Photography by Jim Powell, except where noted.
Charlotte-Anne Fidler’s house in Wiltshire overlooks a valley with magical light.
Through the shuttered sash window, Charlotte’s garden has maximum light and an uninterrupted view. She was mad about clothes and plants and collected both with a connoisseurship unusual in someone just down from Oxford.
Photograph by Charlotte-Anne Fidler.
Charlotte’s garden style is unapologetically romantic and pretty, with a strong leaning toward pink, purple, and green in spring/summer.
Draping over the old front door and reaching around the corner of the house, wisteria is one of the garden’s attractions in May. Every view is considered: from windows, toward doors.
The long border which ranges along the perimeter wall, seen to the left of the view from the window. Scallop shapes have been cut from the wide expanse of lawn, the first indication of Charlotte’s way with geometry.
Where the Long Border meets two fields. The back of the garden is marked by a simple fence, where buttercups and cow parsley occasionally meeting a rose.
The eating area has been divided so that the table and chairs are surrounded by a circle of color, scent, and buzzing (the latter is of bees on the nepeta).
A cross-shape provides a vista straight from the side door toward the cutting garden, and from a cherry tree toward the monumental horse chestnut tree at the garden’s edge.
Charlotte and Matthew were so blinded by the view when they first looked at the house that they didn’t notice that the house was surrounded by asphalt.
The ancient horse chestnut tree is like four individual trees, joined by a hollow core.
Because my flower beds aren’t near the trees, the shade they cast is welcome on hot, summer days.”
A cross-section of the garden before midsummer.
Charlotte used to become despondent about the garden after June, until she discovered dahlias, which she grows in quantity in the cutting garden (along with nicotiana, zinnias, salvia, Ammi majus, A. visnaga, nigella, larkspur, and tons of sweet peas).
Charlotte and her husband, Matthew, were struggling to make sense of the asymmetrical shape of their property and benefited from the advice of garden designer Jolyon Humphreys.
Photograph by Kendra Wilson.
Naturally, different parts of the garden reach their peak at different times.
Photograph by Kendra Wilson.
A lesson in awkward-shaped gardening. Yew topiaries mitigate an acute angle outside the kitchen window, while a straight path cuts across from the old porch to a door in the wall.
Garden’s end, with Rosa ‘Albéric Barbier’, a rambler.
On the extraordinary light that floods the garden Charlotte says: “My theory is that it’s to do with being on top of a hill, so that when the sun rises and sets the light is always angled upwards.” Adding: “I regularly have to stop what I’m doing just to look at what the light is doing to the landscape and the garden.”