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A conversation with Sarah Price about how she designs her planting schemes is fascinating. She works in an unfettered way, with no specific planting plans but an intuitive sense of the plants that will work well together to form the nature-inspired compositions she is known for. Her gardens are like exquisite paintings, comprising layers of detail with a gentle succession of plants that provide interest for most of the year. This summer combination comes from Sarah’s own garden on the edge of Abergavenny. Here, she has created different areas and habitats, including a dry garden in the old walled kitchen garden.

For several years after she took over the plot, Sarah’s kitchen garden was inspired by the Dutch garden Priona, where a wonderful hotchpotch of flowers, fruit and vegetables are grown alongside each other in a rich ecosystem. But, despite its relaxed aesthetic, in this guise, the space needed constant maintenance to prevent it from tipping over into wilderness. So, in 2016, Sarah removed the topsoil to use in another part of the garden, and made a new experimental, low-nutrient garden with locally sourced recycled sand, gravel and rubble.

Arranged in a mosaic of substrates, with varying particle sizes – from sand to 10mm gravel and 20mm rubble – the dry garden is now home to an incredibly diverse range of native wildflowers and Mediterranean plants, which bloom in waves through the seasons. ‘I made it because I wanted to experiment with different plant communities that can grow in really dry conditions,’ says Sarah. ‘The plants grow slower and harder here, so there is less competition between them, and the complexity and succession can be quite amazing.’

All this diversity can be visually confusing, so one of the ways Sarah creates her compositions is to have two or three dominant species that anchor the planting throughout the year. In her own garden, these include sea kale (Crambe maritima), Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana and Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’. These are all plants that give an extremely long season of interest and they create a framework around which the other plants can come and go. Happily growing in the coarsest rubble substrate, the sea kale pushes up through the ground in spring, with purple-tinged foliage forming wonderful, tall sculptural shapes, from which branched sprays of small white flowers are sent up in summer. Euphorbia seguieriana subsp. niciciana forms neat, rounded mounds with lime-green blooms from late spring to August; in richer soils, Sarah says, it looks more ungainly and can flop. The same can be true for origanum, which thrives in the sandy substrate, with dusky purple flowers through July and August.