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Veddw House Gardens

Veddw House Gardens

Veddw House Gardens

Veddw House Gardens

Veddw, created by writer and critic Anne Wareham is one of the most interesting contemporary gardens in the UK, laid out amongst the gentle hills of the Welsh borders. It has an unusual genesis: not a plantswoman’s garden, not a gardener’s garden. Instead, its creator was driven by a fascination with the garden as art form. With her photographer husband Charles Hawes, Anne has spent 25 years developing Veddw from meadowland.

The garden is full of big confident sweeps of plants and patterns of hedging. This is not a timid place, fiddling around in details. It makes bold marks on the landscape. The first thing many visitors notice is the dramatic use of colour. Rather than the classical green foliage familiar from traditional garden designs, the creators of Veddw Gardens use silver and purple foliage to add interest to hedges and borders. Many of the benches and outbuildings are contemporary but tasteful, meshing beautifully with the garden around them. In line with modern thoughts to ecologically-friendly gardening, meadow grasses are used to deepen the contrast between precise hedges any classical topiary garden would be proud of.

For many people the focus of the garden is the dramatic black reflecting pool (water dyed black with organic dye), which reflects a garden of clipped hedges, shaped to echo the undulating hills of the surrounding countryside. Elsewhere, there is a garden filled with contrasting silver cardoons and purple heuchera, backed by a border of mixed silver and purple shrubs. Anne Wareham’s great interest in the local landscape history is incorporated into the garden design, in particular in a large parterre of ornamental grasses spread across a small hillside within a pattern of box hedges based on the Tithe Map of 1842.

Veddw House Gardens

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