A Spanish garden in perfect harmony with its surroundings

In the hills and the woodlands of the Sierra de San Vicente, south west of Madrid, spring brings an extraordinary richness of wildflowers that ebb and flow round the gnarled trunks of native Quercus ilex oaks. In the evening gloaming, swathes of yolk-yellow Anthemis tinctoria, vivid purple Echium vulgare and delicate white Silene vulgaris take on a surreal glow. The effect is so arresting that it takes your breath away. Pale pink foxgloves, Digitalis thapsi, arrange themselves artistically around moss-covered boulders, and wild Stipa gigantea – used so frequently in British gardens – dots itself around the landscape.

Sometimes nature is so intensely beautiful that there is almost no need to make a garden, but in this unspoilt corner of Spain, landscape designer Fernando Martos has succeeded in creating one around an old farm dwelling that works in complete harmony with the land around it. ‘The surroundings are fundamental to me when designing a garden,’ says Fernando. ‘I want it to look completely integrated in the landscape – it must look as if it has always been there.’

Fernando has been championing this naturalistic approach in Spain ever since he qualified as a gardener and designer over 20 years ago. Now aged 46, he gave up a career in law to follow his heart and work with plants, starting as a gardener and setting up his own company, and then going on to establish his design studio 15 years ago. During a three-month placement at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, he fell in love with English gardens and returned to Spain energised and inspired, wondering why other designers were not being more adventurous in their outlook.

‘All people wanted was green lawns and lavender – there was no imagination,’ he explains. ‘To me a lawn looks so alien here and needs to be irrigated all summer. I wanted to develop a new type of garden in Spain – an English-style perennial garden, but using Mediterranean natives.’ He came back from Newby Hall with a list of plants to experiment with. Now, after more than a decade of pioneering gardens in this style, Fernando finds him-self at the forefront of a new wave of garden design in Spain, devising beautiful, plant-filled, drought-tolerant schemes that work with the landscape and the seasons rather than imposing an artificial ideal on a space.

This garden near Toledo wholeheartedly embodies Fernando’s design philosophy. Its owners had fallen in love with the area and wanted to maximise the views out into the landscape. So they needed no persuasion to keep the formal areas to a minimum, ensuring that the cultivated spaces played second fiddle to the natural environment beyond. At the front of the house, the planting beds contain a matrix of evergreen shrubs such as Pistacia terebinthus, Phillyrea angustifolia and Cistus salviifolius, interspersed with silvery Stachys byzantina and wild white roses, acting as a transition point to a new meadow. ‘As the garden moves away from the house, I am planting an area that was previously grazed by sheep, introducing native shrubs such as hawthorn, arbutus and prunus to attract birds,’ explains Fernando.

The main planting area is in the gravel garden at the side of the house and is a small, intimate space contained within softly curving granite walls. It was here Fernando could indulge his love of combining plants in a natural-istic tapestry, creating a scheme that echoes the contours of the surrounding hills and the curious, lumpy forms of the holm oaks. ‘Historically, the oaks have been pruned and cut for firewood, so they have these strange shapes,’ he says. Boulders push up through the layers of plants, further linking the garden with the landscape beyond. Several have been artfully placed by Fernando, while others were already there, along with an old stone pigsty that has also become part of the design. The planting here is subtle in colour to make sure it is subservient to the terrain outside. ‘I don’t want too many colours,’ he says. ‘In this bright light, the effect would be too intense. I like a simple colour palette, but one that is always changing.’