Lulah Ellender immerses herself in a folktale of a garden, newly landscaped within Sheffield Park.

Poet Alice Oswald said, ‘A good garden is close to a folktale. It has a path and characters and that is enough.’ Sheffield Park’s ‘Garden for the Future’, inaugurated in July 2025, has both: gently looping paths, bright plants populating the tale with colour, and a demure peacock bringing hero energy to a flower bed. Like all folktales there is a beginning, middle and end.

So, the beginning. John Baker Holroyd, later the 1st Earl of Sheffield, commissioned Capability Brown to remodel the grounds at Sheffield Park in 1796; his work was later refined by Humphry Repton. They created a showy, theatrical landscape of serpentine lakeside paths and sweeping lawns. The Earl’s cricket-mad grandson, the 3rd Earl, undertook further landscaping in the Victorian tradition of exotic planting, bringing in giant redwoods and rare shrubs. He died in 1909 with no heirs but a mountain of debt, and the estate was sold.

Enter the next owner, Arthur Gilstrap Soames, who extended the planting, adding rhododendrons, swamp-cypress and Japanese maples, amongst others. By the mid-20th century, Sheffield Park had become a renowned arboretum with a global botanical tradition. Since 1954 it has been under the stewardship of the National Trust, and the grounds are evolving again.

The middle. We encounter the Garden for the Future with no fanfare, stumbling upon it as we walk through the parkland’s impressive trees. There are few signs interrupting the view, and no obvious boundaries. The garden doesn’t try to compete with the arboretum’s blaze, it just offers another story. Curved walkways open into wider spaces edged with rudbeckia, salvia, Californian poppies, euphorbia, and daisies. Drought tolerant plants, rooted in a mixture of sand, recycled brick and compost.

These Southern Hemisphere plants create communities alongside Britain’s native species, continuing a long tradition of mixing naturalised and native plants. The garden was created this year by Joe Perkins, a Hove-based garden designer, and it hasn’t had time to fully unfurl. As the trees grow taller and shade out the plants beneath, the landscape will evolve. Some plants will spread, others will retreat.

The curves of the paths are echoed in the inviting wooden seating, great blackened lozenges made by furniture maker Oli Carter from an oak tree that fell in the 1987 storm. Their surfaces are changing with human touch and the weather as each season passes. These spaces are designed for congregating – family picnics, a pause on a walk, a place to play with schoolfriends. And the garden ends as subtly as it begins, as the paths lead you back into the canopy.

Except it doesn’t end, really. The whole point is that it’s a design for the future, an ongoing conversation between our changing climate and the plants that can survive increasing temperatures, longer periods of drought and milder winters. The Garden for the Future is both a beautiful space for now, and a testing ground for how our gardens might look in the years to come.

Perkins’ concept for the garden began, as all stories do, in the imagination. How could this previously underused space reflect the progressive gardening and innovation for which Sheffield Park is known, whilst also catering for the diverse needs of National Trust visitors? He wanted to create a space that people use, rather than simply pass through; a space that would feed their curiosity about plants and take them away from their everyday concerns for a while. This was the first major intervention since the Trust took over Sheffield Park, and he wanted it to be a resource for future gardeners as well as an enjoyable experience in the present.

Developing the Garden for the Future came with challenges: the land is Grade I listed and there are many significant trees with large areas of protected roots. There were also irrigation and drainage issues, thankfully solved by the resourceful team from The Landscaping Consultants who helped Perkins bring the garden to life. He started with a simple, accessible design based around ornamental spaces and minimal hard landscaping, and then let the plants write themselves into the garden’s story.

Education and research are central to this project. Under Head Gardener Jodie Hilton and Senior Gardener Steve Feazey, the team at Sheffield Park are working with Kew and Royal Holloway University to collect data on the trees, plants and wildlife in the garden to see which are coping with our shifting weather patterns, and which may not be good choices for the future. They hope to monitor how our invertebrates (general and specialised species) benefit from the exotic plants. Using all the data they gather, they will replant the wider park estate so it best supports its intricate, fragile ecosystems.

On this bright October morning, the garden is busy with visitors. Children clamber over the seating, and a dog ambles unwittingly past the peacock that’s semi-hidden amongst the ferns. We have ignored the map and chosen to meander, happening upon the garden before spilling back out to the lakes lined with ebullient red and bronze leaves. Families trip-trap over bridges sheltering imaginary trolls, older couples sit beside the lake watching ducks glide over the fiery reflections of the trees, and people chat in the queue for coffee. All these moments in all these days, shared fleetingly amidst the leaf-crunch and sun-glare of this most delicious of seasons. This garden gives us an example for how we might exist in time, noticing the nowness so the future can emerge. In our age of uncertainty and anxiety, spaces like these become ever-more important. Gardening is always an act of hope – here, it’s an act of generosity, inviting us to learn how to live in a future we can only imagine. ‘Happily ever after’ depends on what we now sow.

Lulah Ellender is the author of the memoirs Elizabeth’s Lists (Granta 2018) and Grounding: Finding Home in a Garden (Granta 2022)