New horizons
Expert planting in an exposed Scottish garden has helped to blend a striking modernist house with its equally impressive surroundings
Expertly designed planting schemes anchor a striking new house in St Andrews with its equally impressive surroundings
Driving to Ladies Lake in the medieval town of St Andrews in Fife, I’m aware a view of the sea awaits me, but I’m not remotely prepared for the sheer drama of the approach or the richness of the landscape of the garden. A discreet wooden gate opens on to a long, gravel drive, bordered simply by a narrow line of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’. But skirting round to the north side of the house, it finally struck me how incredibly special the view was. Standing atop terraced flowerbeds, a broad panorama of the widening Firth of Tay opens out, bordered to the east by the perfectly picturesque ruins of St Andrews Castle. The nests of eider ducks litter the surrounding cliffs and the garden itself, and fulmars swoop hither and thither. The passage through the garden gate now feels like it has been a portal to a different dimension.
The design of the house, by architects Andrew Black Design of Dundee, was intended to maximise the view, and the three stories of its north face are composed almost entirely of floor-to-ceiling glass. However, the impact on the historic landscape to the south is cleverly minimised and the house is barely visible from the road. Edinburgh-based landscape architects Rankin Fraser designed the surrounding garden with a similarly light touch, using sandstone as the predominant hard-landscaping material to match the walls of the house. These are of sawn stone, but the garden benefits from variation between the use of this highly finished material and a more natural, riven-surfaced iteration of the same stone. With a garden built so snugly into a cliff, steps and terrace walls are an integral feature and the success of the garden owes a great deal to local stonemasons WL Watson & Sons. The brief was to create a garden that sat easily in the surrounding landscape, and just as the layout and stonework of the garden helps to ease the transition from the house to the natural landscape, so do the plant choices from planting designer Colin McBeath.
I happened to visit the garden on a rare day of warm sunlight and calm seas, but Colin is quick to shatter any false sense of security. “The conditions here are incredibly harsh,” he explains. The indigenous soil, which Colin has on principle not attempted to improve, is a free-draining, sandy loam, and in places is extremely shallow as the bedrock comes up towards the surface. Moreover, annual rainfall is low and the cliff face is fully exposed to lashings from salt-laden winds off the sea. Parts of the garden were planted as snow fell, driven in by easterly winds. Although the influence of the sea air means temperatures are mild for this northerly latitude, the extraordinary levels of exposure have created a massive challenge.
Crucially, Colin was involved from the inception of the project, and maintains an ongoing involvement, making regular maintenance visits. No stranger to designing planting schemes adapted to a variety of indigenous conditions, the extreme nature of this particular challenge has led to a certain amount of experimentation. “Hands down one of the toughest plants here is Phlomis russeliana,” he
tells me. Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ and Knautia macedonica Melton pastels also find a home here, the latter entirely devoid of the mildew that tends to blight it in softer conditions. Colin has found that the application of a thick mulch is a crucial for the plants to survive the harsh winters. “Here, we use gravel,” he says. “Bark would just blow away.”
The garden is open, without any solid barriers (except the house itself), but there is a gentle progression from area to area and it was important that this was reflected with subtle gradations in the planting. The approach is planted quite simply, but on a reasonably grand scale, with a long row of Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, and two other grasses – Stipa tenuissima and Helictotrichon sempervirens – planted in their thousands in intermingling groups adjacent to the house. These are both evergreen, and although the Calamagrostis is not, its winter skeleton is one of the finest and most durable of all deciduous grasses. As the drive curves and descends around the house, a retaining wall supports a large corner bed, the contents of which buttress the impressive boundary wall of the property – a planting inspired by the work of the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Here, within the constraints of the climate, are plants with presence, such as Fatsia japonica, Griselinia littoralis, Miscanthus x giganteus and an Escallonia ‘Iveyi’ that failed on more exposed parts of the site, but flourishes in this comparatively sheltered corner.
As you round the southeast corner of the house, the garden is exposed to the full majesty of the seascape and to all the brutality of the elements. Establishing a planting of any sort under these conditions would be a major achievement; that Colin has managed to create something with a compelling cogency and sense of progression is quite remarkable. A slightly raised area to the east bears the full force of the elements and its wind-pruned contours are expressive of this. It features a restricted palette of plants including Perovskia atriplicifolia, Olearia x haastii and the dwarf pine Pinus mugo ‘Mops’. Below it to the west, terraced beds house a selection of comparatively tender plants – Osteospermum ‘Nairobi Purple’ thrives year on year, as does the silver sub-shrub Convolvulus cneorum. Generous banks of Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’ link these areas effectively to the broader landscape of tussocky grasses on the cliff face.
The most colourfully planted area sits just below the house, between it and the sea. Achillea filipendulina ‘Gold Plate’ holds itself high enough to contrast directly with the blue sea beyond the parapet; Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’, Eryngium x tripartitum and Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’ offer deep-blue flowers in their season, and structural interest thereafter. Self-sowers, such as Centranthus ruber, Knautia macedonica, Erigeron karvinskianus and Verbena bonariensis, are allowed to mingle throughout. But Colin prefers to maintain a degree of sparsity to the planting, as befits the environment – with gaps filled by a mulch of pebbles, creating an overall effect like an enhanced version of the vegetation found on shingle beaches.
While never attempting to compete with the majesty of the surrounding scenery, or the richness of its ecology and history, Colin’s plantsmanship, applied with a deft, thoughtful touch, defies multiple constraints to add layers of unobtrusive but rich detail to this exceptional landscape. USEFUL INFORMATION
Find out more about Colin’s work at colinmcbeath.com