Owen Clutton Gardens

Owen Clutton Gardens
07939 763223 / owen@owenclutton.com

The Salehurst Halt, Salehurst, Robertsbridge, East Sussex

The Salehurst Halt is a small public house in a little hamlet, but it is extremely popular with the local community and its many visitors alike. My role here is that I am in charge of the garden and I consider it a challenge to make it as interesting as I can for as long as I can. The owners give me a fairly free rein to do this. Before they took the pub in 2006, the garden was run down and very dull, as was the pub itself. I became involved in 2007, when I was charged with laying the new terrace to replace the rather small one which was there before. I do not have photographs of that. I did not do the walling or the pergola, only the terrace and paving for the adjacent steps.

I did not start running the garden itself until 2008, after being employed to re-landscape the rest of the garden. Previously, most of the lawn sloped downwards and outwards from the terrace which was not very useful. There was a big bed in the far corner which was infested with weeds and other unwanted plants. We lifted all of the turf, salvaging what we could, and reshaped the lower part of the garden, flattening it out and reducing the bed size.

The rockery has been altered and enlarged as the area below was levelled for a feature. This area is shaded most of the time so not very good for plants or grass. We constructed a giant chess board, where I used a mix of dark and lighter Indian sandstone to create the board effect. Gravel surrounds it. There are now climbing roses all along the fence line.

The second, lower terrace was not very accessible before. Also it was not separated from the private accommodation in the building. A shed and service area were required for the pub to be separate from the area used by the public. The shed went up one year and then came down again the next because it was in the way of the access required to the new pizza oven. We constructed a stone wall to separate this from the adjacent bed.

The chess board is now usually covered with a table tennis table which is popular with customers.

This is me on a micro digger changing the levels of the garden.

How the garden looked progressively through 2009.

A mix of perennials, annuals and bulbs.

We try to grow a few interesting and labour-intensive plants on the terrace- squashes, tomatoes, pumpkin, many sweet peas, a vine, etc.