Feature Friday: A famous designer's own garden

 There aren't a lot of garden designers who people know by name. There are even fewer who people who don't garden know by name. Arne Maynard is one of them. Thanks to articles in Vogue, Town and Country, Elle Decor, the New York Times and many others, Maynard is known to a lot of non-gardeners as well.

I love looking at garden designers own gardens. Maynard's own Allt-y-bela in Wales combines so many interesting garden styles.

Can you even imagine driving up to a house and seeing this?

Tom Mannion photo / NYT

An orange house would certainly not be my first choice, but when I see it here, I can't imagine a more perfect color for this landscape.

The herb garden is surrounded by espalier crab apples and he has a lot of topiary shrubs on the property.

Check out how stunning those topiaries look in fall.

A maze of pruned copper beech shrubs makes for a dark path to this urn.

There are less formal areas as well. I don't think it would be a proper English garden without some hollyhocks. Don't you just love how these are sort of popping up out of that cobblestone walkway? I wish any hollyhocks I grew were so determined.

And check out his potager. I love how the rhubarb on the outside of the waddled fence softens it. Rhubarb is such a great plant structurally speaking (to say nothing of the fact that I love to eat it).

Tom Mannion / Gardenista photo

This last picture is actually from his previous garden at Guanock Hose, but I couldn't not include it. It is so fabulous.

There are no shortage of places to see examples of other gardens that Maynard has designed, but a good place to start is his website. He even offers (very expensive) garden design courses in his own gardens. Can you imagine how great that would be? 

Here's a description of the courses (which are offered over four days spanning four months, so I guess you'd have to pick and choose if you were to travel a great distance to attend):

On each of our days we'll be looking first at inspirational images of gardens in the season ahead, and then analyze what we need to do to achieve it. We'll look in detail at all the behind-the-scenes jobs that are so important to the finished look of the garden. It will be a mix of practical demonstrations and inspirational planting and design ideas.