Bunny Williams reveals how she created her glorious Connecticut garden

In an extract from her new book Life in the Garden, the renowned American designer reminisces on the early days at her home, as she planted trees, filled beds with her favourite flowers and planned the distinctive garden ‘rooms’ that now define the space

The working garden comprises a barn, greenhouse, and large vegetable and cutting garden

Annie Schlechter

It was while touring Sissinghurst that I really began to understand the importance of a plan that would create a ‘room’ for each garden space. At Sissinghurst, one garden room leads to another, just as rooms in a house are connected by halls. After each visit, I returned home to rethink my own garden. I moved on from the sunken garden to relocate the vegetable garden so it would connect to the original barn on the property. We enclosed the spaces by adding a board fence along the three sides and crafting a rustic arbor of oak branches on the end to grow trailing roses and clematis. I eventually added a hornbeam hedge on the north side to enclose the space even more. Because this was where my compost pile had been, it became a very rich planting area.

Years later, I found an amazing set of 19th-century windows and used them to replace a tiny greenhouse that was attached to the barn to create the ‘conservatory’. It wasn’t until John decided that we should renovate the barn (we turned it into a large space for entertaining and created a guest room in the old hayloft) that the conservatory became an additional dining room. At this point we had to build another working barn to hold all the gardening equipment we had accumulated, so I began to develop the area I call the ‘working garden’. I added a large greenhouse on the north side of a new larger vegetable and cutting garden, and nearby I built a chicken pavilion consisting of two henhouses connected to an octagonal cage in the centre. Since the old vegetable garden outside of the conservatory needed a redo, I decided to create a parterre garden within the original space. Small boxwoods were laid out in geometric shapes for the early spring, and annuals for the summer.

The impressive pool house is inspired Greek revival architecture and looks out over the orchard

Annie Schlechter

Eventually I was able to buy an adjacent piece of property that became a fruit orchard with apple, pear, and cherry trees. Later I created a path to our pool, which I placed on a high knoll to have a view of the hillside beyond. When John and I were shopping in the South of France for our store, Treillage (now closed), we came upon a large set of coping stones from a 19th-century basin that John immediately said should become our pool. When we chose this site for the pool, we also needed a pool house with a powder room, a small kitchen, and a large open space to sit in the shade. One day, the design for the pool house just came to me. The nearby town of Falls Village is filled with Greek Revival architecture, and it dawned on me that it should look as though out of the woods a great temple had emerged.

Each year I planned a garden trip to another country, and wherever I travelled, I visited the local botanical gardens and attended countless lectures by garden experts and designers, all in the hope of educating myself. The Elizabethan gardens at Hatfield House, the hedge garden rooms at Hidcote, and the parklike gardens at Rousham, Great Dixter, and Iford Manor are just a few of the places that have influenced me. It was in Italy that I saw the beautiful garden ornaments that punctuated the more-architectural designs favoured there and where I fell in love with the cypress tree. Since the cypress cannot grow in Connecticut, I’ve used arborvitae in its place for an “Italian moment.” The potagers in France blew me away with their plantings of vegetables and herbs creating beautiful rhythms of pattern, colour, and texture. However, as much as I loved the wall tiles of Portuguese gardens, I knew they had no place in my Connecticut garden, so I refrained from painting all my pots in the fabulous blue that I had seen at the Majorelle Gardens in Marrakech.

This is an extract from Bunny Williams: Life in the Garden, published by Rizzoli (£45)