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Denmans is a registered Grade II garden in the Sussex South Downs. Converted from a market garden with the arrival in1946 of Joyce Robinson, an unknown but brilliant horticulturalist who pioneered gravel gardening and started experimenting on a broad scale at Denmans in 1970. Her work was continued with the arrival of influential landscape designer John Brookes in 1980 who had been using gravel in the 1960s and made it an integral part of Denmans, including two dry riverbeds.
Restoration of the garden which has been underway since 2018 and the layout of the gravel walks and borders is now reflected and punctuated by architectural plantings and a contrasting naturalistic planting style. Denmans is an RHS Partner Garden, has won Gold in the South and South East in Bloom competition in 2021 and 2022 and is open under the NGS.
Gwendolyn van Paasschen began her career in Washington DC as a US Senate legislative assistant to Senators Slade Gorton and John McCain on economic issues and is now is a garden designer and writer. She worked with British landscape designer and author John Brookes on a major multiyear project in upstate New York, and subsequently worked with him on his memoir, A Landscape Legacy (2018) and compiled and edited How to Design a Garden, a book of writings by John Brookes, published by Pimpernel Press (October 2021)
In 2017 she co-founded and is chair of the John Brookes-Denmans Foundation (JBDF) and she also currently serves on the American Trust for the British Library (ATBL) Board of Trustees and is the past president of Kids Empowered by Your Support (KEYS), a Connecticut-based nonprofit that provides free music lessons to under-served children in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Denmans website
Article on John Brookes
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