Originally published by the Guardian, Saturday 27 March 2010

Among the emails encouraging me to buy Viagra and watches lands an invitation to “our B&B with six-acre prairie garden on our small farm in West Sussex”. The website is a vision in pink petals. Curiosity gets the better of me. What is a prairie garden exactly, and why is there one near the South Downs?

An Easter wreath of little eggs and feathers hangs on the door in welcome at Morlands Farm in Henfield, home to Sussex Prairies. If this is modern farmhouse style, bring it on, I think, as Pauline McBride takes me to the Red room. Either side of a contemporary four-poster, two fat table lamps sit on a pair of oriental cabinets used as bedside tables. Richly coloured rugs and kilims cover the floor, tiny Hindu paintings hang above a high-backed sofa, and a pair of stools are piled with Taschen interiors books. I could happily load up a Pickfords van with the entire contents and drive it home.

The bathroom has a shower over the bath, plenty of toiletries and a window, the tea tray, a coffee pot and a teapot (with mini cable-stitch cosy), and homemade chocolate-walnut biscuits. There is just one tiny fly in the ointment – I simply cannot get my bedroom door to shut.

Nosily, I stick my head into a Yellow twin and smaller Blue double (both immaculate, both empty) on the way down. There is no guest sitting room but each bedroom has a sitting area – mine having the largest.

What’s all this prairie stuff then, I ask over a cup of tea with Pauline and husband Paul – and get the story. It was in Luxembourg, where the couple spent 12 years employed on a country estate, that horticulturist Paul began working with Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf. The Dutchman is a luminary of what the gardening world calls the New Wave planting movement, characterised, they tell me, by romantic clouds of strong coloured perennials and ornamental grasses.

Inspired, the McBrides wanted their own “prairie” project, and moved back to Pauline’s childhood home – Morlands Farm – to create the garden and build this new farmhouse. The B&B opened last October – but before that, they planted up their prairie on several acres out back. One spring weekend, after they had positioned some 30,000 pots, they invited family and friends to “The Big Plant”.

“Everyone came to help,” says Pauline. “They were camping or brought caravans, and we had to sound a klaxon at mealtimes.”

Since then, Sussex Prairies has been described by one gardening writer as one of the most exciting new British gardens to open to the public. Some of the taller grasses grow to three metres and the snaking bark pathways enable visitors to get right in among the Jerusalem sage, saponaria, day lilies, ornamental alliums, red-hot pokers and something intriguingly called African love grass.

Of course it is all still a long way off its full summer glory; a small topiary garden beyond the sun-terrace is laden with hoar frost the next morning. Breakfast is a sumptuous feast of homemade yoghurt, fruit salad and deep yellow eggs from Sussex hens (food distance measured in metres rather than miles here). By the time you read this though, the ewes will be lambing, and it won’t be long before the prairie garden bursts into life for another season.

Wheatsheaf Road
Henfield
01273 495 902
sussexprairies.co.uk

Doubles £95 and £125 a night, twin room £110, B&B. Guests have the run of the garden, otherwise guided garden visits for groups by arrangement, or check website for opening times and dates.