now. I did wonder if there are American English words with the same meaning; perhaps these simply are gardening terms I’ve not run into before. I do think I remember us discussing ‘parterre,’ but the meaning didn’t stick.
Those formal lawns just don’t appeal to me, but those wilder areas are glorious. Sometimes the most highly bred flowers don’t appeal, either — but that green and white tulip that has the pinwheel shape is wonderful. The variety of settings is interesting. I certainly wouldn’t have expected a bog garden!
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LOL, it didn’t occur to me that these terms, which are common here wouldn’t be able to cross the Atlantic. I should have explained them but was too deeply involved to see a possible problem. (Gatehouse range simply meant a range of buildings rather than a simple single building that acted as an entry point for a much larger and grander building. That grander building has gone.) Box is a hedging plant that’s used a lot here, especially for topiary. (It’s easier to clip to shape and looks good but now is threatened by disease.) I guess that our formal garden styles, often used for historic buildings, are very different to elsewhere…or else our terms are just very different! 🙂
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Looks lovely. I sometimes get a bit depressed by highly regimented, formal gardens, so it’s good to see here the blend of formal and informal. The setting of the building is great, though that moat must be a bit of a problem when you need to clean the windows!
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Hehe, I wonder how they manage that! They must be the most awkward of windows when it comes to cleaning them. Like you, I prefer gardens that don’t feel regimented and I do like gardens that feel closer to nature. (One of the gardeners told me that he saw a hare in the garden recently. 🙂 )
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That looks like an awesome place. Is the house open to the public or is it just the gardens?
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The house wasn’t open when we visited, but they do occasional guided tours. The gardens have open days for the hospice and are open by appointment for groups…I reckon I’ll be back next year! 🙂
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Pity I can’t really get there. Looks idyllic.
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