The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise
A warm, witty memoir of one man’s escape from the city in an unlikely quest to create out of a mountainous Welsh landscape a garden fit for inclusion in the prestigious Yellow Book – the ‘Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity’ guide – in just one year.It was a derelict smallholding so high up in the Black Mountains of Wales it was routinely lost in cloud. But to Antony Woodward, Tair-Ffynnon was the most beautiful place in the world.Equally ill-at-ease in town and country after too long in London’s ad-land, Woodward bought Tair-Ffynnon because he yearned to reconnect with the countryside he never felt part of as a child. But what excuse could he invent to move there permanently?The solution, he decided, was a garden. In just a year he’d create a garden so special it would be selected for the prestigious Yellow Book – the famous National Gardens Scheme guide to gardens open to the public for charity. It’s an unlikely ambition to entertain in this most unlikely of settings, and one that soon sees Woodward driven by odder and odder compulsions – from hauling a 20-tonne railway carriage up the mountain to making hay with hopelessly antiquated machinery.The path to Woodward’s elusive sense of belonging turns out to be a rocky and winding one, taking in childhood haunts, children’s books and Proustian nostalgia trips. As the family battles gales, mud and Welsh mountain sheep of marble-eyed cunning, not to mention the notoriously fastidious NGS County Organiser, it remains deeply uncertain whether the ‘Not Garden’ and the ‘infinity vegetable patch’ (that grows only stones) will ever make the grade…Warm, thought-provoking and brilliantly funny, this is a memoir of a hopeless romantic with a grandly ludicrous ambition – an ambition to which anyone who’s ever dropped into a garden centre, or opened a packet of seeds, has already succumbed.
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THE GARDEN IN
THE CLOUDS
From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise
ANTONY WOODWARD
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2010
Copyright © Antony Woodward 2010
Antony Woodward asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Source ISBN: 9780007216512
Ebook Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 9780007351930 Version: 2016-02-19
sine qua non
It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are…than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think that you are in paradise.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The link between imagination and place is no trivial matter.
The existential question, ‘Where do I belong?’ is addressed to the imagination. To inhabit a place physically, but to remain unaware of what it means or how it feels, is a deprivation more profound than deafness at a concert or blindness in an art gallery. Humans in this condition belong no where.
EUGENE WALTER, Placeways, 1988
Contents
4 A short detour about wood-chopping
9 The important matter of gates
16 Return of the County Organiser
Hell is all right. The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.
EVELYN WAUGH, Put Out More Flags, 1942
My first involvement with gardening was aged seven. I am sitting in the back of my mother’s car (Austin 1300 Countryman, cream, wood-effect trim). She’s at the wheel; my father’s in the passenger seat, my older brother Jonathan is in the back with me. We’ve pulled off a country road alongside some iron railings. Through the railings a garden can be seen leading back, via a wide lawn, to a handsome stone-built villa. Wiltshire probably; possibly Gloucestershire or Somerset.
‘Antony’—my mother only used my full Christian name when she was serious—‘I won’t ask you again. Get out of the car.’
‘No.’
‘Get—out—of—the—car.’
‘Why? Why me?’
‘The more you sit here arguing, the longer we’re going to be.’
‘Why can’t Jonny do it?’
‘You’re smaller than he is. Anyway, it’s your turn.’
‘What if someone comes? What if the people come back?’
‘They won’t come back.’
‘But what if they do?’
‘I must say, I’m not sure this is wise,’ says my father. ‘It’s breaking the law.’
‘Don’t be so feeble, Peter. How could anyone mind? If the child got on with it, we could all be on our way home by now.’
‘Exactly. It’s breaking the—’
‘Be quiet, Antony.’
‘What if someone does come?’ says my father.
‘He just runs for it, of course.’ She turns to me. ‘You can come back through the gate if you want. Look,’ she adopts a more conciliatory tone, ‘it won’t take a second. You’ll be back here before you know it, and I’ll cook sausages for tea.’
‘The fence is too high. I’ll never get over.’
‘It does look high, Liza. I really do think—’ says my father.
‘Fiddlesticks. Really Peter, you’re as bad as the children.’
‘It’s not fair…where’s the bloody thing again?’
‘Don’t use bad language. It’s the helianthemum. Over there under the wall, with the small white flowers. In that raised bed. On the left.’
From the car there is a view through the wrought-iron gate, down a short, flag-stoned path onto the lawn. Diagonally across this is the raised bed, about eighty yards away.
‘The white thing by the big red bush?’
‘Yes. Now get a move on. And remember: pull downwards so a piece of the stalk comes with it.’
It had recently rained and as I push through the shrubbery to the railings, every move brings a shower of water droplets down my neck and arms. Insects hum loudly, and beetles keep dropping onto me. Straddling the crossbar, trying to get my second leg over, one of my belt loops catches on an iron point. For a few seconds I’m helpless, exposed to both the house and anyone passing. Vigorous arm movements from the car indicate that my mother thinks I’m stalling. I wriggle free, drop back down into the laurels, crawling under their cover until I reach the lawn’s edge. Then I sprint. By the raised bed, I grab at the plant, and a few moments later, breathless with adrenaline, I’m back at the gate. The latch is tight, lifting with a clang, the hinges screech deafeningly, but at last I’m back in the safety of the car.
