May in the English countryside is a lesson in green. From cow parsley-lined lanes to clouds of hawthorn, it’s an edge-of-anarchy rush of new life and leafy abundance. Translating this profusion into a garden setting is a fearsome challenge. Something of the green-man quality is too easily lost, which is why the garden at Yews Farm in Somerset comes as such a delicious surprise.
At sunrise in late spring and early summer, it’s a rolling concert in green. Curved box sculptures are set across the garden like a mid-game chess board, while all around them rises the tide of leafy perennials, all contrasting shapes and textures with the lightest smattering of flowers.
This astonishing quarter-acre garden is the creation of garden designer Louise Dowding and her husband, Fergus. They discovered the farmhouse in 1996 after two long years of property hunting. “It’s in a
