Knepp’s Walled Garden

Is this rewilding, renaturing, or just very brave gardening?

Knepp Walled Garden, West Sussex. Over 1,000 species growing in four acres of former Victorian kitchen garden.

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There’s a gate. You open it, and you step through, and then something happens to your brain. It takes a minute to work out what it is.

Nothing here looks like a garden.

The entrance to Knepp Walled Garden. Weathered oak doors, rewilded planting beyond. You feel the shift before you've even walked through.

Or rather, it looks like NOTHING like a garden you’ve ever seen before. And that right there is both the point, together with a kind of a slightly awkward discomfort. Because if you’ve spent years, as I have, thinking about gardens, designed hundreds of them, visited thousands of them, the first response when you walk into Knepp’s walled garden is genuinely one of shock. Not bad shock. Not disappointment. Just a kind of re-setting. A recalibrating. The brain going: this isn’t quite what I was expecting, and I need a moment.

I went last week with a group of friends, Bea Aling as our guide. Charlie Harpur and I had met recently at a talk and hit it off, and at the end of his day he came to find us in the greenhouses in the kitchen garden, ready to water them at the end of the day.

Charlie Harpur, head gardener at Knepp Walled Garden

After my visit, I want to share what I found, honestly. The good, the questions, and the things I’m still mulling over.

Because right from the off, one question was forming in my head: is this rewilding, renaturing, or just very brave gardening?

I still don’t have a clear answer.

The Thing About Knepp

If you’ve read the book, or seen the film, you’ll likely know the wider story. Isabella Tree and her husband Charlie Burrell took their 3,500-acre Sussex farm out of conventional land management over twenty years ago. The wildlife results have been extraordinary: purple emperors, turtle doves, peregrine falcons, white storks. The estate is now one of the UK’s most celebrated rewilding projects, and Isabella’s book Wilding brought all of it to a massive audience.

But the walled garden was the anomaly. While the wider estate was transforming into a rolling, teeming complex of scrub and wood pasture, the walled garden, right there in the middle of it, was still being managed with traditional formality. A croquet lawn. Neat beds. Mown grass. It started to look, Isabella has said, increasingly incongruous. Like a pressed suit in the middle of a rock concert.

So, they went to Tom Stuart-Smith. And the question they asked him was one of the most interesting in contemporary horticulture: how do you rewild a garden?

Four acres of former Victorian kitchen garden, now a tapestry of over 1,000 plant species.

What They Actually Did

Here’s the part that gives you a sense of the SCALE of ambition. They didn’t just change the planting. They changed the ground itself.

The croquet lawn was stripped. The topsoil was mixed with sand and the crushed brick and concrete of demolished outbuildings, and 400 tonnes of this material was put back, not as a flat surface, but as landscape. Mounds, ridges, hollows and peaks, varying in height by up to 3 metres in places. What was once a flat lawn is now an undulating terrain with aspects, microclimates, south-facing slopes and damp troughs, each supporting different plant communities.

The result is over 1,000 plant species in just over an acre. Tapestry is the only word for it, though even that feels inadequate.

The Victorian dipping pool at the centre of the kitchen garden – the iron railing still holds its shape. Around it, nothing does. Moy Fierheller coined the philosophy for this, and I can’t stop thinking about her words.

The Philosophy In Four Words

Moy Fierheller, the deputy head gardener, has coined a phrase which I think captures the vibe brilliantly: “messy ecosystems, orderly frames.”

You see it immediately in the walled garden. The paths are shaggy at the edges, but largely clear. The walls are maintained. The whole thing is CLEARLY a place being cared for by human beings, with intent. The messiness, the wildness, the complexity is entirely deliberate. And the frame, the order, the structure, is what signals that to the visitor. Without the frame, you’d just think it had been abandoned. With it, you understand that you’re inside something carefully considered.

It challenges and makes us think about what a garden is supposed to look like. And that, Knepp would argue, is EXACTLY the point.

The crenellated wall at Knepp. Four acres of former Victorian kitchen garden, now producing food, flowers, and habitat for hundreds of species. The hazel wigwams are there to climb. The rest makes its own arrangements.

If you’re thinking about doing something like this at home, there’s a note of warning: every design decision in this garden has consequences, some of them unexpected.