The MedievalModernistBritish garden designer Arne Maynard is possessed of a unique talent: restoring centuries-old national treasures with of-the-moment ideas and techniques. Patrick Kinmonth reports.

room with a viewAn expectant Lady Edward Manners, wearing Valentino on the lawn at Haddon Hall, Derbyshire. Details, see In This Issue.Portraits by Ralph Mecke. Fashion Editor: Kathryn Neale.Gardens photographed by Allan Pollok-Morris. Sittings Editor: Miranda Brooks.

Only connect. . . . The mysterious phrase tolls like a bell through E. M. Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, and it rings in my head as I drive across the high-suspension bridge from England to Wales to visit Arne Maynard, one of Great Britain’s most-wanted garden designers. The tarnished mirror of the estuary far below gives way to a rain-

soaked landscape that has for centuries inspired poets and provoked art: In 1798, Wordsworth wrote a poem centered on his visits to the nearby ruins of Tintern Abbey, which changed the course of literature, and the visionary artist J.M.W. Turner painted the ruins many times. Only connect: England to Wales, the past to the present, a house to its garden, a place to its spirit. Maynard lives here, in a house known as Allt-y-bela (which translates from Welsh as “high wooded hillside of the wolf”) in a corner of southeast Wales. No wonder.

Fantastically layered topi-aries of beech and yew soon announce Maynard’s domain as clearly as any sign, though the way itself continues (by his design) up into the hills along a drover’s road that, since the fifteenth century, has pre-sented travelers with a mar-vel, now Maynard’s home: a medieval tower house. Five centuries later its high walls and mullioned windows have been colored by Maynard a deep, traditional burnt apri-cot, connecting him, typical-ly, to a place lost in time but fashioned in the present—in a way, his very design signature.

For years now, Maynard has been reviving nationally important gardens such as the Elizabethan-era terraces at Haddon Hall—a grand twelfth-century Derbyshire house presently occupied by Lord and Lady Edward Manners—as well as making new gardens all over Europe, North America, and beyond. His extensive work for private cli-ents from the U.K. to the Mideast reveals his particular genius: the ability to make a brand-new scheme seem gracefully, often grandly, but always gorgeously settled and old.

A fascination for the romantic past of these islands, along with a passion for making an evocative garden to join a period house to its surroundings—all while keeping a weather eye on innovation—is one of the abiding principles of landscape design in England. Whether at Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst, Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote, Christopher Lloyd’s Great Dixter, or in Maynard’s own work at Haddon Hall, it is the tension between the respect for his-tory and the need for reinvention that drives decisions. No surprise, then, that as we wander through his own garden, Maynard, 50—who possesses a gardener’s deliberate pace

and demeanor—refers to the plants as “players.” We climb a long encircling turf ramp he had cut to give the

house’s back some breathing space. Just as Maynard himself sometimes seems an extension of his landscapes, he often cre-ates garden forms that echo shapes from their periphery; this ramp is inspired by similar scorings made in the fields by the drover’s road. He describes the resulting amphitheater as “a pleasing result of needing to solve hundreds of years of damp in the house—of clearing all this earth away from the walls to drain them.” In exchange, he got a theater where Shakespeare’s plays are now performed, along with a lovely vantage point for looking at the tower and chimneys of the house and a satisfy-ing walk to one of his most persistent trademarks: a vegetable garden with neat raised beds edged in oak.

“Gardening is basically a slow affair,” he says, weeding as he talks. “The deep work can take decades to mature, but a vegetable garden is immediately satisfying. We can have one up and running in three weeks, with a bunch of radishes on

the kitchen table from seeds the client has planted them-selves.” But while he likes to start new garden projects here to foster an early rush of enthusiasm, rediscovering the heart of an established gar-den often involves a colossal edit of trees and shrubs that have taken hold over years. “It’s like clutter in an old house,” he says. “It’s hard to part with, but after it has gone you can breathe again. Replanting is much faster, but taking away is as crucial as anything I bring to a garden.”

Almost from the start, Maynard knew the pain of things taken away. His fa-ther died when he was nine months old, leaving his Ger-man mother to helm the fam-ily ship of four boys, Arne the last, in Dorset in southern England. His godmother, a music teacher, spotted some-thing different in him—some kind of creative spark—when

he was seven or eight, and nurtured it, taking the young boy (at his request) to landmark gardens including the nearby Cranborne Manor, which supplied a seminal moment in his education as a gardener. The former Mollie Wyndham-Quin, now the Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury, had created a gar-den there that prepared her for the later triumph of her hugely grand garden at Hatfield House to the north of London, where Elizabeth I grew up during the Tudor dynasty. Maynard remembers spotting Lady Salisbury working at Cranborne, a butler rattling across the lawn pushing trays groaning with fam-ily silver after she had spent a long afternoon editing borders. Filled with nostalgic and evocative plants and built on frames of bold symmetry, her gardens are marked by the same sense of history that captured Maynard. “At Hatfield she combined plants of distinction with the wild and humble things that

field of dreamsBeech topiaries spring up

from a meadow of oxeye daisies at Haddon Hall.

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making a racquetAbutting a long-ago games pavilion: a badminton court with room to spare.

wallflowersMaynard edited the roses for which Haddon Hall is famous.

don’t fence me inMaynard (left), with Lord and Lady Edward and Maynard’s German longhaired pointer, Rosie, in the meadows below Haddon Hall.

from the ground upAstrantia and verbascum in watercolor drifts are encouraged to self-seed.

green acresMaynard proposed

these mown terraces to catch the last of

the light from over the Derbyshire peaks.

form and functionWildflowers bring color to

summer; copper-beech cubes bring shape in winter.

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intelligent design

At Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire,

Maynard’s garden, as ever, reflects the DNA of the nearby house.

garden of earthly delightsWisteria envelops the stone terrace at Appleton Manor.

might grow in an Elizabethan hedgerow,” he says. “It was the very quintessence of relaxed confidence, along with the very English ability to never lose a deep sense of the country.” The same attitude has distinguished Maynard’s work ever since.

“Arne’s work is always inspiring,” says the landscape de-signer Miranda Brooks. “It’s immaculate and inventive, while staying firmly in a very English garden language.”

His was not a vocation that announced itself easily. “It was as if, after all the hard work of my mother bringing us up, to be a simple gardener was some kind of a betrayal,” he says. He began studying architecture, much to the chagrin of his early instructors. “My teachers were hor-

rified at my passion for wood, stone, and the vernacular,” Maynard says. “They were all modernists who turned their noses up at artisan traditions—at carpenters and plasterers.” In short order, he dropped out and fled to California, a place that had the virtue of being both far away and opposite to everything he knew.

Maynard describes how he discovered himself in San Fran-cisco with deep emotion, even now. “I was like an exhausted, fallow field,” he says. “Seeds and soil and growing had all become second nature—and I finally realized that I was just going to have to be myself, which meant to be a gardener, and that was that.” A longing for the dramatic evolution of the English seasons—combined with a long-distance relationship with William Collinson, whom he’d met as a teen and who has been his partner ever since—lured him back home.

After a stint apprenticing with Peter Hone, the renowned dealer in antiquarian statuary and antiques, Maynard began to make his first tentative designs for gardens. “Peter made it happen,” Maynard says now. “At the start, my designs were for places to put the pieces that a client had bought from him.” Now, of course, they are rather more than that.

His unique ability to impart a kind of instant natural patina to a landscape is a sleight-of-hand art achieved, in part, by erasing just enough of the design to suggest that what you are seeing is a revival of something overgrown or partially re-claimed. Maynard is also fond of using overgrown and cloudy crisscrossed parterres of box to reflect the lead-latticed win-dows of Allt-y-bela. “The low hedges are partly rubbed out, like threadbare tapestries,” he says, and they’re partly full of the plants he loves: early-species tulips, framed by fences of pleached and espaliered crab apples; fritillaries and aquilegia in meadows rich with bluebells and orchids, which surrender in season to crowded roses and lilies, which finally give place to orchards: apple, quince, pear, and autumn fruit.

“If you supply the right suggestion, your mind fills in the gaps and lets you dream,” Maynard says. It is a romantic method, and a deceptively simple one. His work brings the magnificent gardens at Haddon Hall into harmony with the great rambling house—one border, for example, born of the amazing tapestries that hang inside its walls, is made entirely of plants used for textile dye—and at Appleton Manor in Oxfordshire, another major project, the Arts and Crafts–style house now has a garden in deep conversation with Detmar Blow’s extraordinary twenties restoration.

Only connect. . . . More than a century later, Forster’s edict—his exhortation, his imperative—is literally alive and well and growing deeper in Arne Maynard’s gardens. @

passing fanciesBox hedging and

Persicaria bistorta Superba in the kitchen

garden (above); a view of yew topiary inside the Appleton

Manor courtyard.

built to scaleRambler roses climb a wall at

Appleton Manor.

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