Step inside a theatrical Somerset garden that inspired an RHS Gold Medal-winning design

Sarah Mead is no typical farmer’s wife. She sports three studs in her right ear and an asymmetrical bob with purple streaks through it, and she spent three years at stage school before forming a dance troupe (an ankle injury put paid to that career). But then Holt Farm is no typical Somerset dairy farm. It is home to Yeo Valley, a multi-million-pound organic milk and yogurt business owned by Sarah’s husband Tim, his family and their coworkers. And, instead of a mucky yard next to the house, Sarah and her team of four gardeners have created a 6.5-acre garden – organic, of course – that is open to the public three days a week from mid April to the end of October.

Last autumn, with the help of designer Tom Massey, Sarah re-created elements of the garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, where it won a Gold Medal and The People’s Choice award for Best Show Garden. With such a triumph in the bag, would she do it again, I ask, over the loud snores of the family’s pug, Ivy, asleep on my knee. ‘No,’ is her firm answer. ‘I couldn’t have come away any happier. I wouldn’t want to jinx it.’

Legacies of the show garden are dotted around, including a partly burnt wooden sculpture and the palisade walls that represent the farm’s venture into biochar. Made on the farm from felled ash trees that had ash dieback (53 per cent of their woodland is ash and has had to be removed because of this fungal disease), biochar is created by burning the wood in a specialised burner for over eight hours. This results in pure carbon which is then incorporated into potting mixes or introduced directly into the soil where it is highly efficient at storing water and liquid feeds. There are also the pollarded willows from Chelsea, now growing in a meadow surrounding the yurt, where various activities are held. In pride of place in the large gravel garden is a giant, suspended steambent oak egg made by Falmouth-based Tom Raffield.

Designing a garden for Chelsea is about creating a micro stage set and there is similar evidence of Sarah’s theatrical background in the series of rooms she has made around the terracotta pink farmhouse overlooking Blagdon Lake, where she and Tim raised their four children, now aged 27, 25, 22 and 19. Though she inherited an attractive low maintenance garden from her mother-in-law Mary (who now lives in Blagdon village, a mile or so away), when she moved there after her marriage in 1990, it was the re-siting of the milking parlours away from the house in the Nineties that gave Sarah the impetus to start the gradual creation of something on a grand scale. ‘I began playing round with Mary’s roses and soon it became a complete obsession,’ she recalls. ‘It was just for my own pleasure but, early on, I started opening for the National Garden Scheme. Looking back, I had a bit of a nerve, as there was not much to see and what was there was about a minute old.’

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Avidly visiting every garden she could think of, notebook in hand, Sarah read extensively and undertook an RHS Level 2 Certificate. ‘I wouldn’t class myself as a plants-person, but I love big sweeping effects – I like staging stuff that makes people turn a corner and say “Wow!”.’

Vistas of the gentle backdrop of the Mendip Hills are framed in gaps in hedges, a loud chorus of pots of seasonal flowers is arranged outside the purple-painted greenhouse and a quiet path winds between a grove of closely planted, ghostly white Betula jacquemontii, underplanted with ferns and woodland bulbs. In the herbaceous areas, colour-coordinated troupes of bronze or red and lime foliage and flowers high-kick their way along double borders.