Field of dreams

Big bold planting by the founding fathers of the New American Style meets 1820s Bath. Non-Morris visits the American Museum, home of the first garden in this country to have been completed by Oehme, van Sweden

- Oehme, van Sweden

IT’S all about go big or go home.’ Head gardener Andrew Cannell is introducing the new planting at the American Museum & Gardens in Bath, which is epitomised by curving skeins of golden rudbeckia and shimmering stretches of Miscanthus sinensis. The heads of the 6ft-tall Allium ‘Summer Drummer’ march cheerfully through the beds and energise every view. ‘Summer Drummer’ has become a signature plant of what is, rather surprisingly, the first completed British commission for OvS, the prestigious Washington DC-based landscape architects Oehme, van Sweden (OvS).

‘Oh, the alliums!’ wrote lead landscape architect Eric Groft, describing his return to Bath for the opening of the revived gardens by the then American ambassador, Woody Johnson, in September 2018. ‘We planted upward of seven different varieties and thousands of each. They all seemed to be dancing in the wind and almost singing.’

The place is a fascinating mix of cultures. On the one hand, there is the Classical Claverton Manor of 1820, with 125 acres of downward-swooping parkland commanding views of the Limpley Stoke valley on the edge of Bath. To this has been added a ‘bold romantic’ garden in the New American Style designed by a team whose clients include the US State Department and Oprah Winfrey.

When OvS was founded by Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden in 1975, it revolutionised American landscape design. The pair’s mission was to replace the accepted style miles of manicured lawn and ‘funereal’ evergreen hedges with dynamic, prairie-like gardens containing sweeps of perennials and grasses designed to ‘move in the breeze and sparkle like stained glass’.

In historic and pastoral Bath, the words “new” and “American” are a tough sell