A colour symphony

Flamingos may draw the crowds, but it is the brilliant flower borders that keep people coming back to this wonderful garden.

- Tiffany Daneff  

Coton Manor Garden, Northamptonshire The home of Ian and Susie Pasley-Tyler

SINCE 1925, the garden at Coton Manor has been cared for by three generations of the same family, each of which has left their not inconsiderable mark on this south-west-facing landscape that slopes away from the formal stone terraces around the manor house and across flamingo-fringed lawns to a wildflower meadow and bluebell wood and so to the valley beyond.

The garden’s current custodians, Ian and Susie Pasley-Tyler, took over in 1991 and have built up the garden’s reputation—not only for its entertaining birds, magnificent borders, plants and garden areas, a garden school, café and plant nursery—but as a place that local people visit regularly, often weekly, such is the friendly family welcome. Faces are recognised and greetings exchanged as Mrs Pasley-Tyler wanders the grounds taking notes of what plants need dividing or moving. Until recently, her husband manned the plant stall, too, totting up the sales in his head. An exercise in keeping house and garden in good order has thus become a way of life. No wonder that a recent poll elected Coton Manor garden as the nation’s favourite.

There has been a manor here since Domesday and, in 1597, its owner, Sir Fulke Greville, required the annual rent to be paid with a pound of cumin. That house was razed to the ground after the Loyalists were routed by the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Naseby (only three miles away) in 1645, after which a farmhouse was built in 1662 using Northamptonshire stone from the recently demolished royal palace of Holdenby. From then, the land was farmed, with cattle grazing up to the front door until 1923, when it was bought by Mr Pasley-Tyler’s grandparents, Harold and Elizabeth Bryant.