The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise. Antony Woodward

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      This, then, leads up to what I believe to be the great secret of success in garden-making…we should abandon the struggle to make nature beautiful round the house and should rather move the house to where the nature is beautiful.

      SIR GEORGE SITWELL, On the Making of Gardens, 1909

      As we parked on a grassy common alongside a vast leylandii hedge, I couldn’t suppress a pang of disappointment. I’d been waiting months for this moment. We’d just driven for two hours, deep into mid-Wales, specifically to see the garden behind this hedge. In the last few miles the first hints had appeared that we were entering a landscape that was weird and interesting. We were following a Scenic Route through an undulating, much-folded massif of the Cambrian Mountains. There’d been a sign to a sailing club, pointing to a road that led steeply uphill. And now, before I even got out of the car, let alone stepped through the garden gate, I knew with resounding certainty that the garden was not going to deliver, that anyone who had a leylandii hedge in such a place couldn’t possibly have a garden I liked. It wasn’t so much the leylandii per se,^* as what this high and impenetrable barrier implied. Which was awkward, given that its owner was very kindly putting herself out entirely on our account.

      We were on a fact-finding mission. It was proving a good deal trickier than I’d expected to work out how our garden should be. Apart from spending an inordinate amount of time standing about staring at patches of mud from various angles, trying to imagine this scenario or that—the collapsing ex-army Nissen hut in the yard replaced with a stone barn, a dry-stone wall in place of a tangled wire fence, the house magically made pretty, even, in more futile moments, a tree moved twenty yards to the left—my efforts hadn’t amounted to much. We knew Tair-Ffynnon was to be a mountain garden, but what did that mean? If I tried looking up ‘mountain gardens’ or ‘mountain flowers’ I just found a lot of stuff about rockeries and alpines, which didn’t feel right. Reading Derek Jarman’s diaries and garden book revealed that his garden had come about by accident and had grown gradually and haphazardly from there. But we needed more of a plan than this. The most hopeful avenue for inspiration seemed to be Uncle William’s idea of going through the Yellow Book, finding other gardens at a similar height, and seeing what their owners had done. It quickly became apparent, however, that there weren’t many. For good reasons, people tended not to make gardens on top of mountains. Perhaps as a result, everyone with a garden more than 700 feet above sea level mentioned the fact, prompting the thought that we might be higher than the highest garden in the Yellow Book. If so, that would effectively mean—delightful notion—we might be able to make Tair-Ffynnon into the highest garden in the National Gardens Scheme.^*