The garden of designer Bunny Guinness

With the return of her series on designers' gardens, Clare Foster visits Bunny Guinness in Cambridgeshire, where an elegant formal garden forms the nucleus of a productive smallholding

Bunny Guinness is known to many of us as one of the voices of the well-loved Radio 4 series Gardeners' Question Time. She writes a regular column in The Sunday Telegraph and runs a busy landscape-architecture practice with her daughter Unity. She also finds time to grow her own fruit and vegetables, as well as look after a small herd of Dexter cattle, a flock of Soay sheep and several Oxford Sandy and Black pigs. 'We're as self-sufficient as we can be,' says Bunny. 'My husband farmed before he became an accountant, and we have always had livestock, so we have our own meat and eggs, and I grow a fair bit of what we need in the vegetable garden. We eat what's in season.'

Her garden, laid out around a charming stone-built house near Peterborough, is a model of well-ordered efficiency, with half an acre or so of formal garden around the house, and a further eight acres of orchard, woodland and pasture for the livestock. Bunny started making the garden in 1984, when there was nothing here but fields and concrete, beginning by dividing up the empty space and creating structure. 'It was an open, windy site, so the first thing I did was plant a shelter belt of trees and yew hedges across the field. I was on a budget, so many hedges were grown from cuttings.'

She also put in twin avenues of pleached hornbeam in the pool garden at the back of the house to frame the elegant geometric pond. They, too, were literally twigs when they first went in, but are now neatly trained overhead to create shady tunnels.

All around the garden, this network of hedges and topiary creates a strong framework that gives the garden plenty of interest in autumn and winter. Carefully structured around the house, the garden is designed to be glimpsed through windows and is set out in harmony with the building. 'I always like the garden and house to have a strong relationship,' says Bunny. 'A garden is seen from the house, so it needs to be planned with this in mind. Then it's all about creating different spaces, a sense of enclosure.'

Gradually, paths and terraces were added as budgets allowed, a mixture of setts, paving slabs and ammonites in ornamental patterns to bring texture and interest to the ground plane. One of the most intimate parts of the garden is the courtyard at the front of the house, enclosed on three sides by the house and outbuildings, and on the fourth side by a tall yew hedge inset with stone pillars. Here, jewel-like mixed borders and knee-high box hedges (rounded at the top rather than clipped into regimented lines) surround a central seating area paved in a chequerboard of setts with a central square of ammonites. Structures also form part of the hard landscaping of the garden - an ornate fruit cage, a thatched cobb  summer house in the children's garden, and the classiest pigsty you have ever seen. It is this attention to detail and sense of fun that is the trademark of Bunny's design, whether for herself or her clients.

The kitchen garden, of course, is central. Rather than being banished to the far end of the property, it is exactly where a vegetable garden ought to be: right outside the kitchen. It is definitely more potager than vegetable plot, with stone and gravel paths, raised beds and espaliered apple trees giving it a decorative structure, and colourful flowers woven in and out of the vegetables throughout the summer. Bunny mixes crops up rather than following a strict rotation. 'I tend not to put all the similar things together, as you're supposed to do, so I'll grow a few runner beans here, a few there, and throw everything in together. It seems to work.' The kitchen garden and indeed all the rest of the garden is designed to be low maintenance, and is managed on one day each week by Bunny, with help from gardener Emmeline Thrower. 'Raised beds make everything so much easier, and I do little bits whenever I can. I might go out there in the evening with a glass of wine. For me, growing vegetables is as automatic as putting the washing in the machine; it's just something that gets done and I love it.'

From the kitchen garden, it is only a few steps to the paddock, where Bunny's indulged Dexters jostle by the gate for carrot tops. The animals are very much part of the landscape. From the central breathing space of lawn, a ha-ha gives an unbroken view out into the fields, where the horned Soay sheep form a picturesque huddle in shades of coffee and cream. Chickens, dogs, cats and bees round off Bunny's much-loved menagerie, all forming part of her daily routine, and existing alongside humans and plants in happy harmony.

This garden is integral to Bunny's work as a landscape architect, a shop window for clients who come to see it and a place in which she experiments with planting and other __design ideas. 'I change my plant combinations every year, so use a lot of annuals and dahlias, which I lift each winter. I love tender plants like salvias, which you can put out in later spring to add to the garden.'

More than anything else, though, the garden is an antidote to the pressures of a busy working life. 'I need my gardening days,' says Bunny. 'Gardening really takes your mind away from everything else, and it gives me the exercise and fresh air that I need. And there's always something new to try. You always think you're about to get to the stage when the garden feels finished, but it never is'. 

Bunny Guinness - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Pond - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Outdoor Dining Table - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Topiary - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Outdoor Dining Area - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Outdoor Dining Set - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Hedged Garden - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Fruit Tree - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Garden Path - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Plant Pot - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Pig Shed - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Garden Gate - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Cows - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden

Kitchen Garden - Bunny Guinness' Cambridgeshire Garden