Time for the results of the competition for the reviews of “The Best Garden I visited this year.” 

We have five winners. They are – in no special order:

• Valerie Lapthorne (Great Dixter)
• Ruth Brompton-Charlesworth FLS (Great Dixter!)
• Patterson Webster (Haseley Court)
• Deborah Wilson (Dyffryn Fernant) below
• Nicole Marillier (De Wiesse)

Just to remind you, this is what I was looking for: 

 “What touched you, what the spark of excitement was about it, what stayed with you after you left. How brilliantly the maker has responded to context, limitations, challenges and inspiration. Any size garden. And I want to hear also about the downsides – no garden is perfect and I won’t believe you if you try to tell me it is. I don’t want to hear more than necessary about plants.”

I know I said I would publish three, but in the end it seems churlish not to give you these five. In my opinion these reviews met my criteria and I’m pleased that we have been international, with three from the UK, one from France and one from Canada. Thank you to all contributors, and sorry to those who didn’t make the final.

This is the first – Dyffryn Fernant by Deborah Wilson.

Anne Wareham, editor

Dyffryn Fernant reviewed by Deborah Wilson

A sense of place. We love to pay lip service to this important idea. We like to open our gardens to the surrounding landscape so lawns morph into meadow and then into grassland (the real meadow) beyond. Or our planting mimics the way plants grow in the wild. But how often do you see a garden that really sits naturally and comfortably in its place?

Dyffryn Fernant began as a small garden between a rocky quarry and a bog on the west coast of Wales and it has grown outwards to embrace them both. Not conventional gardening terrain.

But the challenges of the terrain mean that parts of the garden have not been spoiled by too much interference and the parts that have been partially or intensively gardened show the care and determination that have had to be given them.

I prefer gardens that have grown and developed as opposed to being designed all at once, and that have been thought about and cared about over the years. And I don’t mean the manicuring sort of caring. Dyffryn Fernant is a bit scruffy in places. There are some neglected areas and abandoned design inspirations sitting around. I like that. Gardens are not about perfection. It’s reassuring to feel that there are bits they haven’t got round to or have lost interest in. A garden that is gardened by its owner(s) over the years shows evidence of them responding to how the garden changes as it grows and accommodating to the strengths and weaknesses of their particular site.  It develops a personality that leaches away when you have a designer and a team of professionals working to achieve a preconceived plan.

At Dyffryn Fernant there is plenty of evidence of choices being made and jobs being done. I like to see how a garden is being gardened. Here the potting area and the greenhouses are not hidden away but at the centre of things. (There is a row of small greenhouses with exotics and cuttings and propagators full of unfamiliar seedlings.)

There are very many appealing aspects to the garden but here are the things that especially struck me. The inventively planted borders with clipped evergreens for structure have comfortable paths and proportions, a bit more extensive than domestic but not grand. There are many unusual plants, exotics, tender foliage plants and sinks full of cacti and succulents (and west Wales is not known for its clement weather).

There is a huge old ash tree with a jungle of clematis lianas left hanging round it and outside the house there’s a fat bronze vat with the water just brimming over.

There’s a simple Richard-Long style stone ‘sculpture’ up above the old quarry, where the view is.

There’s a formal garden of grasses (looks just a bit too much like trial beds for my taste). There’s meadow, orchids, a big pond, young woodland and an unspoilt overgrown stream. There’s a library of gardening books, for goodness sake, which visitors can look at while they help themselves to a cup of tea. It’s all a bit understated (well, maybe not the blazing tulips or the huge aloes) with very little done merely for show. And then there’s the bog.

The formal bog garden has involved years of hard work to introduce variety by building up ‘raised beds’ for plants that like moisture, but not that much moisture. Laid out in a cross formation, it has a glowing, I think an aluminium -definitely not machined stainless steel – obelisk at its centre which lifts us out of the bog to the sky – often, I imagine, a glowering and rainy contrast.

This is what really struck me and what immediately comes to mind when I remember the garden. That sense of being lifted out of the horticulture, out of the appreciation of different plant forms and design considerations, into the space that the garden is in. The formal bog garden does then blend with some interesting transitional planting into a large area of natural bog with its native flora. But the sky dominates. And somehow the irises, the primulas, the rodgersias and gunneras, with their roots held fast by boggy soil, gain meaning from being part of it. The garden transcends itself, seems part of a world larger than itself.

Gardeners often try quite hard to give their gardens meaning – usually with some form of garden ornament or sculpture. At one end of the spectrum, gnomes are given ponds to fish in, or the bird table becomes a sort of altar in the centre of the garden. At the opposite end of the spectrum you have Hamilton-Finlay’s Little Sparta in the Pentland hills outside Edinburgh, a work of conceptual art-landscape, which communicates through its high-art inscriptions and concrete poetry. Garden sculpture is of course notoriously a matter of taste and I have to admit that it is one of my bêtes noires. But the sculpture at Dyffryn Fernant has been used with real thought.

There is a slightly bland portrait head of a young girl who sits, unusually, with her back to the garden, gazing out over the wild bog beyond.

There’s a Victorian statue of Hermes perched up above the quarry, poised as if to take wing and soar above the garden below. An egg-shaped head atop a pillar beyond the bog, looks up at the sky.

Whether the sculpture is to your taste isn’t really relevant because each one has been used to remind us that the garden is part of the wider landscape and enhances our experience of it.

A garden is an artificial creation, aiming to recreate in concentrated form, the pleasures of Nature. But Nature just is, in all its endless variety. The most difficult thing in gardening is to make a garden speak for itself in the same way, despite its artificiality, and to make it feel really a part of the place it’s in. Dyffryn Fernant manages to do that. It is at once modest and grand. But its grandeur comes not from pretentious design or planting but from its reference outwards, in its planting and in its design features, to the universe around it.

Deborah Wilson