Times writer Stephen Anderton invites you to his hillside garden in the Black Mountains

In 2025 the National Garden Scheme has welcomed a host of new gardens including New Inn Farm in Abergavenny, home to garden writer Stephen Anderton.

This enclosed flower garden is a lush mix of modern and traditional perennials interspersed with clipped evergreens. Specialities include ferns, succulents and South African plants. There are simple green terraces retained by sculpted hedges offering valley and mountain views. The garden is full of scented shrubs, bulbs and meadow grass adjoin a small orchard and a magical, steep 15 acre, riverside oak woodland, maintained for its carpet of mosses.

Here, Stephen reflects on hot summer days in the garden:

I can’t decide if I like these hot summer days or not. The plants go glassy-eyed. Petals don’t drop. I have musk roses and philadelphus that would normally have shed a week ago but the flowers remain, toughing it out on the plant. You have to admire them. And hydrangeas in tubs on the terrace, drinking like it’s Saturday night in the Queen’s Head, are building flower-heads visibly by the hour, so long as they get that drink. Without it they wilt, even the buds.

Plants still to flower seem to be biding their time, dry-rooted. All the phlox, thank goodness, are waiting for rain to open and fill the air with that peppery scent (phlox and regale lilies follow on from a dozen philadelphus and as many Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’; I like the garden properly invaded with perfume, not squirted). The pink red-twigged ceanothus ‘Marie Simon’ (yes, pink) looks totally at ease in the heat, which I guess is what you’d expect from a Californian, and up and down the front steps dozens of mealy-white pigs’ ears (Cotyledon orbiculare) lie back and smile as rogue stems of the dusty-miller grape vine (Vitis vinifera ‘Incana’) tickle their underbellies.

The great thing, though, is that this isn’t a drought yet; there is moisture below. The grass may be starting to yellow where the soil is thin but where there’s shade plants are still looking lush. Towering green veratrums always look super-cool. Hostas actually like it pretty dry. They’re a plant I used to love to hate as a young man and I’ve still no time for dwarfs, but I’ve got the bug now for the specials: seething, verdigris ‘Restless Sea’, ‘Valley’s Red Scorpion’ like golden rhubarb, ‘Jade Cascade’ with pale green tongues the length of your forearm. In big square pots are delicate forests of creeping ferns: Araiostegia and Leptolepia. The coarse leaves of colchicums have fried off, of course, and I’m cutting them away or digging them up to split and give away (they bulk up so well).

Mind you, this garden as a whole is short of shade. For shade we have to go to the wood, which is moss: moss and 100 year-old oaks, and nothing else whatsoever. Just light and shade. Acres of it. It looks as if it does it by itself. I wish! My daughter had her wedding down here and when everyone walked back up through the wood at midnight, we had a flautist playing way back in the trees. I wanted a faun or a nymph to do it but you just can’t get them these days.

New Inn Farm is open for By Arrangement visits from July to September for groups of between 12 and 32. Please contact Stephen to discuss your requirements and arrange a date for a group or bespoke visit.
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