National Botanic Garden of Wales

I am reminded of that old truism that if you ask a committee to design a racehorse, they will end up with a camel. Well, the bureaucratic committee’s dreams of national splendour, a garden to fulfill the egos of a national identity, to compete with the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew, the hugely expensive National Botanic Garden of Wales, is a camel.

Set in the deprived area of rural West Wales, over £88 million of tax payer’s money has been spent to create this camel. The gardens are just not good enough for either the price or its label of National Garden. And the people of Wales know it, so don’t come.
But the place is not so bad, visited in late May 2016, it is all just on the wrong scale, with too much tick box trendy municipal labels and not enough garden. The children’s maze, the playground, the “educational” zones can be off putting for an adult looking for planting.  The huge conference size squares outside the stables, empty of flowers but full of concrete, steps and paved areas suggest a good place for a pop concert. The long walk up to the dome from the car park was how the committee clearly envisaged the hordes of crowds being managed as they poured in to see this garden. In fact the crowd management theme seems to have been a vital part of the design brief. They would come in their thousands to West Wales and single handedly rescue the local economy, just by existing.  The result is empty space with a curious set of “sites” and “scenes” arranged far apart, with the supposed crowning glory of a very large dome. The biggest green house in the world.  I think they were trying to out do the enormously successful Eden Project in Cornwall and accept also the reality that West Wales is a rainy place too.
So in the green and verdant landscape they plonked a green house, designed by Lord Rogers at huge expense and record breaking amounts of glass and decided to specialise in dry arid plants. Moss and lichen control must be a constant battle. And who cares about the technological feat of glass. Except the egos on the committee and Lord Rogers. It doesn’t improve the visitor experience to know its the biggest.

Still with so few people there it was pleasant to wander round the cavernous space and enjoy the bridges, the Madeira area, a bit of Australia, and a sniff at California and then South Africa.  Bedding plants galore, and plants of weird shapes to be gawped at. The giant Echiums down in a watery cavern were fabulous, as all to myself, I slowly wound my way over and through the dome. Are they endangered? Is there a horticultural school or a plant bio centre to use all this space? I fear not. With my husband sitting down for a break I was the only person in the whole place.

Outside the Rock garden looked incongruous in the green landscape and the inevitable moss.  Why specialise in the dry and arid out here as well as inside? Such a far cry from a rocky dry mountainside.
The Wallace garden up by the remains of the house is empty of purpose and has bee hives and I think what will be a wild flower area for the kiddies. They could have done a tropical area, in this intimate space, or copied Great Dixter and done a jungle. Or a Rose garden, or medicinal herbs to educate the children…… never mind.

The double walled garden, the old vegetable gardens, are huge and needs more clarity as to its zones and purpose, but the gardeners have tried hard and the plants are interesting in their squares. Perhaps they should have planted by family so we could see what Rosacea plants have in common, or the Labaceaea  family, or the Fabaceaea. The sweet pea tunnel will be lovely though. The formal hedging by the veg patch interesting. Its just that nothing links. The tropical house was fun if you wear glasses, they all steam up like a jungle experience, but I couldn’t as a result see the plants other than familiar bathroom favourites, Dracunculus and maiden hair ferns.

But what was the expanse of green grass before it, large enough for thousands to mingle?  I see on my map it is called the Performance Stage.  Shakespeare in the rain may be, but for so many? The Welsh equivalent of Galstonbury, but it never materialised? Who knows, the committee certainly didn’t.

There were some nice touches, the charming long trickle of water draining down the little cobble rill from the top of the slope to the bottom, was unattached to the water and bogs at the bottom. But it looked quaint and tiny, small and sweet against the municipal space, coming out of little drains and popping down. Children in wellies splashed safely in its puddles. But why only special designers, flown in from Italy, could reset the cobbles was beyond me. It reminded me of a village street drain in any small rural cobbled town.
Llandielo probably had one just like it if they had looked, and council work men to install it. Surely the gardens would have been a wonderful chance for local kids to train in skills and horticulture. Another wasted opportunity to benefit the area. And what was the point of the planting on the other side of the wide path? Is it a long shrubbery, a long herbaceaous border, a slow growing tree belt? Or a stream of consciousness of to be interpreted some how or other, with kids splashing in their open drain. I failed to see the point.  Other fixtures were showing wear and tare with grouting falling out and dirty stone facings greeting the passer bye. Before glancing at the wild bog area, walking by it as there were no paths to enter, no way into the welsh bog.

So do go, especially with children, who are free, making the garden a cheaper day out.  The enormous empty dining room will ensure you dont have to queue for long, and the maze and playground will suit your family.  Hire a buggy for granny if she finds the walks between places too far ( as I did, due to a hip problem), prepare to be underwhelmed and enjoy all that space with so few people. The staff are friendly and smiley and if its rainy you can play hide and seek in the Dome. By yourself.

Roy Strong’s The Laskett,

Fleur writes of a garden with a testicular mania for topiary and tries to work out if the National Trust was right to turn it down as unimportant.

Over the past few years the garden which has perhaps been causing the greatest controversy (the obscene waste of £88 million pounds at the National Garden of Wales aside) and the greatest divide of opinion is The Laskett, or perhaps more to the point, Roy Strong’s The Laskett. The National Trust turned it down as not good enough, despite the millions of pounds endowment he was offering, while Chris Young in The Garden hailed it as one of the best and most exciting of gardens of its generation. Luckily it has been taken on by that impressive charity “Perennial” which specialises in late 20^th century gardens (they now have three) and raises funds for indigent gardeners.

So who is right and who wrong or do they all miss the point. It is Roy Strong’s garden, (and his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman). It has to be seen in the context of the man, not as a garden in its own right. The National Trust rather missed the point by only analysing The Laskett for its horticultural perfections, rather than as a space exploring modern garden fetishisms.  And is Roy Strong important enough? Well that is a question the NT never even considered, but they did buy a small terraced house just because one of the Beatles lived there for a short time.  And Roy Strong came from equally humble origins if they are trying to be more “of the people and for the people”.

It is useful to remember that Roy Strong is a designer, head curator at the V and A, a man who has spent his life making us think and consider objects, an egoist to be sure but a man also who has a sense of humour as well as a love of the beautiful. Even better he has shown again and again a willingness to mock the humourless world of immaculate good taste, and the agreed elitism of good taste, imposed on us all by an educated elite.

His garden is like a window in to his mind. He is a hoarder, a museum collector who never learned the lesson of less is more. To collect obsessively and gather together all the things he enjoys. Shapes, forms, and design influences abound in the garden, collected and grabbed almost greedily as they tickled Roy’s fancy. Topiary balls, long walks, Italian Renaissance style, Greek temples, finials and twiddly bits and a memory of lots and lots of balls. Everywhere. The struggle and low pay of his early years is in evidence in some of the cheaper finishes and concrete slabs, as he proudly points out in his audio pack. It is a poverty that a lot of ordinary people share, but still want a Greek temple in their own gardens, or a raised bed, or a cloud pruned topiary box.  The faults of the garden are clear, on the other hand it is packed full of the fun, the beautiful and the accessible, and gives us all permission to do what we want in our own gardens, despite the elitist horticultural fashionistas.

Testicular mania for a moment fills the eye and I quickly read the guide for reassurance, “and the traditions of Tudor and Stuart England”. Knot gardens of such intricacy my memory cannot untangle them, statues of heraldic figures, Britannia herself sitting serenely. Other influences fling themselves at the wanderer in the mayhem. I look back at the words. “The revivalist gardens of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras” proclaims the guide. Well that explains all the rooms which seem to have grown with as much planning as houses in a slum dwelling, higgledy piggledy where ever a new idea could be squeezed in.

Were Roy and his wife into theatre design? I can’t remember if that was one of their activities, but the rooms have a theatrical quality, a stage set for whatever idea is top of their creativity at that time.  Perhaps what the garden committee on the National Trust found most difficult was the lack of a planting scheme to hold each idea together. Are plants necessary in a garden at all would be a useful debate. The incidental use of shrubs and herbaceous perennials and bulbs in the garden goes against all planting rules. Colours clash, bare bits of earth abound, and there is no harmony in the planting. A magnolia stands, a beautiful specimen somewhere near the Hilliard Garden and the 50^th Birthday garden. But what is its purpose, why is it there behind a hedge in a bit of dead man’s ground between rooms?  The Orchard works as a sense of space with a purpose, and the cross roads in the middle leads the visitor out, but not to another sense of adventure but to indigestion before they try to find the way into the Elizabethan Tudor Walk.

The greatest folly perhaps, in terms of a garden of plants, is where Julia had her vegetable garden. I remember reading an article by Roy soon after her death in which he peers at her kingdom in the vegetable garden, full of growing things, rows with a planting schemes, and seasonal change. He is bewildered by the vegetable garden and its need for so much gardening. When we visit in 2016 I notice the whole thing has been ripped out and the Colonnade Court put up in its place, in honour of his wife. It is designed to be seen from the house so that Roy can look up to his wife’s memory from his front door. A charming idea full of tenderness to his wife, a bit clumsily executed in detail, with a Greek temple to suit any poolside in surrey. But not a garden designer’s solution. I do wonder how Julia would have felt about it.

This is the central point of the debate. Roy Strong, whatever he claims, is not a garden designer nor plants man.  He is a character of the late 20^th century, proud of his humble back ground and wanting to share his thrill of beauty and space with all.  He is not elitist and has rejected the good taste of the fashionistas with his gaudy flowery shirts and cravats. The dancing bears in the formal Italianate garden, the rickety viewing platform, and the multiple layers of topiary hedges using all sorts of plants in a mishmash of knot garden, temples, statuary, wild areas and long walks. All there because Roy and his wife liked them before they moved on to the next creative idea. It is a smorgasboard of a garden, an uncontrolled feast that the specialist chefs at the Hilton, or the Savoy would rebel against, as much as the trained horticultural world has done, as untrained, unruly, lacking in balance and not enough structure in the planting.  

The National Trust with its experts, so carefully trained in all subjects are technically correct that it is not a garden with balance, form and structure between shapes and plants. That it fails in achieving a harmony based on design principles. But I think they missed the point of Roy Strong’s lifelong message that beauty and fun can be killed by good taste. That all of us can do what we like in our own spaces and call it beautiful.

And who are the National Trust to say what is right and wrong in gardening or right in what is beautiful. Visit it yourself and have fun, but take some indigestion pills if you are a garden fashionista.  My husband, a non gardener, loved it. I got indigestion.