Some gardens are all of one style: they’re a house wearing its Sunday best, from front to back. Highfield Farm is different. It has a swatch of different gardens leading out from it, a series of planting styles that you might say set out the gardening trends of the past 30-40 years.
One surprise follows another. And the serious plantsman can expect to be dazzled, for Jenny and Roger Lloyd are busy as magpies. “We’re accumulators,” says Roger, knowing they will always find room for that next promising unknown.
You may also like:
- Best gardens to visit in Wales
- A Georgian walled garden in Wales
- A designer’s own wild family garden by the ocean in Australia
- This is how you make a modern cottage garden
- An Airbnb with its own natural swimming pond
Red kites with fan-shaped tails circle in the sky above: the garden lies only a few minutes’ walk from the River Usk in South Wales, half an hour’s drive from the River Severn and the border with England.
Jenny Lloyd was born in this house and it was her father Charlie’s home from 1946. He began the garden around the house, putting in serious trees to give shelter and variety: a tulip tree, a monkey-puzzle, a ginkgo, cypresses and a fine old paperbark birch Betula papyrifera.
In brief: A Welsh garden in the countryside
- What Rural garden of a plant collector; part new, part old.
- Where Monmouthshire.
- Size Three acres.
- Soil Rich free-draining red sandstone loam pH6.
- Climate Temperate with average annual rainfall of 900mm. The garden sits around 95m above sea level with a winter low temperature of -5oC.
- Hardiness zone USDA 8.
Jenny inherited his gardening bug and developed a far-ranging career in horticulture, both as a plant breeder and later with her own import and interior decoration business. With her husband Roger they moved through 12 houses, making gardens in Germany and the USA, until finally retirement and the
end of her parents’ lives meant they could settle down at Highfield in 2015 to take a rather longer-term shot at gardening.
“We were impatient,” says Roger. After two years remodelling the house they were off, with an avenue of Pyrus calleryana ‘Chanticleer’ and endless cardboard mulch covering newly planted soil. Charlie’s garden of the 1960s acquired a new understorey of small trees and shrubs – stewartias, hydrangeas and the largest-leaved rhododendrons and magnolias.
Today glorious novelties, such as Disporum longistylum ‘Green Giant’ and Indigofera pendula, turn up around every corner, and martagon lilies self-seed. It feels like an especially wonderful woodland garden.
Hydrangeas are Roger’s current big thing, especially the cultivars of Hydrangea aspera and H. serrata. “I have more than 50 varieties – and Jenny has 50 roses – but no need to be embarrassed.” It’s competition and admiration combined.
We were impatient gardeners at first, but now we’re restless gardeners; we need to rein in
Roger gives talks about hydrangeas to raise funds for the National Garden Scheme and Macmillan Cancer Support, for which, including garden openings, teas and plant sales, they have now raised more than £80,000. The aim is to get to £100,000.
All the other parts of the garden are entirely of Roger’s and Jenny’s making. Between the house and adjoining barn is a sunny gravel garden in the Beth Chatto manner, where some plants are permanent and others come and go by self-seeding. Great clumps of Acanthus mollis ‘Rue Ledan’ stand firm above soft arching foliage. Purple-leaved Verbena officinalis ‘Bampton’ self-seeds and crosses with Verbena hastata to produce purple-leaved hastatas.
A wobbling knee-high mound of green coral turns out to be Baccharis genistelloides, a bizarre shrubby member of the daisy family and a typical Highfield curiosity. Still, it does not get Roger quite so excited as his Cornus hongkongensis a few yards away, a flowering dogwood that opens green and turns pure white and – and this is why you feel Roger loves it so much – is evergreen. It’s hardy to -10oC, too.
Glorious novelties turn up around every corner. It feels like an especially wonderful woodland garden
Close by, a rather grand greenhouse is filled with succulents and aromatic pelargoniums. A small kitchen garden through a gap in the hedges has a polytunnel for tomatoes and an apricot.
The most remarkable parts of the garden are two very long rectangles of land lying side-by-side, the inner one hedged with beech and white rugosa roses, the outer one airier and merely fenced off from open pasture. They are two different experiments in large-scale perennial planting.
The inner, older, more enclosed plot has a vertical theme. Grass paths snake through bold blocks of grasses and perennials in all kinds of mixtures, while sentinel pillars of copper beech maintain order. Sometimes the planting is solid. Sometimes it is loose, as when Althaea cannabina, the palm-leaf marsh- mallow, and the grass Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Transparent’ weave airily together.
Sometimes there will be an outburst of one-off rarities but on a common theme: the fingered leaves of Aralia elata ‘Variegata’ alongside A. cordata and A. continentalis, or a Tetrapanax and a Schefflera.
The outer rectangular plot is the garden’s last and most experimental area. Grass paths weave through it once more, but the idea this time is for the impression to be more open and ‘horizontal’ (umbelliferous flowers are the backbone) so the accent shrubs are the variegated forms of tiered Cornus controversa and C. alternifolia.
Perennials are massed and scattered in a seemingly random manner, wild and prairie-like. Eruptions of the huge New Zealand tussock grass Chionochloa rubra sometimes rise from the melee, or yet more spires of Verbascum olympicum.
The irrepressible Achillea filipendulina ‘Gold Plate’ is there in the full dinner service. But perhaps the favourite is towering purple-stemmed giant hog-fennel, Peucedanum verticillare: “Who needs vicious giant hogweed when there’s that?”
Does this sound like the garden of a man in his late seventies? “We were impatient gardeners at first,” admits Roger. “But now we’re restless gardeners; we need to rein in. It’s the weeding of the open space that’s hard, but you have to have it when you want self-seeders. And all that dividing – perennials have to be regularly divided if they are going to stay strong.”
And so this newest garden, in its first maturity, is starting to move to shrubs and small trees. “Seriously cool shrubs, of course,” concedes Roger the collector. But isn’t that just the nature of bare land in Britain’s climate, and certainly Wales’s green valleys. First arrive the grasses, then the perennials, then shrubs, and then finally tree cover. It’s perfectly natural. And licence to collect.
8 of Roger's key plants
Useful information
- Address Highfield Farm, Penperlleni, Goytre, Gwent NP4 0AA.
- Tel 01873 880030.
- Web highfieldfarmgarden.co.uk
- Open For National Garden Scheme on 10 August and 14 September, 11am-4pm, and by arrangement from June to 28 September for groups of between five and 40.
- Admission £7.