The heavenly Monmouthshire garden of Arne Maynard
Arne Maynard came to gardening at an early age. As a very young boy growing up in Dorset, he befriended a neighbour who allowed him to help in his garden. Grandpa Smith, as he was known, would mow neat stripes into his lawn, followed closely behind by Arne with his own child-size Webb mower. In his early teens, Arne discovered nearby Cranborne Manor, then gardened by Lady Salisbury. 'The garden blew me away,' he remembers. 'It was full of old-fashioned roses and dianthus and neat borders, very tastefully done. I used to cycle over during holidays to work in the nursery there, and sometimes I'd see Lady Salisbury working in the garden wearing her pearls. She'd be dead-heading roses or weeding and then suddenly a butler would appear with a tray of tea. I used to fantasise that she was my grandmother and that one day I'd own the garden.'
Steered towards a safe career, Arne started a degree in architecture, but it wasn't for him and he gave it up after three years, escaping to San Francisco to work in the hotel trade. For 18 months, he put gardening out of his mind, but a sudden intense bout of nostalgia for the English outdoors sent him back, and he found himself working at Clifton Nurseries in west London, where he planted up lots of Eighties-style courtyards 'with golden conifers, lollipop bays and awful hanging baskets', before introducing himself to statuary and architectural salvage expert Peter Hone. He began designing spaces for Peter's clients - many of them influential Londoners with weekend country homes - and from there his career snowballed.
Twenty-five years on, Arne is an internationally known designer with hundreds of gardens to his name, and clients in countries as far flung as the US and Jordan. But his love for the art of gardening has never left him. 'I always say my career is gardening, and design is an add-on to that. My passion is plants and I design gardens so they can be gardened, often in quite an intensive way.' His own garden at Allt-y-bela, a wonderful ochre-walled, late-medieval farmhouse in Monmouthshire (featured in 'Lifestyle' in House & Garden March 2008), shows he is still very much a hands-on gardener when time allows.
Created from nothing in the space of eight or nine years, Arne's garden is perfectly suited to the romance of its surroundings, presided over by a perfect Renaissance bell tower and laid out within the contours of a small, bowl-shape valley where cows peer down at you from steep-sided pasture. It is intimate and romantic, with touches of elegant formality balancing a wilder feel, and very different from his previous garden, Guanock in Lincolnshire, which was intricate, formal and full of symmetry - 'like a Kipp illustration'.
Remembering Guanock, Arne says, 'I could never leave the garden for more than a week or two, because it was so intensive. In the end, it was just a rod for my own back; someone else was gardening it as I just didn't have the time for it.' Determined not to let the same happen at Allt-y-bela, Arne has designed a space much more relaxed in feel, where nature is allowed to encroach around the edges to blend the garden into its rural setting. 'I love the idea of a secret garden inspired by the Frances Hodgson Burnett book and want that kind of romantic feeling in the garden,' says Arne. 'I sometimes wonder what would happen if I abandoned it for a year. I think it would be rather wonderful.'
A meandering stream runs through the centre of the garden, and Arne has worked this into the design for a new outdoor theatre that follows the curves of the stream and the slope opposite the house. Clipped yew, hornbeam and beech in random shapes are arranged loosely near the house to counterbalance the layered meadow planting further away, while criss-cross patterns of box and a row of pleached 'Evereste' crab apples - the dark orange fruits ofwhich bear a pleasing resemblance to the colour of the house's exterior - are the only other nods to formality in the garden.
The one intensively gardened patch is relatively small: a beautiful ornamental kitchen garden, where perennials and roses jostle with Mr McGregor rows of beans and lettuces with pretty arch-trained pears above. 'If I had space for only one garden area, it would always be the kitchen garden,' says Arne.
In the meadow areas, the grass is left to grow long and wildflower plugs have been added, as well as perennials a step or two removed from the wild forms, such as Persicaria bistorta 'Superba' and Centaurea 'Jordy'. Rosa 'Comte de Chambord', Geranium phaeum 'Lily Lovell', Sanguisorba menziesii and the prairie plant Liatris pycnostachya have also been introduced into the long grass near the stream. 'I'm manipulating nature, taming it slightly,' says Arne. 'I like to place plants in areas that replicate their natural habitat, but it's very much a case of trial and error to see what works.'
'It's so easy to make a vegetable garden, and within a very short space of time you can have one that is productive and looks lovely at the same time. I think of my kitchen garden as a delicatessen counter that I can dip into at any time. It's about entertaining, too; it's good to be able to share food you've grown with friends. It's a sociable thing,' says Arne.
Arne is now living at Allt-y-bela full-time and is relishing having proper time to spend in his garden. He has put the structure of the garden in, and is looking forward to concentrating on the finer details, having time to grow things from seed, to take cuttings, save seed.
'What I'm really excited about is actually spending time gardening,' Arne says. 'I want to build up small collections of really rare and wonderful things, like forgotten tulips or auriculas. My plant knowledge is still expanding and I'm learning all the time. A garden is different year by year, and every season teaches you something new'.
Taken from the September 2015 issue of House & Garden.
Arne Maynard Garden Design: 020-7689 8100; arnemaynard.com | Arne's new book, 'The Gardens of Arne Maynard' (Merrell, £45), will be published in September. Signed copies will be available from Arne's website.
Andrew Montgomery1/10Arne Maynard working in his garden at Allt-y-bela, where pleached crab apples and clipped hornbeam, yew and beech create a sense of formality near the late-Medieval farmhouse.
2/10The back of the farmhouse with its criss-cross box parterre.
Andrew Montgomery3/10An area of herbaceous planting borders the kitchen garden.
4/10Arne is pictured here harvesting onions.
5/10The meandering stream and outdoor theatre.
Andrew Montgomery6/10Interesting clipped yew shapes near the house.
7/10Rosa 'Sir Paul Smith'.
8/10Arne in the kitchen garden.
9/10Iris siberica 'Perry's Blue' in meadow grass.
10/10A pear arch leads from the kitchen garden out to an area of meadow.
