The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise. Antony Woodward
you to mention this?’
‘Mention what?’
‘The fact that Granny was in the Yellow Book? I’ve been asking you about the Yellow Book for weeks.’
‘No. You never asked that.’
It was July and our move to the sheep-run pastures of Tair-Ffynnon was complete. We’d driven over to the Mendips for one of our periodic Sunday lunches with my father. He greeted us with his usual mock exasperation. ‘Late as ever.’
‘You’d be disappointed if we weren’t.’
He gave me a bottle of champagne to open. He always gave us champagne when we came now: a reminder how special these occasions were, and how seldom we saw each other since my brother and I had young families. Today, however, I had a private purpose in coming. If I were going to make a garden I needed to learn all I could about gardening—fast. It was so vast a subject it was hard to know where to begin, and my father seemed a good start. My mother may have been the botanist, but the garden of our family home was very much his. So I did something I’d never done before: I requested a garden tour.
I regretted it almost immediately. Full of pre-Sunday-roast bonhomie, we’d hardly carried our glasses to the low raised bed outside the kitchen—‘This, as you know, is the Eucryphia…it has the most wonderful big flowers in August’—before the first pang of deep boredom set in. It wasn’t what he was saying so much as what it brought back. Suddenly I was at Stourhead, aged seven, standing on aching legs by some tree or other, while my parents banged on and on about it. And it wasn’t just Stourhead. It was Hestercombe, Barnsley House, Prior Park, Westonbirt Arboretum…all names whose mere mention made me thankful never to have to be a child again.*
With specialised interests, opposite characters and very different backgrounds, my parents ostensibly had nothing in common. The garden was the closest they came. ‘This, as you know…’ my father’s voice brought me back to the present. ‘…is the Philadelphus. It has the most glorious scent…’ Then there were the Latin names. I could almost hear my mother shouting from the kitchen window: ‘Behind the Eucryphia…No, you noodle, the Eucryphia, not the Euphorbia…’ I didn’t discover plants even had English names until my mid-twenties. As academics of the pre-spin school, my parents never seemed to feel the need to make their subjects interesting or accessible, to supply context or simplify.
My father had now moved on to explaining his principles for choosing plants, his preference for foliage over flowers, but it was hard to separate the information from the associations. ‘This is Rhus cotinus. Another shrub you grow only for its leaves…’
‘What are these, again?’
‘Stachys lanata.’
‘Do they have an English name?’
‘I think some people call them Lamb’s Ears.’
It struck me that going round a garden with its owner is not unlike looking at someone else’s holiday snaps at their pace. (‘That’s Jackie, the person I was telling you about. She was so funny.’) Yet, having specifically requested the tour, I could hardly ask to speed things up.
We walked back up the lawn, past the kitchen, and up the steep path towards the open fields behind the house. The garden wasn’t large, perhaps a quarter of an acre, but it was much divided around the house because of the way the site had been bitten out of the hill-side.
‘Did Ma help much with the garden?’
‘Did she actually do anything, d’you mean? Heavens no. She was far too busy with her horses. Full of advice, of course. Sometimes she used to “pop things in”, as she called her cuttings. She was extremely tiresome in that regard.’
As we returned to the front door, we encountered something I could confidently identify. ‘Purple sage,’ I said.
‘Mmm…herbs.’ The word was invested with a scorn it’s hard to convey in print.
‘Why, don’t you like herbs?’ I knew perfectly well what his views were on herbs, and the reasons he’d give for them, but I couldn’t stop myself.
‘They’re a nuisance.’
‘A nuisance? How can herbs be a nuisance?’
‘You have food that tastes of nothing but herbs, rather than what it’s supposed to taste of.’ For my father, cooking was a chemical experiment: instructions were followed, tasting was unnecessary and final temperature (piping hot) was the key indicator of the success of the meal.
We had to go back into the house to reach the patio. The house was my father’s Great Modernist Experiment, the product of his love of architecture in general and Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion in particular. In time for my arrival in 1963, they needed to add onto my mother’s cottage, which had only one bedroom and a wide landing where Jonny slept. My father devised a contemporary solution. Modules precision-machined off-site by Vic Hallam, the Nottinghamshire company made famous by its pre-fabricated classrooms, were bolted to a pre-formed, cantilevered concrete deck. Twenty-eight polished Ilminster stone steps led up from the poky cottage’s front door to an airy, light-filled, flat-roofed glass box, containing sitting room and bedrooms. These were furnished accordingly: razor-edged steel-and-glass coffee table, brick-hard, angle-iron and foam-rubber Hille sofas, Ercol bentwood table and chairs. Comfort took a holiday. And so Modernism made its brazen progress from Bauhaus Germany, via New York, to our ancient Mendip lane. Nothing like it had been seen before in rural Somerset.
The patio arrived in Phase Two of the Great Modernist Experiment, an extension forced upon us by my mother’s riding accident almost a decade later. It was my father’s most successful garden space, enclosed on three sides by the house, and on the fourth by the rising ground of the hill. It was, as he’d intended it, an astonishing suntrap. In raised dry-stone beds he’d planted acers, a green one with broad leaves and a couple with more dissected leaves in red and bright green. I ran my hand along one of the smooth, shapely branches. After thirty years the trees were sculptural, contributing a calming, vaguely Japanese air to the space that set off the severity of the square brutalist concrete pond and the glass and cedar of the house.
During the Modernist years, my father had maintained the pond, with its floor of raked pea shingle, in a state of stark clinical perfection, washing it clean of algae several times a summer so the water never clouded. But in later years he’d given up, planted lilies in the corners, stuck a round stone bowl in place of the water jets and even, the final capitulation, added goldfish. It was softer now, but less dramatic or coherent.
I wanted another drink and for the trip to conclude. We took the path round to the back of the house, north-facing and enclosed by a conifer plantation. Towering into the sky, straight as a missile launcher, was the tree with my favourite name.
‘There you are: Metasequoia glyptostroboides.’ My father pronounced it perfectly, slowly, with just the right amount of ironic inflexion to wring out its full, polysyllabic absurdity. ‘It’s a remarkable tree,’ he said. ‘One of the few in the country when we planted it. Your mother got hold of it through some botanical thing she was doing. Looks ludicrous now, of course, it’s got so big.’
It wasn’t the only giant. Blocking the view in or out from the lane was a stand of three vast leylandii.
‘What possessed you to plant those?’
‘It’s all very well for you to be sniffy about them now, but at the time they were the wonder tree. We’d never come across anything like them. Fast-growing. Dense. Evergreen.’ He sighed. ‘But they do grow like triffids. I’ll have to take them out.’
Was any of this remotely useful or relevant for Tair-Ffynnon,