Writer Olivia Laing's quest for a personal Eden in her Suffolk garden | House & Garden

14.05.2024 - 14:47 / houseandgarden.co.uk / Clare Foster

At the back of the house, Adirondack chairs are placed beside a border with a small standard wisteria, a box spiral and purple Iris ‘Art Deco’ set off by lime-green euphorbia. An unknown red rose on the wall is from Mark Rumary’s 1960s scheme.

For anyone brought up on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, the idea of a garden hidden behind walls is utterly compelling. So when the writer Olivia Laing made her first visit to this house four years ago, she was full of eager anticipation, knowing that both the garden and its garden-designer owner had once been very well known in the horticultural world. Behind the rose-covered façade of the charming house in a Suffolk village, she discovered an intriguing walled garden, slightly over-grown and with an air of neglect that made it even more thrilling. ‘We saw it in the January and, the minute that I stepped into it, I was aware of the seriousness of the planting,’ recalls Olivia. ‘The daphne was covered in flowers and there was a tree peony that was coming into bud. I could tell that this was the real deal. But it was half lost and I didn’t want to over-tidy it. I wanted to keep the slight air of secrecy – that feeling of being on the edge of wildness. That’s the sort of garden I think is really exciting.’

Olivia kept some of the original shrubs below an old medlar, including a variegated euonymus and a spotted laurel, adding hellebores, Tellima grandiflora, Ornithogalum nutans and Tulipa ‘White Triumphator’

The garden had been designed in the 1960s by Mark Rumary, chief garden designer at Notcutts nurseries, and a former assistant to landscape designer Lanning Roper. He had lived at the house from 1961 until his death in 2010. A third of an acre in size, the plot felt