The Garden in the Clouds: From Derelict Smallholding to Mountain Paradise

‘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.