Desig House: Real Homes: Wardington Manor

As The Land Gardeners, Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld are establishing a reputation for designing walled gardens and growing cut flowers at their Wardington Manor base, but their real passion is compost

A passion for plants, as well as a rather healthy obsession with compost, is what brought Bridget Elworthy and Henrietta Courtauld together three years ago to form The Land Gardeners. Specialising in the __design of productive gardens - particularly walled gardens - they also run a thriving cut-flower business from Bridget's home, Wardington Manor in Oxfordshire, juggling teenage children with gardening, lecturing and designing for clients in this country and abroad.

Dressed in their daily uniform of jeans, boots and navy canvas smocks (with pockets that are big enough to hold secateurs, a ball of string and a small vase filled with water), these two women are as happy digging over their compost heaps as they are giving a talk on tulips at Soane in London, and they certainly are not afraid of getting their hands dirty.

Having met in London a dozen years ago when their children were at the same nursery, they trained separately in garden design: Henrietta at the Inchbald School of __design and Bridget at the Oxford College of Garden Design. Henrietta went on to work with landscape and garden designers Christopher Bradley-Hole and Tom Stuart-Smith, where she specialised in planting design. In her native New Zealand, Bridget grew cut flowers and experimented with biodynamic gardening on the family farm, before moving back to the UK eight years ago. Her husband Forbes runs Craigmore Sustainables, a company dedicated to sustainable farm and land management, so the couple have had an active interest in soil science and organic growing for many years.

In 2008, the Elworthys moved to Wardington Manor, a Jacobean house near Banbury that had been the home of Lord Wardington and his wife Audrey, who had been a well-known Fifties model. The house was severely damaged by a fire in 2004, but subsequently restored. A year later, Lord Wardington died and Lady Wardington moved to a house in the village and put the manor on the market. The Elworthys took over the restored house with its iconic Twenties plasterwork and spectacular wood-panelled library, as well as the 30 acres of grounds, which included a fabulous Victorian walled garden.

Bridget soon started formulating a plan to grow cut flowers in the walled garden, an enterprise that has spread to include every inch of the garden, from the traditional herbaceous borders now planted with swathes of delphiniums to the wilder reaches of the garden, where large shrubs are regularly plundered for their flowers. It's very much a working garden designed for functionality, but it manages to look effortlessly beautiful at the same time. 'This is the type of garden we like designing for others,' says Bridget. 'Productive gardens are becoming increasingly important to people, and walled gardens in particular have become our focus. We design and plant them, as well as acting as consultants to anyone wanting to run their garden in a more sustainable and economic way. But we love fun and frivolity, and design theatrical, abundant gardens that aren't too controlled.'

With Henrietta running her own garden-design studio in Notting Hill at the time, the two decided to pool their resources in 2013 and now spend time both in London and Oxfordshire. 'Henrietta comes up to Wardington one or two days a week and I go down to London once a week to work in the design studio,' explains Bridget. 'We're both still very much involved in the flower growing, which is the whole point of what we're doing.' Henrietta adds, 'You only really get to understand plants by working with them, so it's definitely the thing that we have to keep coming back to. It keeps us connected.'

Once a week, armfuls of seasonal English flowers that have been grown in the bucolic setting of the manor are packed in the back of a van and sent down the motorway to clients in London: myriad wild and cultivated blooms including tulips and honesty in spring, roses and ammi in early summer, dahlias and cosmos in late summer and autumn. They sell to florists Scarlet & Violet, Shane Connolly and Flora Starkey, among others, and have an increasing fan club of individual clients who sign up for their 'bucket scheme'. 'People leave their buckets on the doorstep and we fill it with whatever we happen to be cutting that week,' says Bridget. 'We hope we'll be able to offer vegetables soon, too.'

But despite the frills of beautiful cut flowers and exotic garden locations, the pair are adamant that what their business really boils down to is soil health. Sustainability starts with the soil, as Bridget and Forbes discovered while working on the family farm in New Zealand. 'Soil health, animal health and ultimately human health are all linked,' says Bridget. 'The two largest costs after salaries on the farm were fertilisers and animal health. If the fertilisers were working, in theory there should be no issues with animal health, so there had to be a better way to feed the soil.'

The garden at Wardington is run completely organically, without the use of pesticides or artificial fertilisers, but sustainability is about adding goodness as well as taking away the chemicals, and this is where the interest in soil and compost comes in. 'It's all to do with a plant's resilience,' says Henrietta. 'The right nutrients in the soil help to protect it from disease - and when you grow plants, nutrients are constantly being depleted, so you need to replace them with compost or manure.'

Over the past year or two, the pair have been intensively researching composting methods, talking to experts and organising compost workshops at Wardington Manor. 'There's a lot of research going on at the moment into the benefits of certain soil microbes on human health and well-being,' says Bridget. Intriguingly, there may indeed be a natural antidepressant present in the soil. It has been found that the soil microbe Mycobacterium vaccae appears to stimulate serotonin production, which makes you feel happier and more relaxed - so getting your hands dirty while gardening or turning your compost heaps every day may not be such a bad thing.

The Land Gardeners have been talking to the Soil Association about ways to connect growers with their community, as well as the possibility of introducing a listing system for historic gardens. 'Ultimately, our aim is to build a network of specialists in soil health and microbiology, so we can spread the word about how to look after soil to farmers or gardeners,' says Bridget. Down-to-earth is undoubtedly the best expression to use in describing this compost-crusading pair, who have made it their mission to educate and inform people about soil health as the key to a successful, beautiful and productive garden. Definitely time to go and turn my own compost heaps…

The Land Gardeners: thelandgardeners.com