Throughout a chilly and intensely moist English spring, we revisited Gravetye Manor. The bucolic Sussex property—with 36 acres of flower gardens, meadows, combined borders, lawns, and an unlimited one and a half acre elliptical walled kitchen backyard—surrounds a rustic home lodge that’s set in a wider 1,000-acre property. All of it was as soon as owned and nurtured by the prolific Victorian author and backyard maker William Robinson, whose books espoused naturalistic planting and gardening in tune with nature.
For the previous 13 years, the prodigiously proficient Tom Coward has overseen a workforce of six different gardeners to revive and reimagine this heritage backyard. The Nice Dixter alumnus has reinvigorated the kitchen backyard, which was coated in brambles and weeds by the point he arrived right here in 2010, and injected vigor and bravura planting into vibrant borders and electrifying meadows. Even on a humid, cool spring day there have been recent concepts in all instructions.