Church Barn
Essex
A garden around an 18th century black barn conversion near Braintree in Essex, beside an ancient village church. Stefano Marinaz replaced a lawn, a patio and an outsized parking area with naturalistic perennial planting: more than a thousand perennials and bulbs, two dominant grasses, ten multi stem trees and climbing roses on the barn, with meandering gravel paths leading to three open places, one for sunbathing, one for the fire pit, one for morning coffee. A high brick wall came down and became a mild steel fence joining the two halves, and the parking area became a terrace.
Shoots and Leaves built it. Marinaz publishes the garden as New Beginnings: Church Barn, photographed across three seasons, and the Society of Garden Designers gave it three of its 2024 awards, including the Judges' Award.
Stefano Marinaz
Stefano Marinaz is an Italian chartered landscape architect and agronomist whose practice, Stefano Marinaz Landscape Architecture, works from London and Utrecht across Britain, Italy and the Netherlands, on sustainable and biodiverse gardens.
@stefano.marinaz. Photography @alistergthorpe.
The picture comes from this post on Instagram.
Researched August 2026. I credit each piece as carefully as I can; if you know more about this one, message me on Instagram.