Perhaps the greatest place to start is with the Great Meadow, a seven-acre hay meadow that fronts the elegant 17th-century home that serves as the centerpiece of this magnificent estate. Once in the meadow, it is hard to avoid following one of the meandering trails that snake through an ocean of fragrant, swaying grasses that dance with the lacy, flat heads of pignut and the eye-catching spires of sorrel.
The happy surprise of Brook Manor, the ardent environmentalists Donna and Kevin Cox’s house, is that it’s a wildlife sanctuary as well as an inspiring, well designed garden. Birdsong fills the air from sunrise to sunset, and its planting is renowned for its skill and intuition. In an enclosed courtyard, a fluttering of yellow Welsh poppies raises a dark palette of deep purple Iris ‘Superstition’ and Aquilegia vulgaris ‘Ruby Port,’ before shoals of them flee across the cobbles to nestle under yew domes.
The Great Meadow was “mown like a bowling green” and the historic woods was overrun with invasive laurel and Rhododendron ponticum when the Coxes arrived in 2006. A local meadow, which serves as an example for the transformation attainable with a change in management, was visited by Donna at the invitation of an ecologist from Dartmoor National Park. I was astounded. Orchids covered it entirely, according to her. “I was hoping we could replicate the same thing over at Brook.”
Wet Meadow on the estate is now only grazed for two months in the fall, as opposed to being grazed year-round. The outcomes were remarkable. “Ten years later, there were over 1,000 southern marsh orchids, compared to just one at the beginning,” claims Donna. She says that the Great Meadow was sowed with semi-parasitic yellow rattle, which weakens grass and makes room for wildflowers to establish themselves. She advises doing nothing for the first year and seeing what emerges. After that, a schedule of cutting hay in August and bringing cattle in to graze the regrowth in October was put in place. Green hay rich in species was now transplanted from surrounding meadows into three-meter-square rotovated blocks. “You have to strew the hay the day it’s cut to retain the seed, so you need to work fast,” the person says.
For example, it takes five years to determine if the night-scented larger butterfly-orchid has taken hold, but once it has, you can be sure that night-flying moths will have somewhere to collect nectar. Finding out what motivates Donna’s strategy doesn’t take long. She has Dave Goulson’s Gardening for Bumblebees with her when we first meet. With its “brilliant star-rating system for plant pollinators – agastache five stars, climbing hydrangea just two,” and its underlying message that, if we do not stop the tragic fall in insects, our whole ecosystem may collapse, she refers to the book as “an essential manual.” “At the current rate of decline, our insect population could be wiped out in the next century, not only do we have just two percent of the ancient woodland and hay meadow we had at the start of the 20th century.”
While the well-meaning gardener may blame agricultural intensification first, Donna returns the focus to your next tulip order, saying, “The use of neonicotinoids in the nursery trade is devastating to bees.” The pesticide stays in the bulb for the next two or three years after it is applied. I exclusively purchase from businesses who guarantee to provide neonicotinoid-free bulbs, such as Peter Nyssen.
Donna began creating a sequence of evocative, well-proportioned garden rooms with an organic, no-chemical, no-spray philosophy built in. Each garden room struck a perfect balance between loose, realistic planting and anchoring structure. She worked with Angela Morley, a landscape designer: “She brilliantly interpreted the ideas I’d sketched out.”
A spacious loggia with a fireplace provides a view of the exquisite, reflected Lower Pool Garden and almost hidden Upper Pool Garden, which are utilized as gathering places in all weather conditions. Up it came when the gravel in the Pool and Rill Gardens turned into a weed seed bed. In the event that the box succumbs to blight, it is replaced; if recovery is only temporary, it is chopped back and nourished. The lavender variety known as “Imperial Gem” has excelled in the romantic knot garden.
The Rill Garden is on one side and is characterized by a thin, stone-edged rill encircled by pleached Malus transitoria. Mounds of Nepeta “Six Hills Giant” and a tactile underplanting of luxuriant Hakonechloa macra complement the “ridiculously beautiful” crab apple blossoms that Donna describes as appearing in the spring.
The Meadow Garden is on the other side and has a path mowed like a fairy tale that runs through a meadow filled with wildflowers, walls covered with pink dog roses, and clouds of hawthorn blossoms. The idea of borders ceased when Donna chose to create a semi-wild meadow with early-pollinating bulbs, such Crocus tommasinianus, to connect the Great Meadow and the gaps in the hedges.
You cross the river on a charming bridge built of a home-grown oak, and you are enticed to a sea of bluebells and campion. A gate leads to the lush Kitchen Garden, which has a central tunnel filled with ‘Glou Morceau’ pear trees.
This garden extends beyond its boundaries. According to Donna, a co-founder of the Dartmoor community organization Moor Meadows, “every meadow counts.” It’s also a delightfully intimate location. Calm is enhanced by yew hedges and wooden gates, while Erigeron karvinskianus and self-seeded foxgloves cushion each foot on the cobblestone walk. This area is dynamic and beautifully landscaped, serving as a ray of optimism for all of our futures.