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

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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