Portmeirion, the Italianate village that he built in the Twenties, is perhaps his most famous creation. Noel Coward holidayed there in the early Thirties and the place later had a starring role in the Sixties cult television programme The Prisoner. Plas Brondanw, not far away from this pastel piece of whimsy, was Sir Clough's own home. He lived there for more than 70 years, gradually surrounding himself with architectural topiary and alleys of box and yew, curling flights of steps, fountains and an enviable collection of statues.
The best vista in the British Isles is here. It stretches from the raised platform at the southern end of the garden, through the narrow corridor of the sunken garden, over the Fireman's Pond - where a ridiculous cherub in an oversized fireman's helmet holds the hose that makes the fountain - on over the lawn to a raised platform right at the other end of the garden. After that, Snowdonia.
The house, a tall, tough stone-built place, had been in the family for generations. By the time Sir Clough took over, on his 21st birthday in 1909, it had degenerated into a series of tenements set on sloping ground above what had once been an arm of the sea.
Inspired by the example of the best Italian gardens, he began to plant the hedges that now divide up the space around the house into a series of enclosed outdoor rooms. In his autobiography, The Architect, he describes how the house and garden became a passion "an obsession if you like ... A cheque for pounds 10 would come in and I would order yew hedging to that extent, a cheque for pounds 20 and I would pave a further piece of terrace".
He started first in the forecourt to the south of the house, where the private entrance is marked by ivy-covered pillars. A path leads up between lawns to the front door, with clipped mop-headed bay trees either side. But if you get to the door and turn round, you see that the line of the path continues right up the hillside on the other side of the road, flanked by an avenue of chestnut trees. At the end of the avenue he built a folly, Castel Brondanw.
You get the same sense of drama if you turn left in the entrance yard and make for the raised platform at the end of the Sunken Garden. Turning round from this high spot to survey the way you have come, you are suddenly aware of the astonishingly long vista, with the end stop of the mountains, that has been creeping up behind you without you noticing. As you turn, you expect a fanfare of trumpets.
The Castel Brondanw avenue and folly set the tone for the whole garden: grand, classical Italianate lines with an overlay of fanciful decoration. Where in an Italian garden you might find fountains based on classical mythology - Zeus, conch shells, Poseidon - here you get the fireman cherub in his crazy helmet, or mermaids holding out their hair with the sort of agonised expressions that suggest they have just had a particularly disastrous session with a Mayfair crimper.
The layout is formal, the emphasis on stonework, statues and hedging. The head gardener spends at least 14 weeks each year clipping the hedges and the topiary. The hedges are mostly yew, with some fine pleached hornbeam used round the smaller enclosures to the south-west of the house. The tall, thin cypresses are corseted with a series of invisible tight wire bands which help them keep their pencil-slim profile.
If you turned right from the cobbled entrance yard, you would find a wide path paved with slate which stretches along the front of the house. The house itself leapfrogs over the path with an arched, three-storey porch and then the path continues past the house through a wide alley of old double white cherries and laburnums. After that comes the garden's final enclosure, the northernmost point, appropriately called the Full Stop. It is quietly planted with hostas, primulas and tall, sweet-smelling yellow azaleas. A stone lion's mask fountain drips peacefully into a little pond.
In front of the house, the lawn slopes down to a long, thin border made under a line of old apple trees. It is disappoint- ingly thin in its planting: a good romneya, some aquilegias, foxgloves and too much bare earth, but the splendour of the design at Plas Brondanw makes up for what sometimes seems rather meagre plant coverage.
The lawn is dominated by a vast evergreen ilex with a terrace and low balustrade built around it. Over to the left, by the orangery, is a whole series of yew-hedged rooms enclosing pools and statues and topiary. The orangery itself, built by Sir Clough in 1914, is dominated by a superb fig tree.
Hydrangeas and ferns flourish in this damp Welsh climate and grow particularly lushly round a sunken rectangular pool where a dwarfish Roman centurion struggles to live up to a column that is much too big for him. At the moment the pool is surrounded by a brilliant mass of candelabra primulas in shades of pink and purple.
In another enclosure there are turquoise-blue iron railings with finials of mustard yellow, the same shade as the knitted woollen stockings that Sir Clough used to wear. The railings curve round steps leading down either side of a circular pool tucked underneath. A cross-alley lines up three statues sitting in a row under a stone wall with three matching arches cut in the hedge at the other end of the long enclosure. This is a heavily manipulated garden, but it is so cleverly done that you never feel aware of the strings of the brilliant puppet master.
Plas Brondanw is at Llanfrothen, just north-east
of Porthmadog, Gwynedd. Open daily (9am-5pm). Admission pounds 1.50.
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