Gardening
David Wheeler
With a new gardening season well underway, I thought it time to seek out a new place, a new venture, a new gardener. My quest took me all of three miles from my own garden gate. Up I climbed the sinuous, single-track lane that shadows the Herefordshire/ Radnorshire (thus English/welsh) border. Pant Hall – its walls painted an unlikely coastal-village pale blue – hoves into view at around 900ft above sea level, with hills rising higher still above.
Here, battling against occasionally malign forces – fog, rain, snow, frost, deer, squirrels, rabbits – Malcolm Temple, at an age when most men seek little more than a newspaper and a comfortable armchair, is fashioning an ambitious garden on six steeply sloping acres. It’s both the culmination and continuation of his life’s work in the visual arts, and there’s a thread that links this new third-age endeavour with Malcolm’s early years studying stage design at Wimbledon School of Art in the late 1960s when this fashion-conscious, frock-coated maverick, with progressive thoughts about all forms of art, was also obsessed by Victorian gardens and their long, shady walks.
An Essex childhood followed by Kent and London teenage years provided all the fizz needed to fuel Malcolm’s pursuit of painting and sculpture, and the manufacture of stained glass, furniture, rugs, folding screens and huge, brightly coloured, papier-mâché vessels – ‘creating’, as he says so convincingly, ‘magic out of ordinary things’.
College wasn’t for Malcolm. Rather, he espoused the V&A and its stimulating lectures as his true learning ground – taking notes, sketching, seeing – developing all the time an appreciation of eclecticism and ‘crossover’ (Picasso and Matisse, he reminds me, dabbled in a multitude of creative media).
Nascent gardening practicalities only materialised in 1999 when he met Karen Roberts, who became his wife and devoted gardening partner. From a series of temporary accommodations, they eventually settled in a west London house with a 120ft-long garden. There at last Malcolm could put his hands in the dirt, discovering for himself that bare earth is yet another canvas on which to express artistic ideas.
It led to his designing gardens and planting schemes for other people, including Blackadder’s Tony Robinson in Maida Vale. Karen meanwhile was managing a volunteer group in the restoration of Chiswick House walled gardens. Their move to the Welsh borders came six years later. Malcolm might miss London (‘I can walk its streets in my mind’) but the acquisition of plentiful space appeared to realise a lifetime’s dormant desire. In very little time, he has planned and planted a chiefly formal garden on inauspicious land. Others would have chosen flat terrain but, with Malcolm ever looking for a challenge, this steep, wayward and partly waterlogged former sheep pasture has given rise to a garden like no other. Malcolm has created vistas and rides by planting more than 3,000 trees and shrubs and found areas where earthmoving equipment could level a few square yards for his dance terrace, artist’s chapel (with his own stained-glass windows), wildflower meadow and Cloister Gardens. And plans for a pier and bandstand are emerging.
Malcolm is 68; what about serious old age? ‘I’m doing all the heavy work now,’ he says, ‘the future is all about maintenance and, if I need help then, I’ll find a way to fund it.’ Meanwhile, the roots most deeply descending at Pant Hall are his and Karen’s.
Pant Hall gardens open by appointment to groups of fifteen or more. Call 01544 260066; thecloistergardens.com