Sarah Price's idyllic Abergavenny garden, filled with her experiments in resilient and low-intervention planting

Visitors were queuing up at the gate last summer to see Sarah Price’s garden, when it opened for the first time as part of the National Garden Scheme. I, like everyone else, was intrigued to see what this famously discreet and unassuming designer had done, having first visited the garden in 2015, two years after she moved there from London. Situated on the outskirts of Abergavenny with views of the Blorenge mountain, the house had belonged to Sarah’s grandparents, so the garden had a certain character that she was keen to retain. For several years, she simply lived with it, creating a vibrant ornamental kitchen garden within its walls, and managing existing shrubs and trees in the wider garden by clipping and gently shaping them.

In the walled garden, Sarah wanted initially to recreate the ethos of Priona, an interesting and beautiful garden created by the late Dutch plantsman Henk Gerritsen in the Netherlands. There, nature and all its processes were embraced within a structured framework of hedges, brickwork and mown paths. But she found managing it in this way was too labour intensive: ‘It needed a constant gardening presence to stop it looking too wild.’ So, in 2016, she redesigned this area, adding a top layer of crushed rubble, gravel and sand to create a low-nutrient substrate in which drought-tolerant plants could thrive. The result is breathtaking – a remarkable, ever-changing work of art with a community of plants interacting in a fine-spun mix of subtle colours and textures, alive with insects and birds.

‘I wanted to experiment with plants that grow in really dry conditions,’ says Sarah. ‘I laid it out like a mosaic with different depths of recycled sand, gravel and rubble, and I observe which plants self seed where. Because of the lack of nutrients, you can create really complex plant communities.’ She has found that plants that grow lush and tall in normal or rich soil are shorter and more robust in these harsher conditions. Some flower for longer; others that might flop in a rich soil make compact, domed shapes. ‘Generally, the plants are better behaved,’ she observes. ‘Field scabious flowers all summer long here, and the hollyhocks are shorter and stockier and don’t have rust.’

Designed with the look of a wild perennial meadow, the walled garden is planted with both native wildflowers and Mediterranean species, anchored with a few core plants that are repeated across the garden to hold the scene together and create unity. Sea kale, Crambe maritima, is one of these key plants, happy to grow in the coarser rubble, while Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana has a similar presence, its lime-green flowers blooming through summer to form ribbons that link all the other plants together. Grasses of different textures, such as airy Oryzopsis miliacea and bottlebrush Pennisetum macrourum, as well as umbellifers like Ligusticum lucidum, fill the gaps and emphasise the meadowy feel.