The brief was to create an abundant, colourful garden that blended in with the owners’ hand-built home

2 Durnamuck Garden is part of Scotland’s Garden Scheme, a charity allowing visitors to explore gardens all across the country. Visit by arrangement until the end of September, or on the garden’s open day: 26th July, 11am – 4pm. Find more info here.

At the foot of An Teallach, overlooked by the distinctive outline of Beinn Ghobhlach, sits a defiant garden full of colour. This plot, right on the edge of Little Loch Broom in Wester Ross, is regularly battered by hailstones, whipped by gales and drenched with rain. What better place for vibrant South African planting? It sounds unlikely, but it really works.

To truly understand the ambitious nature of this garden, you need to know its owners: Will Soos and Susan Pomeroy. The botanically minded pair bought the four acre croft a decade ago, when it was just a bare, boggy strip of land. They designed and built a timber-and-stone home with a red tin roof for the plot. “Will found much of the stone at the edge of the road. He’d stop on his way to work and load it into the boot of the car,” says Sue. “He even cut down trees and milled them to make the cladding on the exterior.”

The more Sue reveals about the build, the more intriguing it gets. “A former rock band musician and his wife came out to help us put the timber frame together, but Will and his father did most of the physical building. I came in later to help lay floors and things like that.” All this with full-time manual jobs and two young children underfoot – there would have been no judgement if the garden had remained severely neglected. Luckily for us, that’s not how this pair roll.

Will is now head gardener at the nearby Dundonnell Estate but he and Sue met while working at Inverewe Garden (Sue as a propagator and Will in charge of the walled garden). It’s there that Sue spearheaded the creation of the most northerly South African border in the world. “It got a lot of attention at the time,” she says, “and I was lucky enough to get funding to go out to South Africa on two occasions. I met other botanists there and returned with a variety of plants and seeds.”

When she left Inverewe, Sue had cuttings from some of those plants and began to work them into her own garden. The plot lies north-east of the National Trust site, “so now I suppose I have the most northerly South African garden in the world,” she says with a laugh.

A lot of plants grown in this garden come from further afield, places like Chile and New Zealand where the climate is similarly mountainous and windy. As it’s an Antipodean and South African garden, it tends to flower later, from the end of June through to late October.

As well as a variety of colourful plants, there’s also a large vegetable garden which allows the couple to be virtually self-sufficient, and they keep sheep and chickens. Two 18m-long polytunnels sit at the bottom of the garden: one filled with fruit (“cherries, nectarines, raspberries, strawberries, grapes, figs – I even have an olive tree in there”) and the other packed with all the veggies that wouldn’t survive the wind. This area of the croft also has an orchard of plum and apple trees. Every autumn the juice from the apples is extracted and frozen, then used throughout the year. The fruit is made into jam, of course.

“We’re in a great location, with a magnificent backdrop and unmatched views of the loch. We get good rainfall in summer and winter and we’re able to grow high-altitude plants at sea level,” says Sue. “Our herbaceous plants seems to stay fresher for longer because we don’t have the intense sun and baking hot days that southern England sees. I quite miss those… but our flowers last longer because of the cloud cover!”

If all the exotic planting doesn’t grab your attention, the ‘sacrificial mound’ might. Fiery crocosmias (South African natives) in red, orange and yellow transform the raised mound into a volcanic centrepiece. “When we were building the house we had this pile of topsoil which we were keeping for the beds,” explains Sue. “My brother came to stay and he couldn’t bear all the midges we get. We watched him run around the garden until he found a bit of a breeze up on this mound of topsoil. It was funny, but we also thought it was a good idea. We built a new mound with leftover rubble, put slabs around the top and integrated a Kadai fire bowl in the middle. It’s the perfect spot for cooking fish and sitting out with a glass of wine in the summer.” 

Need more time to admire at this gorgeous garden? Sue and Will have a self-catering holiday let onsite. It’s called the Garden Bothy and was self-built using local timber and recycled materials.

2 Durnamuck

Dundonnell

Garve

IV23 2QZ ​

t: 07742 918001

e: sueandwill@icloud.com

Visit the 2 Durnamuck Garden website