High drama of hilltop gardening

BOOK OF THE DAY: The Garden in the CloudsBy Antony Woodward Harper Press, 295pp, £16.99

ANTONY WOODWARD shares with Peter Mayle ( A Year in Provence) a successful past in advertising copywriting, but his book falls a little short of doing just what it says on the tin. A Year in the Welsh Border Countrymight not have had quite the same ring, but promising a mountain garden is a definite product description. A plant-lover's book this is not, and the paradise is gained largely by looking the other way, to the view.

The entertainment is in waiting for the garden to happen. Woodward is the standard ex-urban romantic, looking for somewhere he really wants to be. Lured by red kites and Welsh ponies, he and partner Vez buy Tair-Ffynnon, the six-acre remnant of a hill farm at the top of a long boreen in the Brecon Beacons. Its altitude, about 1,300ft, is key to creating “the highest garden in Britain” – the entry Woodward covets in the famed Yellow Book of the National Gardens Scheme. This raises money for hospice care and its deeper concern runs under a jokey saga of qualifying by a wildly over-ambitious deadline.

Tair-Ffynnon’s location might seem remote, but in Britain remoteness is comparative. “During the day,” writes Woodward, “there were walkers and riders, bemused school orienteering parties, pony trekkers, runners, mountain bikers, radio modellers, occasional motocross riders . . .” That left the hang-gliders, falconers and walkers who just wondered if they could be driven back to their BB.

Having visited existing high gardens in the Yellow Book, and finding most of them lush groves of plantsmanship, Woodward decided to stay more or less true to his slatey, watery landscape, littered with farm machinery.

“There was charm to some of these bits of junk,” he decided, “a sort of wistful melancholy, especially with bracken or foxgloves growing through them.” The rusting sculptures, artfully placed, created much of the requisite atmosphere.

Central to the saga, however, is the preposterous enterprise of having a railway brake wagon transported to Wales and hauled up the hill to use as writing shed. This required heavy machinery and caused great damage to the boreen. It did, however, provide another chapter which, like those on hedge-laying, wall-building, gate-making and beekeeping, gave Woodward fresh occasions for meeting colourful characters. It is in these excursions one catches echoes of Mayle’s memoir of coping with the locals of Provence. Woodward, however, is generally much nicer about them: we shall undoubtedly hear more.

Michael Viney is an Irish Timescolumnist