Garden Guide

Veddw House - a modern romantic garden

Devauden, Monmouthshire NP16 6PH

tel (44) (0) 1291 650836

Open June to August on Sundays 2-5

and on Bank Holiday Monday in August

and by appointment in afternoons or evenings, to parties of 10 or more.

Parties of 10 or less are welcome, but the fee is then £50 inclusive - ie £50 for one, or for 2, or for three... (over 10 people = £5 each.) Guided tour by Anne Wareham £30. If this seems harsh I am happy to explain just why it is problematic and demanding to open the garden, and therefore only worth my while for a decent return - email me at anne@veddw.co.uk.

Most of our best-known, most-visited gardens are merely pretty, or, worse, picturesque. The efforts of gardeners such as Sara Maitland and Anne Wareham to raise our consciousness beyond merely oohing and aahing about dazzling mixed borders or crediting splashing water with promoting relaxation have so far had little effect.

When, at Veddw in Monmouthshire, Wareham replants the lines of vanished hedgerows with box and fills the enclosed spaces with grasses and hardy perennials, she is linking the land-use of the past with the aesthetic of the lordly parterre. By giving expression to contemporary sensibility about conservation, she invites intellectual engagement. Gardening can be - should be - conceptual, which is simply a way of saying that gardens should have ideas in them and the ideas should be perceptible."

Germaine Greer in The Guardian 4th June 2007

Anne and Charles have slowly built up an extraordinarily ambitious and idiosyncratic landscape. Rich and delicate in its detail, intense in its execution, it is now one of Britain's more original gardens.

Tim Richardson, "The Telegraph" January 2005

"My favourite NGS gardens include the Charles Jenks 'Garden of Cosmic Speculation' and the 'yew wave' garden at Veddw House in Wales."

Jane Owen in The Financial Times 22nd March 2008

If I was a garden designer I would be a bit miffed by the fact that every list of iconic or outstanding contemporary gardens comprises special places which have, in most cases, been created by people who are not professional garden designers. Jarman, Jencks, Finlay, Strong/Oman at The Laskett and Wareham/Hawes at Veddw - all of these have been made by individuals who have come to gardens or landscape relatively late in life via other artistic disciplines or interests.

Tim Richardson in the Garden Design Journal April 2008

"Only rarely does one come across a garden so ambitious and successful as the one at Veddw House ……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."

Stephen Anderton, "The Times"

View across South Garden. Veddw. © Charles Hawes

The garden is set in the wonderful countryside of the Welsh border above Tintern. There are two acres of ornamental garden and two acres of woodland. A notable addition to the garden is the dramatic reflecting pool,

Reflecting pool. Veddw. © Charles Hawes

but many people's favourite parts will still be the ornamental vegetable plot (getting more ornamental and less vegetable every year..) with its rose border, brick paths and clematis.

Veg Plot.Veddw. © Clive Nichols

I have a great interest in the local landscape history and have incorporated this interest into the garden design, in particular in a large parterre of grasses in a pattern of box hedges based on the local Tithe Map of 1842.

Grasses, Veddw House. © Charles Hawes

The garden is starred in the Good Gardens Guide. See also the book "Gardens of Illusion" by Sara Maitland and Peter Matthews.

GARDEN GUIDE

From here you can explore the garden through a written garden guide with pictures and a plan of the garden. If you'd like a more objective view of the garden there are articles by The Times gardening correspondent, Stephen Anderton, Noel Kingsbury for Gardens Illustrated, Tim Richardson for the Telegraph, Sara Maitland in "Gardens of Illusion" and Barbara Abbs who wrote about the garden in The Garden.

Elymus Triangle. Veddw. © Charles Hawes