North Yorkshire garden offers fairytale intrigue and romantic roses

Entering a garden feels like stepping into another world, says garden designer Kit Peel. This is the ethos of his studio, where he aims to create an experience similar to a child entering a fairy tale. Kit Peel met Melanie Hanson, the owner of Snape Castle Barn, at a design fair in Harrogate. She had recently moved into her new home in the North Yorkshire village of Snape and invited Kit Peel to see the garden.

The property has a real sense of history, but the garden was a void, Kit Peel recalls. It was north-facing, windswept, and felt empty, with only gravel, lawn, and Indian flagstones. The design challenge was to turn this void into an intimate, formal English garden with good year-round structure.

A Garden with History

The view from the garden of 15th-century Snape Castle has an otherworldly storybook air about it. Katherine Parr, who later became Henry VIII’s sixth wife, lived at Snape when she was married to her second husband, John Neville. Kit Peel was delighted to discover that Melanie Hanson was already a keen gardener, wanting a classic English country garden with a mixture of formality and private spaces.

Melanie Hanson was born in the Lake District but lived in America for most of her adult life. She moved to Florida at 17 and got into gardening after buying a brugmansia that thrived in the subtropical climate. However, she always remembered her childhood in the English countryside and English gardens, and she wanted to have a home back in England.

Creating the Dream Garden

With Kit Peel on board, Melanie Hanson’s dream of a rose-filled, typically English country garden could come to fruition. They wanted to capture the history of the site, which had drawn Melanie Hanson to it in the first place. Kit Peel needed to use the budget judiciously, so he directed it to high-quality details, such as replacing the existing walls’ coping stones and the steps with Yorkstone.

The garden surrounds the house, a former threshing barn, on all four sides, with the largest area at the north-facing rear of the house. Kit Peel explains that they looked at the different areas – north, south, east, and west – almost like a book of hours, or a clock. On the east side, for example, the garden is focused on spring planting in a color palette of blues, whites, and pale yellow.

Milan Design Week‘s honest conversations shift to DMs, though Kit Peel focused on practical design choices for the west garden. This area geared the planting towards autumn, with liquidambar promising a fiery late display and deep beds planted for a long season with veronicastrum, salvias, and eryngium among the cast of perennials. Arches from Harrod Horticultural form a tunnel of Trachelospermum jasminoides and Rosa ‘Alchymist’ that takes you through the gate to the north garden, giving that sense of moving through different spaces that Kit Peel was keen to create.

In the garden to the north, a line of smart pleached hornbeam acts both as a windbreak and to enclose the terrace, so the garden here no longer feels like an exposed void. Roses such as ‘Gabriel Oak’, alliums, and dierama grow at their base; further along are the obelisks and roses of the small cutting garden, where a smart Alitex greenhouse takes pride of place.

Beyond the line of cloistering hornbeam, the north garden is more open, with an expanse of mown grass home to a row of loungers far enough away from the house to be out of its shadow. Then the lawn gives way to a larger area of longer meadow grass, through which a pattern of paths is cut each year, leading to hummocks of crab apple topiary.

Melanie Hanson has made another little seating area with a statue as its focal point at the furthest point at the top of the meadow. She and Kit Peel have always worked in collaboration, with Melanie Hanson messaging Kit Peel about new plants she’s bought and Kit Peel finding homes for them in the garden.

The garden is definitely Kit Peel’s vision, Melanie Hanson says, and she loves the combination of the topiary and the really soft, blowsy flowers – the structure with the softness. She gets a lot of pleasure from walking around in it every day, and it’s not one of those gardens where everything is perfect – it’s got those bits that aren’t as perfect, but sometimes those bits are just as beautiful as the bits that are perfect.

Gardens should have a sense of occasion, but they should be designed for living in, Kit Peel adds. His clients don’t need to be drawn into the complexity of the design or the management of the build – they just want to step into their garden and go, ‘Wow, this feels effortless.’