A quieter way of gardening

The Chain, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire The family home of Sarah Price Close artistic observation combined with a deep horticultural intelligence has made Sarah Price one of the finest garden designers today. Tilly Ware visits her at home, where she is experimenting to magical effect

- Tilly Ware

THE best gardening is experimental, as well as ephemeral. Designer Sarah Price’s garden, tucked into the shadow of Sugar Loaf mountain in Abergavenny, has these qualities in profusion. Ms Price moved to The Chain, a large Victorian house divided into flats by her grandparents, in 2013. Her walled garden is a sheltered, triangular slice leading east from the house, its high walls in the same greyish-pink stone. This part has been gardened productively, with vegetables, fruit and flowers, since the 1870s; the original greenhouse stretches down the north side, the deep staging crammed with cucumbers and grapevines clambering on the pink, lime-washed walls. At the furthest corner, a tunnel dips under the lane that borders the east wall, emerging into a wilder grassy orchard. The River Cibi rushes along the south perimeter and a fern-strewn path by the water’s edge circles back to the front lawns. The site covers two acres and Ms Price has plans for all of it, but the walled garden has so far seen the biggest transformation.

Ms Price tried annuals and dahlias at first, but realised that ‘to look good, it needed much more regular care: the seed bank was huge with a lot of weeds’. She removed the first eight inches of topsoil and filled it with recycled sand, gravel and shingle, a weed-free substrate that could grow the sun-loving perennials she desired. The existing gravel paths allowed for walking amid the planting and Ms Price added criss-crossing tracks into the beds. She used different mediums for trialling and observing the effects—‘as a designer, you need an experimental aspect’—with pebbles around succulent sea kale or sand sweeping the feet of Ligustrum lucidum. Some paths have developed their own ecosystems, such as the self-sown mix of bird’s-foot trefoil, Euphorbia