Countynews
Anne tells her story
Monmouthshire gardener Anne Wareham, who designed and created the garden at the Veddw near Devauden, with photographer husband Charles Hawes, has published a book about her journey through the world of horticulture.
In the introduction to her book, The Bad Pupils from Castle Park Primary School, Caldicot, with their time capsule Pupils leave lasting legacy
Pupils in Monmouthshire have preserved their special memories on the site of their new £1.5m Learning Plaza at Castle Park Primary school in Caldicot, which will be opened in September 2011. The time capsule burial ceremony was organised by Willmott Dixon, the construction firm which has worked in partnership with Monmouthshire’s 21st Century Schools Team and Property Services on a number of projects, including the design, build and opening of what will be the first Learning Plaza in Monmouthshire.
Attended by members of the School Council, Governors, staff
as well as County Councillors and representatives from Monmouthshire and Willmott Dixon, the event was an opportunity to celebrate the new site and for pupils to preserve a part of their lives by selecting objects that they would like to bury underneath the site, for future generations to one day discover. Among items buried were a school uniform, newspapers, photographs of the Royal Wedding, a selection of school literature and drawings created by the children.
The capsule will be sealed with a commemorative plaque to mark the occasion.
Climbing centre set to rock town
Abergavenny is to become home to Gwent’s first dedicated bouldering centre. Huw Charrington, a serving
detective with the Metropolitan Police in London, will open the centre in a warehouse on an industrial estate on the outskirts of town. Mr Charrington, 34, of
Westminster, has won approval from Monmouthshire Council to set up ‘Aber Rocks’ along with a café and small shop on Castle Meadows Park
in a unit that housed a brewery until recently. Work to transform the unit is
expected to take up to eight weeks and the former King Henry VIII Comprehensive pupil hopes to open the centre in August. Mr Charrington, who will relocate
to the county, has been a keen climber for the past 15 years and said climbers currently have to travel to Trefforest where Wales’ only other dedicated bouldering centre is based.
Tempered Gardener, Anne admits to being a round peg in a square hole. She sees gardening as a serious and even outrageous art form, is keen to experiment and has little patience with received ideas about how everything in the garden should be done. She says in the book: “I began to get tired of hearing every garden described as ‘lovely’. I visited many of them and often found them to be banal and uninspired. I got bored of reading endless descriptions of plants and very little useful guidance as to how to use them together. I became impatient because i could find intelligent and challenging ideas in all sections of newspaper and magazines except the garden sections.”
From the strange (plant obsessives) to the everyday (deadheading and sharing a garden), by the way of paeans to favourite plants and thoughtful pieces on show gardens and status, this is an intelligent, pugnacious and engaging book. It also unflinchingly conveys the challenges, the hard work, the triumphs and failures behind the creation and development of a substantial contemporary garden.
Revealing discussions of the key elements and design decisions are illuminated by Charles Hawe’s superb photographs of the garden throughout the book.
Anne has written extensively on gardens in various publications and is a founding member of ‘thinkingardens’, a group set up with the support of the Royal Horticultural Society to encourage serious discussion of gardens.
Charles Hawes’ photographs regularly appear in national gardening magazines. The Bad Tempered Gardener, by Anne
Wareham with photographs by Charles Hawes, is published by Frances Lincoln Limited. Price: £16.99.
For more Monmouthshire news visit
www.monmouthshirecountylife.co.uk/news 11
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