Hello - we are Barney and Victoria. We didn’t begin life as gardeners, in fact we met in London where we were working as Chinese translators, and we spent several enjoyable years living all over the place while we worked out what we would like to do with ourselves, including a stint in Shanghai, where Victoria made English-inspired gardens and we both drank a lot of Dragon Well green tea.

When we eventually stumbled on the old walled kitchen garden at Stokesay Court, which was looking for tenants, we couldn’t resist the romantic lure of the dramatic setting, the interesting outbuildings, the good condition of the garden itself, and most of all the magical feeling of peace and serenity that has settled upon the garden, snug within its high surrounding walls.

The garden had been built in around 1890 for the ‘new house’, and for a few decades it had been very productive, packed with carefully trained fruit trees and abundant with vegetables for the house and estate. Gradually it had fallen into neglect until revived a few years prior to our arrival by Jane and Norman, a couple with boundless energy who cleared the brambly tangle and created a neat garden mostly laid to lawn, but with some large, well-tended vegetable beds and a big patch for soft fruit. Sadly, when they pulled the brambles from the old greenhouses the timbers crumbled and the whole thing collapsed, leaving only the low brick walls and lovely decorative tiled floors.

We began with growing a mixture of flowers, fruit and vegetables, but we quickly discovered that the flowers squeezed out most of the edible produce, as we came across more and more delectable and needful varieties, and demand from customers meant that we needed to be able to produce them in ever greater quantities within our one acre. We have grown slowly, investing the profits of the business back into the garden to keep pace with our gradually increasing knowledge. The early years of focusing on annuals (packets of seed cost little, and the annuals are extremely generous bloomers) were succeeded by the planting of robust perennials (yarrow, asters, garden chrysanthemums, campanulas and geums have all been with us for several years and have bulked up well as we have divided the clumps), shrubs (hydrangeas paniculata have been particularly popular and successful), bulbs (everybody always wants tulips), climbers to make use of the old walls (jasmine and clematis just keep on giving) and our very favourite: roses. Roses. So beautiful, so fragrant, so interesting and varied, so many new varieties to discover. At Stokesay Flowers we have seen some less enjoyable kinds come and go, and now we have almost exclusively old roses (pre-1920, mostly with evocative French names) and lovely varieties bred by David Austin. The scent and beauty of all these varieties makes them eagerly anticipated every year, and the shorter flowering period of some of the oldest roses means that they are even more valued by us, not only for their charming habit, robustness and generous growth (meaning that we can pick huge boughs of bloom for florists making enormous displays), but also for the fleeting nature of their glory period. In our online shop you can find our book which details all our favourite roses for cutting, and tips we’ve learned for how to grow them at their very best.

After ten years of growing and making a garden at Stokesay, we took on the lease of a second walled garden, at nearby Downton Hall, to give ourselves more growing space and becasue we liked to have another garden adventure. At Downton we are planting perennials, trees and shrubs, and very many beautiful roses for cutting.