Midway along a small ribboning valley outside the city of Bath is Hillside, home of garden designer Dan Pearson and his partner, Huw Morgan. The old stone farm cottage sits high on the southwest-facing slope looking out across a bucolic view of rolling hills, woodlands and patchwork green fields. The garden stretches out on either side of the house then gently spills and tumbles its way down to a winding stream at the bottom, a stream that looks too innocent to have carved so deeply into the land. It’s a truly wondrous garden, full of joy, colour and movement and retaining incredible sensitivity and connection to place. I have watched it evolve since 2010, when the couple moved here from Peckham in south London in search of a different way of living, one they hoped would be deeply embedded in a landscape. Dan was partly inspired in this by his work with Priscilla and Antonio Carluccio at their idyllic cottage in Hampshire, where growing, foraging and cooking were a way of life, and Huw by his love of cooking and eating outside as a young boy with his aunt in Wales.
Their garden in Peckham was like a maquette for a future dream. I used to visit it regularly to take photographs for Dan’s column in the Observer. It was a place of wildness and colour eked out of the London brick of urban SE15. Back then, as now, one of the great joys of visiting the pair was Huw’s cooking. In Peckham it was raised from a small vegetable plot at the end of the garden (and a close-by allotment), and, weather permitting, lunch was eaten alfresco brushed by fennels and crocosmia. Now, with the move to Somerset, food and outdoor living are much more central to the garden.
Hillside is abundant with food, mostly grown from seed, varieties collected from friends or trialled from catalogues. When they first arrived, land was made level next to the house and beds marked out, formal and less formal, radiating away from it. Dancing poppies, sun-baked fennels, cardoons and artichokes eventually gave way to rows of salads, chicories, kales, chards, courgettes and beans, and then to every kind of soft fruit. Beyond that, where the contour of the land picks up again, they planted an orchard of apples, pears, plums, gages, mirabelles, quince and cobs. With the passing of some 15 years, lush grass now runs and laps around the trees, which are heavy with fruit when they are cropping. Below that, a path winds its way down through a field to a polytunnel where the tender tomatoes, peppers and aubergines take shelter.
Nestling up against the side of the house is a corrugated roof reaching out like an outstretched wing that protects a beautiful outdoor kitchen and eating area from the elements. The roof is set with a large northeast-facing window, so there’s good light even on a rainy winter’s day. A rough concrete floor underneath opens on to the vegetable and herb garden at one end. Two large wooden tables look out across the garden to the other side of the valley. On them sit a basket of plums collected that morning, a copper trowel, some well-used secateurs, cups of tea from earlier that have long gone cold and a pair of binoculars to track the continuing rise and fall of the woodpecker making its way across the valley.
There are pots and vases of flowers cut from the garden, bright-red dahlias and pelargoniums, floating orange cosmos. A simple black cast-iron gas hob, shallow ceramic sinks with handmade copper pipes and taps and a wood-fired bread oven sit in the corner next to a hand-hewn fruit-picking ladder made of chestnut poles. It is a kitchen pared down to its simplest ingredients. And it is the hub of daily life in the garden. I love dining outside; I have taken meals here in its cool shade on sultry summer days, and wrapped in blankets in the clear chill of a starry night. There have been cups of tea and slices of cake as a welcome break from the work of gardening. It is so simple and an utterly beautiful way to experience both cooking and eating.
Food is important in this garden: its growing, preparation and consumption. From my first meeting with Dan and Huw there has always been an importance placed on stopping and taking time, talking over tea or lunch, always in the garden with produce from it. Huw’s beautiful displays of plants that are flowering here are joyful celebrations of what you might miss or overlook. The dishes do something similar. The exquisite mirabelles in a frangipane serve to remind us of the extraordinariness of colour, taste, smell and texture. The basket of tomato varieties from the polytunnel are like a lexicon of the fruit’s colours and flavours, a presentation of moments you might otherwise pass by and miss. Dan and Huw have always been good at this, at sharing these moments with others.
Huw does most of the cooking. He’s one of my favourite cooks, and his love of growing, curiosity of taste and his warmth in feeding others come together to make memorable dishes. Borrowed, adapted or invented, the recipes are full of the life and energy of the garden. Many make their way on to Dig Delve, their online magazine, as do the results of their trials, taste tests and growing advice. There is something fantastical about cooking and eating outside. It has a sort of magic that is broken only by going inside and turning your back on the garden.
For more about Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan’s online magazine, ‘Dig Delve’, visit digdelve.com
A version of this article also appears in the May 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive interiors stories like this one, direct to your inbox
