‘I don’t like straight things very much; rooms should be organic, soft and undulating,’ says topiarist and artist Charlotte Molesworth. The bricks laid out across the floor of the dining room in her home in Kent were dug out from the kitchen garden, where ‘ragged and weathered’ blocks lined the edges of four beds rich with vegetables, herbs and salad leaves. Charlotte and her husband Donald, a gardener, had two rooms knocked through to establish the room, a large space with a welcoming dining table, a busy desk and a cosy sofa covered in custard yellow, rose and orange striped blankets. The walls match the sofa in colour, with sponge-printed abstract paisley and a bunting trim, overlayed with paintings and drawings by friends and family, of woodlands, hills, birds – and a portrait of Charlotte’s mother in a Tudor fancy dress costume, complete with ruff.
Most of the house runs off the dining room, with Donald’s room – ‘it’s like a cinema’, says the owner – and the bathroom to one side, the kitchen, ‘yellow room’ and larder to the other, and Charlotte and Donald’s bedroom, built later as an extension, at the back.
What unifies the house is the way that every corner expresses a certain ingenuity and willingness to improvise with the materials at hand. The bathroom, which was previously part of the larder, has what looks like the end of a ladder poking out from the ceiling, but is in fact half of the support for a high shelf: ‘You would balance a plank of wood on here to keep your cheese away from the mice,’ Charlotte explains. The larder is now filled with drawers adopted from a wardrobe and slate shelves ‘from a friend who didn’t want them – how peculiar’.
The teak wardrobe, which Donald’s family brought back to England from India, provided the doors for fitted cupboards and the wood for a coat rack; the rest of it has become the Molesworths’ four-poster bed. The walls of the bedroom are painted with leaves, the cornicing lined with soft arches to break the hard edge of the room.
A knack for adapting, reusing, and fixing things, growing abundant plants from cuttings, and finding new homes and functions for inherited and found objects, runs through the Molesworths’ home and garden. Collections, both practical and ornamental, congregate throughout the house. Cabbage plates are strung to kitchen pipes, wooden dogs loaf around the kitchen, gathered stones are laid out across a mantelpiece, ceramic animals and other fare congregate above the sofa and paintings and drawings of nature line every room.
The garden has come together with a similar natural abandon, grown entirely from cuttings, divisions and seedlings. The yew seedlings were a wedding present, Charlotte, says, as was the pond, and the box has grown from a nursery: ‘After seven years, they were nice chubby little plants.’ The topiary, which stands at the centre of the garden, ‘holds it all together’, shaped into puff balls, peacocks, and stacks of rings, like dollops of ice cream. Facing the topiary is a large slate table, with mismatched legs reclaimed and cut down from other pieces of furniture.
Beyond it is the Molesworths’ barn, with a collection of mended ceramic pots stacked up against the wall. Inside, it holds a cast-iron printing press, and cupboards, shelves and drawers packed with books, ceramics, coats, tennis rackets, prints, drawings and apples picked from the garden. It is here that Charlotte hosts her annual open studio, when she invites friends to show and sell their work, and where she shares a collection of her own pieces. The artist draws from observation, and much of her work is grounded in her garden, or the landscape surrounding her home. ‘I have a friend who I go to the woods with to draw old trees, dense thicket and animals,’ she says.
Charlotte’s studio is at the back of the barn, through a low door and into a bright room. The room is filled with ink and pencil drawings, prints and paintings in many shades of green, although the owner asserts that she ‘doesn’t do much’: ‘We have got too many animals, too big a garden and too busy a social life – too much fun – and drawing just gets elbowed out.’ For her, making art is an almost meditative pursuit, and a selfish one. ‘You need self-discipline and can’t have anyone getting in your way. I don’t want to think about food, the house. I don’t want to think about anything when I am working,’ she says. ‘When you have achieved that setting, it is amazing: you cannot quite believe it – there are no demands of you.’
Since the Molesworths moved to Balmoral Cottage, soon after their wedding in 1983, they have been cultivating the house and garden as one. ‘We moved in on Christmas Eve with two dogs, a very old donkey, seven hens and two cats. We had one light bulb, our bed, table and two chairs. We lit the Rayburn fire and have lived here happily ever since!’ When they bought the house, prospective mortgage providers wouldn’t recognise it as a worthy building, but with the help of a loan from Donald’s employers, who owned the cottage and surrounding land, the couple restored the cottage.
Although when they bought it the garden was overgrown ‘with cabbages and bindweeds, thistles and leeks that had gone to flower’, they knew they had good quality soil. It had been the kitchen garden for the larger estate, which had been home to ornithologist Collingwood ‘Cherry’ Ingram until his death. Ingram had routinely improved the Wealden clay soil, and it was primed for new growth. ‘My main regret is that we didn’t just leave it [overgrown],’ Charlotte says. ‘Human beings always have to make changes.’
While the Molesworths have indeed established new paths and grown abundant plants of their own, above all, they have made sure to tend to their land with space, peace and quiet at the centre of their gardening ethos – regardless of what species it may host. ‘Nature always gets booted out. We have plenty of space for everyone.’
The philosophy of welcoming nature in runs through the garden and into the Molesworths’ house. Indoor plants and fresh flowers, drawn and painted woodlands, the practice of sowing a space with whatever you have available, the very cycles of nature, are evident in every room. Indeed, at the centre of the dining room, strung up to a supporting oak beam, is a garland of hops. ‘We buy fresh hops at the beginning of every year,’ Charlotte explains: ‘Getting rid of the old energy and last year’s stuff, and bringing in the new.’
Charlotte Molesworth will be hosting an open studio at Balmoral Cottage, Benenden, Kent on 24–26 August 2024, which will showcase pottery, paintings, drawings and sculpture. The garden will be open to the public as part of the National Garden Scheme on 7 April and 21 April 2024 from 11am–5pm. Details: ngs.org.uk and www.seos-art.org
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