The Garden

Dordogne Tulip

Chenies Manor Winner of the Historic Houses Association & Christie's Garden of the Year 2009 Award.

The gardens in their present form are the creation of Alistair and Elizabeth MacLeod Matthews and are divided into a series of compartments, with various colour themes and structural forms, combining imaginative plantings and beautiful plant associations.

Among these are:

• the sunken garden
• the white garden
• the south border
• the rose gardens
• the inner court
• the physic garden
• the parterre with its yew maze
• and the kitchen garden with its orchards and penitential maze.

The house

Throughout the garden, permanent herbaceous plantings and shrubs are complemented by two distinct main seasonal plantings, for Spring and Summer.

Francesca Greenoak, writing for the Royal Horticultural Society magazine The Garden observed:

"For several years now Elizabeth MacLeod Matthews has directed her skill, that of assembling beautiful plant associations, towards the most tumultuously coloured of plants; tulips. Among the vanguard in rehabilitating tulips as garden plants and using them with other spring foliage and blooms, she has refined her palette to daub the sometimes gloomy days of Easter with brightness and elegance."

Purple Sensation Alliums around Sundial

This summer the garden will have a large display of dahlias which will be on show from July to the first frosts among a host of other tender perennials which will fill the garden with style and colours which compliment the permanent plantings.

A fuller idea of the plant associations which succeed one another can be found in The Garden Year.

Garden of the Year Award 2009

Page Last Updated: January, 2012