Portmeirion
An intricate illusion
20 March 2024
By: James Lennox
In the Jerry Herman musical, Mame, there's a particularly rousing first act number in which the title character, bemoaning her financial woes following the Wall Street Crash, decides that “We need a little Christmas, right this very minute”.
She had it easy. I've just had to endure one of the wettest winters on record. When it's not been raining, the wind has been howling - neither of which is particularly conducive to gardening. Rather than dragging out the Christmas tree in March or embarking on building an ark, I decided I needed some colour injecting into my life. Preferably involving plants.
And so, to Portmeirion in North Wales. It's no great mystery why the architect Clough Williams-Ellis chose this site to build his fantasy holiday village - a project that occupied him for around 50 years from 1925 onwards. (I empathise - it'll take at least that long before La Corolla is ready to receive visitors.) He recognised that this wasn't just another rugged, rocky promontory that Wales does so well. Instead, a Victorian shelter belt offers some protection from the prevailing wind, while the village itself was built in a cove facing south over a wide tidal estuary. Frosts are few and far between, rainfall is high.
Perfect growing conditions for the plants I love best - conifers, ferns, rhododendrons and other goodies that seem to have fallen from grace. (My tastes are either a hundred years out of date or on the cusp of a comeback.) But before I get carried away in the woods, a word or two about the village itself. It's the main reason visitors flock to Portmeirion and the primary focus of its creator.
Colourful is the first word that springs to mind. Followed closely by whimsical, fantastical, Baroque, joyful, kitsch, amusing, riotous, entertaining and eye-catching. The buildings surrounding the village green form quite the ensemble. Some critics see an echo of Portofino, although Williams-Ellis denied being directly influenced by any one spot on the Italian Riviera.
Rather, it’s a gloriously shameless collection of architectural details, styles and effects - an onion dome here, a colonnade there, a frescoed ceiling, a bronze Buddha. Only his signature turquoise and gold-painted ironwork visually links Portmeirion to the much more sober and restrained Plas Brondanw up the road which he created as his private retreat.
Yes, this is a self-consciously designed tourist attraction, but perhaps that undersells it. Portmeirion is a three-dimensional stage set (inevitably beloved of television location scouts), the largest multi-component sculpture around, a giant art installation, a provocative, fully immersive experience. Is this real life? Or is it, as the song goes, just a fantasy? Years before Walt Disney produced his plastic version, here's a magic kingdom made of stone and stucco, all whipped up out of thin air for our delectation.
And there's equally impressive planting to boot. The obvious crowd-pleasers are packed into the village proper. As with the magpie-like architectural smash and grab, plant provenance is not a major concern here. This is not the place for native plant purists to convene an away-day. If it grows in these conditions and adds to the joy of nations (or ice-cream licking day-trippers - and I include myself in their ranks), then in it goes.
New Zealand is well represented with clipped hebes, variegated pittosporums and spiky drifts of phormiums. Bedding out is big - bulbs for spring, pelargoniums and other stalwarts later on. There are echiums and Euphorbia mellifera, Luma apiculata and Irish yews dressed up as Italian cypresses.
All appropriately quirky seaside planting, with ranks of Chusan palms (Trachycarpus fortunei) somehow looking less ridiculous than normal in this setting. But peer a little closer, beyond the mophead hydrangeas lying in wait for the summer season, and there are signs of a lively gardening mind at work.
An Edgeworthia chrysantha here, a cluster of agaves clinging to a rock slope there, cloud-pruned bay trees lining a walkway and further hints at the woodland’s horticultural delights dotted between the idiosyncratic buildings. A billowing camellia clashing with the painted stucco, a majestic Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) demonstrating its value as a specimen and not just as plantation fodder on a Highland bog, an Australian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) hugging the side of the town hall - all are just a little unexpected.
Venture up the steep slope to the Gwyllt woodlands and you could be forgiven for thinking that you've left all trace of artifice behind in the village below. Yes, there's a wildness to these 70 acres (reflected in the Welsh name) with its native populations of birch, oak and rowan and the far-reaching views of rugged coastline and treacherous sands. But again, like the village, this is very much a man-made creation.
Exotic plants were introduced from the 1850s onwards, first by Henry Seymour Westmacott, then by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and lastly, in the first part of the 20th century, by G.H. Caton Haigh, an ornithologist and authority on Himalayan plants, from whose estate Williams-Ellis purchased the woodland in 1941.
To the very few visitors who break free of the village's attractions, the woodland's botanical treasures are the cause of many a double-take. Now, I'm a huge fan of dense planting, a committed adherent to the “more is more” school of gardening. But the array of specimens piled up, seemingly at random here, is bewildering. There's a distinct danger of missing the wood for the trees, particularly as labels are few and far between, adding further to the illusion that these plants must all just have drifted in on the wind.
Look up and the canopy is composed of towering Douglas firs (Pseudotsuga menziesii), Monterey pines (Pinus radiata), Sequoiadendron giganteum, Pinus muricata and Cryptomeria japonica. Over 40 species of eucalypts hang precariously above the sea, their leaves perfectly mirroring the silvery-blue expanse.
The mid-storey is dominated by rhododendrons (R. sinogrande, macabeanum, sinofalconeri, maddenii among other species, with 20th century hybrids and azaleas akimbo), eucryphias, crinodendrons, groups of Maytenus boaria, Lomatia ferruginea, Schima wallichii, tree ferns and camellias, often strikingly juxtaposed.
And now it's time for a confession. I've never really seen eye-to-eye with camellias. Too often they seem to have yellowy foliage, wishy-washy pale pink flowers which brown at the merest hint of frost or rain, and a sulky demeanour that adds little to the garden for 50 weeks of the year.
Well, I think I'm on the verge of being converted to their charms. Perhaps it was their weedlike profusion, their ruddy good health, their vigourous upward growth or their sheer variety (japonicas, Williamsii hybrids, plain old species, flowers ranging from deepest burgundy to fuchsia pink to clotted cream to arctic white), but when planted en masse in a woodland of exotic treats, even I admit they look the part.
More of a contrast in atmosphere to the village it would be hard to find. It’s a refuge from the crowds, there's not a hint of commercialism, it's sensitively maintained but not to the extent of feeling scrubbed for its next starring role on TV. New arrivals are filling the very few gaps - and who doesn't love a Fitzroya cupressoides or a Podocarpus salignus?
There are few designed structures in the woodland, precious few architectural twiddles, merely the odd Chinese-style bridge or tea house, a rotunda or a gazebo. Here the artifice all lies in the plant choices, the exoticism of the planting subtly playing up the otherworldliness of the village below.
Of course I was vaguely aware of where I was the whole time, but the sheer incongruity of finding an exotic woodland next door to an Italianate village in a remote and rugged corner of North Wales might be unsettling for some. For me, it was invigorating, energising and just the splash of colour I needed at this time of year.
More information here: https://portmeirion.wales/
