Inside the transformation of this English country garden in Dorset

A 12th-century monastery is an unusual place to find a serviceman-turned-horticulturist, but Joshua Sparkes is bringing his own modern, ecological approach to a traditional English country garden 

At just 29, Joshua Sparkes, head gardener at Forde Abbey on the Devon/Somerset border, is one of a wave of young horticulturists mixing innovative techniques with traditional methods. But Sparkes didn’t always see himself spending his life in the potting shed.

He had a fairly feral childhood in the Kent countryside. ‘I had a best friend called Blaze, who was a wild child as well,’ he tells me. ‘We used to play in the woods, go on the lake, wild swim. Every time I went to school, I was a bit depressed.’

At 17 he joined the RAF, where he served as an aircraftman. ‘I was still a kid, really,’ he says. ‘I loved travelling. I went all around the world, but it was during my last tour, in Afghanistan, that I began to recognise the allure of the landscape.

There are wonderful meadows, grasslands, trees there – it’s not just hemp and opium fields. It’s a beautiful, varied landscape, snow-capped mountains going down into green- pastured hills and desert.’

During his time in the military, Sparkes was one of many in the forces called on to plant up the wildflower meadows around the Olympic Park in Stratford, east London. It was only when he saw the Afghan pastures, though, that he realised his true vocation.

‘It gave me a jolt. You join the military and you forget who you were, because you’re so busy forging this new, military person. I remembered my roots. It felt like a calling.’

He handed in his papers and studied horticulture at Plumpton and Hadlow colleges. He then got a job with the National Trust at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where head gardener Troy Scott Smith soon saw his potential.

He was given charge of the estate’s wild-flower meadows, which became one of the property’s most popular attractions. Sparkes was chosen for the prestigious Triad Fellowship that sends the country’s best young gardeners around the world to study different horticultural practices.

He followed this up by winning a Winston Churchill Fellowship to research different approaches to composting and soil cultivation in Europe and Asia.

Now, though, Sparkes has settled at Forde Abbey, the 12th-century Cistercian monastery, where he works in partnership with the current owner of the house, Alice Kennard. She and her husband Julian live in one wing of the abbey, which is otherwise open to the public.

The 30-acre garden has always been managed with the environment in mind, something evident in the meadow that Sparkes leads me through when I visit Forde on a blissful late-spring morning. ‘These are Cistercian meadows planted by the monks,’ he tells me, ‘and they really have been untouched for hundreds of years.’ There’s hay rattle, clover, knapweed, pignuts, all combining to form a dense carpet of flowers.

Forde stands close to the banks of the River Axe, and it’s a garden full of water. There are a series of ponds, in one of which rises the Centenary Fountain – the largest in the UK – that shoots a jet of spume 160ft into the air.

There’s a bog garden teeming with gunnera and hostas, fed by a medieval culvert (an underground pipe), installed by the monks. But the real pleasure of Forde is the way that the beauty of the abbey – the long, honey-coloured house swagged in clematis and wisteria – is framed by the garden.

‘That’s one thing I learnt in Japan,’ Sparkes tells me. ‘The idea that you have a formal structure and layout into which all the wildness creeps back in. We only have three gardeners, so we actually can’t maintain it all, but rather than seeing that as a problem, we’re using it to create beauty. The cow parsley is making its way in, the buttercups are appearing in the borders.’

Sparkes has found a willing ally in Kennard, who has embraced his approach to horticulture, which is rooted in the soil.

‘The compost and the soil is the foundation you build the garden on,’ Sparkes tells me, as he leads me up to the composting area. There are a dozen bokashi bins, in which food waste is anaerobically fermented, and a vast mound of goat manure – ‘Goats are fussy eaters, so it’s the best manure.’

Sparkes is a keen proponent of biochar – carbon-rich charcoal – and ‘compost tea’, a liquid fertiliser brewed from a variety of ingredients.

Along with his compost, which he cures ‘like a fine ham’, he adds dock, comfrey and a fungal mixture made with rice, all steeped in water and molasses. It’s hard not to buy into his theories, given the beauty of the results he has achieved.

Despite the fact he has only been at Forde for a little over a year, the garden is already shaping itself to his character, with his signature plants – hesperis, woad, teasel and honesty –thronging the borders, each of them in dialogue with the soft wild beauty of the surrounding landscape.

Forde Abbey is a very special place and is lucky enough to have found itself in the hands of an equally special head gardener.

The gardens at Forde Abbey are open daily; admission £10 (fordeabbey.co.uk) 

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJ%2BRp7GmusinnmifkaexprrSZquoZaaewKrAjqKlrKGUmnq1vsCnqp%2BnoqKutbXOp2SeppehtrS0jJymrqakp8Zus8Crm56mXZm8s7%2FErWY%3D