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INFLUENCED BY PRAIRIE-STYLE DESIGN, LIZ DAVIES’ GARDEN BURSTS WITH SWAYING GRASSES AND A LATE FLUSH OF FLOWERY COLOUR IN THE LAST WEEKS OF SUMMER
A prairie-style garden in Gwent showcases the subtle beauty of ornamental grasses
Liz Davies’ passion for plants dates from childhood. At the age of eight, she stood beneath a massive gunnera leaf in a Cardiff park. ‘I was totally amazed by its size and from that time on I wanted a garden with gunnera in it,’ she says. Nowadays, her two-acre garden at Rogerstone near Newport in south Wales has bold foliage in profusion, including the giant rhubarb that so impressed her as a child, plus a host of exuberant late-flowering plants extending interest into autumn.
Liz and her husband Barry bought Croesllanfro Farm, a derelict Welsh longhouse with outbuildings in a rough field, in 1976. The couple and their three children spent the first few months living in former stables ‘overrun by mice’ before moving into the renovated part of the house in December 1977. ‘It was a big project to take on,’ says Liz. ‘We bought it thinking it would keep us busy forever, which it has. It’s a bit like the Forth Bridge.’
Creating a usable, attractive garden from scratch on a sloping site with no existing trees or hedges was a challenge, and Liz confesses to having made several false starts before realising that the ground levels needed sorting out before progress could be made. ‘I got a digger in and showed the driver what I wanted with hand movements. We made a flat area at the back of the house for a patio and built a retaining wall to terrace the slope.’
As far as possible, the couple used materials found on site for the hard landscaping. ‘Flagstones from the barn were used for the patio and old roof tiles for risers in the steps and to cap the wall,’ says Liz. For inspiration on the layout, she turned to designer John Brookes, author of published in
1969. He was one of the first to emphasise the importance of design over planting in the making of domestic gardens. ‘I spent hours poring over the illustrations in his books,’ says Liz.
these days, the patio provides an elegant setting for eating outside during the summer and a place for Liz and Barry’s granddaughter to play in her wendy house beneath the cool green canopy of a pair of spreading cherry trees. Containers of hostas and trachycarpus mix with pots of vivid blue agapanthus and red-flowered Dahlia ‘Mystic enchantment’. ‘Flowers are always transient,’ says Liz, ‘so I’m very keen on using foliage with contrasting shapes and textures. My current favourite for this is a woodland variety called Podophyllum ‘Spotty Dotty’.
As Liz developed her garden through the 1980s, the stylish minimal gardens of Californian landscape architect thomas Church and the prairie-planting style of design duo wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden influenced her thinking. Visits to York Gate garden on the edge of Leeds, renowned for its garden rooms, clipped yew and box, and attention to detail, and to Bury Court Barn in Hampshire, where owner John Coke worked with plantsman Piet Oudolf, had a profound effect. ‘Seeing the use of grasses there was a real epiphany for me,’ she says.
the combination of dark evergreen box balls surrounding a shimmering block of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldschleier’ shows just how effective a simple arrangement of foliage plants can be. Liz’s other architectural favourites include tetrapanax papyrifer ‘Rex’, the rice-paper plant, and gauzy grass Stipa gigantea.
throughout the garden there are intimate places to sit and enjoy the lush, detailed planting, including a sunny courtyard
planted in various hues of purple and pink. The maroon and white foliage of Persicaria microcephala ‘Red Dragon’ echoes purple tones in the leaves of Ricinus communis ‘Carmencita’, and flowers include pink Japanese anemone ‘Hadspen Abundance’, crimson sanguisorbas, spikes of purple-flowered lobelias and purple-stemmed Actaea simplex Atropurpurea Group.
In autumn, great sloping banks of grasses and herbaceous perennials in the back garden give one last colourful hurrah before leaves fall and flowers die. Sunny yellow daisy Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, deep purple spikes of aconites, waving pink wands of persicaria and crimson-flowered eupatorium bloom among tall stands of dark, upright grass Miscanthus sinensis ‘Malepartus’.
While Liz has always loved gardening, she didn’t think of it as a career at first. ‘I trained as an occupational therapist, but when people started asking me to design their gardens I realised it was something I could do as a job so I did an intensive one-year course.’ From 1993, Liz worked as a garden designer, something she now combines with teaching yoga. ‘If it’s nice weather we’ll do the class in the garden,’ says Liz. ‘Yoga and gardening fit well together. You’re connecting to your inner self, the universe and every living thing in it and that’s what gardening should be, too.’ ☎ CROESLLANFRO FARM, GROES ROAD, ROGERSTONE, NEWPORT, GWENT NP10 9GP (01633 894057). OPEN FOR THE NGS (NGS.ORG.UK) ON 3 SEPTEMBER, 1.30-5PM, AND BY ARRANGEMENT MAY TO SEPTEMBER.