Front Garden. Veddw. ©Charles Hawes
Veddw House Garden by Anne Wareham
Gardens can be a pleasure for all the senses. Sight, obviously, but scents, sensations, sounds, - and something to nibble on as you wander - can all add to the experience. But I like words and thinking, too, so those are aspects I've added to the garden that Charles, my husband, (and garden photographer) and I have made over the last fifteen years.
We left London especially to make a garden. We had originally intended to do that in the Peak District, where we had friends. At the last minute, at just the point when we were due to sign contracts on the sale of our house in London, we discovered that planning regulations in Derbyshire wouldn't let us convert agricultural land into garden.
We panicked, debated and reconsidered. Charles remembered enjoying walking in the Wye Valley in his student days in Bristol. The next weekend we came to look - and made an offer on Veddw House. It was once an agricultural labourer's cottage and barn with two acres of land, originally heath, set a few miles above Tintern Abbey. Later we were lucky enough to be able to add two acres of woodland to the garden.'Veddw' is pronounced 'Veddoo', and is neither English nor Welsh, but an ancient and typical Welsh border mix, probably derived from 'birches'. This sudden change of plan left us feeling shocked and dislocated for a long time.
It dawned on us slowly that we had ended up in a wonderful location, surrounded by beautiful farmland and fields, and with an ideal site to make a garden. The house was satisfyingly in the middle of our land, which consisted then of two fields. I got out my spade.To help us to understand the place we'd come to so unexpectedly I also began to study our local history; first the history of the house, and then the history of the surrounding landscape.
As the garden developed along with my love of the countryside I began to incorporate aspects of local history and the landscape into the garden. I used the local Tithe Map of 1841 as the basis for a pattern of hedges in box on a large slope to one side of the garden. This created miniature fields which I then filled with ornamental grasses, as a tribute to, and in an echo of, the views of farmland visible from the garden. It is also, of course, a kind of parterre - and ornamental grasses make an ideal filling for any parterre, as many of them look their best in blocks.
Stipa arundinacea and tenuissima are two of my favourites in the grass bank, both easy to grow from seed, and looking good all year. I have learnt not to cut them down, however, as sometimes advised: patches died out when I did. In early summer I love festuca amethystina showing off its slatey purple flowers against the background of the newly emerging stipas. Glyceria maxima var. variegata is also be appearing and providing brilliant contrast in rich pink, cream and white.As a garden reader as well as writer I'm constantly bemused and entertained by current preoccupations about "natural" and "wild." These are terms commonly applied to land uses that are neither - all of Britain has been intensively managed since the Bronze Age. A meadow, for example, is carefully farmed, but meadows are often described as "wild". So I've played with these notions in the garden.
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 corn cockle. (And some "real" weeds!) For this kind of gardening understanding agriculture suddenly becomes more important than understanding horticulture; in last year's wet summer all the barley was ruined by rust and the flowers struggled. If that had been our food, we'd have gone hungry..
Many people think that a "natural" area in a garden should be informal with wavy edges. But a formal frame 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. So we are growing roses and clipped yew round the edge of the semi-circular path in the "wild garden" 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, because I can't cultivate the ground much for fear of disturbing the anemones and violets which carpet this bank in spring. They are a relic of the old woodland and must stay. Campanula lactiflora will survive anything and is sweetly like our occasional harebell when shrunk by the competition; tough hardy geraniums cope and look comfortable; crocosmias spread happily.
The long low curve of the path round that garden is a recurrent motif. It is the curve of the surrounding Monmouthshire hills, and again brings the garden and the landscape together. I have used it in another path around the Windfall Garden (named for the source of its original funding) and also to shape the top of a beech hedge. It is the basis of a seat I designed for the garden which features the dark, black, reflecting pool.
I do enjoy gardening, but I enjoy sitting and reading just as much……….. When I look up from this seat I see the curves again, newly clipped in hedges which will shortly read (when grown just a little more) in a pattern against one another, an exciting and satisfying backdrop to the pool.
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 Daily Telegraph Plants and Flowers 2003