How West Dean Gardens is adapting to climate change

Folded into the chalk hills of the South Downs National Park, West Dean’s Grade II-listed gardens pull off the remarkable feat of being both expansive and intimate. The estate evolved over centuries, first recorded in the Domesday Book and later reshaped in the 19th century by owner William James. Today, its flint-faced manor house and verdant grounds serve as the campus for West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation, founded by Edward James, the poet and Surrealist art patron who inherited the estate in 1912. 

West Dean‚ an RHS Partner Garden‚ is painted on a generous canvas. Thirty acres of formal gardens sit within a wider parkland and arboretum‚ creating a borrowed landscape that feels timeless. Lawns are studded with sculptures, specimen trees and an archipelago of gardens. The two-and-a-half acre Walled Garden is home to 13 restored Victorian glasshouses, each with its own specialism, and an orchard of heritage cultivars such as pear ‘Catillac’ and apple ‘Mannington’s Pearmain’.

So far, so traditional. Yet under Tom Brown’s stewardship, West Dean is anything but a museum piece.

Adapting a historic garden

Tom took over as Head Gardener in spring 2019, having previously headed Parham House Gardens in West Sussex, and before that the fruit and vegetable trials at RHS Garden Wisley. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, the acclaimed gardening duo Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, was initially a tall order. Then, in March 2020, Covid changed everything. Working alone for days at a time, Tom fell in love with the garden and had an epiphany.

The variety of living organisms (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) in a particular environment. Boosting the biodiversity of your garden has many benefits, including supporting wildlife, improving soil health and reducing the likelihood of pest and disease problems.

biodiversity

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs.

perennials

Euphorbia characias provides vital early-season forage for pollinators, while its informal habit and lime green bracts make a pleasing contrast by the topiarised yew

The dry meadow experiment

Rethinking the Sunken Garden

Innovation continues in the 19th-century Sunken Garden, where box blight and moth rendered traditional gardening unsustainable. Inspired by sand gardening pioneers Peter Korn and John Little, Tom has laid a 10cm layer of Fittleworth sandstone and replaced the worn-out lawn with ground-hugging Thymus serpyllum cultivars‚ including ‘Pink Chintz’ and ‘Red Carpet’. Using repeat planting to make the scheme feel immersive and cohesive, Tom has established a colourful community of clump-forming perennials that thrive in poor fertility, such as Achillea ‘Moonshine’, Cytisus × boskoopii ‘Apricot Gem’, Nepeta × faassenii ‘Kit Cat’, Salvia rosmarinus ‘Green Ginger’ and Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’.

Gardening for wildlife

With biodiversity declining across the wider landscape, wildlife support has become integral to West Dean’s management. “Every spring we release red mason bees to build the population‚” Tom explains. Meadows remain uncut until mid-July to protect wildflowers and insects. Dead hedges‚ log piles and standing trunks with an owl box on top provide habitat‚ while an insect hotel in the orchard built using found materials like pine cones, logs, bamboo canes and broken terracotta pots helps build ecological strength in the garden. 

These are fleshy, rounded, underground storage organs, usually sold and planted while dormant. Examples include daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, lilies, onions and garlic. The term is often used to cover other underground storage organs, including corms, tubers and rhizomes.

bulbs

Variegated means having leaves or other plant parts with streaks, blotches or patches of different colours. Typically, these would be a combination of two colours, such as green and gold or green and white.

variegated

Can refer to either home-made garden compost or seed/potting compost: • Garden compost is a soil improver made from decomposed plant waste, usually in a compost bin or heap. It is added to soil to improve its fertility, structure and water-holding capacity. Seed or potting composts are used for growing seedlings or plants in containers - a wide range of commercially produced peat-free composts are available, made from a mix of various ingredients, such as loam, composted bark, coir and sand, although you can mix your own.

compost

A bud is a small, undeveloped shoot that contains the potential for new growth. Buds are typically found on stems, where they can be apical (found at the tip) or axillary (found between leaf axils) and may develop into leaves, shoots or flowers.

buds

South African Lachenalia aloides

Tom Brown’s pruning masterclass

Fruit trees and topiary are a defining feature of West Dean’s Walled Garden. In this visual guide, Tom shares some of the principles behind training and pruning the garden’s sculptural forms.

A blueprint for the future