Suffolk Town Garden
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
A small town garden of about 15 by 11 metres behind a 1990s house in the suburbs of Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, for clients who are keen gardeners and wanted an immersive green retreat. Large format limestone paving makes two seating areas in a staggered, offset layout with the joints planted, limestone gravel runs between for texture and lower maintenance, and a simple bowl, the lily bowl by Urbis Design, brings the still, reflective quality of water.
The planting of hornbeam, pines, perennials and grasses refers to the Suffolk countryside, its arable fields and hedgerows studded with pockets of woodland that mix deciduous trees with pines. In the picture, creeping thyme, the variety Pink Chintz, spills pink over the joints of the slabs in early summer beside a mounded dwarf pine and the scalloped leaves and yellow green flowers of lady's mantle. Richard Bloom took the photograph. Gardens Illustrated put the garden on its cover in June 2022 and again on a design special edition in March 2023. The studio publishes it as Suffolk garden on its project page and Suffolk town garden in its portfolio; the second is the form used here.
Colm Joseph Gardens
Colm Joseph Gardens is a garden design studio near Cambridge founded by Colm Joseph, who retrained in 2017 after working as a management consultant and economist, studying at the London College of Garden Design at Kew, and who works across East Anglia, the South East, London and further afield.
Design Colm Joseph (@colm_joseph). Seen via @shootgardening.
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.