This ‘Italianate’ Arts and Crafts garden was designed in 1922 as a collaboration between the Architect Eric Francis and Henry Avray Tipping, an architectural historian and garden designer. Perched overlooking the Severn Estuary, Wyndcliffe Court survives as a beautifully unaltered time warp.

Garden rooms playfully transverse the different levels of the steeply sloping site, masterfully drawing you through the spaces whilst gradually revealing surprises – woodland rills, a circular sunken room, lily pond and summerhouse.

SPL was invited to restore the rose garden in 2018. Over the years, the existing boarders (narrow in comparison to the immense scale of surroundings) had become barren supporting only a few disease-ridden roses. The original crazy paving stone pathways remained alongside kooky ‘Alice in Wonderland’ topiary. Exuberant, romantic and robust plantings of annuals, perennials, bulbs and roses brought new life and atmosphere to the garden.

The roses are a mix of early-flowering species, shrub and rugosa roses, including favourites of the client’s such as ‘Lady Curzon’, a pale pink hybrid rugosa, and Rosa ‘Partridge’, a groundcover rose with small, shiny leaves and simple, delicate white blooms. Roses and herbaceous clematis trained over dome shaped hazel structures mimic the shape and proportions of the topiary, whilst grasses, asters and clematis extend flowering detail through to the winter frosts.