Two cobbled paths, laid by Turkish craftsmen who’ve been working for him on a beach house in Kuwait, lead at right angles into a corner refuge, guarded by a stilt-hedge of copper beech. A long thin rill runs down the left-hand side of the plot, with a huge old pear tree in the corner.
The pear, chosen from dozens of mature trees at a Dutch nursery, is a beauty, but having fallen in love with it, Arne realised that its branches spread too wide to get through the gates at the Bull Ring, the entrance that all contractors have to use for the show. So he went back to the nursery and very carefully pruned the pear to make it fit. When I met up with him, two weeks before the show opened, he’d just heard that this keynote tree had been loaded onto a flat-bed truck with a wooden crate built over it to protect the young foliage. The Chelsea journey had begun.
I thought he was remarkably calm for a man who’s let 12 years pass before returning for a second appearance at Chelsea. He won Best in Show for his first garden, which he designed with Piet Oudolf in 2000. Having started so high up the ladder, there’s nowhere much else to go. But if he’s churning, he doesn’t let it show. Perhaps the roses keep him awake at night. Just a little. His big, informal border is punctuated by mounds of the gorgeously perfumed pink rose ‘Louise Odier’ and grey-leaved ‘Comte de Chambord’, trained and tied onto lobster pots of hazel. What will the weather do to these lovely flowers, once they come out into the open? More rain is what he fears most, for in those conditions the flowers of old roses get beaten down and refuse to open.
“What I’m thinking of in this border is a contemporary version of an old linen loose cover. You know how they look. The reds and maroons stay fast and the other colours fade in the sun. So I’ll have lilac-coloured opium poppies – double ones – soft blue campanulas, dull purple Geranium phaeum.”
I could imagine it very well, because I was standing in his garden at the time, looking at mounds of old roses trained over lobster pots of hazel. But this was when the last of the tulips were still flowering, a rich heady mix of orange ‘Prinses Irene’ and dark ‘Black Hero’ interspersed with the pale, acid-yellow globes of the peony that’s called ‘Molly the Witch’, because nobody knows how to manage all the consonants in its real Latin name. We’re looking out over a wildish landscape on the Welsh side of the Bristol Channel, with pasture and woodland rising steeply out of the valley where Arne’s house sits.
His former home, in the Lincolnshire fens, demanded a formal garden to match the house. Here, he’s slipped into a more informal style. It was a natural response to the irregular boundaries and the demands of the site itself. “I’m into a kind of asymmetrical formality now, which I haven’t done before. Topiary in groups, rather than pairs. Everything is becoming softer.”
A strong sense of place has always been his trademark. It was a theme he explored in his first book, Gardens with Atmosphere, and which he defines as a perfect marriage between a house, its garden, plants, the wider landscape and, not to be forgotten, the dreams of its owners. At his new place, Allt-y-Bela, Arne’s desire was to break down barriers between the house and its setting – a dream that involved two years of moving earth, putting in drains, diverting streams, pulling down stone walls, and fighting for some level ground on a steeply sloping site.
Now, behind the extraordinary lime-washed tower house, built in the 1590s, a smooth grass ramp winds up through grass well peppered with yellow rattle and planted with spring bulbs, astrantias, cowslips, Michaelmas daisies and perennial geraniums. There’s more gardening in grass here than in formal borders. It’s what the spirit of the place demands and the ‘species meadow’ is Arne’s new goal. “A simpler plant palette is what I’m after. I’ve loosened up. I didn’t do a single drawing for this garden. I’m just building it up slowly.”
It must always have been an issue here, managing the water that charges down from two streams towards the house. Only six months after Arne and his partner bought the place from The Spitalfields Trust, the streams rose and flooded the entire house. Now, with the aid of several JCBs, he’s persuaded them to take a line a little further from the front door. And created some nice waterfalls and weirs in the process.
“The good thing about the flood is that it swept away the modern gravelled yard and revealed the curving line of the original entrance to the house. We’ve kept that. And I’ve just planted a very small garden in front: mostly box with a few little treasures like Pasque flowers between. It’s a kind of curiosity cabinet.”
“A garden’s sense of place is an autobiography of its custodians and reflects their philosophy, tastes and passions,” he wrote in the introduction to his book. So to know Arne Maynard, go to one of his gardening courses at Allt-y-Bela. The first – The Edible Garden – is on 12 June, the last – August Blues to Indian Summer – on 21 June. Gardening days run from 9.45am-5pm and cost £195.
Arne Maynard Garden Design is at Second Floor, 14 Baltic Street East, London EC1, 020-7689 8100, arnemaynard.com. Admission to the Chelsea Flower Show (Tue-Sat) is by pre-booked ticket only. Call 0844 338 7505 or go to theticketfactory.com/rhs/online
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