Garden design Education of a gardener
Arts outdoors - five top summer events In Review’Asuccessful garden is one that has a sense of place,” begins Arne Maynard.
I believe him because, in garden design circles, he is God. So even if he scarcely utters a word today, some of the magic from his own creation at the end of a single-track lane near Usk is bound to rub off.
But Maynard, 43, a genial man with a ready smile, runs at full throttle, which surely comes as a relief to we dozen students of the soil paying ï¿¡180 each to learn about “The Main Plant Players - Designing Structure with Plants“.
Maynard’s one and two-day courses, running from March to November, are now in their second year and the venue is his own newly created garden at his 15th-century hall house in Monmouthshire.
Whether you want to design kitchen gardens, build earthworks, mazes and knots or learn how to make the most of topiary, summer perennials and winter woodlands, these educational days feature seasonal themes and well-made lunches.
The garden - a redundant farmyard of grassy banks and orchards with a stream and an ancient track running through it - is a beguiling open-air classroom.
As we stand in the approach to Maynard’s house, which is planted with an emerging tapestry of Angelica sylvestris ‘Vicar’s Mead’ and Geranium phaeum ‘Lily Lovell’, he explains his naturalistic approach to structure: “The garden melts into the landscape so that it roots into its setting.”
Maynard achieves a gentle transition from woods to garden with a 30-year-old topiary beech standing beside the track.
“It’s saying ‘This is the way’, it almost draws you in,” he says, as the track takes us across a bridge over the stream where thistles (Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’) grow.
Beech, yew, box and Ilex crenata are among Maynard’s main players, and he clips them into free-flowing topiary. As he wanted his garden to look good quickly, his trees are mature and wildly expensive - the beech was a stupefying ï¿¡4,500 from a specialist nursery in Holland.
“The Dutch and the Belgians have always moved large trees - the secret is to keep moving them and cutting the roots to create a tight root ball. Our culture is different - we like growing from seed and taking cuttings,” he continues.
His planting is robust. “I don’t want a garden that’s too precious,” he says.
“It’s about connecting the landscape with the garden - it will appear completely seamless but will get very intense around the house with a mad jumble of topiary.”
Weaving between huge yews, a swirling contemporary earthwork is planted with a spiral of copper beech at different heights.
At the rear of his house, a boundary fence has blurred into the landscape; more earthworks planted with bush apple trees allow the garden to merge with the pastoral amphitheatre behind, where the line of an old drovers’ road cuts through the middle distance.
After lunch, in the loft of a barn, Maynard discusses design. There is no glass in the wooden mullions. “I so like the connection with outside,” he says, flinging back the shutters.
He explains how he trims, tames, pollards and pleaches, how he half-annihilates an ancient yew hedge to spectacular effect, how he sinks a drive to lose it in the landscape and how he despises parked cars.
We students scribble in notebooks. “Apart from a few trees, my garden is non-existent. I’ve never done anything like this before; I’ve come to listen to one of my gardening heroes,” whispers Louise Brook, who wants to transform her garden in Italy.
Emma Mills from West Sussex, also intends to try what she has picked up on the course.
“What attracted me to Arne is his idea that you bring the landscape into the garden and look to nature for inspiration. I like his holistic approach,” she says.
Archie Scott from Whitchurch concurs: “I’m a professional gardener specialising in hard landscaping but on a smaller scale - a day like this is where I get new ideas.”
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