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

ground. Apart from a lawn behind the house, there was hardly a square inch of space that wasn’t bursting with trees, shrubs, climbers, pergolas and pots. In his extensive fruit and vegetable garden, the runner beans, raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes were so bowed down with the weight of provender they gave the impression that, however fast anything was picked, there was not the slightest chance of keeping pace with the output. The place had what I would learn was a hallmark of a plantsman at work: narrow paths rendered almost impassable due to the rainforest density of vegetation spilling from either side. Should you dare level a criticism at Uncle William’s garden, it was that you couldn’t see the garden for the plants.

      If green fingers existed, Uncle William’s were of the most livid, fluorescent, Martian hue, and chlorophyll coursed through his veins. It was known far and wide that he had only to be handed a plant for it to perk up. Gardening rows between my parents concerning any matter of practical plant husbandry—where a particular plant was best placed, why it wasn’t doing well, what the best treatment should be—invariably ended with a defiant, pursed-lipped: ‘Well. We’ll ask William.’

      As a child, I’d found Uncle William slightly intimidating.^* He was a naval captain and had a deep, husky voice that exuded peremptory command. I always imagined the huskiness had come from roaring orders across the wind and spray-swept flight deck of HMS Ark Royal, of which he’d been second-in-command in the 1970s, not that I’d ever heard him raise his voice or even seen him in his naval role (though he was wearing his uniform, holding an umbrella over them, in my parents’ wedding photographs). It was a voice that implied that, once a task was stated, it might be regarded as done. I couldn’t imagine any member of the plant kingdom defying it. He was a pillar of the local establishment and churchwarden in his local parish. I was sure he must open his garden to the public, and, on a hunch, looked him up in the Yellow Book. Sure enough, there was his garden: ‘Planted over many yrs to provide pleasure from month to month the whole yr through.’

      If anyone knew what would grow on a windswept hill-side 1,300 feet up, it was Uncle William. I hadn’t spoken to him for years and was summoning the courage to make the call when, out of the blue, he called us. He gathered we’d bought an unlikely property in the hills and had ideas about making a garden. (Clearly, word had spread of our offbeat acquisition, though I did wonder how my father had described Tair-Ffynnon to trigger quite such prompt interest.) As it happened, he said, he and Aunty Jeanette were visiting a garden near Usk in a few weeks time as part of the local gardens society (I later asked him about his role in this: ‘Chairman, for my sins’), and he suggested coming on to see us.

      Which was how, one Saturday a few weeks later, Uncle William came to be pottering about Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky and bracken-invaded acres. He seemed amused by the whole enterprise, as he poked cheerfully about with a stick. ‘Well, your soil’s alright,’ he said, jabbing at the thick clump of nettles growing round the wood pile. ‘Nettles only grow in rich soil.’ The hundreds of molehills he thought were a good sign, too. ‘Excellent potting soil if you collect it up. If you put bottles in the vegetable garden the sound of the wind in the glass discourages them.’ We took him up to the gully where the spring ran. More jabs with the stick. ‘You can increase the sound of the running water by adding stones,’ he said. I’d briefed him about my Yellow Book plan as we progressed around the place, hovering behind him hopefully, biro and notebook at the ready for any suggestions about what we should plant. However, little apart from these general comments had so far emerged. Looking up and down the gully now, his gaze alighted on the stands of foxgloves. ‘Foxgloves,’ he said. ‘There you are. You can grow foxgloves.’

      ‘But foxgloves…foxgloves grow everywhere.’

      Uncle William shrugged his shoulders. ‘You can only grow what will grow. You need to look around you and see what’s growing naturally.’ He looked around again, taking in the clumps of gorse, the encroaching bracken. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘you could have a very fine bracken garden.’ He dissolved into chuckles. ‘The first bracken garden in Britain.’

      I wasn’t convinced Uncle William was taking me as a gardener, or the project, seriously. After lunch, however, he opened the back of his car and revealed a boot crammed with treasures. He’d brought with him dozens of trees: crab-apples and holm oaks, birches and sessile oaks and limes. Best of all, there was a yew, and yews, we knew, grew on the hillside, because many cottages had one (often calling themselves, imaginatively, ‘Yew Tree Cottage’ or ‘Ty’r-ywen’: ‘the house by the yew’). ‘The yew,’ began Uncle William. ‘D’you remember the yew at Rookwoods? Perhaps you were too young?’

      ‘I remember it.’

      ‘Well, this is its grandchild. When Granny left, I took a cutting and planted it in the garden. This is from a cutting from my tree.’

      The idea of having a genuine piece of Rookwoods, of the garden in my head, growing in my own real garden…well, I need hardly say, the thought gave me goose bumps.

      A week or two later, Uncle William emailed me. His advice boiled down to:

      1 Get the place fenced. You can’t do anything until that’s done.

      2 Look at what grows naturally around you.

      3 Visit other Yellow Book gardens at a similar height and aspect.

      4 Go to the Botanic Gardens of Wales, Edinburgh and the Lake District.

      5 Consult your mother’s books. She was a botanist, after all. Her shelves must be full of useful information.

      As for getting into the Yellow Book, he said he could only speak from experience in Dorset, but he suspected they were ‘far too stuffy’ to take on such an unusual place. Which I presumed was his polite way of saying, ‘Forget it.’

       4 A short detour about wood-chopping

      The Home Handyman’s advice on smoking chimneys…did have one unusual suggestion to make: ‘Perhaps you have troublesome wind currents in your location. Find out if your neighbours have trouble, and if so, how they tackle the problem.’ What a good idea! We went at once to see what information we could gain. Our neighbours were sympathetic. Yes—they too had troublesome parlour flues. How did they get over the problem? Easy. They never used the parlour.

      ELIZABETH WEST, Hovel in the Hills, 1977

      Had you gone down to the woods—technically, the arboretum—of Hawarden Castle, six miles west of Chester, in Flintshire, North Wales, on any number of afternoons during the second half of the nineteenth century, you might have encountered a diverting sight: Her Majesty, Queen Victoria’s sometime Chancellor of the Exchequer, latterly Prime Minister of England, complete with fine set of greying mutton-chop whiskers, in shabby tweeds, ‘without a coat—without a waistcoat—with braces thrown back from off the shoulders and hanging down behind’, setting to work with an axe. William Ewart Gladstone, aka ‘The Grand Old Man’, aka Liberal statesman, four-times Prime Minister, and bête noire of Benjamin Disraeli, the same man whom Churchill called his role model and whom Queen Victoria accused of always addressing her as if she were a public meeting, had an eccentric hobby. He was simply potty about wood-chopping, in particular, chopping down trees.

      ‘No exercise is taken in the morning, save the daily walk to morning service,’ recorded Gladstone’s son, William, in the Hawarden Visitors’ Handbook. ‘But between 3 and 4 in the afternoon he sallies forth, axe on shoulder…The scene of action reached, there is no pottering; the work begins at once, and is carried on with unflagging energy. Blow follows blow.’ He seems to have possessed more enthusiasm than aptitude for his hobby. One Christmas he almost blinded himself when a splinter flew into his eye. On another occasion he almost killed his son Harry,