Fifteen years ago I was in London, reading Country Living and dreaming of country living. I hated the noise and the crowds - and my garden was far too small. The difficulty was to find a house with land for a large garden and a job to pay the bills, all in the same place at the same time. In the end I persuaded Charles, my husband, to take a risk that still gives me nightmares when I remember it - we bought the house and trusted that work would follow. After many scary months, it did.

We bought a two hundred-year-old cottage on the Welsh border, near Tintern. It was originally built by a squatter, who also took over the land which has become Veddw (pronounced "Vedoo") House garden. There are four acres of garden, two of which are woodland. The ornamental garden is on a north-facing slope, sheltered by a sweep of trees, which create a delightful amphitheatre effect. The house sits satisfactorily in the middle, at the bottom of a small valley.

I had a spade and blind faith, so started digging at the side of one of the fields. I soon gave that up as a bit of a joke and took to clearing land by covering it with mulches. The first vegetables were planted right into the turf under a foot high covering of grass cuttings, and did very well. But vegetables weren't my real interest and I soon persuaded Charles to take over the vegetable plot so that I could concentrate on the making the ornamental garden.

Under Charles' management, the mulch humps in the vegetable garden have gone, to be replaced by a formal garden with the corners marked with clipped box. The beds all have a centre-piece of either a standard rose, the excellent white "Iceberg," or a standard clipped holly glowing with red berries in winter. There are beds of perennials and beds of old roses, clematis scrambling over arches and over hedges - and lots of vegetables, of course. Last summer all the beds were edged with scarlet nasturtiums, which were a stunning combination with the purple kale and red cabbage. We even ate the cabbages, - eventually.

Veg Plot at Veddw. © Charles Hawes

The history of the house and land fascinates me and spending years studying it has given me an intense love of the local landscape. Both these things have influenced the garden we've made. I used the local Tithe Map of 1841 as the basis for a pattern of hedges in box on one slope of the valley. This created miniature fields which we've filled with ornamental grasses - in tribute to both the history of the landscape and to the present views of farmland beyond the garden. It is also, of course, a new kind of parterre - and ornamental grasses are an ideal filling for any parterre, as many of them look their best in blocks.

I am also entertained by the current preoccupation with ideas about "natural" and "wild". These are terms commonly applied to land uses that are neither. A meadow, for example, is carefully managed farmland. This paradox has also found its way into the garden. In one corner creeping buttercup, bluebells and poppies conjure up ideas of idealised wild gardening - but the poppies are blowsy orientals in salmon pink instead of red field poppies. The colour scheme works surprisingly well, (although it actually arose because the red oriental poppies failed to germinate.)

The bottom of the valley, below the parterre of grasses, is divided into small formal gardens with yew hedging. One of these gardens has another take on the "wild" theme. The "Cornfield Garden" consists of six small plots, divided by brick paths. These are edged with box and with railings ornamented with gold lettering. Within the hedges are the "cornfields," filled in summer with barley and cornfield "weeds" - field poppies, corn marigolds and corncockle. (And some "real" weeds!) For this kind of gardening understanding agriculture *suddenly becomes more important than understanding horticulture.

Cornfield Garden. © Charles Hawes

This is an illustration of how "wild" effects benefit can be happily incorporated into a small space. Many people think that a "natural" area in a garden should be informal with irregular (wavy?) edges. But fields can come in squares and rectangles, and are framed by hedges. A clear edge or formal surround framing a planting works as well for the garden as it does for a painting - and it can help clarify that the area really is gardened, not neglected. This matters, for example, in another of our "wild" areas, where I grow perennials in rough grass. There are times when this looks more rough grass than garden - the critical thing is to get enough flower power and this is not easy. I have to succeed though, because in spring this bank is covered with wood anemones and violets, probably a relic of the old woodland, and they must stay undisturbed. The most successful summer flowers here so far have been hardy geraniums, campanula lactiflora, and then crocosmias later in the summer. A solitary lupin reappears every year. A big bonus is that the weeds - such as stitchwort, clover, meadow vetchling, tormentils and field scabious - are a positive delight in this patch. The classy touch comes from the orchids.

Wild Garden. © Anne Wareham

We have framed this challenging bit of the garden with an edge of several clipped yews, white rugosa roses and an enclosing path. The long low curve of this path is a motif in the garden. It echoes the curve of the surrounding Monmouthshire hills, bringing the garden and the landscape together. I have used it in another path around a purple, white and pink garden and also to shape the top of a beech hedge. It is the basis of a seat I designed for an enclosed garden which features a dark, black, reflecting pool.

Reflecting Pool.© Charles Hawes

The garden as a whole is intensively planted, full of flowers, ornament and incident, so that quiet, peaceful spaces like the pool garden provide a breathing space, an important pause. The meadow, grass walks and the woodland have a similar function, the wood also providing welcome shade on hot days. Unfortunately here in the wet West it more ordinarily provides drips of rain down the back of your neck from sodden trees.

The flower borders in the garden usually contain repeat plantings of two or three vigorous plants whose colours work well together. Impulse buys and special treats in the right colours can then find their place in the overall picture without undermining it. The intention is to keep the excitement going from late spring through to early autumn, at which point we both collapse into an exhausted heap, along with most of the flowers.

Published in 'Country Living' August 2002