How green is their valley

The garden of Low Crag, Cumbria The home of Mr and Mrs Chris Dodd A thoughtful approach to gardening has brought about a great increase in the population of birds and animal life in this two-acre plot, discovers George Plumptre

- George Plumptre

SOME people garden in the same place all their adult lives. Others are restricted by their careers, but have gardening in their blood and are constantly planning for the time when they will settle and put down gardening roots. Chris Dodd and Liz Jolley are such a couple. As geologists, they spent 30 years travelling the world working in oil and gas before settling in 2016 at Low Crag, where the house and two-acre garden sit perched on a slope overlooking the Lyth Valley.

When they were students, the pair had acquired a copy of Violet Stevenson's book The Wild Garden, first published in 1985. It accompanied them on all their travels and its central proposition, that a garden has a responsibility to accommodate wild plants, insects, and other creatures, became gently embedded in their own gardening philosophy. Added to this, their encyclopedic knowledge of geology has given them a particular love for and understanding of the land.

The Lake District is one of England's most iconic natural landscapes. Some of its most beautiful parts are around the edges-mostly in what was the county of Westmorland: an unspoilt patchwork of small stone-walled sheep pastures and gentle rounded foothills with pockets of woodland. The Lyth Valley, which runs past Kendal and down to the coast at Morecambe Bay, is just such an area and it provides the enviable setting in which the garden of Low Crag has evolved.

If a garden is sustainable by virtue of being in close bond with its surrounding landscape, both physically and in its management, then Low Crag is a good example. The gabled house was carefully sited, in the lee of a curving bank that gives protection from prevailing westerlies, with views to the south and east along a broad sweep of the Lyth Valley and up to neighbouring fells. The garden itself merges into the surrounding sheep meadows.