A conversation with Sarah Price about how she designs her planting schemes is fascinating. She works in an unfettered way, with no specific planting plans but an intuitive sense of the plants that will work well together to form the nature-inspired compositions she is known for. Her gardens are like exquisite paintings, comprising layers of detail with a gentle succession of plants that provide interest for most of the year. This summer combination comes from Sarah’s own garden on the edge of Abergavenny. Here, she has created different areas and habitats, including a dry garden in the old walled kitchen garden.
For several years after she took over the plot, Sarah’s kitchen garden was inspired by the Dutch garden Priona, where a wonderful hotchpotch of flowers, fruit and vegetables are grown alongside each other in a rich ecosystem. But, despite its relaxed aesthetic, in this guise, the space needed constant maintenance to prevent it from tipping over into wilderness. So, in 2016, Sarah removed the topsoil to use in another part of the garden, and made a new experimental, low-nutrient garden with locally sourced recycled sand, gravel and rubble.
Arranged in a mosaic of substrates, with varying particle sizes – from sand to 10mm gravel and 20mm rubble – the dry garden is now home to an incredibly diverse range of native wildflowers and Mediterranean plants, which bloom in waves through the seasons. ‘I made it because I wanted to experiment with different plant communities that can grow in really dry conditions,’ says Sarah. ‘The plants grow slower and harder here, so there is less competition between them, and the complexity and succession can be quite amazing.’
All this diversity can be visually confusing, so one of the ways Sarah creates her compositions is to have two or three dominant species that anchor the planting throughout the year. In her own garden, these include sea kale (Crambe maritima), Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana and Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’. These are all plants that give an extremely long season of interest and they create a framework around which the other plants can come and go. Happily growing in the coarsest rubble substrate, the sea kale pushes up through the ground in spring, with purple-tinged foliage forming wonderful, tall sculptural shapes, from which branched sprays of small white flowers are sent up in summer. Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana forms neat, rounded mounds with lime-green blooms from late spring to August; in richer soils, Sarah says, it looks more ungainly and can flop. The same can be true for origanum, which thrives in the sandy substrate, with dusky purple flowers through July and August.
- Eryngium yuccifolium
- Oenothera stricta 'Sulphurea'
- Origanum laevigatum 'Herrenhausen'
- Melica ciliata
- Allium tanguticum 'Summer Beauty'
- Cephalaria transsylvanica
- Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana
- Seseli hippomarathrum
- Catananche caerulea
- Lychnis coronaria
- Lotus hirsutus
- Allium flavum
- Zizia aurea
- Ligusticum lucidum
- Foliage of Geranium pratense 'Midnight Reiter'
- Verbena officinalis 'Bampton'
- Helianthemum 'Rhodanthe Carneum'
- Linaria maroccana 'Licilia Azure'
Another way to bring cohesion to this meadow-inspired planting is to repeat colours and shapes through the space – but not necessarily with identical plants. ‘For traditional planting schemes, it is often said that you need at least 20 or so of one species. However, I like echoing the shapes and the colours with different plants, so you build up that sense of repetition, but with more species diversity,’ says Sarah. For example, the rounded, purplish flowers of the origanum are echoed in the Allium tanguticum ‘Summer Beauty’ and in two forms of scabious that have slightly different pale mauve button-like blooms – the British wildflower Knautia arvensis and the annual Turkish scabious Cephalaria trans-sylvanica, which lightly self-seeds in the sand.
The lime green of the euphorbia is picked up elsewhere in Bupleurum falcatum, Zizia aurea and by yellow Allium flavum. Dozens of kinds of grasses – from Sesleria nitida to Oryzopsis miliacea – wander through the space, similar in colour but all slightly different in shape. Silvers and greys are dotted around in the form of Eryngium yuccifolium, Stachys byzantina and the unusual Lotus hirsutus, an extremely tough and durable plant that looks as good in seed as it does in flower. Brighter colours are used sparingly, with sudden bursts of bright pink Lychnis coronaria, electric purple Verbena officinalis ‘Bampton’ and beautiful Cistus x argenteus ‘Silver Pink’ to catch the eye. ‘At some points of the year, the colour is so dreamy and incredible. And at other times, it is richer and quieter,’ says Sarah. ‘It’s the type of planting that you have to sit down to look at, and then all the intricacies can be seen.’
Alive with insects and birds, and intensely romantic in the summer evening light, Sarah’s walled garden is now much less time-consuming to look after. None of the plants are ever watered and the only maintenance is editing out unwanted seedlings in spring, then cutting everything back in February. ‘Conventional borders take so much time to look after and it seems wrong to be creating high-maintenance gardens today,’ she says. ‘I design for beauty first and foremost, and I hope I make gardens that people instinctively want to be in. But I’m also designing for sustainability and it just so happens that my aesthetic brings nature along with it’