Stephen Anderton on Veddw House Garden

genista aetnensis at Veddw copyright Charles Hawes

genista aetnensis, © Charles Hawes

Stephen Anderton: Times 9th August “Gardens to Visit”

Veddw House

Only rarely does one come across a garden so ambitious and successful as the one at Veddw House. It is the work of Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes, made during the last fifteen years around a small agricultural worker’s cottage in the hills above Chepstow.

Wherein ambitious? Well, this garden combines all the achievements of a great garden – excellent relationships between house and garden and between the garden and its surroundings, a satisfying blend of formality and informality and of wildness and control, good use of colour and texture, and a distinct personality. Nor was this an easy place to make a garden: the site may have good views, but who would want to make their dream garden on a piece of land which slopes down northwards? It’s a hard trick to pull off, but how it succeeds! Go see it: pay that Severn bridge toll and be grateful.

Veddw House.© Charles Hawes

The house sits in the middle of its plot. It looks eastwards downhill over a highly-coloured formal flower garden, through screen planting and a huge hornbeam arch to a flower meadow, with a potager tucked away to one side. You might expert this to be a weak prospect since it drops away before you. But it is saved by plenty of verticals both in the structure and the planting, upon which the sun can play upon as it moves round. Looking out along this main axis, there is flat, head-on light only at dawn, and few people see that.

ground elder and Lysymachia @firecracker' Veddw. Copyright Anne Wareham

Variegated ground elder and lyschimachia 'Firecracker@ Anne Wareham

The flower garden seems at first to be the heart of the garden. It plays with sophisticated, civilised colours, predominantly powerful reds, oranges and yellows, alongside purple foliage. Under the beneficent eye of a glowing Mount Etna broom there are quadrant beds containing domes of box and osmarea surrounded by perennials such as yellow loosestrife, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, good old orange alstroemeria, Rosa ‘Parkdirektor Riggers’, and a striking interplanting of variegated ground elder and the purple-leaved Lysimachia ciliata ‘Firecracker’.

Euphorbia 'Fireglow' Veddw. copyright Anne Wareham

Front Garden, early summer, euphorbia griffithii 'Fireglow', humulus lupus 'Aureus'.© Anne Wareham

The flower meadow below, partly planted with orchard trees, has a close-mown path down its centre flanked by pairs of the Turkish hazel Corylus colurna. These are pruned annually to make tall cones on clean stems, creating a kind of aerial terracing to the meadow and halting its downhill momentum. It is a tree I have never seen used so creatively before. In the meadow grass, which has been mown as hay meadow for the last fifteen years, there are orchids, masses of purple knapweed, and a top-up of camassias. And all around the flower garden and the meadow is a network of smaller paths, constantly offering new choices of direction.

But at the back of the house lies the garden’s biggest surprise. What would you expect behind a muddley asymmetrical cottage in a bowl of land hemmed in by woods? Not what you get here, I am sure.

First there is a waist-high terrace wall. Sizeable walls just feet from the house can make you feel shut in, but this wall is perforated by wide steps, and a bolster of pale alchemilla froths along the top to lighten the effect. Immediately behind one end is a raised formal pool. So you can sit by the back door and observe the water-lilies at eye-level. To provide the sound of running water, the pond ‘leaks’ through the wall into a tank, a nicely unsophisticated touch beside this simple cottage.

pool copyright Charels Hawes

Pool © Charles Hawes

Above the terrace wall is a semicircular lawn backed by a raised border of shrubs and tall, willowy perennials. In July it is a parade of blue Campanula lactiflora and rosebay willow-herb, in white, pale- and dark-pink.

Crescent Border, Veddw. Copyright Charles Hawes

Crescent border, Veddw,© Charles Hawes

So far so good. But behind all this polished cottaginess is the emotional core of the whole garden. Slung side-to-side across the bowl of land between the house and the trees is a conglomeration of geometric yew-hedged rooms. An odd thing to do, you might say. Does it not look uncomfortably like a suspension bridge over such a dished site? The answer is no, because the rooms’ hedges are of different heights, occasionally with sloping top, so that when you look down on them they seem settled into the bottom of the bowl, like a handful of dice.

hedges at Veddw copyright Charles Hawes

One room contains rows of cereal crops, another ‘secret’ room a collection of formal mini-meadows. They provide one of many powerful references to the surrounding agricultural landscape. But it is the biggest room which is the core of the garden: here a massive, pink, wave-form bench overlooks a rectangular pool of black water towards a maze of rising, wavy-topped hedges. It is a powerfully contemplative space but also curiously disturbing. Here you sit under the glowering woods with your back to the garden, and choose – what? - to contemplate the reflected blue sky, or lose yourself in the fathomless black water.

Reflecting Pool, Veddw. Copyright Charles Hawes

Interestingly black wood is used throughout the garden, in steps and walls and seats. I cannot say it appeals to me, but it has a certain commanding presence. Like it or hate it, it exemplifies the mixture of seriousness and joyous brightness constantly combined in this garden. And the combination is heart-lifting.

Features To Note:

1 Ways of handling a garden on a sloping site.
2 Formal flower garden of hard-working colour schemes.
3 Several adjoining yew-hedged garden rooms.
4 Flowering meadow.
5 Grey-and-black garden, with ‘seaside’ plantings of blue-grey lyme grass and white valerian.
6 A lesson in the circuitry of open spaces and subsidiary winding paths.

7 Owners who positively welcome discussion and criticism. Enjoy it.