Chapelside

About Chapelside

The immediate backdrop here of the Lake District fells is always the primary consideration in design and planting choices. Key elements are the enclosing field walls, together with the creative use of stone more widely, often with water. Winds are certainly harassing, but you couldn’t wish to be snug in sheltering rooms in such a fine setting. Just look across and through the beds and borders or over the big pond to the hills close by.

In Claire Takacs’s book Dreamscapes, a glorious photographic gallery of gardens worldwide, much the smallest featured is Chapelside. The listed farmhouse, fine barns and outbuildings
stand comfortably in their acre plot. We share occupancy with house martins, frogs, newts and red squirrels.

This garden is a peaceful place, respectful of its location, full of colour, form and texture, yet within a relaxed regime allowing self-seeding and the quirkiness of the unexpected. You will find both familiar and less usual plants: ferns, hostas, hellebores, alpines, anemones and meconopsis all feature. Orchids have arrived, surprising but welcome. An informal area under the fell has mixed trees and a meadow slope with bulbs. Our approach is organic: some compost, lots of leaf mould … perhaps more moss than grass.

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