MY FAVOURITE VIEW

From flying kites with his grandfather to inspiring his award-winning garden designs, the Malverns are part of life’s landscape for Chris Beardshaw

The Malvern Hills are full of both memories and inspiration for Chris Beardshaw

Stretching into the distance, the beautiful Malvern Hills can be seen for miles around

We’re spoilt for choice with views in the UK, but for me the most iconic image is of the Malvern Hills. I grew up in Worcestershire, about 10 miles north of the hills, so what I was always looking at was this great big jelly mould off in the distance.

The Malvern Hills are a remarkable geological feature. It’s a strange eruption of rock out of a river plain, about nine miles long but less than a mile wide, almost like the spine of a dinosaur. One of the greatest claims of the Malverns is that it’s ‘almost’ a mountain. It’s sufficiently high that there’s no tree growth on the top, so what you see is a kind of bald, dry grassland, a ring of yellow gorse popping in the summer sunshine, and below that a necklace of woodland.

So many of my memories are attached to the Malverns. My grandad was a Birmingham man and used to drive down at weekends to take us for picnics, to fly kites and to drive go-karts down the steepest sections of the hills. Then when I was older I would drive through the wooded lanes in my very first car, with the roof down and just inhale the fragrances brought out by the heavy evening dew. I went to school in Worcester and studied geology, and we spent hours there on sunny afternoons chipping away at various bits of granite.

I collected my very first seed in the Malvern Hills, as well. I can still picture the rather awful burgundy jacket and blue wellies my mother put me in at the age of four to go for a walk with the family. We were trekking up this track and I noticed that there were these kind of embryonic seed leaves peeking through deep-leaf litter and, unbeknown to my parents, I picked a few up and put them in my pocket, took them home and planted them in the garden behind my father’s garage. Miraculously they grew into enormous trees and my parents still have one of them to this day – they’ve moved houses several times and they’ve taken the tree with them each time, so it’s still in their current garden.

In a way it’s been fundamental in how I view the landscape. To create a great garden you want a range of experiences, a theatre, and the emotional response to that theatre, and when you look at the Malverns, that’s what’s happening there.

Chris is proud to be an RHS Ambassador for Communities and Ambassador for the National Youth Orchestra GB