Bryan's ground - other voices, other rooms

Bryan’s Ground occupies a genius site, with wooded hills and rolling fields around. Below the garden, just temptingly in view at times, a winding tributary of the great River Wye relentlessly eats out its own course.

I visited on the penultimate day of their opening for this year. It was either that or I would have missed it for another year. Their famed Siberian irises were of course long over, but any garden design of this size, with this amount of structure should be worth a view at any time of year. Because it is the spaces and flow that I am looking at.

Of course I found much more. These guys have taste – even the car park is a gracious curve lined with pollarded trees. But geometric formality is big here with topiary, numerous hedged rooms through which you are drawn by focal points which are often just simple distant stone vases. I suppose if you are lucky enough to have arts and crafts buildings, passages and rooms are the inevitable garden vernacular which the place suggests.

The Sunken Garden is beautifully simple with a texture thing going on. Classic box and yew structures emerge from a sea of wafting fennel studded with both lilies and daylilies . But throughout the garden as a whole relaxed planting is juxtaposed with the formal structure. Lanky teasels erupt from the very paving stones.

And in the old kitchen garden, despite being weighed down by the wild and woolly Marches weather, campanulas and clematis wowed. The Dutch Garden is stark and almost mournful - a complete change of pace. Elsewhere there is also quirkyness.  The Arts and Crafts outbuildings themselves somehow suggest tall giants live inside.

 You come across arrangements of anything from suitcases to complex pieces of very dead ivy trunk. Recherché and rusting metal is a passion – lord knows I like scrap (!!) but the kitchen garden postively clatters and clanks with it. The Greenhouse is like a jewel box with pelargonium flowers and its tinking tiled pool. After a while I began to see everything as an installation. Maybe this was just a pile of forgotten pots under the greenhouse bench or was it deliberate.

All this may suggest the merely pretty, but for example the supporting design framework for the decoration is strong. And out in the arboretum there is the same juxaposition of formal and informal. An amazing allee of poplars with sentinel yews below marches through long seeding grasses.  You encounter  a square of cherry trees close planted like the woods in a ucello painting. It is all a bold and brave endeavour.

So I loved it? Yes undoubtedly. My reservation is whether there aren't too many rooms. I mean how many rooms do you need? Looking at the map you do see how complex the garden is close to the house and that is actually the effect on the ground. They will be all too familiar with it, but we as visitors either follow the plan or the nose. I am a great one for the nose. I am also a great one for looking at gardens cold, no research, just how it seems. I did wonder afterwards whether I had actually seen them all. 

  

And certainly fewer rooms could have amounted to broader corridors and areas which would have had more spatial value and be easier to maintain. And I could also have done with more openness. Was it a need for shelter , a reverence for that design staple, division and the consequent sense of enclosure, or a passion for secrecy which saw the space so parceled up?

I wondered whether establishing and guarding your territory was part of the whole marches historical legacy. But there are times when it all feels a bit claustrophobic. You think there is a door and walk towards it. But its just another reclaimed piece propped up against the wall. Perhaps this is all a game and my feeling means they've won!

Do you need two canals? The Dutch Canal I liked whole heartedly, but the wavy edged canal through the irises I found fussy and shallow (depth wise) with weirdly coloured sediment. It looked  great from the house end. But the other way round didn’t end satisfactorily in front of the house. For all its boldness this felt like a design add on.

Of course when we put on our clothes in the morning there will be those who take a different view of our wardrobe. And there is no reason why the same should not apply to how we arrange our gardens. Other people than me, other voices, will say different things.

But the thing that I most enjoyed was the sense that these guys had enjoyed themselves. The plotting, the planning, the arranging. There was a relaxed feel even to maintenance. The sense that at any time there might be a party. And it had all been done with love.

So worth the fiver? U bet!

R