Review of Aberglasney, South Wales.

Visited 11th September 2000

Aberglasney is a Welsh Historic Garden Grade 11*, situated near Llangathen, Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire, Wales. It is currently being restored/reinvented.

There apparently has been a house and gardens on this site for hundreds of years, but the estate began to fall into decay from about 1900 until the Aberglasney Restoration Trust took over and began to try and recover the house and gardens in the 1990s. This process got a lot of exposure on television, due to be repeated soon. (Wish wonderful NEW gardens could get this publicity, never mind the charitable funding!!!) The general impression given by the programmes was that people kept getting very excited at discovering something very old or important that then turned out to be nothing of the sort. But no one was ever downhearted or less than impressed by everything.

I found the garden was better than this had led me to expect. But I was struck by how dismal the beginning of the route round the garden was as if once you've paid you're regarded as captive, so there's no need to consider whether a grotty bed with dismal grey plants opposite a bank covered with weeds and building spoil is a less than elevating start. Nearby was the Yew tunnel, no longer regarded as ancient and terribly important. Its claim to specialness now (because clearly it has to have one) is that it was made by the yews being bent over, rather than having two rows of yew joined at the top. It is being expensively revived and cared for and looks awful.

By the house is the Cloister Garden. This is exciting stuff the large rectangle fronts the house and is enclosed by a raised walkway. You may not quite be able to picture this, because status houses don't come like this anymore they usually have views, grass or terracing. This is the kind of thing that got so notoriously done away with by the landscape school, and it's super. You get cloister-like walks under the walkway, and the walkway itself gives views over the gardens outside it.

The first consists of a large pool, - original (i.e., there before restoration) and not terribly wonderful, just pleasing, and then to the side is the newly planted up, excitingly named, Upper Walled Garden. This is lovely to look down on. Designed by Penelope Hobhouse, the garden is rectangular and walled. Within are two concentric oval borders, set in gravel (they look like circles actually, from above) planted with herbaceous perennials, with a plain grass oval/circle in the middle. Simple and stunning. The corners have little groups of three trees, which will obscure some of this view when they grow and to me seemed superfluous. No doubt this has historical precedent.

It was interesting that looking at this garden seemed to prove that the eye creates and fills in pattern. The largest ovals were edged at the outside with some eupatorium purpureum and yellow daisy things (heliopsis?), some of which were missing. This was not immediately obvious or important, though, I think from this habit our eye has of automatically making a pattern wherever possible. Unfortunately, however, once I had noticed the gaps, I kept noticing. The colours were simple and restrained the soft purples, lemon yellows and white the last just sharpened it up nicely.

The effect was not so wonderful close to when you entered the garden, though I was delighted to see the beds were mulched. Then perhaps, the cost of separating designer and gardener becomes apparent. For example, there were a lot of very badly mildewed monarda. If it had been my garden I would have concluded they were an error in that location and had them out and replaced. I imagine the gardener at Aberglasney doesn't have that role (Penelope Hobhouse's job?) so they stay, mouldering. And somehow a bright orange crocosmia had got in and should have been got out. Telling details like that unnecessarily took the edge off things.

Then inevitable "kitchen garden"! This made me cuss. What on earth are they doing in this brand new (however historically informed) garden having vegetables that there is no one to eat, and cutting flowers for no house to cut for? It seemed to me to be playing to sentimental notions based on nostalgic "Victorian Kitchen Garden" stuff, and although some of the result was quite pretty it is a dreadful waste of a wonderful opportunity.

Outside of this there is a lot of "naturalistic" planting around the edges. The inevitable "boggy bit," looking as natural as plastic ducks. Woodland with big blobs of "woodland" (i.e. shade tolerant) plants. Usual sort of stuff, and I hate it. It's boring and horribly unnatural. Though it was fun to discover a white metal "ghost" hiding behind a wonderful old tree. Someone should take woodland planting by the scruff of the neck and revolutionise it for ever. Should it be me?

Things are labelled at Aberglasney, and this made me realise that labelling always raises expectations which are inevitably dashed. When I wanted to discover the name of a particular rudbeckia the label was missing and labels are very ugly. There are lovely views from the garden mature trees with telling gaps showing distant wooded hills. Nice.

This is a garden still in the process of being made, (the process is far too radical to call "restoration") so the way that it fades out and loses focus around the edges may just be due to this, though it's a common fault in gardens. Equally, the Cloister Garden by the front of the house is still a building site and may become another pleasing part, like the Upper Walled Garden. At present it lacks coherence as a whole, bit curate's egg and no overriding vision but the historic aspect adds interest.

(if you have any comments/additions/complaints about this quite dated review, please email me on anne@veddw.co.uk)

For details about the garden try their website, www.aberglasney.org