A transportive garden can owe as much to a magical setting as to the plantings. At the garden of brothers and award-winning garden designers Harry and David Rich, the surrounding landscape ramps up those feelings before a visitor even sets foot in the garden. Nestled deep in Welsh woodland, this is a fairytale cottage fully immersed in nature—including roving herds of sheep—where access is possible only by bridge over a stream, a tributary of the River Wye.
The atmospheric garden is one of 18 featured in my new book Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home, in which I explore the private spaces of leading landscape designers, revealing how their own homes become testbeds for their professional projects; these are spaces for the slow evolution of ideas, schemes, and plant combinations, as well as private idylls where they can retreat from the world. Some are grand projects created over decades, but many, like Harry and David’s cottage garden, are hands-on gardens created with limited resources in the past few years.
Photography by Éva Németh.
Above: A run of pleached crabapple trees dissects the space and creates a link from the building to the garden.
Harry relocated from London to the secluded cottage just north of the Brecon Beacons in Wales, where he now lives with his wife, Sue, and their two children. But the garden has always been a shared project between the two brothers, who together became the youngest winners of a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2012, when Harry had just formed his landscape architecture firm and David was still at university. They went on to create two more gardens at the show, winning another gold medal in 2014.
Above: Plantings are taken right up to the cottage walls, increasing the sense of full immersion in greenery.
When they started to create the garden, the brothers realized that adding significant structure to the garden was key. The principal forms here come from yew; young hedging demarcates each area of the one-acre garden and is already starting to have a presence around the borders to the front of the house. There are loosely shaped yew domes that punctuate the cultivated garden, while a secluded courtyard on the east-facing side of the house has large yew cubes. A run of pleached crab apples cuts across the main beds, marking the spot where the original part of the house meets more recent additions; in spring the trees provide a cloud of blossom, but by midsummer they frame views across the plantings below. In winter their frames add another layer of structure the garden.
The dense shelter here means that in the still of winter, the sun barely peeks through the surrounding trees, turning the whole plot into a huge frost pocket for months on end. So plants for winter are key. The brothers moved an existing mature Hamamelis x intermedia ‘Jelena’, relocating it to the corner of the herbaceous borders where it arches gracefully over steps down to the stream. ‘We’d never moved a mature tree and we knew it was a risk, but it was originally sitting on stone and has thrived since being replanted,’ says David.
Above: A snapshot of the typically soft and naturalistic planting here. Seedheads of Sanguisorba contrast with the airy growth of Scabiosa ochroleuca.
Above: Clipped yew adds structure throughout the garden, right up to the borders around the cottage.
Deep and immersive herbaceous borders spill out across the front of the house, but the color palette is subdued in pale yellows, cream, and white. Eupatorium, thalictrum, asters, and foxgloves are contrasted with ornamental grasses including Molinia ‘Transparent’. The whole effect is elegantly understated, with just an occasional jolt of color from a vivid red Hemerocallis or Echinops bannaticus ‘Taplow Blue’. Earlier in the season there are Sibirica irises (including ‘Papillon’ and ‘Perry’s Blue’). Wild self-seeders including Achillea and ribwort plantain are welcomed along the edges of narrow paths.
Above: A view across the deep herbaceous borders with white thalictrum and veronicastrum in flower.
Above: Golden Digitalis ferruginea ‘Gigantea’ sits alongside Selenum wallichianum, Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’ and scented Nepeta govaniana.
On a west-facing lime-rendered wall, Rosa ‘Cécile Brünner’ is trained across a lattice of sturdy hazel poles, while at the far end of the house ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’ has already scrambled up to first-floor windows. Another rose, a spinosissima variety called ‘Falkland’, has recently been planted and will in time begin to arch over a low stone wall. “Every day I get to observe the plants here,” says Harry. “They are quite large beds, but I can put in all my favorite things and play around with combinations, seeing how they grow. Making the garden we’ve learnt more about who we are as designers.”
Above: On a west-facing lime-rendered wall, Rosa ‘Cécile Brünner’ is trained across a lattice of sturdy hazel poles.
Above: Harry (left) and David photographed beneath Chimonanthus praecox—wintersweet—which is one of the plants that brings scent in the long winter months.
Above: Underneath the crabapples, the delicate Nepeta govaniana flowers.
Throughout the garden Harry and David have made subtle connections with the surrounding landscape, choosing trees that link with the species populating the woods, including Malus sylvestris, hawthorns, and hazel, so that the garden is ornamental but still very much in touch with its environment. Through spring, wilder forms of bulbs also feel appropriate to the setting, with snowdrops, Tulipa sylvestris, and Narcissi planted into the borders.
The biggest challenge in building a garden here was the access—or lack of—as there are no curb-side deliveries in this remote and challenging location. Almost all supplies have to be carried down to site, so reusing existing and found materials was paramount. “Everything was a process and took twice as long,” says David of the initial landscaping. Despite that, this spring, work is underway on a large kitchen garden—the next stage in the evolution of this beguiling space.
Above: Wonderlands is in bookstores now.
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