Anne Wareham - The Bad Tempered Gardener

9 Magnolia Walk

10 Charless Wood

11 That Population Gate

12 Wild Garden

13 Windfall Garden

14 Hazel Coppice

15 Conservatory

16 Crescent Border

17 Triangle

18 Pool Garden

19 Hedge Garden

20 Hosta Walk

21 Ruin

22 Pond

23 New Garden

24 Cornfield Garden

25 Grasses Parterre

I am a square peg in a round hole and just as uncomfortable as that sounds. I have to make my way in a world which is totally alien to me. A world where people are inevitably passionate, always green and always terribly concerned about the little furry things and even the little slimy things sometimes. Its a busy world, both visually and literally, which invents, admires and perpetuates hard work. But, paradoxically, it appears to be fast asleep. I attempt to waken the garden world up but it deeply resents my shaking it.

I began, of course, like everyone else. My first gardening attempts were on a bit of flat roof on the block of flats where I was living and I climbed in and out of a window to set up and then care for a miniature vegetable plot of pots. A few years later, thoroughly addicted to growing things, I was tackling two acres with a spade and a compulsion. I read everything I could lay hands on and I visited every garden I could. And, as I and the garden matured, my perspective changed.

I began to get tired of hearing every garden described as lovely. I visited many of them and often found them to be banal and uninspired. I began to wish for writers who would tell the truth about the gardens and gardening and found only garden stories and discussions of gardening techniques which were totally foreign to me and as much use to me as learning how to lay an egg. I got bored of reading endless descriptions of plants and very little useful guidance as to how to use them together. I became impatient, because I could find intelligent and challenging ideas in all sections of newspapers and magazines except the garden sections. Even the Spectator, spiky, cconfrontational and outspoken, let me down. The misnamed gardens section is in fact almost always about gardening and is indistinguishable from the gardening columns you will find in the politest newspaper or magazine. This is not the columnists responsibility they keep meticulously to their brief. The problem is the fond idea that gardening is inevitably nice but dull. It seems that no editor ever imagines it could be otherwise.

Ive succeeded in becoming the elephant in the garden. People know Im there, galumphing about and making trouble, but on the whole the garden world prefers to pretend all is well and the wild animals are still safely locked up. Ive galumphed a bit in print, and on television, and I think that some people are beginning to think there is something to be said for a more critical look at gardens, but its a long struggle and it may well come to nothing.

So my picture is this: that there will, at some remote point in the future be someone else, also making a garden someone else with a demanding vision and a need to express that vision in competition with and collusion with the seasons, the weather, the light and the elusive flowering and destruction wrought by time. Someone without banal reverence for nature and greenness but who recognizes that working with nature is a serious game, where we can party but the party will continue without all of us once our game is ended.

This rather lonely person will find this book, in some form, in the equivalent of the second-hand bookshop, and they will no longer feel alone. They may even feel heartened to take up the struggle again. And perhaps the world may then be ready and gardens will blossom again as a serious and even outrageous art form.

The reflecting pool, reflecting the hedge garden and coppice, just as it should.

THE BEGINNINGS

Making a garden for me has been about making a place for myself in alien worlds. I am an outsider in the garden media world, and when we first came to the Veddw we were also outsiders in our immediate geographical world. I am by nature an outsider who continually struggles for acceptance, so I tend to begin my forays into alien worlds by trying to find myself a place. So it was in the Veddw.

This part of the Welsh border is strange not so much because it is Welsh but because it was, for me, an unfamiliar kind of countryside and very hard to make sense of. The conventional picture of the country in the UK is of sweet and cosy villages, surrounded by farmland. Here, I found myself surrounded by a multitude of tiny settlements, rather odd villages and very ugly houses, which were mostly peoples mixed responses to trying to make old squatter and agricultural cottages into what might be considered acceptable housing in the late twentieth century.

We had also come to this part of the world in a very abrupt and arbitrary way. I was looking for land enough to make a real garden, as opposed to the relatively tiny garden I had in London. I knew, having gardened for a few years, that this was a serious part of my life and that a hundred yards of London garden was not going to satisfy me for ever: I needed more scope.

The first place we looked was the Peak District, because we had friends there and good possibilities for work for my then partner, now husband, Charles. We were at the point of exchanging contracts on our London house when we discovered that we would be refused planning permission to make the kind of garden we were envisaging in the Peak District National Park. We suddenly had to decide whether to give up the whole enterprise. So looking on the Welsh border was very much a last-ditch attempt to do something which seemed quite crazy anyway, given that Charles didnt want to move and we had very little money.

Charles drew a circle on a road map in a part of the world he knew vaguely from his student days in Bristol and told me to try there. It was just in Wales, and we had an idea that property was cheaper in Wales. The message from Charles was definitely last chance.

We came down that weekend, saw the Veddw and decided we could settle for the place. We did not fall in love with the rather shabby, unattractive house or really recognize at that point how perfect the land was for our purpose. It would do.

So we bought in haste out of necessity. We knew no one. This is not a Welsh part of Wales, the language is English, but we still felt very uncomfortable in this strange landscape. It all felt very arbitrary, as if wed been dropped randomly from a balloon. Our first year here was the worst of our lives together and settling in took time and effort. Our comfort and refuge had always been our local pub but the one in Devauden at the time felt like something out of Thomas Hardy. A single room, like someones old cottage sitting room, where cider was served to clannish locals who all stared when you walked in and muttered a rather unfriendly greeting. Any conversation was public, audible to the whole room. We were like fish in a septic tank.