As a landscape designer, how do you leave the discipline you’ve followed for years to create your own, less formal domain? This was the challenge Catherine Fitzgerald faced when she moved to a former Victorian brewery in rural Wiltshire in 2018 with her husband, actor Dominic West, and their four children. Catherine’s masterplan for her own garden was to respond to the spirit of place.
The previous owners had lovingly looked after the house and garden for over 50 years, but Catherine was keen to create something atmospheric between the quaint spaces between the ancient cottage on the lane and the nearby brewery building. Set in the heart of a Cotswold village dotted with old mills, she wanted it to feel like it had always been there: whimsical arts and crafts topiary, roses and clematis on hazel structures, giant cardoons – nothing ‘imposed’. ‘I wanted it to be relaxed – a place of experimentation and change, where random plant associations and self-seeding could happen without objection,’ she says.
With its thin, free-draining and coarse soil, it’s a far cry from Catherine’s family home at Glyn Castle in County Limerick on Ireland’s west coast, where she grew up and now tends the garden. There, the soil is heavily clayey and acidic, and the Gulf Stream climate is mild and wet. ‘Some of the plants I love, such as roses, have been quite a struggle to grow in what was essentially a brewery yard. The soil was hard and compacted, and required a lot of manure and compost to make it.’
Catherine, who worked for Arabella Lennox-Boyd before setting out on her own, has collaborated with landscape architect Mark Lutyens for 20 years and has recently joined forces more formally as Lutyens & Fitzgerald Landscape Design. Inspiration has also come from designer, writer and neighbor Mary Keane, who is building a new garden nearby: ‘Of course, overall design is important to Mary but I love the way she values her “treasures” – her favorite plants – above all else. What is important is the plant. On any day of the year, even in early January, her courtyard pot collection would be glittering with jewels and closely admired and the succession would continue every month.’
