Making Veddw Garden: 13 The Wood

Erythronium Pagoda in the Wood at Veddw Garden

 

I’m afraid you will need to engage your imagination first, because I have no photograph at all of the wood when we bought it. But it would have looked very much like this:

Bracken and bramble in the fields at Veddw

 

The Forestry Commission owned the two acre squarish wood when we arrived. Here it is – it’s the bit with the little conifers on, 528 and 527:

 

The Forestry had been using the Wood as an experimental site of Japanese larch and had felled them just before we arrived. The larch hadn’t stopped other native trees and shrubs from growing, and they mostly grew magnificently tall and straight because of being stuck amongst the larch.

 

We call the Wood Charles’s Wood if we ever call it anything but the Wood, because his persistence in asking the Forestry several times to sell it to us eventually paid off. (Though I got the mortgage to pay for it).

The Wood alongside it on the map, with the hardwood trees (it’s now the other way round – that wood is full of European Larch) has been called both ‘New Wood’, and ‘Vedw Wood’ on various maps, but our bit stays separate and discrete.

I ventured into our wood once in the first summer we owned it.

The bramble and bracken were taller than me and when I’d reached about the middle I got a bit scared that I’d not find my way out again. I was clutching a pair of shears, so I managed it. And subsequently made war on the two b’s. Successfully, I am proud to report.

So, what have we done with the wood since then? Well, we installed a telly. There is, perhaps, a tradition in Wales of abandoning machinery and vehicles in fields. So we have heard. And here, next to our Wood, there is one:

Someone had fun getting it here.

 

So we kind of joined in, though we didn’t have a car to spare:

 

Once, there had never been a book on the gardens of Wales. Wales doesn’t quite exist in the British garden world: it’s sort of fallen off the side. BUT Charles and Stephen Anderton produced one! – Discovering Welsh Gardens: 20 of the liveliest Gardens Selected and Explored.

And then, (are we disaster prone or what?) in a development that made us spit, Helena Attlee published a book on the Gardens of Wales in the very same month.

I’m mentioning this because it will make you laugh Helena was terribly disapproving of our television in the wood. Which was a bit of a blow, of course. But it’s still there.

As is the sculpture Charles made to honour the elm which came, grew and, inevitably, collapsed.

 

 

The Wood has a sweet variety of trees and shrubs – beech, oak, hornbeam, viburnum, ash, prunus, sorbus and yew. And holly, but as you will have guessed, devastated by holly blight.

And as it’s outside our fencing, the Wood is savaged by deer, rabbits and squirrels.

 

Deer damage.

 

So we decided after some difficult years to simply keep the large trees which we inherited and stop trying to add to them. Which, I think now, adds to the Wood, because the trees are rather magnificent and they are wonderfully visible.

 

The biggest thing we have done in the wood – or, once again, Charles has done,- is plant erythroniums. With only one exception Charles has planted 100 Erythronium Pagoda bulbs in the Wood every year since we got the wood. That’s 30 odd years: you do the maths. So they are our annual treat. yards and yards and yards of them.

 

 

We added a couple of White Beauty, but then decided to be purist and stayed with Pagoda. Which doesn’t seed, just clumps up.

Erythronium White Beauty

 

(We have succumbed to other erythroniums in the Coppice though. We are almost human. And here is the best place to see them in the UK)

Erythronium revolutum – see here too.

 

I’m delighted that since we have been managing the Wood the bluebells have returned and are spreading – maybe into competition with the erythroniums. Which could be anxiety provoking. Of course. Gardening is simple?

 

 

We had one tree down, in Storm Arwen – a huge beech:

 

I’ll tell that story another time.

 

The gate back into the garden tells a little of the Veddw story, from an account of a Perambulation of the Manor Of Chepstow. (A perambulation of a manor is an official walking tour of the manor’s land, to define and record its boundaries. In this case as part of a regular survey of the manor to discover what’s going on)

You will have gathered – I love this stuff.

 

I don’t think many of our garden visitors venture into the wood. But it is a part of the garden that I love and not just for the erythroniums. And so does he:

 

Charles

I think I’ve been a bit of a misery with some of my comments here, but the wood is a source of great delight. Yes, its annoying when the deer have a go at the trees but mostly they’ve just scarred them. And I feel excited whenever we disturb these beautiful creatures wandering through it. And amazingly nothing much has bothered my erythroniums. And the beech and oaks have grown so tall, as they had to reach for the light when they were surrounded by the larch: they are truly majestic.

And more pictures to relish:

 

 

Whose bone was this???

 

Trees can make pools. This one is waiting for some rain.

 

Magical light

 

Stem madness