A cottage garden on a grand scale

The garden had to suit the house – and the house is a Bavarian four-sided farmstead with a timber balcony and geraniums. So it became a cottage garden, only on a grand scale: clipped hedges framing the beds, a natural stone fountain in the centre, rose arches with benches – and in between, perennial beds where bellflowers, marguerites and roses are free to grow into one another.

In the centre stands a beautiful natural stone fountain. It is the point everything leads to: the hedges frame it, the paths run around it, the beds rise up towards it. You only notice this when you stand in front of it – a garden needs a place where the eye can come to rest. Everything else then falls into place by itself.

And this garden changes with the year. In May the irises bloom blue among the box shapes, in June the roses arrive in apricot and rosé, and in summer marguerites and bellflowers grow so thickly that you can no longer see the ground. In winter the structure remains: hedges, paving, the stone of the fountain. That is the advantage of a garden built from shapes rather than just flowers – it still looks like a garden in February.

The real effort lies in the ground. 109 m² of granite crazy paving, 195 m² of small-sett paving in arcs, plus reclaimed small setts in rows and 95 m² of granite slabs: all done by hand, stone by stone, with no right angle to fall back on. And the green structure is a sum in itself – almost 680 beech plants in three deliveries, 55 yews, over a thousand ground-cover plants. Anyone who plants hedges in these numbers is really planting rooms.

A note from us: back then, 182 box plants also went into the garden – today we no longer plant box, since box tree moth and box blight have made it a risk. What we use instead can be found under box alternatives. The garden was built in 2009 and 2010; Miquel Tres's photographs show it in August 2011. More on the craft: Paving in arcs · Privacy screening & hedges.

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Photos: Miquel Tres