Ever-changing colour of a secret garden
The ever-changing colours of the season can be enjoyed within a walled space planted out at The Laundry in North Wales
TUCKED AWAY IN a picturesque corner of the Clwydian hills, in Denbighshire, North Wales, is a Grade II listed Georgian building. Blessed with splendid mountain views beyond, its gardens and woodland are ablaze with autumn colour. This is The Laundry; home of Tom and Jenny Williams and their three sons.
Seasonal planting ideas abound in this atmospheric 3-acre garden. “It’s such a colourful season,” says Jenny. “The garden seems to change daily at this time of year.”
Plants for autumn interest are spread throughout. To the back of the house is a pleached circle of crab apples, malus ‘Evereste’. “In autumn, its colourful leaves and fruit look spectacular from the kitchen,” adds Jenny. “We also have a collection of colourful acers, a weeping pear, a pleached lime avenue and a beech hedge that looks fabulous through winter. We keep the hedge tightly clipped, so it’s nice and dense. Its leaves change from green to burnt orange in autumn, then fade to brown. These last until May or June the following year, when the fresh green growth starts to come through.”
Flowering Mount Fuji cherry, prunus ‘Shirotae’ offers an incredible pop of fiery red and orange foliage too. “Even on a grey day, it can be such a colourful time of year,” says Jenny.
Starting from scratch
“Our house is the former dairy and laundry for Llanrhaeadr Hall, which Tom’s family owned for more than 100 years,” she explains. “The Laundry was passed down to Tom in 1984, and we restored it in 2010.” The house dates back to the 1770s and is complete with a walled kitchen garden and a woodland which skirts the outside of the walls.
“We began work on the garden in 2009, before we moved in,” says Jenny. “When we started, the garden was an overgrown jungle, and we had to remove everything in order to start with a clean slate.”
Jenny completed a short introduction to garden design course in 1999, but both she and Tom have shared an interest in gardening for more than 20 years. This is the second garden they have created together, although Tom admits the first one was much smaller.
“Tom has a design background, and he’s very good at drawing,” says Jenny. “Initially, he sketched out the layout on the back of an envelope. We knew we wanted a terrace to the front, an oval lawn and a pleached lime avenue, so we laid that out on an east-west axis from the back door. Then we used beech and evergreen yew hedges to form a structural backbone that would look good all year round.
“We ordered all the trees and hedges from a wholesale nursery and planted them ourselves. When we finally moved into the house in 2011, we laid the terrace and lawn areas. They were the icing on the cake.”
The pleached limes in the avenue glow gold in the autumn sunlight. These trees started life as 12ft (3.7m) whips. The metal training frames had to stay in place for five years before the couple could plant a nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’ and white peonies underneath. “That was when the garden really started to come together,” says Jenny. “We planted a little clipped box parterre on the terrace as a finishing touch. It’s taken approximately 10 years for everything to look established. The plants have really merged into their space.”
Listed walls
The couple renovated the 1-acre historic walled garden next. “The walls are listed, and there’s a fabulous old mulberry with a gnarled trunk that’s still bearing fruit, in spite of being approximately 100 years old,” says Jenny. The mulberry, which stands in the middle of the garden, is the only tree remaining from the original garden layout.
“My father-in-law used to grow Christmas trees here and keep pheasants and sheep,” she adds. “It had vague pathways crossing the garden from each of its doors, and once we started digging, we discovered the old slate edging, which was exciting.”
The original garden had a cobbled path, but successive excavations for services and drains over the years had turned it into a bit of an eyesore. “After a conversation with the neighbour who shares the yard, we removed the cobbled surface and created a circular cobbled feature, surrounded by pleached crab apples,” says Tom. “Then the path was laid using the same reclaimed
“The Walls enriched with Fruit-trees and faced with a covering of their leafy extensions; I should rather have said hung with different Pieces of Nature’s noblest Tapestry”
James Hervey
cobbles.” Tom undertook this task himself. “The path is 4ft wide and 30ft long,” he says. “It took three weeks to complete and resulted in some very sore knees.”
After reinstating the ancient paths, Jenny and Tom levelled the central area in order to create a lawn. “We sowed the grass from seed,” says Jenny. “Then we planted more than 400 yew plants to make hedging that would define new planting areas, making flower beds and borders from the north end of the garden round to the west.”
One of the biggest challenges they faced was that of the borders in the walled garden, which are 14ft (4.2m) deep. “We tackled them by looking at other gardens of a similar scale and nature, and we were given a lot of plants at the outset, which helped to give instant bulk to the borders,” says Tom. “We also approached them systematically; for some reason we worked anticlockwise round the walls.”
Taking it slowly
The garden has arisen slowly, at an organic pace that suits the couple’s mood and pocket. “It’s been inspired by our own ideas, thoughts and travels as we go along,” explains Jenny. “The secret is not to rush. We let things happen when they happen, which hopefully makes our garden more personal and unique.”
“Our garden is on the dry side, as it is so free draining, sitting as it does on river shingle,” adds Tom. “As a result, moisture-loving plants, such as rodgersia, have failed or just not thrived. We simply adjust our plant choices accordingly.”
The amount of maintenance required on the garden increases every year. “We have had help in recent years, up to one day a week, but we still do the majority of the work on the garden ourselves,” says Tom. “We constantly look for labour-saving methods, and we have two robot mowers in the walled garden. We also religiously mulch early in the year. We used a lorry load, which was 18m3, this year.”
For inspiration, the couple like to visit Wollerton Old Hall. “Its owners, Lesley and John Jenkins, created their garden
“For the best grows highest, always highest, Upon the mulberry-tree”
Dinah Maria Craik, ‘The Mulberry Tree’
“the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall” Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
from scratch, just as we’re doing; growing everything from tiny plants,” says Jenny.
“Like Wollerton, there are lots of different spaces to explore as you move around the garden: a new orchard in the walled garden, where we let the hens roam; an Italianate avenue of yews. On the west side, we’ve salvaged four pillars from the porch at Llanrhaeadr Hall and some leftover York stone from our terrace. We like to think the garden is full of bite-sized ideas like this that anyone can use, whatever the size of their own garden.”