My garden in Wales

Allt-y-bela is a medieval renaissance tower house cradled in a valley between grazed and wooded hillsides. It could not be a more dramatically different setting to my previous garden which was in the flat fenland of Lincolnshire. Here I wanted to use a restricted palette of favourite elements: fruit trees and vegetables, topiary and wild flowers, roses and bulbs, but had to evolve a very different way of planting them to suit the garden here. I found my beloved symmetrical formality was at odds with the house and landscape and so I have been prompted to develop exciting new ways of designing.

My topiary here are like characters at a party, congregating around the house, and bold new sculpted banks at the back of the house are amassed with jewel like bulbs in long grass. Roses will tumble out of trees and the vegetables are tended in raised oak beds that sit in a simple, almost naive, oak and hazel enclosure.

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