St Johns Mill is the former Moores textile mill located on the banks of the River Neb in Tynwald Mills. It is one of the few mills in the Island where the water wheel that drove the machinery was located inside the Mill. Rolls of cloth were brought out from the mill and stretched on drying racks, known as tenter frames, in the field next to the Mill.

By the 1990s, the Mill had been unused for some years and was semi-derelict with the tenter field overgrown with brambles and bracken. A project to renovate the Mill was conceived as a Millennium project and Prescott Associates was commissioned to design a garden on the former tenter field. The brief for the design was that it should be an open garden, accessible to all, but which could be used for outdoor events, meetings or for individual contemplation. The design was to interpret the industrial heritage of the site, and also show how a garden could be welcoming to wildlife as well as people.

The design that we produced used the layout of the original tender frames and the route that the cloth was brought out, along the length of the garden, to create a spine footpath, bordered with frames, rebuilt to the original design. The role of water in the original Mill was played with; the mill race was relined and water now runs along this again, issuing through a new cascade, reflecting the light and bringing the sound of splashing water to the garden, from where it runs under the path into a newly-created pond, which brings stillness and reflections of the sky.

The garden was split into a number of ‘rooms’ which decrease in formality away from the building and where different types of habitats have been created, including a short turf meadow, a summer meadow, which has now been colonised by Common Spotted Orchids, a south-facing butterfly border and woodland with an understorey carpet of spring-flowering wood anemones and Bluebells. The Manx Wildlife Trust helped with planting up the different areas and also managed the garden for a number of years.

The garden has matured and changed a little over the years, but remains a lovely space that is enjoyed and used by humans and non-humans alike.

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