Ashcombe Vale · 2025
The rectory gravel garden
A worn-out lawn inside an old walled garden, turned into a dry gravel garden that needs watering twice a year.
- Size
- 160 m²
- Build
- 5 weeks
- Plants
- 420
- Watering
- Twice a year
The brief
A mossy lawn the owners never used and couldn't keep green, beside a lovely old wall. They wanted somewhere to sit in the afternoon sun, planting that looks after itself, and no more mowing.
The plan
A path that bends
A curving path of reclaimed limestone from the house to the far corner, so you see the garden a bit at a time.
Gravel, not lawn
The lawn lifted, the clay broken up with grit, and 8 cm of local gravel over it: drought-proof and weed-suppressing.
A seat against the wall
An old stone bench where the wall holds the afternoon heat, with a reclaimed slab beside it as a table.
Planting that self-seeds
Grasses, euphorbias and thyme in the gravel, left to seed and wander, with two multi-stem amelanchiers for height.
The walled garden at the old rectory had everything going for it except the lawn. The wall holds the heat, the soil is free-draining under the clay, and it faces south-west. The lawn had given up years ago.
We lifted it, broke up the clay with grit and laid local gravel over the top, then planted straight into the gravel the way a dry garden grows in the wild. Two summers on, the thyme has crept between the path stones and the grasses have seeded themselves into places we’d never have dared to plant them.
It gets watered twice a year, in the first hot week of summer and the worst of August, and cut back once in February.
