Gardens: Wendy Matheson has given her garden a professional touch - her own

When Wendy says ‘move 400 tons of soil’ we do it,” says Don Matheson. At issue was the mound of earth to the rear of the natural-looking lochan behind Boath House, the Regency property the couple purchased 20 years ago and transformed into a Michelin-starred restaurant with rooms – eight rooms in this case. Here, Wendy, a qualified landscape and garden designer with a diploma from the Oxford School of Garden Design, has created a wildflower meadow to the rear of the lochan with mown grass paths, encouraging you to take a meandering route. The mountain of soil needed to be moved to open up the view and allow more space for the wildflowers.

Built in 1820, Boath House with its surrounding 20 acres of parkland punctuated by mature oak and beech, and a one-acre walled garden and lochan, created thanks to the gravel excavations of a previous owner, presents the perfect backdrop for a garden. Having spent the first six years of their tenure renovating the house and the next ten devoted to the restaurant, Wendy felt it was time to start work on the garden.

Here, she happily admits, she hadn’t a clue as to the way forward. Besides maintaining the old trees and keeping the grass surrounding the house tidy, little had been done in the walled garden, where Wendy confesses the grass was so long when they moved in they “managed to lose two-year-old Sam.” Having cut the grass they erected a series of polytunnels in order to grow vegetables and herbs for the restaurant.

After working in the kitchen for so many years, she handed the reins to current head chef, Charlie, “who walked up the drive one day and asked if we had any work for him,” and prepared herself for her next challenge.

“I felt daunted by the size of the project,” Wendy says, “and felt I needed some training.” Bravely – the couple have three children, then in their teens – she took time out of the business and enrolled at the Oxford School of Garden Design, where she admits she was “instantly overwhelmed by the volume and standard of the work.”

Rising to the challenge she completed the course, gaining the knowledge and confidence to transform the walled garden with a traditional design where the highlight must be the show-stopping naturalistic planting scheme inspired by Dutch designer Piet Oudolf and interpreted in Scotland by Catherine Erskine at Cambo House in Fife. She also liked this style of prairie planting, well suited to free-draining soil in the relatively dry microclimate south of the Moray Firth because “it is easy to maintain once it is established and the grasses are lovely to look at year-round.”

Tucked in at the side of the house, the walled garden is reached after a short walk across the lawn, past a fiery red acer palmatum, and entered through a narrow gate framed by box pyramids. The impact is instantly jaw-dropping: in front of you a gravel path leads through fairy-tale beds filled with light airy grasses, including stipa gigantica, which combine with the autumnal hues of tall purple eupatorium, thalictrum and asters, as well as deep-red and burnt-orange drifts of helenium, and long-flowering red persicaria “Orchard Dean”. Splashes of colour come from dahlias, such as Scarlet Bishop of Landuff.

The gravel path takes you via a wisteria-covered arch towards the orchard, where treble rows of apple trees – Coxes, John Paxtons and five different Russets – stand in strips of long, wavy grass separated by closely mown paths. Underplanted with daffodils, narcissus and bluebells, the apple trees pack a punch in spring when the blossom on the trees is rich with nectar for the inhabitants of the nearby trio of beehives.

Further down the gentle slope is the vegetable garden, a geometrical layout of four raised quadrants framed by low wooden fences painted in Farrow & Ball “Lichen”. The colour makes empty beds in the winter months less noticeable. Each quadrant has its own theme; there’s a rotation of vegetables, herbs, salads and cut flowers for the hotel while a central herb-filled parterre completes the layout. “Everything has to work as a practical garden,” she says, adding that she and Don tend this garden alone, with help two days a week from an RHS-trained gardener.

Now, in early autumn, the beds are filled with a selection of winter vegetables while the central herb parterre overflows with an abundance of fresh greenery – always on hand for the restaurant. With one bed reserved for cutting flowers, the scheme is always colour-filled.

A walk past the greenhouse and studio where Wendy nurtures seedlings and tender plants as well as working on her garden design business, takes you to the west-facing wall where she has allowed her imagination to run riot in a generous border punctuated by tall, wooden pyramids. Here, in succession are year-long plantings of bulbs, delphiniums, pink and blue lupins, Asters, wands of pale yellow cephalaria, tall blue globes of echinops interspersed with further drifts of helenium “Moerheim Beauty”, and yellow achillea neatly linked to the upper beds by her key plant: grasses.

The lower gate leads out towards the lochan, where a short walkway acts as a bridge between two ponds allowing you to see tall, umbrella leaves of gunnera, red and pink astilbe, the foliage of flag irises, plenty of hostas and the candelabra Primula that take centre stage in spring and early summer.

Wendy says completing a landscape and garden design course was a life-changing experience. Now working as a garden designer she says: “The aim was that the design work would pay for the work in the garden.” Furthermore it has allowed the couple, who share a lower ground-floor flat with their children in the hotel, to fully restore Boath House to its original condition.

And she’s still learning. “Whatever you think you’ve designed, it always works out a bit different,” she says, “Nature takes its course. I only have control over the hard landscaping; everything else is up to nature. But when pressed she admits, “I didn’t think the garden would turn out as well as it has. My problem is that I have champagne taste and beer pockets when it comes to the garden.”

www.boath-house.com/the-gardens

For information about Wendy Matheson’s garden design business visit www.wmgardendesign.com