Clara Merton’s show garden for the Wildlife Trusts at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show blended a wildflower meadow with a still pool and a deadwood stumpery, earning her a gold medal and the People’s Choice award. Running a studio from the Cotswolds, she takes on projects ranging from London roof terraces to Scottish estates, and has spent two decades refining an approach that treats every garden as a self-sustaining ecosystem. Below, the award-winning designer shares the practical principles any gardener can adopt to create outdoor spaces that are both beautiful and teeming with life.
Designing with Soil First
A garden’s vitality, Merton insists, begins below the surface. “If your soil is dead, you might as well be arranging plastic flowers,” she says. Her first step on any site is a no-dig assessment, preserving the existing soil food web. Instead of turning the ground, she applies a thick mulch of well-rotted organic matter—often a blend of homemade leafmould and a peat-free wool compost from Dalefoot Composts. For those without a home supply, she recommends Melcourt SylvaGrow, available at many garden centres.
Sheet mulching with plain cardboard suppresses perennial weeds while encouraging earthworms and mycorrhizal fungi to bind the soil. Merton spreads a 5–7cm layer of mulch in early autumn, topped up lightly in late spring, always keeping it away from woody stems to prevent collar rot. When introducing new trees and shrubs, she dips the roots in a mycorrhizal inoculant such as Plantworks Rootgrow to speed establishment even in poor ground.
A simple home test kit—purchased from the RHS Wisley Plant Centre or any good nursery—reveals pH and nutrient levels. Yet she cautions against fertiliser: “Feed the soil, not the plant. A handful of pelleted chicken manure once a year is usually enough.”
Layering Plants for Nectar, Shelter and Structure
In Merton’s designs, every plant plays multiple roles. She mimics a woodland edge, building a canopy of small trees such as Crataegus monogyna (hawthorn) or Malus sylvestris (crab apple). Beneath that, a shrub layer of Viburnum opulus and Cornus sanguinea provides nesting sites and berries well into winter.
The perennial understorey is engineered for a long succession of blooms. Early bulbs like Narcissus pseudonarcissus give way to Geranium phaeum and Pulmonaria officinalis, followed by towering Eupatorium maculatum and Veronicastrum virginicum in high summer. She frequently uses Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’ for its late nectar and copper tones. All these can be sourced from specialist nurseries such as Avondale Nursery in Warwickshire, which holds national collections of several key genera.
A ground-hugging carpet of Vinca minor or creeping Thymus serpyllum smothers weeds, while airy grasses such as Stipa tenuissima catch the light and shelter beetles. “I think of a planting scheme as a community, not a display,” Merton explains. “Each layer interacts, and that complexity is what makes a garden feel alive.”
Inviting the Insects: Host Plants and Bare Patches
To Merton, a garden without a thriving insect population is not only ecologically impoverished but also aesthetically flat. “You can hear the difference,” she says. “A garden full of hoverflies and bees actually hums.” Her rule of thumb is to dedicate at least 60 per cent of planting to native or near-native species that double as larval host plants. A controlled clump of Urtica dioica (common nettle) tucked behind a shed supports comma, peacock and small tortoiseshell caterpillars, while Anthriscus sylvestris (cow parsley) and Daucus carota (wild carrot) serve beneficial insects through their umbel flowers.
“You can hear the difference. A garden full of hoverflies and bees actually hums.”
She also champions the “messy corner”—a bare, undisturbed patch of soil or a sand bank that solitary bees and wasps need for nesting. In a small courtyard, even a 30cm-square area of exposed earth in a sunny spot makes a measurable difference. Wildflower seeds and plug plants can be ordered from Emorsgate Seeds, which offers mixes tailored to different soil types. Gardeners in North America can find similar selections from Prairie Moon Nursery.
Throughout her designs, she incorporates dead wood—a half-buried log or a stumpery—to provide a refuge for stag beetles and fungi. And she insists on leaving all hollow perennial stems standing over winter as perfect overwintering chambers for ladybirds and lacewings. “That so-called untidiness is the engine of next year’s health.”
Water Brings the Birdsong
Even a tiny water feature, Merton believes, will transform a garden’s wildlife. She installs a wildlife pond on almost every project, from a deep clay-lined pool on a country estate to a simple preformed liner sunk into an urban courtyard. The key is a variety of depths: a shallow pebble beach for birds to bathe, a marginal shelf planted with Mentha aquatica and Iris pseudacorus, and a central section at least 60cm deep for amphibians to overwinter.
Preformed ponds are widely available; a durable model from the RHS Wisley Plant Centre costs under £60. Merton recommends coupling it with a solar-powered fountain such as the Oase Aquarius Solar Kit, which oxygenates the water and prevents mosquito larvae without using mains electricity. Rainwater harvested from a nearby downpipe can be directed into the pond via a simple swale, reducing the need for top-ups.
Aquatic plants from a dedicated native nursery like Naturescape in Nottinghamshire will thrive without chemicals. Add a clump of Ceratophyllum demersum (hornwort) as an oxygenator, and a few leaves of Nymphaea alba (white water lily) to provide dappled shade and keep the water clear.
Maintenance as Gentle Intervention
For Merton, a well-designed garden requires less intervention with each season. She visits established gardens just once a month during the growing year, mostly to observe. “My maintenance regime is really just thoughtful editing,” she says. “I remove anything that is smothering its neighbours, I deadhead a few plants if I want to prolong flowering, but mostly I watch and wait.”
“I see maintenance as editing, not cleaning. You’re guiding the garden’s own evolution, never imposing a rigid order.”
She prefers traditional tools chosen for precision. A pair of Burgon & Ball sheep shears handles light summer trimming of grassy edges far better than a strimmer, which can shred leaves and disturb insects. A razor-sharp, stainless-steel transplanting spade from De Wit is her favourite for dividing perennials in early autumn. And she gathers leaves with a rubber-tyned rake from Sneeboer, leaving piles as hedgehog refuges rather than using a blower.
Timing is everything: she cuts back herbaceous tops in late February, just as new shoots appear, so that seedheads feed goldfinches all winter and spider webs glint in frost. This approach fosters a garden that can largely care for itself. As Merton reflects, “When a garden hums with life, it’s the result of thousands of tiny partnerships—between roots and fungi, caterpillar and wren, soil and rain. Our role is to set those partnerships in motion, then step back and enjoy the music.”
The stumpery at the heart of Clara Merton’s Chelsea show garden drew directly from the Victorian tradition popularised by William Robinson, who wrote in *The English Flower Garden* that such structures “give a natural and picturesque effect” while providing essential habitat. Robinson’s own garden at Gravetye Manor in West Sussex still contains one of England’s finest stumperies, built from sweet chestnut and oak root plates. Modern practitioners can source similar materials from Parker’s Traditional Stumperies in Herefordshire, which supplies sustainably harvested root systems from managed woodland. The key to a successful stumpery lies in the arrangement: pieces should be set vertically with root plates facing upward, sunk at least 30cm into the ground to prevent toppling, and packed with loam-based compost in the crevices. This creates a microclimate where liverworts, mosses, and ferns such as *Polypodium vulgare* (common polypody) and *Dryopteris filix-mas* (male fern) can establish naturally, while the decaying wood supports specialist beetles and fungi that rarely colonise elsewhere in a garden.
