“The garden is a test bed, but it’s also like a library or sketchbook that I can draw on for future schemes,” says Sarah Price, taking in the scene at her experimental walled garden in Abergavenny. It’s hard not to get lost in her painterly planting, where a haze of luminous plants in yellow, intense blue and purple are shrouded in clouds of bees, hoverflies and butterflies as soon as the sun emerges from passing clouds.
Price is one of the UK’s leading landscape designers with three RHS Chelsea Flower Show gold medals to her name. Her projects range from private gardens — including those at Monmouthshire’s Grade II*-listed Arts and Crafts house Wyndcliffe Court — to public schemes such as London’s Olympic Park and Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery.
In Abergavenny, she presides over a personal garden that is complex and layered, created by her family over seven decades. She moved to Wales in 2013 with her husband, Jack, and their two children and lives in the house that used to belong to her grandparents — both keen gardeners who for decades took part in the National Garden Scheme, opening their several-acre plot up to visitors. Price has taken over this tradition, too, and on June 15, will welcome the public into her private sanctuary alongside three other local gardens (pre-booking required via ngs.org.uk).
“Gardening was highly valued in my household,” she says of her formative years, growing up just outside London. One of five siblings, she would help her father on his “wild” allotment as a way of spending time with him away from everyone else, and in the long school holidays she would visit her grandparents in Abergavenny, roaming the garden in the shadow of the rolling Monmouthshire hills, “picking mulberries and running through an oxeye daisy meadow,” she recalls.
Today there are trees and shrubs planted over generations, including a group of semi-dwarf apple trees. Selected and planted by Price and her late father, they bring beautiful form and colour to an innovative wild orchard where grasses and perennials — including asters, towering thalictrums, sanguisorba and wild peonies (Paeonia mascula) — flourish alongside topiarised self-seeded oak and beech trees, acting as anchor points in the tangle of vegetation.
Plants here tend to be as close to the species as possible — adding to the wild feeling — such as Rosa “Partridge” which she says is a useful groundcover plant but will also scramble up over walls too. “I don’t like the hand of the gardener to be evident,” she says of the immersive space. “But you do have to go in and edit [in order] for it not to be messy.” As with her professional projects, here too there’s an emphasis on local and natural materials and reuse. They’ve recently added a pond and commissioned local artist Mick Petts to craft an arching bridge using a fallen wych elm.
Price’s own painterly approach to planting has roots in a fine art degree from Nottingham Trent University. Afterwards, she took a job as a gardener at Hampton Court Palace and enrolled in a garden design course. In 2006 she entered and won a Royal Horticultural Society competition with a gravel garden for the Hampton Court Flower Show. This was swiftly followed by two gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show, and an invitation to join the team designing the planting at London’s 2012 Olympic Park.
“Her style is so understated and gentle it’s hardly there,” says the writer and garden designer Mary Keen. “Plants look as though they had grown with no help from the gardener. Sarah is an artist and everything she does is considered, elegant and restful.”
It’s a sensitivity that is woven through her garden at Maggie’s Southampton, a facility for cancer-care patients, where the visual effects of her naturalistic, pointillist planting is acutely heightened by reflective walls. In her community garden at The Exchange Erith, a library turned arts hub in south-east London, meandering paths in gravel and reclaimed brick wind through ethereal plants.
In Abergavenny, that dreamlike quality is abundant in her own gravel garden (connected to the orchard via a Lilliputian tunnel that adults have to crouch their way through). Drought-tolerant perennials, biennials and annuals including salvias, geraniums, sedums, nepeta “Blue Cloud”, and billowy swaths of Scabiosa ochroleuca “Moon Dance”, are planted alongside Mediterranean shrubs and subshrubs such as Cistus x argenteus “Silver Pink”, Santolina and Lotus hirsutus. Numerous grasses — Pennisetum macrourum, Melica ciliata and Sesleria nitida — bring a diaphanous layer of texture and movement, and there are eight different varieties of euphorbia, adding acidic jolts of colour.
It’s a hotbed of trial and error. She originally planted into soil but the rich seedbed (built up over decades) made it almost impossible to keep up with the weeds. So she stripped the soil away and replaced it with three different sizes of recycled sand and gravel. “I’d heard about Peter Korn’s experiments with sand and I just thought I’d try recycled materials,” she explains. “It’s all about how the plant community interacts.” The lower nutrients result in shorter plants and more intricately knitted combinations, and because they are grown hard there is no need for staking or watering.
In another experiment she filled old cold frames with salvaged wall rubble and planted them with dark and glossy Aeoniums and glaucous Cotyledons. They’ve also made an excellent habitat for mining and solitary bees. “Often what gives an atmosphere is the biodiversity because it makes the garden feel comfortable and alive, and you feel part of something when you are immersed in the plants. It’s something we’ve all become dissociated from, it’s not an obvious thing — the movement, the sound — but it’s really deep.”
It’s impossible not to trace the threads of influence from this space back to her 2023 Chelsea Flower Show offering: the Nurture Landscapes Garden, which was inspired by the paintings and plants of the artist Cedric Morris and his garden at Benton End in Suffolk. There were Morris’s own exquisite bearded iris cultivars, spires of Angelica archangelica, euphorbias and delicate poppies, all offset with shimmering foliage of silver-leafed salvias and multi-stem Elaeagnus trees, while climbers including deep pink Rosa mutabilis and wisteria scaled the colour-washed pink walls.
Aesthetically, it was poetic and mesmerising, but it was innovative too, with a low-carbon, “reuse and recycle” philosophy; all features were made from waste products, including walls, bricks and planters — even the ropes surrounding the garden had been laboriously crafted over weeks using waste hops and brambles while furniture was made from fallen trees. (Her 2018 garden at the show took a similarly resourceful approach with rammed earth walls and recycled tiles but, says Price, back then, no one was interested at all in how sustainable her garden was.)
The seeds of that Cedric Morris-inspired garden were sown in 2015 when Price first saw the Benton irises that Sarah Cook, a former head gardener at Sissinghurst Castle Garden in Kent, had diligently amassed into a national collection. This spring, elements from Price’s Chelsea garden return to Benton End, where the atmospheric walled garden of the 16th-century house, which was gifted to the Garden Museum in 2021, is being reimagined by head gardener and Great Dixter-alumnus James Horner, and opening to the public next year.
The serendipity of the story is not lost on Price, who is an adviser on the project. “I always wanted the garden to go on somewhere and Benton End is going to be a creative hub for gardening,” she says. “It’s fantastic to know that the garden will have another life.”
Price’s garden is one of 18 featured in ‘Wonderlands: British Garden Designers at Home’ by Clare Coulson and published by Quadrille. Photographs by Éva Németh
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