Piano Garden, Lewes, East Sussex
Commissioned by a highly successful musician, The Piano Garden is designed to inspire, give space to, and nourish the creativity of its primary user, who looks out onto it as she sits at the piano.
A dream project for any English garden designer, the brief asked that we design a garden that flows from country house to river, includes a balance of planting through gravel meandering paths, changes in level as it progresses, and is marked by the sound of water.
Making the most of the relationship between garden and courtyard, we kept any hard landscaping to the minimum, ensuring a clean backdrop for abundant planting, and introduced a green oak pergola across the back of the garden as a means of framing the space. This was a design that had to tease out and build on the space’s past and position.
To this end, the planting plan includes a range of drought tolerant plants – evergreen, shrub, climber, hardy perennials, grasses and bulbs – year round interest. Olive, lavender and rosemary gives the garden its loose evergreen structure. Grasses ground and give shape to the likes of geranium and sea thrift, which drift across the garden. Spires of verbascum, salvia and foxglove erupting from the gravel, providing vertical drama. Native species abound, especially towards the boundaries, allowing the garden flow into the river and the surrounding landscape.
Requiring a relatively light hand, the garden has matured beautifully over the years.
