Future Office & Garden Lab

Over the Easter weekend, we enjoyed working on the future Turtlewings garden lab and office for five days. This amazing space is located just north of Marlborough in the Wessex Downs, county Wiltshire, UK. The site is a historic walled garden on a country estate called Burderop Park. It was built in the mid-1600s, and we purchased the property almost two years ago.

The old greenhouse built in the 1880s is the only remaining greenhouse within the garden and will become Turtlewings Design Studio and kitchen garden. The 1-acre walled garden will house a herbaceous nursery and be the experimental space for our Wonder and Wellbeing outdoor research projects, Wondergarden and Classroom Garden. There is an existing Bothy (small stone lean-to building on the north side of the wall, which will become our residence, along with a new eco-friendly timber frame building inside the garden. This will be built on the footprint of an old peach tree greenhouse, which was in its day one of the first steam-heated greenhouses in the UK.

We await the final planning permission but hope this space will be inhabitable by spring 2024. I won’t say finished as I don’t think it will ever be truly finished, but keep your eyes and mind wide open for this exciting new space, which will be the perfect incubator for wonder and wellbeing designs!

If you are interested in following the build and development stage, you can find it here at www.bothygardens.com (lots more will be added to this site once we have final planning permission)