persevering with her series on garden designers, Clare Foster visits the Suffolk home of Tom Hoblyn, which, way to a year–round harvest of trained fruit timber and greens, is more than just a feast for the eyes…

Tom Hoblyn’s walled garden inside the Suffolk village of Bardwell is his sanctuary. ‘After a week of theoretical gardening inside the workplace, designing gardens for different humans, it is awesome to bury myfingers in the actual issue at the weekend,’ he says. at the beginning educated in agriculture, Tombecome destined to take over the circle of relatives farm in Cornwall, but realised quite early on that it wasn’t for him. ‘i used to be gardening for vintage ladies on the aspect and commenced to suppose that being a gardener changed into much extra up my road,’ he says. identifying to follow his coronary heart, he got a task as a head gardener earlier than making use of to do a 3–year course in horticulture at Kew.part of the course focused on garden design, with tutors along with Christopher Bradley-hollow and Brita von Schoenaich, and Tom discovered himself more and more interested in this greater innovative side of horticulture.

After graduating, he labored on various initiatives with Christopher, in addition to Dan Pearson, which gave him the wreck he had to set up his personal London-based totally design exercise in 2001. ‘My firsttask was in Chalk Farm,’ he says, ‘and before I knew it, I had labored my manner down the road.’
within the starting, London turned into in which the paintings became, but Tom’s recognition quickspread, and soon he became getting commissions all around the usa and additionally overseas. Themetropolis become now not the centre of his universe so, in 2004, he and his wife Mary, along with theirfour youngsters, determined to spread their wings and look for a house that was huge sufficient to deal with the six of them plus two puppies, horses, half a dozen sheep and ump-teen chickens.
They settled on East Anglia and got here across Mansard house, a 16th-century farmhouse with a one-of-a-kind mansard-roof façade delivered in the eighteenth century, set in three acres of land. The residenceslightly were given a look-in, however, once Tom realised that there has been a small but perfectlyformed walled lawn buried under thick swags of ivy, now converted from an overgrown yard into a nicely-ordered kitchen lawn in which every inch of area is placed to accurate use.

‘Ashmead’s Kernel’ educated on the antique walls.
Tom had constantly hankered after a walled lawn for developing educated fruit trees, a skill that has beensurpassed down from generation to generation in his family. His grandfather grew and trialled apples for East Malling studies in Kent (one of the us of a‘s leading horticultural studies centres) and becomepresented an OBE for developing the dwarfing rootstock for apple bushes. Tom recollects his lawn fromadolescence – ‘stuffed full of fruit trees‘ – and now he is developing a number of the equal antique sortsin his own garden. His delight and pleasure is a set of around 40 styles of apple, pear and peach trainedas espaliers, cordons and lovers around the old walls.

The dessert apple ‘Worcester Pearmain’.
‘there may be something fantastically pleasurable about education bushes,’ says Tom. ‘i like theexercises, the clipping, the one of a kind strings and twines you use.’ He offered his timber as one-12 months–antique maidens and educated them himself, and he recommends doing this in place of buyinggeared up–skilled timber, as a way to unavoidably restriction your preference of cultivars and won’t bepretty the right shape for the space you have got deliberate for them.
‘schooling your own trees is simple,’ he says. ‘Fruit trees are very forgiving in case you make a mistake.’ He prunes two times a yr, constructing up clusters of fruiting spurs alongside the primary stem of the tree, and schooling the branches along canes inside the required form. Having discovered fruit identity fromone of the usa‘s leading fruit specialists, Harry Baker, he has a discerning flavor for apples and selectsonly people with the great flavour. ‘Newton wonder‘, for example, is a dual–reason apple that is used for cooking early in the season after which as a dessert apple, as it sweetens through garage. ‘it’s got a marvellous records,’ says Tom. ‘It was a threat seedling observed growing on the thatched roof of a pub in Newton, Derbyshire.’