Small and container gardens: Winner Sue & Richard Taylor

Jul 23 2008 by Val Javin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

VISIT Sue Taylor’s delightful garden at Bradley Grange and chances are that you won’t want to leave.

VISIT Sue Taylor’s delightful garden at Bradley Grange and chances are that you won’t want to leave.

There’s something beguiling about the atmosphere created by Sue and her husband Richard in a peaceful wooded corner of the town.

First impressions count and as you walk down this drive, the attention to detail is immediate. Here’s a corner you want to sit and linger in, your eye caught by wicker baskets brimming with pastel summer impatiens, gently swaying birdcages frothing with tiny flowerheads. Even an every day ladder is festooned with geraniums.

Sue’s planting style is relaxed and informal, the colour palette largely pastel but with occasional show-stopping flash of red from nodding poppies.

Look closely and you’ll see carefully positioned horticultural and household tools. Old mowers and a mangle find a new and perfect home in a garden which oozes charm and personality in equal measure.

Billowing perennial geraniums and columbines, gently swaying bronze fennel and towering foxgloves create waves of colour and movement.

Old wooden boxes, a bread crock, terracotta forcing pots, all provide character and reinforce the feel of a country cottagey garden that anyone would fall in love with.

Sue’s day job as manager of theTextile Centre of Excellence’s Design Incubator, says much about her commitment to design. Her garden, she says, is where she pours all her creative talents - and it shows.

But this garden, though its detail has the gloss of a magazine quality setting, has that irresistible extra, bucket-loads of love and affection.