A sustainable Spanish garden perfectly situated in its hillside landscape
The sound of the birdsong at dawn is almost deafening in Álvaro Sampedro’s hillside garden. Set apart from everyday life by a very rough and rutted track, which runs almost two miles up into the hills, the tranquil, contemporary garden is a veritable sanctuary – a place that invites you to slow down and be at one with nature. This charmed piece of land is situated in the verdant Tiétar Valley in central Spain, sheltered by the Sierra de Gredos mountains, which give it a unique, gentle microclimate.
Álvaro is one of a handful of forward-thinking Spanish garden designers creating sustainable, nature-led gardens throughout the country and further afield. Fifteen years ago, he left a career in law and finance to retrain as a landscape designer, setting up his own business in 2010. He feels passionately that gardens should be led by the environment. ‘Here in Spain, more people are starting to understand that our climate is not right for large expanses of grass and lawn,’ he says. ‘People are beginning to see the alternatives.’
Álvaro bought the land in the Tiétar Valley, about two hours’ drive west of Madrid, in 2018, and built a small stone dwelling at the top of the sloping site, now used as a weekend house. ‘The garden is a testing ground for my design work,’ he says. ‘We make gardens with low water requirements, so I am constantly trying out drought-resistant plants and experimenting with different planting combinations.’ The garden does not look remotely like an experiment, however. Spilling down the gentle valley slope, it is intensely beautiful, its hummocks, curves and muted colours echoing the contours of the wooded hills that lie beyond. It looks as if it has always been here and this is exactly the illusion that Álvaro hopes to create. ‘I want my interventions to be almost unnoticeable,’ he explains. ‘The garden is in the landscape and the landscape is in the garden.’
Before Álvaro began to clear and sculpt the land, the hillside was covered with dense scrub and bushes, but the garden area was already delineated by a series of old stone walls, which helped give it a feeling of age. To create structure, a number of huge glacial granite boulders had to be dug from the earth. Álvaro then positioned these to make sense of the space, mapping out curving paths around them and creating large planting beds that surround small, enclosed seating areas. At 2,000 square metres, the garden is not vast, yet it seems much bigger. New views and discoveries are opened up as you progress through it, hidden and then revealed to create a sense of mystery and expectation. When you first enter the garden, for example, the pivotal water feature – a slim, raised rectangular pool – is shielded from view by a dense planting of yew, so that its discovery comes as a wonderful surprise. After your eye has taken in the curving paths and soft, organic drifts of plants, the dramatic, geometric lines of the pool and its absorbing reflections are a complete contrast, demanding a different reaction and a different emotional response.
The planting is largely Mediterranean in character, with a backbone of tough, drought-tolerant shrubs. At the top of the garden, the small stone house – swathed in roses and other climbers, and shaded by a long, vine-clad pergola – looks as though it is being swallowed up by the hillside. A seating terrace is enveloped by undulating domes of Pistacia lentiscus and myrtle, with the branches of three statuesque white mulberry trees overhead, their canopies casting just the right amount of shade for the area beneath.
Further down the slope, the evergreens become less dense, broken up by soft grasses and the mauve spires of Perovskia atriplicifolia and other sun-loving perennials. Silvery-blue Teucrium fruticans is clipped into different-sized domes, while Cistus x skanbergii, the dwarf pink rockrose, makes lumpy hummocks. Some of these plants, or different forms of them, grow wild in this region of Spain. Rockroses, the strawberry tree (Arbutus unedo), wild fig (Ficus carica) and golden oat grass (Stipa gigantea) are native to the area and all feature in this garden, giving it a more compelling link to the landscape beyond. As in nature, the garden peaks in late spring before dying back in the heat of the summer, and then reviving again with the rain that falls in autumn. Because the plants are given little or no irrigation, it is a question of survival of the fittest, so what Álvaro ends up with here is a palette of resilient plants that are 100 per cent eager to grow here in these often harsh conditions.
Sitting here, cocooned by plants, offers the chance to observe the many forms of life that enliven this garden. Blue-tailed Iberian magpies nest in the surrounding trees, darting back and forth across the garden with their distinctive call. Honey bees nest in the hives that Álvaro has brought into the garden, helping to pollinate the plants that will seed and continue to evolve the planting mix here. Huge violet carpenter bees – black with iridescent purpleblue wings – cluster on the pale silvery spires of Stachys byzantina and, as dusk falls, moths appear to feast on night-scented flowers. ‘The garden is helping the wildlife of this valley,’ says Álvaro. ‘When we came here, there were no birds; now the garden is alive with them.’
Although this garden is young, it feels ancient. Its experimental mix of plants is completely in tune with nature, demanding very little in terms of water or maintenance, and flourishing and fading in soothing synchronicity with the seasons. It is not a wild landscape and it contains only a handful of native plants, but its varying shapes and textures, its smells and sounds, and its wonderful biodiversity all evoke an atmosphere akin to nature, which feels as right to us as human beings as it does to the myriad insects, birds and mammals that have made it their home.
Álvaro Sampedro: alvarosampedro.com
CLAIRE TAKACS1/3The geometric, stepped dipping pool brings a contemporary feel to this part of the garden, where four statuesque, white-stemmed mulberries are being clipped to form a canopy over a seating area.
CLAIRE TAKACS2/3Meandering paths lead through plantings full of texture and movement. Shown in late May, the garden is still lush and green, but by July the colours are more muted, before it springs back to life with the first September rains.
CLAIRE TAKACS3/3Huge granite boulders were dug out of the earth and strategically repositioned to create structure when Álvaro landscaped the site. Now weathered and covered with moss, these form part of the organic tapestry of the garden, skirted by creeping thyme and low-growing stachys. Rounded, silvery hummocks of teucrium and cistus mimic the form of the rocks and are clipped twice a year to keep them in shape
