a recent issue of Spadework - Cardiganshire Horticultural Society

cheerful soul, not wholly confident of his plant names, and we had
some animated discussions over the affinities of some of the more
unusual shrubs.
Like most visitors we first made our way to the walled garden,
within which Lady Sybil had been responsible for the layout of a
formal garden in the 1920s. At the top of the garden is a stone
pillared arcade well wound with climbing roses, which replaces a
former orangery, and there are three formal concrete-edged lily
pools set in a box-edged rose garden. The pools have period
gravity-fed fountains, one a diverging spray from a metal pole
standing upright in a pile of random rubble, another a mere piddle
arcing up 9 inches or so before dropping back into an indented
cushion of moss. The trees and shrubs along the top wall of the
garden are varied and outstanding. Unusual Chilean introductions
include the camphor-fragrant leaves of Peumus boldus and a hardy
climber, Mutisia ilicifolia, which has daisy flowers like an
osteospermum and seed heads like dandelion clocks. Among the
specimen trees on the slope below the giant Eucryphia cordifolia
was in bloom, a huge columnar tree speckled from top to bottom
with white buttercup blooms. We racked our brains to name other
autumn trees: a big sophora with deeply creviced bark, a catalpa,
Sciadopitys umbellata, magnolias, pieris and clerodendron.
Beyond the garden is a swampy area, deep in the giant leaves of
gunnera and presided over by fine swamp cypresses, Caucasian
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