THE GARDEN IN
THE CLOUDS
From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

ANTONY WOODWARD

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

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

To Vez
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

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

To Vez

Prologue

1 Walking country

2 Tair-Ffynnon

3 The Yellow Book

4 A short detour about wood-chopping

5 Winter on the hill

6 The Not Garden

7 The perfect country room

8 The County Organiser

9 The important matter of gates

10 The orchard

11 Bees

12 How not to mow a meadow

13 The Accident

14 The pond

15 Stoning

16 Return of the County Organiser

17 Life, death and hedge-cutting

18 The house

19 ‘Garden Open Today’

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

The National Gardens Scheme

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue

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.

‘Quick, go,’ I pant, pulling the car door shut.

‘Let me see,’ demands my mother.

I thrust the sprig of foliage into her hand.

‘Come on. Go.’

‘This isn’t a helianthemum,’ says my mother. ‘This is aubrietia. You nincompoop, Ant. You’ve got the wrong plant.’

‘What?’

‘This is no use at all.’

‘Well, I can’t help it. You should have said.’

‘No use at all,’ repeats my mother. ‘Why on earth would I ask for aubrietia? Quick—back you go.’

‘WHAT?’

‘Come on. We haven’t got all day.’

‘I’m not going back in there.’

‘Of course you are. And this time, use your nous,’ she adds, tapping her temple with her forefinger; ‘it’s an alpine. Come on. Get on with it.’

For the second time, I find myself ejected. ‘Well make sure you switch the engine on…’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

The angry yell of a man’s voice comes from the direction of the house just as my hand stretches out to the raised bed: ‘Hey! You! What are you doing?’

I don’t look, I just leg it across the lawn to the flagged path to the gate. This is my undoing. Following the rain, as soon as my feet touch the flags, I perform a graceless cartwheel, coming down agonisingly on my left thigh. Picking myself up, I fumble for the gate latch. A clang, a squeal of hinges, and I’m back in the car. ‘Quick. Quick. Someone’s coming. Quick. Go. Go, go, go.’

My mother hasn’t started the engine. I dive behind the front seats as she fiddles unhurriedly with the ignition. As we at last pull away, I emerge to find my mother holding the cutting at arm’s length (she’s longsighted), appraising as she steers with one hand.

‘Please keep your eyes on the road, Liza,’ says my father.

‘That should take alright,’ she says. She starts to wrap the cutting in one of the numerous crumpled paper handkerchiefs that always surround her, the car swerving dangerously as she does so. ‘See darling?’ she says, turning to me. ‘That couldn’t have been easier, could it? All that fuss. You do make such a meal of everything.’

This book is partly about an attempt to make a garden and partly an attempt to resolve my vexed relationship with the whole subject of gardening. The specific impulse was planted about twenty years ago, during a conversation with a friend whose party trick was hypnotising people. ‘We all have a garden in our heads,’ he happened to mention. Asked to close our eyes and imagine ourselves in our favourite garden, most people will find a special place, usually a childhood garden. Real or imaginary, once chosen, it’ll always be the same place we visit, if requested to do so thereafter, again and again. This fact, he said, was indispensable to hypnotists, who need to make their subject feel secure, contented, fulfilled, calm and relaxed—in short, highly susceptible to whatever humiliating routines he had planned for them—in a hurry. ‘Just get them into the garden,’ he finished cheerfully. ‘Then you’ve got ’em.’

‘What if they don’t have a favourite garden?’

‘Everyone has a favourite garden.’

Somehow, this idea stuck in my head. The genius of it was its individuality. The instant he said it, I knew I had just such a place. It was the house where my grandmother lived when I was little: a gabled, Elizabethan Cotswold farmhouse with outbuildings, down a long drive, above a valley of hanging beech woods. The house was built of that honey-coloured limestone that seems to absorb the sunshine then radiate it back so even on grey days it still felt warm. The roof was of mossy stone tiles, the windows mullioned. The south-facing garden side was framed by two trees: a vast and ancient Irish yew and a flowering cherry whose white blossom indicated spring had arrived. A stream ran across the lawn in front of the house, feeding a natural swimming pool hewn out of the rock. Inside the dark interior, there were beams and oak panelling and a smell of wood smoke and beeswax. A trap door under the sitting-room carpet led to the cellar. Even the name was charmed: Rookwoods-on-the-Holy-Brook.

Rookwoods was sold in 1968, when I was five and my brother Jonny was seven. ‘It was far too remote for an old woman in winter,’ my mother would declare matter-of-factly when, later, we demanded to know why. ‘It only took a frost for her to be cut off.’ It was the only criticism of Rookwoods I ever heard. The sense of loss, the mounting resentment, the indignant accusations, they followed gradually. As we grew up, vignettes of our Cotswold idyll would drift back, until, by our teens, mere mention of the name was enough to trigger outraged nostalgia. My brother and I would compete for whose imagination had the greater claim on the place, trumping each other’s memories in an area in which my brother, with a two-and-a-half-year head start, had an irksome advantage.

When Granny died, decades later, we inherited two Rookwoods heirlooms. One was a bird table made by Cyril, the gardener. Architecturally, it was little different to most bird tables—a platform on a post beneath a pitched roof—but it was clearly handmade. The pitched roof was of beaten tin. Whittled oak pegs served as perches. The supporting pole had an irregular section where Cyril had taken the corners off with a draw knife. Erected in its new home, our garden, the bits gradually fell off: first the roof, then the supporting pillars, then the perches and the lip to stop the food blowing off. But, because it was oak, the rest, the pole and the platform, lasted: a daily presence outside the kitchen, gently reminding us of its charmed provenance.

The other heirloom was a picture. Before selling Rookwoods, Granny commissioned a painting of the house from a retired artist who lived nearby. The artist was Ernest Dinkel (the illustrator behind some of the classic 1930s underground posters) and he made a particularly good job of it. His watercolour, in its limed oak frame, moved with Granny to her next house. When she died it came to us, and when Jonny and I left home, it went to him, sparking a row so immense my father had a copy made for me.

I once read that in loving relationships between adults, the relationship does not start the day two people meet, but in the childhood of each partner. That’s when the template which governs adult behaviour, when it comes to love, is laid down. If that’s the case, then why shouldn’t much the same apply to our relationship with places? It’s always fascinated me that if you ask someone where, if they could have one, their secret rural hideaway would be—by a stream, say, in the woods, by the sea or in the hills—they always seem to know immediately. How can this be?

When I started trying to make my own garden, I discovered the task had actually begun years earlier, before I’d even found the place where my garden was to be, and that I was embarking on a more involved adventure than I could possibly have guessed, one in which all kinds of unexpected influences came to bear. Careful, patient assessment of the garden in my head, no doubt, might have explained some of these things, while simultaneously revealing much about myself (to make your paradise, after all, you need to know yourself). I did no such thing. Instead, I blundered on, baffled but trying to stay loyal to my instincts, following inexplicable imperatives. Only gradually did some explanations begin to dawn. The result is a book that often strays beyond the garden gate to all kinds of peripheral things, from childhood and family to wood-chopping.

My hope is that, on the off chance that others, too, have a garden in their heads alongside the one that they’re trying to make for real, my explorations will prompt them to reflect on theirs. After all, no one can deny the sheer grandeur of ambition or romantic purity of the impulse behind Britain’s greatest shared passion, to which anyone who’s ever dropped into a garden centre of a Saturday morning, hauled resentfully on a mower pull-start, or opened a packet of seeds has, however unconsciously, already succumbed.

A. W.

Tair-Ffynnon, 2010

1 Walking country

Now and then we passed through winding valleys speckled with farms that looked romantic and pretty from a distance, but bleak and comfortless up close. Mostly they were smallholdings with lots of rusted tin everywhere—tin sheds, tin hen huts, tin fences—looking rickety and weatherbattered. We were entering one of those weird zones, always a sign of remoteness from the known world, where nothing is ever thrown away. Every farmyard was cluttered with piles of cast-offs, as if the owner thought that one day he might need 132 half-rotted fence-posts, a ton of broken bricks and the shell of a 1964 Ford Zodiac.

BILL BRYSON, Notes from a Small Island, 1996

‘What d’you want that old place for? You a farmer? You don’t sound like a farmer.’

Mr. Games had the easy telephone manner of someone used to talking for a living and the cheery directness which I was beginning to associate with the Borderland brogue. It was late September and I’d been told there was nothing he didn’t know about property in the Black Mountains of South Wales. If we needed someone to bid on our behalf, then, as a pillar of one of the old established local auctioneers, valuers and land agents, no one was better for the task than Mr. Games.

‘I’m a writer.’

‘Are you, bloody hell?’

‘I was wondering, is there any chance—’

‘If you’re a writer, you’ll know Oliver Goldsmith? I was thinking of him just now.’

‘Oliver Goldsmith? No, I don’t think—’

‘Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,/Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;/Now lost to all; her friends, her virtue fled,/Near her betrayer’s door she lays her head,/And, pinched with cold and shrinking from the shower,/With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour.’

‘That is lovely. No, I don’t know that poem, but—’

‘The Deserted Village. You must know that.’

‘I must look it up. But I was wondering—?’

‘What about Keats? Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades/Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep/In the next valley-glades:/Was it a vision, or a waking dream?/Fled is that music—do I wake or sleep? How do they do it? That’s the bloody question. It’s in there you know, right from the start. Thomas, d’you read much of him? “And Death Shall Have No Dominion?”’

‘I…er…’

‘No more may gulls cry at their ears/Or waves break loud on the seashores…’

Was everyone in Border Country like this, I wondered? Everyone we met seemed to love to talk.

‘…He was nineteen. Nineteen. How can you know that stuff aged nineteen?’

‘Amazing, isn’t it? But I was wondering—’

‘So why d’you want this house anyway? It’s in the middle of bloody nowhere.’

‘That’s the point. I like—’

‘D’you read Johnston? You must’ve read him? That time at the Giant’s Causeway…’

And he was off again. Forty minutes later, with difficulty, I extricated myself (‘Got to go, have you?’)—though, as I put the phone down, I felt at least we now had a sound ally. I arranged to meet at his office the following Friday at twelve o’clock to run through the formalities before the afternoon’s auction.

The call was the culmination of a decade of dreaming followed by a three-year wild-goose chase. I’d been looking for a rural hideaway for as long as I could remember. In my mind, I knew precisely what I was after. It would be a remote, whitewashed stone cottage with a sagging roof of mossy stone slates, up a long, rocky track. Inside would be a sitting room lined with books, and battered old leather armchairs, a threadbare carpet and a blazing log fire. The place would have elements of Gavin Maxwell’s Camusfearna (his cottage on the West Coast of Scotland in Ring of Bright Water), Uncle Monty’s Lake District retreat in the film Withnail and I, and Shackleton’s hut at the South Pole, with its tin stove pipe, cosy bunks and (yes, let us not forget) plentiful wooden packing cases of canned lobster soup and vintage claret. It had to be somewhere properly wild: mountains or moorland—walking country—where the wind howled and the rain lashed, somewhere that would be cut off for weeks by snow in winter, as an antidote to the airless, Tupperware skies of London. In this place, after long walks in the hills (wearing sturdy, red-laced boots), worries could be soaked away in deep baths while sipping whisky (not that I liked whisky) while savouring the sound of the weather hammering the windows. It seemed a straightforward enough fantasy, yet finding it had proved anything but. Scotland, Snowdonia and the Lakes were too far. The Dales and High Peak were too expensive. Exmoor wasn’t wild enough. Dartmoor wasn’t mountainous enough.

And thus my late twenties passed into my thirties, with me no nearer, mentally or financially, to finding my rural hideaway. So, my forties on the horizon, I compromised. I bought an ancient Land Rover and parked it in the street as a daily reminder that one day that’s where I was going.

Then I met Vez, who also worked in London, and thoughts of escape to remote rural hideaways seemed less urgent.

Until, out of the blue, my friend Mary called. She’d heard of a place in the Black Mountains, likely to be cheap, but we’d have to move fast. I’d not even heard of the Black Mountains, but spring was in the air and it felt like an adventure. So Vez and I dropped everything, called in sick to our respective offices, and next day drove down the M4 to Wales.

We met our mystery guide, Ian, in a pub. From the start a sense of intrigue and skulduggery pervaded the day, enough to make us feel, for once, we were on the inside track. In the pub, Ian spoke in whispers: ‘Keep your voice down, these walls have ears.’ Then he whisked us off in his car along a wide green valley of big fields, before turning up an unsigned lane, the sides of which narrowed and deepened as it began to climb until the car fitted it like a tube train. Up and up we went, the lane kinking and twisting past ancient tree trunks whose vast boles were sawn flush to allow just enough room for a car to squeeze by. Eventually the gradient eased and we emerged, blinking in the light, at a small crossroads. Ahead of us, framed through a gateway, rose a table-topped summit. ‘Sugar Loaf,’ said Ian.

He took a turning marked ‘NO THROUGH ROAD’. A dark mountainscape opened up on our left, completely different to the grassy valley where we’d started. A hairpin bend took us steeply uphill again. The hedges were getting scrappier now, and gateways revealed ever-more-dramatic panoramas of heathery hilltops above sheep-dotted fields. Up and up—my ears popped—until a quarter of a mile later the road ended at a gate between dry-stone walls. An embossed wooden sign read: ‘NO CARS ON THE COMMON. PRIVATE ACCESS ONLY.’ Beyond the gate a rocky track bordered by a stone wall continued upwards, curving tantalisingly out of sight between bracken-covered banks before disappearing into wispy fog. ‘That’s as far as we can go,’ said Ian at that point. There were complications. The house was being sold by Court Order: a bitter divorce. There was no question of actually seeing the place. We wouldn’t understand the niceties, he said, but he’d keep us posted.

And with that, we returned to London. But over the days and weeks that followed, phrases Ian had used kept drifting back. ‘Over a thousand feet’, ‘National Park’, ‘Offa’s Dyke’, ‘red kites’, ‘wild ponies’, ‘spring water’…Each alone was enough to send me into happy reveries. As it turned out, however, it didn’t come to market. ‘Don’t give up,’ said Ian. ‘It’ll happen.’

Our next attempt to see the place coincided with the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001. With the grand obliviousness to rural affairs that only the truly urban can display, we’d booked a B&B, packed walking boots and maps and arrived in the Black Mountains astonished to find every road into the uplands ending in sinister roadblocks plastered with yellow warning notices: ‘FOOT-AND-MOUTH DISEASE. BY ORDER, KEEP OUT.’

The effect of this was to make a place already enticingly elusive positively tantalising. What was this mysterious, out-of-reach farmstead like? By now I could think of little else. Sitting in London traffic, Vez got used to endless conversations prefaced: ‘Just say we got the place in Wales…’ Briefly, it looked as if it might really be coming to market. Ian sent us a small ad in the local paper formally announcing its sale, only to call, a few weeks later, telling us it had again been withdrawn. A third visit, six months later, prompted by a friend’s wedding near Hay-on-Wye, found the Black Mountains open and accessible again. Festooned with binoculars and cameras we walked up Offa’s Dyke footpath, looking forward to glimpsing for the first time the subject of so much discussion, only to find that due to a fold of the hill and some trees still in leaf, almost nothing could be made out except a collection of ramshackle outbuildings and tin barns clustered round a boxy house. Big dry-stone walls reached up the hill behind to claim green fields back from the gorse and bracken. To take too much interest, however, seemed like tempting fate. The place clearly wasn’t coming to market, so after a few minutes, we walked briskly on.

Abandoning hope, we left our names with other agents. But every set of particulars that arrived—for derelict water mills in dank valleys, remote farms beyond the protective cocoon of the National Park, medieval farmhouses way beyond our price range—just seemed to confirm the essential rightness of ‘our place’.

Then, unexpectedly, the day Vez went into hospital to have our first baby, particulars for ‘our place’ arrived. ‘Tair-Ffynnon’, we learnt it was called (formerly ‘Hill Cottage’). It was described as ‘occupying an outstanding rural location in the Brecon Beacons National Park, a good size, three-bedroom, detached, two-storey cottage in need of modernisation and improvement. The property occupies a spectacular position with outstanding views from its isolated location…approached via a stone track across the common…approximately 5 acres of sloping pasture…private water supply from a natural spring…For sale by public auction 3rd October.’ There was a smudgy photograph of the house but, it was pleasingly awful, it conveyed no sense to anyone who didn’t know the place of its remarkable setting.

And so, finally, with our daughter Maya just seven days old, we saw it properly. We drove through the hill gate, bumped up the track, and arrived, officially, to inspect my dream hideaway. Admittedly, to an impartial observer, the place’s appeal might have seemed obscure. The yard was littered with derelict cars and bits of twisted metal, jostling with random lumber heaps, rubble and old tyres. Geese babbled and puttered in the mud. A wall-eyed sheepdog ambushed us as we got out of the car with a series of terrific lunges to the limit of a long chain. The assorted outbuildings all looked on the point of collapse. As for the house, it was hard to say which side was ugliest. It had received a full 1970s makeover, burying all trace of the stone cottage it presumably replaced beneath breezeblock, render, concrete tiles and cavernous, flush-fitted windows. The fields around were so lumpy with anthills they appeared to have a kind of geomorphological acne, and ruckled up like bedclothes on the steep slope. There was a suggestion in the hulks of broken farm machinery that things had grown here, but it was hard to conceive what or when.

But I was not an impartial observer. I was in love. My only concern was that, with so much emotion invested, I might cock up the bidding. Which was why Ian had suggested Mr. Games as our man.

The Montague Harris office was exactly as I imagined an old established auctioneers and valuers (‘offices Brecon and Abergavenny, serving the Usk Valley’) in a rural market town should be. Its sash windows overlooked the cattle market, with (this not being market day) its metal sheds and steel sheep pens empty. A receptionist led us upstairs to Mr. Games’s office where, behind a panelled door, was a wide leather-topped desk, behind which was Mr. Games himself. The floor sagged, perhaps from age, perhaps from the weight of the desk and the hundreds of calf-bound volumes and racing calendars that lined the shelves behind it. Mr. Games, as he rose to greet us, contributed a considerable presence. His complexion was that of the pure-bred countryman, evoking the hills and the hunting field and dispersal sales held in all weathers, balanced and offset by his shoes, polished to a deep-hued patina somewhere between oxblood and mahogany. Those shoes were things of wonder: mighty, double-welted brogues against which the turn-ups of his heavy green tweed suit gently broke. ‘You’re the one wants that bloody place on the mountain.’ He looked me up and down. His eyes narrowed: ‘You don’t look mad. Are you mad?’

His secretary was despatched to fetch a disclaimer form. On it there was a box for the highest bid we were prepared to make. The night before, I’d persuaded Vez that we must be prepared to pay what it cost, to remortgage ourselves for everything we had if necessary. We’d agreed on a figure that was absurdly high for a derelict smallholding in the hills; it would have required us both to sell our cars and probably our television too. I wrote in the amount. Mr. Games took my arm and led me over to the other side of the room, out of Vez’s earshot. He lowered his voice. ‘You’re bloody mad. It’s not worth it. You might think it’s alright now, in October, but get up there in the winter, in the mist and the rain and the snow and the mud. You don’t want that place.’ Evidently feeling he’d discharged his responsibilities as best he could, he watched as I signed the paper. Vez couldn’t bring herself to sign. When I proffered the paper, she turned away, pretending not to know. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t tell you you’re bloody mad,’ said Mr. Games.

In the end, it was neither as cheap as we hoped, nor, happily, anywhere near as much as I’d have paid. Mr. Games sat silently through the bidding, before calmly rising to secure it with two perfectly timed movements of his hand.

And so, thirty days later, I got to drive my Land Rover to its new country home.

2 Tair-Ffynnon

I usually skip topographical details in novels. The more elaborate the description of the locality, the more confused does my mental impression become. You know the sort of thing:—Jill stood looking out of the door of her cottage. To the North rose the vast peak of Snowdon. To the South swept the valley, dotted with fir trees. Beyond the main ridge of mountains a pleasant wooded country extended itself, but the nearer slopes were scarred and desolate. Miles below a thin ribbon of river wound towards the sea, which shone, like a distant shield, beyond the etc. etc. By the time I have read a little of this sort of thing I feel dizzy. Is Snowdon in front or behind? Are the woods to the right or to the left? The mind makes frenzied efforts to carry it all, without success. It would be very much better if the novelist said ‘Jill stood on the top of a hill, and looked down into the valley below.’ And left it at that.

BEVERLEY NICHOLS, Down the Garden Path, 1932

An obligatory requirement for any house in interesting country is a wall-map. Having made the satisfying discovery that Tair-Ffynnon was not only marked on the Black Mountains map, but mentioned by name—we were, literally, ‘on the map’—I wasted no time in pasting one up by the stairs. The map of the Black Mountains is a particularly pleasing one. The many contours make up the shape of a bony old hand, a left hand placed palm down by someone sitting opposite you. Four parallel ridges form the fingers, with the peaks of Mynydd Troed and Mynydd Llangorse constituting the joints of the thumb. At the joint between the second and third fingers is the Grwyne Fawr reservoir, up a long no through road. Between the third and fourth knuckles is the one through route, a mountain road that passes up the Llanthony Valley, past the abbey and Capel-y-Fin (‘the chapel at the end’) and up over the Gospel Pass (at 1,880 feet the highest road pass in Wales), before switchbacking down to Hay-on-Wye.

Hay, at the northern end, with its castle and bookshops and spring literary festival, is one of the three towns that skirt the Black Mountains. Crickhowell is to the south-west, beneath its flat-topped ‘Table Mountain’ (‘Crug Hywel’, from which the town takes its name). With its medieval bridge, antique shops and hint of gentility, Crickhowell is to the Black Mountains what Burford is to the Cotswolds. To the south-east, Abergavenny is the town with the least pretensions of the three, sitting beneath the great bulk of Blorenge (one of the few words in the English language to rhyme with ‘orange’) as Wengen sits beneath the Eiger. Central to our new universe was the Skirrid Mountain Garage, a name which conjured (to me, at least) wind-flayed and hail-battered petrol pumps huddled beneath a high pass, but which, in reality, was a homely establishment facing the mountain, selling everything the rural dweller could need, from chicken feed to homemade cakes.

Until some basic building work allowed us to move properly—installing central heating, replacing missing windows and slates, moving the bathroom upstairs—we were still only visiting Tair-Ffynnon at weekends, armed with drills and paint brushes. Our first night on the hill, after weeks of B&Bs down in the valley, felt as remote and exciting as bivouacking on Mount Everest, especially when we woke to find a hard, blue-skied frost had turned everything white and brought five Welsh Mountain ponies with romantically trailing manes and tails to drink at the bathtub where the spring emerged. The same day we spotted our first pair of red kites, easily distinguishable from the ubiquitous buzzards by their forked tails, elegant flight and mournful, whistled cries: pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo, pweee-ooo ee oo ee oo ee oo.

Between DIY efforts, we explored. no one who hasn’t moved to a new area can understand the excitement that almost every modest outing brings, be it merely trying out a pub or seeking a recommended shop, and the incidental discoveries the journey brings in the form of new views, a charming farm or enticing-looking walk for some future date. Much of our delight came just from being somewhere we’d chosen to be, as opposed to somewhere foisted upon us by our work or childhood. From growing up in Somerset I knew it was possible to live in a place without feeling the slightest connection with it, and the experience had left me hungry for knowledge of our new locality. Skirrid, Sugar Loaf and Blorenge, as the three triangulation points visible from most places, had to be climbed. The Black Hill and Golden Valley had to be inspected to see if they lived up to their names. Expeditions had to be mounted to walk Offa’s Dyke, and to drive the upland roads where Top Gear tested their supercars, to check out Cwmyoy church’s crooked tower and Kilpeck church’s saucy gargoyles of peeing women. And when we heard that a cult porn classic had been filmed in 1992 exclusively around a particular local farm, naturally we hurried off to see that too. The Revenge of Billy the Kid* (plot: farmer shags goat; monstrous half-goat-half-man progeny returns to kill his family) may not rank directly alongside Kilvert’s Diaries, Chatwin’s On the Black Hill, or Eric Gill’s sculptures (not that Gill’s extra-curricular activities were so far removed) but it still supplied local colour.

After the auction, when I’d shaken hands with the vendor’s solicitor, he’d said: ‘If you’ll be wanting a builder up there, I can recommend a tidy one. Very tidy.’ Any impartial recommendation of a local tradesman was plainly useful, given our newcomer status. And I could see that the notion of a tidy builder—the phrase, after all, was practically an oxymoron—was praiseworthy. But even if the one he was recommending was exceptionally orderly, even if he dusted every finished surface and ran the Hoover round before leaving, was this feature, in itself, sufficient justification for recommendation? Surely the foremost qualities for a builder must be workmanship, diligence, reliability, integrity, value for money, and so on, all before the undoubted bonus of tidy-mindedness?

Having, nevertheless, taken up his recommendation, over the succeeding weeks we heard mention of tidy jobs, tidy places, tidy machines, and it dawned that ‘tidy’, of course, didn’t really mean tidy at all, but was local vernacular for ‘good’ or ‘excellent’. As, in due course, we learnt that ‘ground’ was the term for ‘land’, cwtsh (pronounced ‘cutch’ as in ‘butch’) for cuddle, trow for ‘trough’, ‘by here’ for ‘here’ and so on, my favourite being the localised version of good-bye, the delightful ‘bye now’, as if parting were a mere trifling interruption, that resumption of contact was taken for granted. Phones, too, were generally answered with a joyful ‘’Alloooo’, as if you caught the recipient moments after his lottery win. The accent’s combination of Herefordshire and a hint of West Country, with a sing-song Welsh lilt, made communication easy on the ear, if periodically incomprehensible.

It also highlighted we were not just in a different place but in a different country, with a different language. ‘ARAF’ painted on roads at junctions meant ‘Slow’, while the word ‘HEDDLU’ appeared on the side of police cars. Signposts to bigger villages carried place names in both English and Welsh, however similar. The sign into our local village was large to accommodate (for absolute clarity) both ‘Llanfihangel Crucornau’ and ‘Llanvihangel Crucorney’. Cash machines offered Welsh instructions. Station and Post Office announcements were in Welsh as well as English. All official council, government or civil service documentation was bi-lingual, more than doubling its length. Names of smaller villages and individual properties tended to be in Welsh. In fact such a bewildering profusion of the same words kept cropping up again and again, of Pentwyns and Bettwses and Llanfihangels and Cwm-Thises and Nanty-Thats, that we bought a Welsh dictionary for the car. A new world emerged. In combination with words for ‘big’, ‘little’, ‘over’, ‘under’, ‘near’ or numbers, a poetic topography of landform sprang out.* Yet, despite this, and despite a general allegiance to Wales (especially evident during televised rugby finals), we soon discovered next to no one spoke or even understood Welsh.

The area seemed to be in the grip of a benign, easygoing, low-level identity crisis. Keen to learn a few basics, I spent an afternoon in the local reference library. The three classic guidebooks, A. G. Bradley’s In the March and Borderland of Wales (1905) and P. Thoresby Jones’s Welsh Border Country (1938) and H. J. Massingham’s The Southern Marches (1952), devoted pages simply trying to define where they were talking about. Everywhere there were signs of Welshness, or Englishness, or of a confusion between the two. Despite the unambiguous geophysical boundary of the ten-mile Hatterrall Ridge, the actual border with England ran only part of the way along its length, before descending to make various arbitrary and unpredictable kinks and turns, with the result that a short drive ‘round the mountain’ to Hereford or Hay crisscrossed the border repeatedly. So, not surprisingly, at least as many people seemed to be called Powell and Jones and Davies in neighbouring Herefordshire as in Monmouthshire. It was similarly interesting, if a little bewildering, to be given the option in every newsagent, however small, of nine local papers: the Abergavenny Chronicle, Monmouthshire Beacon, Abergavenny Free Press, Hereford Times, Brecon and Radnorshire Express, Western Mail, Western Free Press, Gwent Gazette and the South Wales Argus. For leisure moments, these were supplemented by the magazines Wye Valley Life, Usk Valley Life, Monmouthshire Life and Herefordshire Life, plus, for the macro view, Welsh Life. Whole sections of most newsagents were set aside for this remarkable array of verbiage. Even Abergavenny’s slogan—‘Markets, Mountains and More’—on signs hanging off lampposts and on its literature, suggested a certain doubt about exactly what it was the place stood for.

This uncertainty was echoed by the physical landscape. Upland or lowland? Sheep or cattle grazing? Hedge country or stone wall country? On the last question, most fields seemed to be a mixture, as if, halfway through walling, the waller had thought: ‘Sod this. Why don’t we just plant a hedge?’ Then, fifty years later when the hedges weren’t doing so well, another generation had said: ‘Hedges here? What were they thinking of? This should be a bloody wall.’ Even the birds seemed confused. At Tair-Ffynnon there were few trees but we had several fat green woodpeckers feeding off ants from the anthills, along with treecreepers and nuthatches. We had mountain birds like red kites and ravens, and moorland ones like red grouse and merlins. Yet we also had farmland birds like redstarts and fieldfares, water birds like yellow wagtails and herons, and garden birds: tits, chaffinches and blackbirds (though no songthrushes, strangely).

It was Border Country alright. Monmouthshire, a county in-between. But tidy, nevertheless.

My father and brother Jonny came to inspect the place. ‘D’you think my car will recover?’ said my father, parking his Fiesta after picking his way up the track. He looked well, but then he always did. Now in his eighties, he hardly seemed to have changed in the time I’d known him. Largely bald with white Professor Calculus-style hair, he’d looked old when he was young, but as his contemporaries aged, he’d just stayed the same. I bent down to kiss him, giving Jonny the usual curt nod. ‘Wonderful view. What a hideous house,’ said my father, fastidiously surveying the yard, taking in the scrap metal and the junk, as I helped him out of the car. ‘And what an appalling mess. What possessed you to buy this place, darling?’

I’d known my father wouldn’t like it. He loathed disorder, crudeness, ugliness. His relationship with the countryside was one of suspicion bordering on revulsion, and I guessed this counted as extreme countryside. I was impressed, frankly, given how bad the track was, he’d attempted it at all.

Although, technically, we’d all grown up in the country, in as much as our house was located in rural Somerset, ours wasn’t a rural existence. My father would vastly have preferred to live in the town. We were there entirely on my mother’s account, because she was obsessed with horses. Although dedicated to his garden, his interest was in abstract, strictly non-productive gardening. Most day-to-day aspects of rural living my father cordially detested. The getting stuck behind tractors and milk lorries. The smell of muck-spreading. The filth and slime with which the lanes steadily filled from December to March. It was a point almost of pride that he possessed not a solitary item of the default green country wear sold by shops with ‘country’ in their name. He was repelled by traditional rural activities such as hunting, shooting and fishing and would not have dreamt of attending an event such as the Badminton Horse Trials, had the latter not been forced upon him by my mother. Visiting churches, distinguished gardens and occasional walks up Crook’s Peak were the extent of his rural ambitions. We kept no animals, other than horses, and grew no fruit or vegetables. He wished for no contact with country people and did not enjoy having it foisted upon him (such as when he answered the door to find Ken, the farmer at the top of our lane, following one of the periodic shoots through the adjacent wood, bearing the unwelcome gift of a brace of pheasants). He made no secret of the fact that he was in the country on sufferance and would have preferred to occupy a terraced house in Bristol or Bath. Maybe it was from him that I acquired the sense of rural root-lessness that had driven me up a Welsh mountain.*

Although, technically, we’d all grown up in the country, in as much as our house was located in rural Somerset, ours wasn’t a rural existence. My father would vastly have preferred to live in the town. We were there entirely on my mother’s account, because she was obsessed with horses. Although dedicated to his garden, his interest was in abstract, strictly non-productive gardening. Most day-to-day aspects of rural living my father cordially detested. The getting stuck behind tractors and milk lorries. The smell of muck-spreading. The filth and slime with which the lanes steadily filled from December to March. It was a point almost of pride that he possessed not a solitary item of the default green country wear sold by shops with ‘country’ in their name. He was repelled by traditional rural activities such as hunting, shooting and fishing and would not have dreamt of attending an event such as the Badminton Horse Trials, had the latter not been forced upon him by my mother. Visiting churches, distinguished gardens and occasional walks up Crook’s Peak were the extent of his rural ambitions. We kept no animals, other than horses, and grew no fruit or vegetables. He wished for no contact with country people and did not enjoy having it foisted upon him (such as when he answered the door to find Ken, the farmer at the top of our lane, following one of the periodic shoots through the adjacent wood, bearing the unwelcome gift of a brace of pheasants). He made no secret of the fact that he was in the country on sufferance and would have preferred to occupy a terraced house in Bristol or Bath. Maybe it was from him that I acquired the sense of rural root-lessness that had driven me up a Welsh mountain.*

Jonny, on the other hand, was in heaven, as he methodically inspected every inch of the place, shed by shed, rusty wreck by rusty wreck. For fifteen years, Jonny’s day job had been as a Formula One motor-racing mechanic, at one time ending up as head of Ayrton Senna’s car—thus maintaining the Woodward tradition of having a job sufficiently specialised to be utterly meaningless to other members of the family. He was so shy, with us at least, he’d never, under any circumstances, contemplate leaving answerphone messages. Yet his spiky handwriting, indenting at least three sheets of paper beneath the one he was writing on, hinted at his determination once he’d set his mind on something. In recent years we’d bonded, bizarrely, over an affection for old farm machinery; the key difference between us being that he was a mechanical genius. Machines in his hands sprang back to life, as plants did in my mother’s, and as they died in my own.

‘Pick-up cylinder off an International B74 baler…radiator off a David Brown…top link arm…link box flap…hitch and footplates off a Super Major. Did you know your hay trailer’s the converted chassis of a Bedford Army Four-tonner?’

I could tell Jonny was as approving as it was possible for him to be.

‘I just do,’ said Jonny.

We went into the house for lunch. ‘What’s going there?’ asked Jonny, indicating the empty space left for the Aga.

‘An Aga.’

‘An Aga? How awful,’ said my father.

‘Oh, I don’t know. I rather like an Aga,’ said my brother. ‘What colour are you getting?’

‘Cream.’

‘Thank goodness for that.’

After lunch, Jonny returned to his inspection outside, exactly where he’d left off.

‘This hay rake’s been converted. Look, you can see where it used to be horse-drawn and they’ve welded a tractor hitch on. See, just there. Bamford’s side delivery rake…mmm, nice.’

‘What’s this called?’ We were standing next to a particularly eccentric-looking appliance which consisted of four huge metal wheels in an offset row, each spoked with sprung metal tines. From seeing it in the fields as a child, I knew it had been used for turning hay.

‘A Vicon Lily Acrobat.’ He enunciated the syllables slowly, ironically. We all smiled.

‘How do you know this stuff?’ said my father.

‘You’ve got three Ferguson ploughs, so whoever was here before you obviously had a Fergie. And a lot of this other kit’s for a Fergie too: the potato ridger, the spring tine cultivator. You can see it all used to be painted grey. Hmm,’ said Jonny, surveying it all. ‘Looks as if you’d better get yourself a tractor.’

Gradually, we began to meet our neighbours. Key amongst them was Ness, darkly beautiful, gypsy-like, striding the hill with a long-legged gait and her sheepdog Molly. She lived in a cottage behind a hedge on the lane and talked with a force and speed I have yet to encounter in another human being, as if life were too short to leave gaps between words. She was also, it soon emerged, a kind of self-appointed guardian of our corner of the National Park, waging a lone battle against what she regarded—aptly, in many people’s view—as mediocrity, idleness, bad taste, stupidity or the general failure of officialdom to discharge its duties adequately. Gratuitous street-lighting, crass development, over-signage—all fell within her remit as unofficial custodian. Early on I’d had the privilege of hearing her in action when I’d dropped in for something. Some ominous big ‘C’s had recently appeared in yellow paint on the trunks and branches of various trees on the lane up the hill, including one on the bole of a mighty, spreading oak. I found her pacing the room with a phone hooked under her chin. ‘So,arewequiteclearonthisMr.—?Ifanything—anything—happenstothattreefollowingthisconversation…IhaveyournameheresoIknowexactlywhotocomebackto.’

It was clear from her tone that her blood was up, that she’d been fobbed off by one jobsworth too many claiming he or she didn’t know what the markings meant, or that they were there in the name of health and safety. I watched agog as, with hurricane-force indefatigability, she worked her way up the hierarchy of plainly shell-shocked and unprepared officials until, when she decided she’d got far enough, she delivered her pièce de résistance: ‘Isthatclear?ForyourinformationIhavebeentaperecordingthisconversation,so,asIsay,Iwillbeholdingyoupersonallyresponsible.Thankyouverymuch.’ She put the phone down. ‘That should stir them up a bit,’ she said cheerfully, lighting a Silk Cut from a lighter marked ‘BUY YOUR OWN FUCKING LIGHTER’. ‘Now,canIofferyouacupofcoffeeord’youwantsomethingstronger?Gladyou’vecalledinbecauseI’vebeenmeaningtoaskyou…’

I need hardly add that the sentenced oak still stands, wearing its yellow death warrant like a badge of honour, a daily reminder that battles with mindless bureaucracy can be won.

Ness became a vital source of information from the start, issuing us with contact sheets of trusted local artisans, sources and suppliers, each accompanied by comprehensive briefing notes. Another was Les the Post. We enjoyed what must be one of the best-value mail services in the British Isles, with Les frequently negotiating two gates and a mile of rough track simply to deliver a flyer promising ‘Anglia Double Glazing now in your area’. He was regularly to be seen chivvying stray sheep back into their fields (being familiar with every local farmer’s markings) where we would just push uncertainly by, often herding them ever further from home. Start a conversation with Les, however, and, as he switched his engine off, you knew it was unlikely to last less than twenty minutes.

In February, we encountered our most exotic and colourful visitors to the hill. We’d had intimations of their presence, in the form of folded five pound notes wedged into cracks of the porch, or neat piles of coins left by the door, which we’d discover on Saturday mornings when we emerged, blinking, into the daylight. On this occasion, a car with long overhanging bundles on its roof-rack came racing up the track. It swept into the yard, and, without slowing, splashed through the muddy gateway to the field. Two figures leapt out and started untying the long bundles. After that, cars started arriving in a more or less steady stream. The wind was in the east. The hang-gliders and paragliders had arrived.

We’d already heard a lot about them. Within moments of getting Tair-Ffynnon at the auction, a man had introduced himself, congratulated us on our success, and explained he’d been the under-bidder, representing a consortium of hang and paraglider flyers. Were we aware, he said, that Tair-Ffynnon was one of the finest paragliding sites in the country? Apparently the Hatterrall Ridge was the first significant geological barrier to east-flowing air after the Urals on the far side of the Russian steppes two and a half thousand miles away. The previous owner had allowed, even encouraged, parking in her field: would we consider doing the same? I mumbled something about being sure we could work something out, only to discover I’d entered a minefield. The site was popular because the combination of the track and parking meant pilots could drive their heavy gear all the way to the take-off point, something few sites allowed. But permitting parking encouraged greater use of the site, sending Ness, for one, crazy from cars driving up and down past her house all day. We decided the best course for the time being was to do nothing.

There’s no doubt they were a dramatic spectacle in the late winter haze. The brightly coloured canopies of the paragliders stood out against the bracken and lichen-covered stone walls, and across the hill drifted the murmur of voices punctuated by the crackles and soft wumphs of air pockets inflating and deflating. We counted thirty in the air simultaneously that day. They brought a note of glamour and contemporaneity to the ancient hillside.

By the third week of February, the Aga still wasn’t installed. We’d ordered one secondhand and it was supposed to have been delivered and fitted by Christmas. After the delivery driver had failed to find Tair-Ffynnon on his first attempt, then declared the track too rough on his second, his third attempt coincided with a hard frost, converting the wet lane into an impassable sheet of ice. A fourth attempt was finally successful, but unfortunately by this time we’d missed our slot with the fitter. The disembowelled cooker was heaped in the lean-to pending his return from his January break. When he finally arrived, fresh and recuperated, he informed us the parts were from Agas of different dates and incompatible. As we’d torn out the existing Rayburn to make way for the Aga, the house was distinctly chilly and unwelcoming without either, so after that Vez declared we should not return to Tair-Ffynnon until the correct Aga parts were ready for assembly.

Then the forecast promised snow in the south of England. During weekdays away from Tair-Ffynnon a curious imaginative process had started taking place. The less we were there, the more romantically unreal the place began to seem. Stuck in London, enduring yet another mild, drearily overcast day, what I wanted to know was: what was it like on the hill, in the high, clear, cold air there? I had no difficulty imagining that a place less than two hundred miles to the west of the capital and a thousand-odd feet higher could be experiencing an entirely different climate. I was convinced a frost in London must mean feet of snow on the hill. Indeed, it would have been but a step for me to believe woolly mammoths bestrode the ridge. I got sidetracked for almost a morning researching what kind of generator would be most suitable for the inevitable power cuts and how much snow chains would be for the car. So when genuine snow was promised—well, that could not be missed.

Thus it was against Vez’s better judgement that we descended off the elevated section of the Westway out of London that Friday afternoon, the car’s temperature gauge hovering at a disappointing +1°C. (I had become a compulsive watcher of the car’s temperature gauge, which routinely indicated a two-, three-, even four-degree difference between the bottom of the hill up to Tair-Ffynnon and the top.) By Reading, however, the digital display showed 0°C and big flakes started coming at us out of the night. Larger and larger, they made a soft, unfamiliar pfffffff…pfffffff…pfffffff…pfffffff…as they settled on the windscreen. The temperature started to drop promisingly…-1°C, -1.5°C, -2°C. ‘This is mad. We’ll never get up the hill. We should go back,’ said Vez.

‘Don’t be silly. What’s the point of having the place? Of course we’ll get up the hill. And if we can’t, I’ll get the Land Rover.’ The Land Rover now lived proudly in one of the sheds at Tair-Ffynnon.

‘We’ve got a four-month-old baby in the car and no supplies.’

‘We’ll be fine.’

By the time we turned off the main road, the countryside was white and so was the tarmac. At the bottom of the hill the temperature gauge showed a satisfying -4°C. As we turned up the unsigned lane it was hard to tell how deep the snow was, but there was enough on the ground to soften the edges between the road and the hedgerow banks. The lane led directly through the yard of a farm and we were about to join the road out the other side when the front wheels began to spin. We lost traction. I reversed back to try and gain momentum, but the wheels spun again. I tried a longer run-up, reversing all the way back to the turning. I could get no further. We were, indubitably, stuck.

Strapping on a backpack, and glowing with manly virtue, I crunched and squeaked my way up the hill through pristine powder snow. The clouds had cleared by this time, revealing a moonlit snowscape beneath an absurdly starry sky. Unfortunately, having reached the Land Rover, I found I had forgotten the keys, necessitating a slightly less satisfying trudge back down the hill to fetch Vez and Maya on foot. At length, however, we were installed in the house.

Next day I got the Land Rover out of its shed, but by then more snow had fallen and it was too deep for us to go anywhere. There wasn’t much to do except pass most of the weekend huddled in bed to keep warm. ‘I hope it was worth it,’ said Vez, a little uncharitably on Sunday, as we crouched over our fourth meal of canned soup, cooked on the old electric cooker, facing the space where the Aga was supposed to be. Eventually we trudged back down the hill to the car and returned to London.

The Aga in which we’d planned to cook our Christmas turkey was eventually installed and working in time for Easter and the spring.

3 The Yellow Book

Even when German bombing signalled the start of the Battle of Britain and fear of invasion spread, the Gardens Scheme carried on…

A Nurturing Nature: The Story of the National Gardens Scheme, 2002

I could now think of little besides Tair-Ffynnon. All other matters seemed an annoying distraction. I’d taken to carrying a camera whenever out of town, snapping odd things—ferns on an old chimney-stack, yellow lichen on a slate roof, rusting machines in corners of farmyards. I’d also begun tearing pictures out of magazines and newspapers, images of lonely crofter’s cottages, Icelandic turf-roofed churches, old tin frontier buildings. Lots of new things had become interesting, from old farm buildings and dry-stone walls to trees and wild flowers. I edited these cuttings into a scrapbook, which I could spend almost indefinite periods leafing through, daydreaming contentedly, shoving it guiltily away like porn if I heard footsteps approaching the door.

So I suppose I was searching for an excuse to immerse myself in the place. The garden idea came about partly because of that. But it was partly, too, that we’d had it up to here with remarks masquerading as polite interest (‘How did you stumble on this place?’, ‘I can see it has great potential’) that we were perfectly aware translated as ‘What a dump!’ My father had made no secret of his bafflement, and Vez’s mum had watched with mortification as her daughter exchanged a successful career and a warm, clean house in London for a derelict shack up a mountain. True, some people ‘got’ it instantly, but many more did not. Why couldn’t they see it? Were its charms really so obscure? I’d recently visited Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness and been deeply impressed by the way he’d seen the beauty of that place, hitherto an isolated, little-known shingle headland in the shadow of a nuclear power station. Through his minute garden, hardly bigger than the fishing hut it adjoined, he’d shown that beauty to others too. It seemed to absorb its surrounding seascape and play it back in distilled form. Why couldn’t we try something similar at Tair-Ffynnon?

The idea was no doubt encouraged, as April turned to May, by the first tentative signs of spring’s arrival on the hill, in the form of a dishevelled swallow resting on the telephone wire. The following week, two dozen more had joined it, and the place had come alive with flitting, wheeling, diving, skimming birds playing tag around the house as they noisily nested in the barns. Our home, it seemed, was others’ too. A fortnight later the hedgerows on the lane turned white with May blossom and the shady verges exploded into a riot of bluebells, Lady’s Smock, violets, red campion, cow parsley, and a hundred other wild flowers I couldn’t identify. By this time the hills were echoing cacophonously with the joys of the season as lambs and their mothers bleated relentless inanities to one another.

The moment I latched onto the idea of a garden, it seemed right. It licensed me to spend as much time as I wanted thinking about the place, and it would force us into making a plan. This in turn would give us purpose and structure and provide a deadline. Maybe it would even help me understand why the place meant so much to me. Two further comments acted like rallying cries. One, from a visiting friend as he got out of the car: ‘God, there’s nothing that doesn’t need doing.’ The other, from Jonny, who when I mentioned the plan, hooted with derision: ‘A garden? What…at your place? You’re joking.’ Followed a few moments later by: ‘You are joking, aren’t you?’ At a stroke, a half-baked idea graduated into a clear personal challenge.

I’d heard of the National Gardens Scheme’s ‘yellow book’ and was vaguely aware of the yellow ‘Garden Open Today’ signs that sprouted across the countryside from around the time the clocks went forwards. I’d even thought that, one day, visiting such gardens was something I might like to do. Now, with my own garden in mind, it seemed as good a place as any to begin my research into what might be achievable. Might we be able to get into the National Gardens Scheme? I bought a copy of the book: a fat yellow paperback entitled Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity. Its 500 pages were crammed with brisk little one-paragraph entries beneath addresses of scarcely believable quaintness: ‘Pikes Cottage, Hemyock’, ‘The Old Glebe, Eggesford’, ‘Mottisfont Abbey, Romsey’.* It was a remarkable collection. Here they all were: the cream of Britain’s secret gardens. Thousands of them (3,542 to be exact) with directions and opening dates: precise instructions on how to see, at the best possible moment, the pride and passion of some of the world’s most dedicated gardeners. Scanning the descriptions at first glance revealed many to be disconcertingly grand (‘60-acre deer park’, ‘Tudor knot garden’, ‘pleached lime avenue’, ‘Victorian fernery’), though there was also evidence of more modest attainments (‘pot patio’). There was no sign of Derek Jarman’s garden in the index, though endless other famous names were there: Sissinghurst, Hidcote, Stourhead, Newby Hall, Nymans, Bodnant. Was this the kind of thing we had a hope of getting into? And how on earth had such a scheme come about?

A little research revealed that the National Gardens Scheme was an institution that could have evolved nowhere but Britain. The inspiration arrived in 1926 at a committee meeting of the Queen’s Nursing Institute. In those pre-NHS days, the QNI was a charity that raised money to pay for district nurses and to provide for the retirement of existing ones. Ideas for fundraising were being batted to and fro before the steely gaze of the committee chairman, the Duke of Portland, when one of the committee members, a Miss Elsie Wagg, piped up. What a shame it was, she said, that Britain had so many marvellous gardens, yet most were seen by nobody except their owners and a few friends. Why not ask those owners to open for the appeal one day next year?

It was genius. If the idea could be implemented, here was a way to tap into one of Britain’s great hidden resources. But it was a big ‘if’, for the idea was presumptuous, impertinent, socially revolutionary even. Post-war Britain was still class bound. Garden-visiting was common enough, but only among a tiny minority. The thought of asking owners of large private houses to fling wide their wrought-iron gates to, well, anyone was outrageous. It smacked of Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism or any of the otherisms which had been filling the papers recently. However, and this was the real genius, because the idea was to raise money for charity, and because it was approved by a duke, it looked mean-spirited to refuse. So suddenly, whether you were interested in gardens or just wanted a snoop behind the park wall, an irresistible opportunity presented itself. The Scheme licensed nosiness. It also sanctioned repressed British amateur gardeners to show off their efforts.

But what a feat of organisation. The idea lived or died by the contacts and persuasive powers of those setting up the Scheme. So, to be on the safe side, the first chairman of the new ‘National Gardens Scheme’ was a duchess (of Richmond and Gordon), who recruited a committee of well-connected county ladies, all with suitably fat little black books. And so was born the County Organiser: an imperious, horticultural version of the Pony Club’s District Commissioner.

As I read on about the history of the Scheme, a picture began to emerge of a type. A handful of retired senior servicemen notwithstanding, most were women with names like Daphne or Phyllida or Veronica, who soon became the grandes dames of the gardening world. The County Organiser tended to be someone who’d grown up within, and now kept, a large walled garden, the kind whose obituary—and County Organisers, it became clear, were the kind of people who got obituaries—said things like ‘could be impatient’, ‘fearsomely smocked and gaitered’, or ‘had a knack for engineering spectacular fallings-out, a process she thoroughly enjoyed’. She needed no reassurance about her place in the world, and had little time to spend reassuring those who did. As virtues, energy, efficiency and effectiveness took precedence over charm and humour; as a result, County Organisers were entirely immune to the latter. But in an imperial, ancien régime way, she Got Things Done. She was, in fact, my mother.

In 2002, to celebrate its seventy-fifth birthday, the NGS published a short history of the Scheme. There, on page 28, clustered around the Queen Mother on a staircase at St James’s Palace, fifty-four of these Lady Bracknells stare out from beneath their hats, with gimlet eyes and don’t-mess-with-me smiles—fifty-four iterations of the woman I knew best.

Under the organisation of these forces of nature, the Scheme triumphed from the start. In the summer of 1927 a printed list was included free with Country Life, detailing 349 gardens that would open in June ‘between the hours of 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.’ for ‘a shilling a head’. The ‘Women’s National Committee’ responsible had done their work well. The list included the King’s gardens at Sandringham, the Duke of Marlborough’s at Blenheim Palace, those of such contemporary gardening giants as Norah Lindsay, and William Robinson’s Gravetye Manor, not to mention ‘the best of modern gardening’ such as Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll’s garden at Hestercombe. Such was the success of that first June opening that the Scheme was continued into September, by which time 609 gardens had opened, visited by more than 164,000 people. The hitherto undreamt-of sum of £8,191 was raised for district nursing. Indeed, the Scheme was such a triumph that King George V wrote to the Gardens Subcommittee of the Queen’s Nursing Institute requesting the event should become a permanent way of raising money.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, hardly a great garden hadn’t been recruited. Chatsworth, Hatfield, Major Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote, Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst—they were all there. So, too, were the former Prime Minister, David Lloyd George’s garden Bron-y-de, and Winston Churchill’s Chartwell, and even the Welsh garden where Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies. In 1949 the guide acquired its distinctive yellow livery, and the NGS found its mascot. In no time, the slightly cumbrous Gardens of England and Wales Open for Charity had become affectionately known as ‘the yellow book’.

Then, in the mid-eighties, Britain went gardening crazy, and a strange thing happened. Where the County Organisers had traditionally had to plead, persuade or order grudging friends, relations, earls, spiky industrialists and absent-minded bishops to do their duty, suddenly they found themselves inundated with applications. From worthy institution, the National Gardens Scheme overnight became an elite club, to which a new class of Capability Browns, Smiths and Joneses all wanted admission. At last there was a formal goal towards which the ambitious amateur gardener could aspire. And as the only official horticultural yardstick available, the Yellow Book naturally became the gold standard. Applications tripled and the County Organisers found themselves in the eminently more in-character role of laying down the law. Numbers of gardens in the Scheme more than doubled between 1980 and 1990 (from 1,400 to 3,000*) and, for the first time, formal selection—and rejection—criteria had to be laid down. Getting into the Yellow Book became a whole lot harder, whether you lived in the Home Counties or on top of a Welsh mountain.

To be considered for the National Gardens Scheme, a garden must:

1 Offer ‘45 minutes of interest’.

2 Be a good example of its type (cottage, alpine, herb, etc.)—if it is a type.

3 Have something of special interest (the view, a water feature, a national collection of plants, etc.).

This information was heartening. Forty-five minutes wasn’t so long. The type of garden? Well, there was plenty of time to figure that out. As for having something of special interest, Tair-Ffynnon’s setting and views must be as good as anywhere’s. Yes, on the whole there was room for optimism. All I had to do was learn how to garden.

There was, of course, one other small matter. Would anything grow so high up? But here again, I was inclined to optimism. We already had evidence that potatoes, mangelwurzels and hay had been grown on Tair-Ffynnon’s rocky policies, as that’s what many of its previous inhabitants had lived on. If they could survive, no doubt other things could too. Derek Jarman had coaxed life out of shingle, by the sea, with all that that implied in terms of wind and salt.* Stuff must grow on mountains, too; it was just a matter of finding out what. In fact, in the circumstances, my course of action was obvious: ask Uncle William.

Uncle William was the great gardener of the family, and my mother’s half-brother. He and my Aunt Jeanette lived in a secluded nook of the Dorset Downs not far from Sherborne. Ranged around a seventeenth-century chalk and flint cottage (its thatched roof pulled well down over its eyebrows, at home in any book of idyllic English country cottages) was a garden that even I couldn’t fail to notice was a plantsman’s delight. The last time I was there, one August, summer was in its dusty and desiccated last gasp. Yet in Uncle William’s garden greenery, foliage and flowers were positively clawing their way out of the 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, when a tree Gladstone was cutting fell with the boy in it.

His tree-felling was achieved only by four or five hours of unremitting exertion, and much is made in descriptions of the terrific energies he expended, the way the perspiration poured from his face and through the back of his shirt; something that, according to his supporters (and, they claimed, the vox populi), emphasised his vital, heroic nature. His opponents did not agree. ‘The forest laments,’ remarked Lord Randolph Churchill, Conservative politician and later Chancellor of the Exchequer, ‘in order that Mr. Gladstone may perspire.’ Wood-cutting even turned political when Disraeli spotted an opportunity to undermine his old foe. ‘To see Lovett, my head-woodman, fell a tree is a work of art,’ he declared smoothly in 1860. ‘No bustle, no exertion, apparently not the slightest exercise of strength. He tickles it with the axe; and then it falls exactly where he desires it.’

Gladstone took up his tree-chopping in 1852, aged forty-two, and continued with inextinguishable ardour until he was eighty-five, after which, he noted meticulously in his diary, he contented himself with mere ‘axe-work’ rather than ‘tree-felling’.

I mention Gladstone merely because, although he’s possibly the most celebrated British example, in my experience most men find at least the idea of chopping wood appealing. In America the axe is an emblem of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. It’s the great symbol of the settler, the outback, of rural survival, self-reliance and the frontier spirit. Seven Presidents of the United States were born in log cabins.* Possibly this explains the axe’s curious romance. All I knew was that if my idealised rural existence had to be summed up in a single image, that image would be me either snoozing by the fire, or splitting logs on a frosty morning. Either way, the two elements were indispensable: a fire and logs to go on it.

Now, obviously lots of people like open fires. It’s tempting to say everyone, were not my reason for bringing up the subject that the two most influential figures in my life emphatically didn’t. My childhood was fireless. In the Woodward household, fires were one of the few subjects about which my parents were in complete agreement. They put their case peremptorily. Open fires were a chore. They had to be made, fed, poked and raked out. They were dirty. Their smoke ruined books. They were inefficient: everyone knew the heat went straight up the chimney, sucking draughts in its wake. They were dangerous, in a timber-framed, timber-clad house. None of these was the real reason for their antipathy, of course, which was that fires were yesterday’s way.

To understand their viewpoint, it’s necessary to remember the era. This was the 1960s and ’70s: the nuclear age, the space race, motorways, comprehensive redevelopment, Concorde, and Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’. My parents were academic scientists: Da a research chemist,* Ma a botanical geneticist. Science, to my parents, was the way forwards. My mother was feeding us limitless quantities of instant food. My father was experimenting with disposable paper underwear. In our house there would be no ugly radiators or visible heat sources (at least not to start with). The future was electric: clean, silent, odourless and available at off-peak rates. Arguments (during one of my brother’s and my periodic campaigns) that fires were cosy were ignored. The cottage chimney was bricked up.

My father was ahead of his time. Our new extension, complete with electric underfloor heating, was in place just in time for the 1973 oil crisis. The price of electricity shot up faster than heat up a chimney. The next six years (when, aged 10–16, my powers of recall were sharpest and my temperament most vindictive) saw strike after strike, power cut after power cut, culminating in the Three Day Week and the Winter of Discontent. Now, the all-electric house, without electricity, has a chilly comfortlessness that’s all its own. With heating under the floor, there are no radiators to hug. I remember long, cold, dark evenings spent hunched round a Valor paraffin heater, as we tried to conserve our torch batteries. I left home fixated with radiators, Agas and roaring pot-bellied stoves; but most of all with dear, friendly, filthy, high-maintenance, chronically inefficient, open fires.

As it transpired, my mother, as she got older, softened in this area, getting me to draw the curtains close on miserable days, wrapping herself in blankets and hugging the electric fire. ‘Granny-bugging’, she called it. And even my father had the temerity recently to declare that he likes open fires—‘in other people’s houses’.*

So, a fire and logs to go on it. With Tair-Ffynnon the archetypal lonely mountain cottage, a near-perfect enactment of almost every literary evocation of the granny-bugging fantasy, it clearly centred around an open fire, but for one small hitch. It didn’t have one. It was patently meant to have one. There was a big stone chimney breast rising out of the sitting room. But the traditional cottage grate and bread oven were long gone, replaced by a tinny metal water heater connected by pipes to the hot water tank.

One of the first tasks with which the ‘tidy’ builders we’d engaged were charged was to remove this excrescence and ‘open up’ the fireplace. With it gone, I waited with mounting impatience for my big moment: an open fire of my own. In preparation, we’d bought an old iron fireback in a salvage yard. This, with due solemnity, was placed in the hearth. I laid a fire, spreading the kindling into a neat pyramid, and struck a match. Almost immediately the room filled with smoke. It curled thickly out under the beam so it was clear none at all was going up the chimney. We endured it as long as we could until, eyes streaming, gasping for air, we had to stagger outside. Once the fire was doused and the smoke cleared, we peered up the chimney. We could see nothing. It was plainly blocked.

The following afternoon Frank the Sweep appeared with brushes and vacuum cleaners. The chimney was swept. No, he said, it wasn’t blocked, but it was a bit tarry, which could have made a difference. Anyway, it was all clear now. As his van departed, we tried again. Precisely the same happened as before. I rang round for advice. It was freely available and readily dispensed: almost certainly the wood was damp and the chimney cold. It just needed warming through: all we had to do was light a really good blaze, keep it going for at least an hour and the problem would be solved.

As it had been raining we didn’t have much in the way of dry wood, so we broke up some of the furniture that had been left behind by the previous owners. Pressing damp tea towels to our noses and mouths, we took turns to stoke the flames until they roared up the chimney so far sparks flew from the chimney pot. With such intensity of flame, it was true there was less smoke. But when we tried to light the fire the following time, it was just the same. More advice was solicited. ‘Screen the chimney breast,’ our experts said confidently. That was the standard procedure. So screen it we did. But however low we brought the screen (and we lowered it almost to the hearth itself), tendrils of smoke snaked determinedly under it into the room. ‘The opening should be more or less square,’ we were told, ‘with neither width nor height less than seventy-five per cent of the depth.’ I measured the fireplace and found this was already the case. ‘Raise the hearth: fires need air, for goodness sake.’ So we splurged £300 on a fine wrought iron grate and fire dogs to go with the fireback. And with like result. ‘Raise it further,’ we were briskly advised, as the smoke billowed forth no less prodigiously. So higher and higher we perched the iron basket, until it looked eccentric, then comic, then ludicrous and, finally, proving our advisers right, the fire no longer smoked. But that was only because it was out of sight up the chimney.

As the weeks passed our advisers’ confidence never slackened. ‘Try a hinged metal “damper” to block out cold air and rain.’ It made no difference. ‘It’ll smoke when the wind’s from the east,’ said someone else. ‘A lot of fires smoke when the wind’s from the east.’ And they were right, it did smoke when the wind was from the east. But as it came round, we were able to determine that the fire also smoked when the wind was from the west, and the south and the north. It even smoked when there was no wind at all. And on it went.*

We transferred our attentions from hearth to chimney. The chimney had been more messed about than the fireplace. The original, sturdy stone stack, when the house was enlarged, had been given mean, spindly brick extensions. But rebuilding the whole chimney was too expensive. Besides, fresh advice informed us that this was not the fundamental problem, which was almost certainly one of downdraught, caused by the position of the house relative to the rise of the hill and the prevailing wind. Just as we were about to despair, one day in the builders’ merchants a leaflet caught my eye. It advertised chimney cowls. And there, amongst the chimney cappers and birdguards, the lobster-back cowls and ‘H’ cowls, the flue outlets and ‘aspirotors’, was the very item for which we’d been searching:

In constant production for thirty years, the Aerodyne Cowl has abundantly proven its worth in curing downdraught, showing clearly that the laws of aerodynamics don’t change with the times. As wind from any direction passes through the cowl the unique venturi-shaped surfaces cause a drop in air pressure which draws smoke and fumes up the chimney for dispersal. The Aerodyne Cowl is offered with our money-back guarantee. If it fails to stop downdraught simply return it with receipt to your supplier for a full refund.

Why had no one suggested this? An ‘Aerodyne Cowl’ was duly ordered. It took three weeks to arrive, two more to be fitted, but at last we were ready once more. All I can say is it was lucky about that money-back guarantee. If anything, the fire smoked more than before.

So we gave in. We ordered a wood-burning stove. By this stage I had my doubts that even this would work, but the man in the stove shop guaranteed it. And it did. The fire roared and crackled: it just did so behind glass. And thus, at last, we had an authentic need for logs. Which is how, by the convoluted way of these things, I came by my first tractor.

Amongst the chattels that came with Tair-Ffynnon (which included two mossy Opel Kadetts, a collapsed Marina van, numerous bathtubs and an assortment of broken and rusting bedsteads, trailers, ploughs, cultivators, rollers and diesel tanks) was an iron saw-bench. A farm saw-bench is a heavy cast-iron table with, protruding through a slit in the top, a big circular blade with scarily large teeth. They date from the time when farmers cut their own planks, gateposts and firewood. Many old farms have one somewhere, superannuated, rusting away in a corner. The moment I saw ours, I wanted that saw-bench back in action. It spoke of self-sufficiency and self-reliance, of replenished wood stores and cold winter months. It was, to an almost baleful degree, a renegade of the pre-health and safety era. Like most of the older ones, ours was worked by a pulley belt, which connected the bench to a parked tractor. Modern tractors ditched pulley wheels decades ago, but a couple of the older makes, Fordsons and Fergies, still had them. All I needed to get the saw-bench into action was one of those.

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it became that an old tractor was just what Tair-Ffynnon was missing. Now the requirement for firewood spelt it out. Jonny’s remark came back to me: ‘Looks as if you’d better get yourself a tractor.’

‘Why?’ said Vez.

It was one of those typically female questions that, on the spot, it’s surprisingly difficult to answer. Arguments that a tractor was self-evidently a Good Thing to have, that it would lend tone to the place, in our straitened financial circumstances, lacked weight. ‘For towing and mowing and pulling stuff. For cutting logs…everything.’ My answer was necessarily vague, as I wasn’t absolutely sure myself of all the myriad uses to which an old tractor might be put.

‘You can buy a lot of logs for the price of a tractor,’ said Vez. ‘How much does a tractor cost?’

‘Well, you could probably get an old Fergie or a Fordson for about £1,000, but I should think…’

‘A grand! A grand! Are you out of your mind? When we haven’t even got a dry place to store anything. And Maya needs shoes.’

There’s no arguing such a case. Even I could appreciate that an inclination to see an old saw-bench back in harness, coupled with the knowledge that we could cut our own logs, sounded a little thin when ready-cut firewood was available for £40 a load.

All this I had only half worked through in my mind when I arrived on a Saturday in mid-July at the annual East Wales and Borders Vintage Auction, held, conveniently, in a field at the bottom of our hill. Over the last few days the field had been cut for silage and a tented village had sprung up so that now, although it was windless and grey, the white canvas and bunting presented a cheerful scene. Vintage auctions being the sole recreation my brother and I shared, he and my nephew Thomas had come over for the day, taking the opportunity to see us all, as had my father from Somerset. Jonny had arrived early for his usual forensic examination of the lots and announced that, amongst the collections of old railway sleepers, feed bins, mangles, chaff-cutters and nameless implements and agricultural bits and bobs, there was ‘a very nice Fergie’. And sure enough, there amongst the junkyard tractors, Lot 571, was a peach of a machine.

The finer (and indeed the broader) points of tractor mechanics meant nothing to me, but I could see this was something special. For a start, unlike the other tractors on sale, it was complete. It had four wheels, two matching mudguards, and so on. no one had attempted to spruce it up; it had a couple of dents, a buckled number plate, but still a fair amount of original grey paint. Headlamps either side of its radiator grille gave it a friendly, if slightly melancholic air. Here was one of those gems, it was clear, one might never forgive oneself for missing. Befitting its exalted status, it was one of the final lots, but the auctioneer and his throng were already working their way steadily down the rows towards it. Jonny, who knew about old Fergie prices, said not to go a penny over £1,200. By the time the brown-coated auctioneer approached, he had established himself as a waggish figure whose skilful manipulations of his bidders was drawing a larger-than-average crowd. The auctioneer hoiked his foot onto the front wheel and, as his sidekick clambered into the seat, made a whirling motion with his hand. ‘Start ’er up, Jack.’ The sidekick pressed a button and the Fergie clattered cheerfully into life with a cloud of black smoke and diesel fumes, settling down to a homely chugging rattle.

There was no shortage of interest. The bidding flicked rapidly upwards. Soon it narrowed down to me and a small, sharp-eyed, fox-faced man with a peaked cap pulled well down over his eyes. By the rubber overalls under his shapeless tweed coat, I was pleased to note he was a hill farmer rather than a restoration enthusiast, so presumably wouldn’t have absurd amounts of money to spend. £1,160…£1,180…£1,200…I could feel my pulse quickening. My adversary looked shrewd, informed, sure of himself. If he wanted the Fergie, it was plainly a good buy so it would be doubly foolish to miss out. £1,220…£1,240…My opponent’s face was a mask. He communicated his bids by tiny, almost imperceptible nods, hardly more than twitches. £1,360…£1,380…£1,400…Would the man never give up? How much did these hill farmers have tucked away? The auctioneer sensed my wavering. ‘Go on, Sir, you’ve come all this way’—(where did he get that idea?)—‘Not going to lose her for a couple of quid, are you?’

‘£1,500,’ I said crisply.

He turned to my adversary. ‘He’s way over his limit, Sir. I think you’ve got him.’

Another expressionless twitch. The auctioneer turned back to me. ‘Come on, Sir. You know it’s got your name on it.’ The crowd was loving it. Well, suffice to say, I got her. In the adrenaline rush it seems I also bought Lots 572, 573 and 574, the all-important pulley wheel, assorted bars and links that Jonny had announced went with the Fergie, and a complicated-looking hay mower with scissor blades that looked like a big hedge trimmer. As the crowd moved on, and the Fergie was again deserted, I sat on its front wheel in a daze of mixed emotions: happy fulfilment (I owned a tractor!), guilt (the purchase was indefensible), trepidation (what was I going to tell Vez? How did the thing work?). My father looked nonplussed. ‘How much was it?’ he said. ‘What ever will you do with it?’

Jonny climbed onto the Fergie and pressed the starter. Nothing happened. ‘Notoriously bad starters, Fergies,’ he said. He fiddled with various switches and levers and tried again. Again, nothing. ‘That’s odd,’ he said. He ordered me into the driving seat, while he tinkered in the engine. I was instructed to press a button in with my right ankle, while pressing the gear lever forwards. ‘Are you sure this is what you do? It doesn’t sound very likely.’ I was told I knew nothing and just to do as I was asked. It made no difference.

‘It started a minute ago. There must be something you’re not doing.’

But there wasn’t. Or there didn’t seem to be. The crowd had moved well away by this time. Did I catch a frisson, a lightning backwards glance towards us, from my foxy friend in the low peaked cap?

An hour passed. People started arriving in pick-ups with trailers to collect and load their lots. We buttonholed any likely looking person who wandered past. They leant under the raised bonnet. They pored over the engine. They prodded and poked. They said Fergies were notoriously bad starters. But everyone agreed, it all looked fine. The field began to empty. My father went home. As I drove back to Tair-Ffynnon to look for tools for Jonny to start dismantling the engine, the full idiocy of what I’d done sank in. It had never occurred to me that the tractor might not work. In the excitement of the auction I hadn’t given a thought to any practicalities. I knew not the first thing about tractors. I was amechanical. What was I to do next time she wouldn’t start? Call the AA?

A couple more hours passed while Jonny dismantled and reassembled the engine. It made no difference. At length, he puffed out his cheeks. ‘Well, I don’t know what’s wrong. Everything works fine. It should start.’ By this time, the field was almost empty and a steady drizzle was falling. We were saved by an old boy wandering by. He told us to check a tiny lever hidden out of sight on one side of the engine. Somehow it had mysteriously moved from ‘ON’ to ‘OFF’. ‘I think someone’s played a joke on you,’ he said.

It was months before we finally got the saw-bench rigged. After a rudimentary course of tractor-driving instruction, Jonny departed, leaving me to make jerky, undignified forays up and down the track, trying to master the clutch. This tended, however gently it was engaged, to snatch, catapulting the machine forwards in ungainly kangaroo bounds. Vez, presented with my sly fait accompli, was magnificent, even agreeing the tractor looked just so, and made us appear less like urbanites (an accommodation assisted, unquestionably, by an envelope from my father which arrived a few days after the auction containing a cheque for the price of the Fergie and a fairytale about finding more money in an account than he’d expected).

From a company Jonny told me about (‘A & C Belting’), I ordered a rubberized canvas belt and the next time he visited, we heaved the eye-poppingly heavy bench into position, pegging it into the dirt floor of the barn with eighteen-inch iron pegs.* Then Jonny oiled and greased the blade shaft and pulley wheel spindles. With much to-ing and fro-ing, we positioned the tractor. We chocked the wheels and connected up the pulley belt between the tractor and the saw-bench. We engaged the tractor’s pulley wheel, setting the belt turning. Then I pulled the iron lever on the saw, which slid the belt across to drive the blade. The saw cranked into life.

It was simply terrifying. I’d never been so close to a machine that was so blatantly lethal. The belt flapped and slapped between the pulley wheels, hungry to snag any loose clothing or inquisitive passing child. The blade whirred and squeaked like a giant bacon slicer, though the sound was quaintly soothing and almost musical: the rattling rhythm of the Fergie’s engine, the regular ting-ting of the staples in the belt as they passed over the iron pulley wheels. I found some small branches and pushed them towards the blade to warm it up (something the man from A & C Belting had advised). The saw scarcely noticed. After a few of these I pushed a thick old stump forwards with a stick. The blade screamed as it bit into the wood, and the tractor engine chugged harder, reverting to its gentle clatter as the cutting finished, the blade ringing as the severed timber thudded onto the ground. The smell of sawn wood filled the air. It was sensational.

Wood was strewn all over the place at Tair-Ffynnon: shambolic heaps of logs and stumps, hedging offcuts, old fence posts, sections of telegraph poles and sleepers, as if a giant had been playing Pick-Up Sticks before being called away mid-game. To at last be clearing it was satisfying work. Some timber cut more easily than others. Yew and old oak were so hard their sawdust was as fine as flour. Sappy larch and fir released a delicious piny smell, but the resin gummed the blade, making the belt slip. As my confidence increased I discarded my stick, pushing the logs forwards by hand. Occasionally, with the scrap wood, the saw would hit a nail or a staple, screeching and sending out showers of sparks. Soon the iron table top shone and the feet of the bench were lost in deepening heaps of sawdust that dusted every surface like snow.

True, I couldn’t quite banish the image of a gross-out, splatter-movie death. A momentary lapse of concentration, a trip from catching my foot on something buried beneath the sawdust, and—the wood chipper scene from Fargo or Johnny Cash’s brother in Walking the Line. My hand, or arm (or head) in the log pile. But the tangle of timber was transmogrifying into a neat pile of logs for splitting. And all that fear worked up a prodigious appetite.

Maybe stockpiling wood is in our genes as hunter-gatherers. Stacked wood bespeaks security, cosiness, preparedness for winter. Perhaps it’s because it’s exercise with a purpose, or a way of clearing one’s head. ‘I chop wood,’ Gladstone told the journalist William T. Stead, ‘because I find that it is the only occupation in the world that drives all thought from my mind.’*

Maybe it’s all the associations that come with an axe: the forest clearance, the ancient oaks of England on which a navy and an empire were built. Or the perfection of its form. If an hour’s wood-chopping is soothing work, it must be because quite so much hopping around, swearing, trying to extricate the wedged head has taken place over the 1.2 million years of steady R&D devoted to this, the prototypical tool. Though in fact it’s not a tool, it’s a simple machine, using leverage to ramp up the force at the cutting edge, and dual-inclined planes to enhance the splitting action. That head is drop-forged from medium carbon steel (the flaring cheeks averaging twenty-nine degrees): hard enough to hold an edge, yet not so brittle it shatters. The shaft (of ash or hickory so it won’t splinter or split from the strain) is kinked for easy swinging by anyone of average height. And it’s a philosopher’s axe—not a rake or broom—over which we puzzle: is it still our grandfather’s if our father replaced the head and we the shaft? The Director of the British Museum recently called the axe ‘the most successful piece of human technology in history’.

Not bad for twelve quid from Homebase.

5 Winter on the hill

A glance around at the landscape should have warned us what we were in for. Where rowan and hawthorn trees bend at permanent right angles, man wasn’t meant to plant Jerusalem artichokes and rhubarb.

ELIZABETH WEST, Hovel in the Hills, 1977

‘Was Granny’s garden in the Yellow Book?’

‘It was.’ My father could compress much meaning into two words.

‘At Rookwoods?’

‘At Rookwoods. And again when she moved to Bath. She was very much the magnanimous charity worker, remember’ (that was pretty loaded, too). I’d been sporadically quizzing him about the National Gardens Scheme since hatching my plan, but it had only recently occurred to me that Rookwoods itself might have been in the Yellow Book.

‘And…?’

‘Well, it was the kind of menace you might imagine. We all had to dance attendance and ended up doing most of the work. On one occasion she announced she was going on holiday the week the garden was opening, leaving us to take care of it. You can guess how well that went down with your mother.’

‘So you helped, too?’

‘We all had to help.’

‘Didn’t it occur to 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, I wondered? We went in for lunch. Midday sunshine streamed through the south-facing floor-to-ceiling glass, the same glass that on winter nights used to seem so cold and black and endless (and still makes me yell at wide-eyed couples on Channel 4’s Grand Designs as they order their steel and glass boxes: ‘Don’t do it! You’ll feel cold and vulnerable and watched! You’ll spend a fortune on curtains and ruin the look!’). Four candles on wall sconces in the dining room, comically drooped and corkscrewed, testified to the opposite extreme. But today, with the doors open, the house was perfect: warm and light and airy.

After lunch, while Vez, pregnant with our second child, lay snoozing on the sofa, and my father played songs on the piano for Maya, I ransacked my mother’s bookshelves, as Uncle William had advised. Here were floras and herbals, catalogues and regional guides. Many of the names were familiar: Hillier’s Manual of Trees and Shrubs and H. J. Bean’s doorstop volumes of Plants and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles (a title which for some reason always conjured images of plants swathed in brightly coloured cagoules and scarves battling up a hill), though I’d never opened them before. And I now saw, as I pulled a few out, what a wise course this had been. It would be hard to devise books more calculated to repel a potential plant lover. All appeared to share the same striking characteristic: not a picture to be seen. I was puzzled because these volumes, I knew, were mere holiday-reading, lightweight warm-up acts, alongside the vade mecum of my mother’s day-to-day existence: the much-thumbed Flora of the British Isles, which I now pulled out. Its cheerful yellow jacket, with a picture of a flower, was at iniquitous odds with the 1,591 pages of closely written print within. This was the immortal ‘Clapham, Tutin and Warburg’, named after the three distinguished professors of botany who were its editors. Each entry matched absolute incomprehensibility with mildly pornographic lang uage. A sample might run:

Basal sinus wide, coarsely dentate; cauline lvs. Pedicels erect, with small sessile glands. Densely tormentose with pickled, blue-veined spectricals. Sparsely ciliate on the petiole. Stipules and peduncles fili form indehiscent. Sepals lanceolate-aristate, hairy. Petals obovate cuneiform. Carpels pubescent. Naturalised in North America. Endemic.

Was this, I wondered, why places seemed so much more interesting than plants? Alongside Clapham, Tutin and Warburg, the architectural jabber wocky of my father’s Pevsner’s county-by-county Buildings of England series (another collection for which a few more pictures might not have gone amiss) read with Orwellian clarity.*

Further meditations were interrupted by the soothing, familiar rattle of my father bringing the tea tray. Tea was an inviolable 4.15 tradition in the Woodward household (equal mix Lapsang and Earl Grey, minute, much-stapled tea cups, and, when she was alive, one of my mother’s cakes). As Vez stirred and sat up, and Maya hurled herself at my legs, I wrenched my thoughts from stipules and peduncles.

That summer was the record-breaking one. Back at Tair-Ffynnon, it seemed as if clouds had become extinct. Exchanging our hard-won London pad for a derelict hilltop smallholding seemed the cleverest move we’d ever made. We bought a big army frame tent (big enough to accommodate a Land Rover) to act as a spare room for friends to stay in. It came in two vast canvas bags, so heavy the delivery driver and I could only just move them. The military instructions specified at least five to erect it (‘pitching party—five men’) so we did it one day when friends came for lunch. We weighted the wide ‘mud cloths’ with concrete joists and breezeblocks and whacked in two dozen enormous iron pegs with a sledgehammer. Then, inside, we decked it out, until, frankly, it was the cosiest room about the place.

We’d got a new black Labrador puppy (christened Beetle after her propensity for eating dung) and twice a day I’d walk up to the trig point with her. The place bustled with activity. During the day there were walkers and riders, bemused school orienteering parties, pony trekkers, runners, mountain bikers, radio modellers, occasional motocross riders (on plateless scrambling bikes and always careful not to remove their helmets). Gliders would fly down the ridge, almost brushing the bracken, so close you could hear the air rushing over their wings. There were falconers, racehorses exercising from the local yard, whinberry pickers with faces and fingers stained purple-black. Walkers would stop to ask for water, or, exhausted, if we could drive them to their B&B. And when we heard muffled shouts and bright canopies billowed up on the far side of dry-stone walls, we’d know the wind was from the east. Then dangling figures suddenly appearing out of the sky would drive Beetle into paroxysms of territorial barking, a remit she soon extended to anyone wearing a backpack, rendering our walks a good deal less relaxing for all concerned.

But as evening came, calm would descend; the hill would empty, until the moment when it was deserted apart from the swallows. After all the bustle, the quiet seemed twice as intense. Day after day dawned cloudless and warm, some so clear and still that, in the way that silence amplifies space, the sky seemed twice the size. Far above us, vapour trails dispersed like gradations on some vast protractor. Stonechats arrived, their characteristic call like two stones smacking together. At ground level, the forests of thistles left by the sheep went to seed, sometimes filling the air with so much thistledown it seemed to be snowing. A red start nested in the baler. As the hill got drier and drier, the ponies brought their foals to drink at the bathtub in the yard.

October brought the first serious hill fog. We were used to inter mittent fogs lasting the morning, shifting with the wind which interrupted their opaque evenness, perhaps affording a glimpse of the shining white disc of the sun, or offering fleeting vignettes of things made strange by the randomness of their selection—a wind-blown thorn tree singled out from the hill across the valley, a distant farm, the top of Skirrid or Sugar Loaf. Occasionally a confused-looking pigeon or crow might make us feel momentarily less alone. Usually these fogs burnt off during the morning, but this one was different. It arrived one Sunday when our friends Nick and Kate were staying. Kate, who was pregnant, went out for a ten-minute stroll, only for dense cloud to sweep across the hill. When after an hour she hadn’t returned and twenty minutes of bawling her name into the murk met with no response, we began to worry. What made it worse was Kate was a byword for self-reliant competence. Another hour later, neighbours just the field below us called to say she’d found them, having lost the path and stumbled over tussocky moor, scrambling over five foot walls and barbed wire fences in her desperation to find civilisation. We sensed, as Nick and Kate’s red tail lights faded into the gloom, that they left few regrets behind them in the fog, now denser than ever.

Next morning it was still there, deadening everything. Usually, depending on the wind direction, the sound of tractors, farmers calling dogs, chainsaws or even the railway were audible from the valley below. But not now. We could hear nothing. By Tuesday the oppressive atmosphere had begun to affect us; we were getting on each other’s nerves and taking headache remedies. Escaping to walk Beetle, usually the best remedy for every irritation, brought no relief; indeed, it seemed to compound the problem, confirming the impossibility of escape, while the heavy air made me breathless and left my clothes damp. We would compete for the chance to go down the hill, once we’d discovered the fog stopped at the hill gate and life seemed to be carrying on as normal down there.

After four and a half days, I opened the bedroom curtains and stood blinking. The fog had gone. No, that wasn’t strictly correct: it had moved. It was below us. Now we, Skirrid and Sugar Loaf occupied a lofty world above the clouds. Tendrils of water vapour lapped at the yard gate, sometimes reaching up as far as the front door, like waves on an incoming tide. Occasionally, the mist would rise up and engulf us completely, then sink back down again, the water vapour sliding off the roof of the house and rolling round the yard, as the first pink shafts of the rising sun broke over the roiling sea of cloud. We pulled on our clothes and walked to where the hang-gliders launched, then climbed the hill in the chilly stillness, to see how far this ocean extended. Over the entire world, it seemed.

Then, at the end of November, came the wind. It was not cold, but it was fierce. It arrived from the south-west and its strength, at least to start with, was amusing. It blew so hard we found ourselves frogmarched across the yard. It clawed at our mouths and eyelids, messed with our balance and made it hard to breathe. Walking up the hill became a comedy stagger, coats flattened like Lycra on the windy side, snapping and flapping crazily like loose sails on the other. Dustbins had to be weighted. Anything light and unfixed was swept away, collecting against west-facing walls. Parking her car crosswind, Vez found herself a prisoner, the door pinned shut. Unthinkingly, I parked the Land Rover with its back to the wind, opened the door and found it wrenched clean away. It clattered and bounced for thirty yards.

After a few days the novelty of this began to wear off. Loose corners of tin sheeting on the barns flapped and banged, the cut edges screeching like fingernails down a blackboard. Fast as I could screw them back down, the wind tore them loose again. The gale howled in the chimney. It tugged and strained at the house, searching for the weak points. The windows fitted so badly, or were so holed by rot, there were draughts everywhere. Open a door and the curtains would be sucked against the windows. We could feel the pressure changes in our ears as we moved from room to room. Lying in bed, I’d listen as the wind funnelled between the outbuildings and the house, and on round the tin barns, setting up a haunting, organ-pipe moan. Every now and again the note would change, as it veered or gusted. As it strengthened, its note rose from a scream to a shriek. I found it soothing and it lulled me to sleep, but it kept Vez awake. After a week, despite earplugs, she looked so grey and shattered I feared we might have to abandon Tair-Ffynnon altogether.

We knew we should be taking the tent down. We’d known it since October; not even our hardiest friends would volunteer to sleep under canvas now. We’d taken out the rugs and lights. But, as the terse military instructions declared (‘striking party—five men’), the tent was just too heavy for us alone and we never seemed to have enough pairs of hands. On Boxing night, we were woken by what sounded like a strong man vigorously and repeatedly slamming a door downstairs. The internal doors were all secured by Suffolk latches, but the sitting room door didn’t catch. I went downstairs to wedge it closed, to discover that even the doors whose latches caught were rattling. Usually inert parts of the house had come alive: newspapers rustled, dust filled the air, draughts howled around my ankles, window panes creaked and groaned. I shoved a chair against the door and returned to bed. An hour later we were woken again, to the sound of glass smashing. The heavy velvet bedroom curtains were billowing, and there was the unsettling patter of rain on paperwork. The bedroom window had been sucked out.

In the morning, the wind had dropped. As I drew open the bathroom curtains and peered out, something looked different. I couldn’t for a moment tell what it was. There was a patch of brown grass outside the barn. What had made that? Then I realised. The tent had gone. There was nothing left at all, apart from the row of breezeblocks and concrete lintels used to weight it. No frame, no ropes, no eighteen-inch iron pegs, no ground sheet, no mattress. It was a tidy job, as if the recommended striking party had come in the night. We eventually found it about a mile away, wrapped round the top of a tree. It seemed we’d had our last guests until the spring.

6 The Not Garden

This, then, leads up to what I believe to be the great secret of success in garden-making…we should abandon the struggle to make nature beautiful round the house and should rather move the house to where the nature is beautiful.

SIR GEORGE SITWELL, On the Making of Gardens, 1909

As we parked on a grassy common alongside a vast leylandii hedge, I couldn’t suppress a pang of disappointment. I’d been waiting months for this moment. We’d just driven for two hours, deep into mid-Wales, specifically to see the garden behind this hedge. In the last few miles the first hints had appeared that we were entering a landscape that was weird and interesting. We were following a Scenic Route through an undulating, much-folded massif of the Cambrian Mountains. There’d been a sign to a sailing club, pointing to a road that led steeply uphill. And now, before I even got out of the car, let alone stepped through the garden gate, I knew with resounding certainty that the garden was not going to deliver, that anyone who had a leylandii hedge in such a place couldn’t possibly have a garden I liked. It wasn’t so much the leylandii per se,* as what this high and impenetrable barrier implied. Which was awkward, given that its owner was very kindly putting herself out entirely on our account.

We were on a fact-finding mission. It was proving a good deal trickier than I’d expected to work out how our garden should be. Apart from spending an inordinate amount of time standing about staring at patches of mud from various angles, trying to imagine this scenario or that—the collapsing ex-army Nissen hut in the yard replaced with a stone barn, a dry-stone wall in place of a tangled wire fence, the house magically made pretty, even, in more futile moments, a tree moved twenty yards to the left—my efforts hadn’t amounted to much. We knew Tair-Ffynnon was to be a mountain garden, but what did that mean? If I tried looking up ‘mountain gardens’ or ‘mountain flowers’ I just found a lot of stuff about rockeries and alpines, which didn’t feel right. Reading Derek Jarman’s diaries and garden book revealed that his garden had come about by accident and had grown gradually and haphazardly from there. But we needed more of a plan than this. The most hopeful avenue for inspiration seemed to be Uncle William’s idea of going through the Yellow Book, finding other gardens at a similar height, and seeing what their owners had done. It quickly became apparent, however, that there weren’t many. For good reasons, people tended not to make gardens on top of mountains. Perhaps as a result, everyone with a garden more than 700 feet above sea level mentioned the fact, prompting the thought that we might be higher than the highest garden in the Yellow Book. If so, that would effectively mean—delightful notion—we might be able to make Tair-Ffynnon into the highest garden in the National Gardens Scheme.*

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