For some time now Sue has been hoping that the garden would appear in a book. Magazines like The Garden and Gardens Illustrated are wonderful, but they don’t ‘hang around’ like a real book.

There have been a couple of potential publications, but for one reason or another they haven’t come to fruition. Apart from writing our own, we had nearly given up.

Then last week Sue went to a workshop at her friend Alison’s garden near Bath. Alison said that while on holiday in Paris last year she’d picked up this book and flicking through was surprised to see Nant-y-Bedd.

When she told Sue, it came a a complete surprise. We haven’t had any communication from the publishers.

It’s called The Avant Gardens – surely a pun on the phrase Avant Garde – and subtitled ‘Visionaries and gardens beyond wild expectations’. And we are in it!

There are 27 gardens featured and they include such well-known places as Great Dixter, Sissinghurst, Beth Chatto’s Garden, Gravetye Manor, Knepp, The Tokachi Millenium Forest and Hummelo (OK, I hadn’t heard of that one, but apparently it is famous worldwide due to Piet Oudolf!). Not bad company for a little place halfway up a Welsh mountain.

How they came to feature us we know not, but the write up was obviously well researched. Did the writer come to the garden incognito? We’ll probably never know, although the photographer of our chapter is Jason Ingram, who has ‘shot us’ a couple of times.

Here’s a couple of the pages

The book retails for £40, so it’s a bit of a coffee table special. We hope to get hold of a few copies which we will sell to garden visitors, probably for a bit less than the RRP. A lovely present for the garden lover in your life!