Noel's Garden Blog

Working Weekend at Hummelo

2012-01-31T23:12:00.000-08:00

A busy weekend in the Oudolf studio, sorting out pictures and final details for the book I am doing with Piet. I’ve written the text over the last few months, now its the all-important images. Neither of us can remember how many we can use for the book but we’ll sort that out later. There seem an extraordinary number of pictures that Piet constantly looks through on the computer, we have a lot to choose from. Piet’s design work is very intuitive, his mind and thought patterns move fast, my job is to slow things down and clothe key thoughts in words. There are no design secrets, as Piet wants everyone in gardening and landscape to know ‘how to do it’, so the book will have lots of plan excerpts, and we are hoping we can find a way to put the whole plans online or make them available somehow to people who’ve bought the book.
So, the endless ribbon of the New York High Line (note always to myself, not Highline) winds along the computer screen (a Mac of course), lots of projects in Netherlands now: waterfront in Rotterdam, some private gardens (good that the prophet is recognized in his own country) a park in Stockholm for public housing, a temporary planting at the Serpentine Gallery in London, for the Venice Biennale, a vast private garden on Nantucket. Ideas and new ways of combining plants constantly roll out onto big sheets of paper - there’s a discarded one from the pile by the studio woodstove on the windscreen of my car right now holding off the vicious Dutch frost. Ideas, ideas, ideas, plants, plants, plants. I have to find the words, words, words.

This time I brought along Ye Hang and her husband Jingyu Cai. Ye is one of James Hitchmough’s doctoral students from Sheffield. She wants to translate our books into Chinese, but she has turned out to be so much more, a real third member of the team on picture selection. She has a good eye and is not afraid to speak her mind, the three of us take votes on pictures sometimes and take turns out-voting each other. Piet clearly thinks she is good and its nice to see him listening to her suggestions. Ye is the confident, creative, ambitious, commercial few face of China, full of plans for what she wants to do: a landscape company to do naturalistic planting, teaching, even a nursery in Jingyu’s home town on the North Korean border, where the local flora is apparently fantastic and hardly explored.

view from the kitchen in the annex, Piet took this shot with Pro HDR app on an iphone which enables you to combine 2 shots taken with different light settings so we get to see the view and the remnants of breakfast

The Oudolf studio is a new brick building, lovely high ceilings, plenty of light and space. There are some additional rooms, which can accommodate guests like us if need be, and a little kitchen - all very much like our own annex building in concept but contemporary rather than eco-. The room I’m staying in has some of Piet and Anja’s collection of Bloomsbury group ceramics and a wonderful Caucasian rug I remember Piet getting as payment of a job many years ago.

The studio is increasingly becoming inhabited by ‘designer toyz’ - limited edition characters inspired by graffiti, comix, manga and other manifestations of urban street art. A whole new world to me. Its as if here, in the quiet and open countryside of eastern Holland they represent the gritty urban reality of the NYC and Chicago streets where Piet’s planting projects make a real green impact. I half wonder if they come alive when we turn the lights out.

Winter weeding

2012-01-25T10:02:00.000-08:00

Weed control is what actually dominates my garden management. The west of Britain has such mild winters that many wild pasture grasses and things like creeping buttercup can grow almost all year round. If you live in the country chances are you'll have a massive 'weed seed bank' in the soil, so any soil disturbance brings up more seeds to germinate. Long-term, perennials form good solid clumps which tend to be weed-resistant and undisturbed soil develops a layer of moss which seems to reduce weed seed germination. At this time of year in the border, you can see some early Geranium phaeum and G. endressii growth and some evergreen Liriope, but the green haze is germinating grasses. Now is a good time to get on top of weeds, and then the rapid growth of perennials in spring will soon form a good solid canopy.

Roundup is a fantastic tool for spot-spraying weeds, especially grasses, and of course bio-degradeable, Especially in the earlier phases of a planting's life. I know of a garden (actually an old churchyard) in Yorkshire, which is an incredible wild garden, maintained with a few hours spot spraying once a month - its over two acres I think.

Flame-gunning weeds has been promoted of late - the organic lobby are quite keen on it as it does not use any 'nasty chemicals'. Actually of course its burning fossil fuel, and doing it on a big scale is nonsensical from a sustainability point of view. Very useful for burning off weed seedlings though when very small, larger shoots just get a mild scorching, so we use it a little bit. This is Diana, our wonderful WRAG trainee. Its a sort of precision version of the prairie burn - which here is usually impossible because debris never dries out enough. She's zapping goosegrass seedlings, which germinate early and can be a nightmare in herbaceous vegetation because they climb and smother everything.

Seedlings of I'm not quite sure what - perfect for flame-gunning.

If we have a few days of dry easterly winds thats ideal conditions for hoeing, but at any other time round here hoed off weeds just root back in as it is either so wet or humid.

In the end, as plantings mature, the range of weed seed in the top layer of soil gets exhausted, and gradually increasing clumps of herbaceous dominate, so it becomes less of a problem, but I think I've still got quite a few more years of serious weed control yet.

For those who don't garden in an Atlantic climate, you probably have no idea how quickly or how comprehensively pasture grasses can take over and completely suffocate all other plantlife, apart from brambles (their co-conspirators in garden overwhelming) and decent sized woody plants. Even let loose into other climate zones they can do a pretty good job of eliminating other plants too.

Some years ago I did experiment with growing perennials in rough grass, but the fact is that very few species will co-exist, primarily because of the ability of Atlantic climate grasses to grow at any temperature above freezing. I still do have an experimental area for this, but for the rest of the garden, it has to be serious weed control.

A Rambunctious Garden? thoughts on the earth, natives, new eco-systems etc.

2012-01-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

I'm giving a couple of links here to pieces I recently wrote on Gardening Gone Wild: Bringing Nature Home, or a Spinning a Web? was intended to raise a few awkward questions about a hot topic in American gardening circles, and rather less over here (the role of native plants in the garden), and As the Garden, so the Earth began as a book review about one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time, but which then turns into a discussion about wider links between how we garden and how we tend the earth.

Follow me on Twitter: @noelk57

and if you want any Kindle or smartphone reading, don't forget to check out my Amazon page.

More Veg Talk

2012-01-08T11:54:00.000-08:00


Tomato 'Losetto' resistant to late-blight.

Just had this published in The Daily Telegraph. And its about more than tomatoes - but the whole business of breeding new veg varieties, and my pick of the most hopeful-looking ones for this season.

While we are on veg, re. the last posting here, I opened with a pic of kale Redbor, well we've just had some and I was puzzled by its very poor flavour, then i remembered that the wisdom of the old guys who used to dominate allotments "dun eat that til its ad the frost on it". We haven't hardly had any frost this year, so they must be right.

Veg Talk

2011-12-27T11:03:00.000-08:00

Redbor Curly Kale F1 is not only delicious, hardy but decorative too. Just one of a surprising amount we have currently in the veg garden. OK, its a mild winter, we have hardly had a frost yet, but even so, I'm always pleasantly surprised about just how much choice we have at this time. The 'hungry gap' I think of as May and June, after all the last year's stuff has bolted/been eaten/died but before the current year's produce has really got going.

Leeks are the hardiest winter veg by far, This is Sultan F1, I think. Modern varieties are good as they are more likely to be rust-resistant , and if you like to eat the green bits where most of the vitamins are a rust-resistant variety is essential.

Another good kale is Ragged Jack, but known as Russian Red,and probably a lot more, a good old open pollinated variety, very good when small as well, so arguably a more versatile plant.

Surprisingly good last winter (down to -16C) was Georgia Collard Greens (front), a traditional variety from the American South which are better than any British spring greens variety, but difficult to get here. Oprah Winfrey once mistook Hostas for them but that's another story. At the back is Mizuna, which survives quite a bit of frost. We have enough of the stuff to feed Tokyo.

Swiss chard is looking a bit manky, and its not the world's most exciting vegetable, but stays productive through the winter, especially in this mild weather. Far better than spinach at keeping going from one year to another.

Winter is an easy time in the veg garden - very little to do and surprisingly, plenty to harvest. Paradoxically it can be a more productive time than May or June, when last year's crop has finished but before the new year's has come on stream.

Traditional brassicas usually sit out winter well, although in last year's -16C we lost broccoli and cabbage, even famously hardy kale. Softer-leaved oriental stir-fry greens can survive cold well, and in mild weather, like this winter, can carry on growing. Which is not necessarily a good thing, as they may start to bolt. Which is the curse of these high-speed greens. Once one mizuna pushes up a flower stalk you know that the rest will soon follow. A new winter crop for us is Raab, an Italian hi-speed broccoli, producing small heads a couple of months after flowering, and needless to say going over quickly, but in the winter ours has continued to produce decent little heads for a few months now; leaves have a nice mustardy flavor too. Good stuff, but a bit hard to get hold of - a good reason to save your own seed if you get any.

Only failure has been Chinese cabbage, which is always a nightmare, sow it too early in the summer and it can bolt, sow it too late and it doesn't grow enough to head up - which is what happened to my lot this year - boo hoo!

Still chomping, baking, roasting, souping etc etc our vast pile of Uchiki Kuri squash, the only variety which does here at 500ft (130m) in the Welsh borders, its from Hokkaido which has a very short hot growing season, and it thrives in our long, cool one.

Wolfgang Oehme RIP

2011-12-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

Wolfgang Oehme, one of the most important figures in recent North American landscape, has just died. He was one of those people who achieve great things despite being, well shall we say, very eccentric. Autistic basically. Let's face it, they are not always great company but so often it is the extraordinarily focused and utterly obsessive and anti-social geniuses who have moved human history on, despite being exasperating and maddening to deal with as people. The worst lecture I have ever been to was given by Wolfgang - it was so bad it was almost performance art.

Wolfgang got his deep understanding of plants in his native (east) Germany where he trained in the tradition of pioneer plantsman Karl Foerster before emigrating to the US in the late fifties. There after a number of years working as a landscape and garden designer he met James van Sweden. The rest is history. It was an extraordinary partnership - between the extrovert James, trained as an architect and not only a superb designer but also a very good businessman and Wolfgang who knew about plants, and not a lot else. Plants which were reliable and deerproof and everythingelse the Washington DC suburbs could throw at them proof, was just what US landscaping needed back in the 1970s. Without Wolfgang there would have few alternatives to grass, more grass, more grass, and the limited number of boring shrubs which the US landscape industry was using at the time. The fact that the US landscape design profession has broken through to its very dynamic and much more plant-orientated present was given an enormous boost through Wolfgang's knowledge.

The Elysian fields will no doubt be planted up with lots of Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm' and Calamagrostis x acutiflora. One of my favourite stories about him was him going round to a client's garden and noticing that some impatiens had been planted in the middle of one of 'his' borders. Pulling them out with his bare hands the told the client "this is not your garden , this is my garden". I think most of us in the design profession have felt like doing that occasionally.

Here's a proper obituary

Hadspen Garden - The Archive

2011-12-07T10:44:00.001-08:00

Part of the Red Border at Hadspen, (c) Clive Nichols Photography

Hadspen House Gardens were, from 1988 to 2005, one of the most talked-about gardens in Britain, and one of the most passionately loved. They had been known before, it was where Penelope Hobhouse started gardening, and after she had left for Tintinhull, when two of the gardeners took it over, keeping it open to the public but letting it sink into a genteel decline, and trying to run a nursery at the same time. Which is when I first discovered it. One of those really romantic secret garden places - go through a door into a sheltered world, of embracing walls, clambering roses and other climbers, sprawling borders, down at heel, a garden taking over the running of itself. It was a kind of a ruin, there had been greenhouses, and vegetable beds and now there were tenderish things taking advantage of the shelter and the south-facing aspect.

The next thing I heard that a Canadian couple, visiting on a tour of English gardens, had heard that it was up for a rent, as a garden+nursery, and stayed, bunked ship, leaving their almost-grown-up children in BC. They had fallen in love with the secret garden, and had taken it on as a business. The next few years saw their reputation grow. They were unusual, clover, skillful, imaginative, disciplined gardeners who worked with color. They were also both so good-looking (which shouldn’t matter, but it does, as we are dealing with something of a myth here, and in myths it always helps if the heroes and heroines are drop-dead gorgeous).

Nori and Sandra had a theory, about how men and women seen color differently, that women have more cones in their retinas. and so see color with more detail, they can see differences that men can’t. I don’t know whether this has ever been tested, but it is certainly true that more men are color-blind. Sandra experimented with color combinations and Nori refined them, specializing in single-color borders. The garden magazines loved them. They were just the right people at the right time. Their work with color was just so thoughtful, so sophisticated.  

Hadspen’s reputation spread. It became one of the most discussed gardens in Britain. Needless to say they did a book, with pictures by Clive Nichols, but it seemed sadly inadequate - it needed to be much longer (Nori had written far more, but it got edited out). Then, in 2005, with grand-children back home and Nori needing a hip replacement they left. The garden was stripped by the local gardening ladies (by invitation of the owner Niall Hobhouse). The rest of the story is well-known. Niall got a bulldozer in and announced a competition for a gardener/designer. Which nobody really won, and the garden just became a sad empty space. No decision made. Yet. I suppose one day it might be.

Recently though, we have launched ‘The Hadspen Archive’ to try to encourage as many people to send in pictures or other anything else which enables us to do something about documenting this remarkable garden and what the Popes learnt there. Other people will want to carry on from where they left off, and it would be nice if new garden-colorists could have a record of what they
did. If you've ever been and have pictures, we'd love to hear from you.

I am now Tweeting on @noelk57

Texting the Garden

2011-11-20T10:42:00.001-08:00

At a time when the garden is looking rubbish, ‘cos its November and however much we bang on about grasses and seedheads, the garden always does look rubbish now except for when the sun shines, which it has done a little bit lately. Good time to think about garden stuff that doesn’t involve green things.

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@noelk57

Cold n’dry, lean n’mean

2011-10-25T11:54:00.000-07:00

Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire, still looking good in early October

Preparing for climate change is an iffy business, driven by media hysteria, and the inability of many people, journalists especially to think beyond their next holiday. One misconception is that it is going to ‘get warmer’, whereas in fact here in Britain, or indeed more widely in north-west Europe, this does not seem to be happening. We have just had the coldest summer in twenty years, as have the Dutch, and I think the Danes too. This might be due to climate change or not - we can never know. As gardeners we have to plan and plant for all sorts of eventualities - so there should really be no need for radically-different plantings.

A historic greenhouse range awaits restoration.

One unfortunate result of a run of a twenty year run of mild winters, and much ill-informed press speculation about climate change, is that the British just got silly with what they were planting. A generation of younger gardeners grew up not knowing what a ‘proper’ winter was. And... I can’t help feeling, cynically perhaps, that there was a certain amount of wishful thinking that global warming was somehow going to make our climate more like that of the Med, that land where the British middle-class like to holiday, the land of olive trees, vineyard-draped pergolas and tomatoes picked effortlessly from the garden. ‘Preparing for climate change in the garden’ for some people meant living out their fantasies about the good life in Provence without having to move from Islington.

Sesleria autumnalis is a grass of infertile moorland type habits, its a useful height and spead.

The last three cold winters and our lousy summer should make them think again. OK, it is less sexy than the Mediterranean look, but the Steppe look might actually be a better look to cultivate. Forget Provence, Tuscany and San Tropez, think Anatolia, Kazakhstan and Colorado. Sorry lotus-eaters.

Steppe climates have cold winters and hot summers and tend to be dry. Anything from a steppe climate will survive drought, extreme heat and extreme cold. My experience of them is actually pretty limited, but I suspect we are all in the same boat. We already have plenty of steppe plants in cultivation: a lot of grasses, bearded irises, perovskia, European-origin Salvias. There is scope for more plant-hunting of course.


Molinia caerulea 'Poul Petersen' in waves - one of the best and most original pieces of contemporary formal planting I know.

Scampston Hall, Malton, NorthYorkshire, where I recently ran a workshop for the north-east group of the Landscape Institute has a splendid Piet Oudolf designed garden dating from 2001. The soil is sandy and not terribly fertile, the climate is north England cool, and being on the east coast relatively dry. Its a great model for the kind of planting which is very resilient to climatic extremes, and much more useful for indicating what we should be learning from than holiday snaps from southern Europe.

Dolly Parton meets Lutyens? Roy Strong does not meet us.

2011-09-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Funny business, acting as a tour guide in your own locality (The Welsh Borders), driving around in a big coach, in places that are really familiar, talking people through who don't know it all. Helps you see the familiar afresh. Also rather funny to roll up at your own garden, show people around and then all get back on the coach again.

Stephen and Judith Anderton's cottge high in the Black Mountains

Stephen Anderton, garden correspondent for The Times now lives in a site with fantastic views, which have I think rather unwilling to try to compete with the location by making something so humble as a garden. So, planting is largely restricted to the side of the house away from the view. Its feels like a cottage garden but with more contemporary plants, such as grasses and kniphofias. It actually feels very undesigned, and artless - difficult to know whether this is really the case. I really like it, there is something very unpretentious about it, and the colouring works well, lots of different colours but subtle harmonies everywhere. Lots of succulents and ferns sitting in pots on old stone steps. The garden of someone who loves growing lots of plants and feels under no pressure to make bold statements or impress anybody.

"The slugs are this long" Peter Clay expounds the story of his garden, Sue MacGregor of Boxwood Tours looks on.

Brockhampton Cottage, near Hereford, went down very well. Home of Peter Clay, who runs Crocus the online garden centre. The fact that he took time out of a busy working schedule to talk to us at length about the garden, how it fits into its wide and very English and very beautiful landscape, and his involvement with designer Tom Stuart-Smith, was much appreciated.

H.Avray Tipping was a well-known, but now largely forgotten, garden designer of the early 20th century, and a key part of the Arts and Crafts movement which has dominated British garden design ever since (which is a thoroughly bad thing if you believe my colleague Tim Richardson). A&C gardening is a harmless pursuit and it balances order and growth so well, many of us are quite happy to follow in the footsteps of Tipping, Jekyll, Sackville-West et al. Tipping created three gardens in the Monmouthshire area, only one of which has been restored, by the current owners, Hilary and Helena Gerrish. Helena has just written a book about him. So now you have no excuse to say you have never heard of him.

High Glanau vintage Arts and Crafts

The trouble with mounts is that some people just have to stand on top of them and wave their arms about.

We also visited Westonbury Watermill, a modern folly and water garden, where owner Richard Pim is building an enormous (two storey) water-powered cuckoo clock. Watch this space.

Westonbury Water Mill, at Pembridge, Herefs. features a very impressive gunnera maze. Jo is describing the size of our cabbages this year.

The Pant, near Abergavenny, is a most intriguing landscape-as-garden, created by Jeremy and Camilla Swift. Jeremy is an eminent anthropologist, and much of the garden's content reflects interests from his professional life. It is a garden of great subtlety, making the most of wonderful surroundings.

The loo at The Laskett - strangely austere

Finally, The Laskett, well-known through the voluminous writings of Roy Strong. It is obsessively formal, with allee upon allee, and everything in sight topiarised to within millimetres of its life. He has clearly had enormous fun making it - which after all is the most important thing. I love the way he bulldozes through so many of the basic rules of garden design. Unfortunately he disgraced himself by failing to keep an appointment to meet us, so we had to wander around by ourselves, getting lost in a kind of Alice in Wonderland world of hedges, hedges, yet more hedges, pleaching and monuments (mostly to himself, and one to a cat).

Roy Strong and I in 1996, or thereabouts. Check the body language. I still have the shirt, I understand he gives all his clothes to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Reminds me, I must make arrangements to do the same. We've both cut our hair by the way.

You may have gathered that Mr Strong and I don't see eye to eye on gardening matters. I think I once wrote that a garden restoration of his should be bulldozed into the Thames (the Hampton Court Privy Garden). We once had a wonderfully bitchy spat on the radio, which could have been the start of a re-play of Robinson versus Blomfield (a great and rather stylised debate of the A&C era - see above), but I think both of us had rather more important things to do (promoting naturalistic planting design in my case and writing fawning books on the British monarchy in his).

Tour leading is great fun, you get to meet lots of interesting people (even if not Roy Strong), and hear about their lives and interests. Over the days, you learn about what they like in gardens and what they don't like, I always find it interesting getting people's reactions, I also learn a lot too, they always see things i have never noticed, even in places I know well. Seeing familiar places through other people's eyes in this way is actually rather special.

Finally, there was one comment I adored, I'm not saying which garden it was about... "Dolly Parton meets Lutyens".

Well not quite finally, we had Monique and Thierry Dronet, of the wonderful Jardin de Berchigranges, stay with us recently. Lovely people, kindred spirits; Thierry pointed out to us that (unbeknown to us)his garage was on the front cover of a book on green building in the guest room of our (needless to say eco-build) guest room. They had the idea of digging up half a square metre of our wildflower meadow and planting it in the middle of a new meadow area they are creating. So here it is going in, a little bit of Herefordshire in the Vosges mountains.

“Grrrt lush!” – exotic fruit in the west of England.

2011-09-07T13:08:00.000-07:00

Peachesand apricots at 52 degrees north and 167m (547ft) in the English/Welsh bordersis pretty good going. Nothing to do with global warming or microclimate,although they are on the south wall of the house, and all to do with goodmodern plant breeding.

Thepeach we’ve had for four years; its fruited for three of those, and we were upto 24 this year. Good juicy flavourful peaches, far better than anything youcan buy in the shops. Its name ‘Avalon Pride’ made me think it must have beenbred somewhere near Glastonbury in Somerset, which of course would meant thatit is a “grrrt lush” variety in the local lingo. But it turns out to be from the Seattle area, and amore or less accidental discovery, a seedling which appeared to be totallyresistant to the peach leaf curl disease which devastates peaches, especiallyin cold wet winter climate zones like ours. It turned out to be very hardy too,although hardiness is not really the issue with peaches, rather that they flowervery early, and the young fruit are easily caught by later frosts. They are sopretty in bloom that they are almost worth growing for their flowers alone.

Theapricot was even more of a surprise. I bought it from DT Brown, a mail-ordervegetable seed company. It arrived, very crudely pruned, and it went into soilat the base of our home’s massive mid 18^th century chimney stack –its not good soil at all, so we’ll have to try to improve it with compostmulching from now on. No expectations of any apricots. Actually we aren’t greatapricot fans, they often seem to taste rather astringent, or maybe that’s justEuropean ones. The best apricots I’ve had are the dry ‘white’ ones you can getin the Hunza valley in northern Pakistan, mysteriously completely unlike thelittle round balls sold as Hunza apricots in wholefood shops here.

Apricotsare very hardy. Very. Winter in northern Pak at 3000m is very very cold, but once it’sspring it doesn’t freeze. So the locals of the Hunza and neighbouring valleysgrew family apricot trees – that’s family as in several different varieties oneach tree. Dried on rooftops during the intensely hot and dry summer, theywould be eaten as a staple diet for the rest of the year. Imagine living onapricot porridge for breakfast, dinner and tea, with a bit of barley thrown infor excitement.

Again,the problem for us as apricot growers is that the young fruit gets caught bylate frosts. However our variety ‘Flavourcot’ and its sister ‘Tomcot’ have beenbred in New Zealand to flower a little later and so reduce the frost risk. Toour astonishment this year we harvested thirty fruit, deliciously juicy andwithout much astringency. Actually they really were the nicest apricots I haveever tasted. Since then I have heard of someone in nearby Gloucestershireplanting a commercial orchard of –cot type varieties.

Iwonder what other surprises the future might bring. British bananas are a theoretical possibility. Anyone who knew us at our last house would have beenfamiliar with the vast Musa basjoo in the backgarden. I had planted it when Jowas away teaching for two years in Bratislava (1993) and it just grew and grewin its sheltered inner-city Bristol, cat-shit fed, environment. Every year wewould hack bits off for people. Last winter (minus 12) killed it to groundlevel, but the tenants in the house reported that by May it was sproutingagain.

Musabasjoo is a higher altitude south Chinese species, with inedible fruit full ofbullet hard seeds. The fruit is also produced very late as it flowers late incool British summers. Even with conventional breeding techniques I reckon itmight be possible to start on the path to a variety which had small ediblefruit by late autumn in southern Britain, or certainly in the warmer summers ofcentral Europe.

Rollon modern plant breeding!

A kindred spirit

2011-08-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

Ton terLinden is famous for his garden-making in Holland, and for his art - mostlystill-lifes. Time spent weeding or planting is as important to him as hispainting, it’s a kind of partnership with time spent at the easel.

I’m glad to be here at last. I first came across his gardenthrough photographs taken in the mid 1990s by Marijke Heuff, an incrediblygifted Dutch photographer, who at the time was busy with gardens by Piet Oudolfand Henk Gerritsen - indeed her ability to capture the misty faded glory feelof Henk’s Priona Garden helped launched ‘The New Perennial’ look. We usedseveral pictures of his garden in eastern Holland for my book The NewPerennial Garden. But I never got round tovisiting. He moved with his partner Geert to South Limburg, that salient ofDutchness that shoves itself down between Belgium and Germany in an attempt toplant the flag on a decent hill or two. But it turned out not to be so restufulso they came up here – to the empty fields of Friesland.

I’d come with Dani Coray (whose wonderful really plantygarden so deservedly won a gold at Tatton Park recently) and a friend, Zoe Weston. Clutchingour googlemap printout and a very basic £4 Dutch satnav app on my iPhone webumped down concrete slab roads, where every slab was pointing in a differentdirection. It’s remote, but it sounds like Ton and Geert get lots of visitors.They run a studio, with work by other artists as well as Ton’s work. Somewonderful sculpture in the garden too.

Ton doesn’t speak English, so wir sprechen ein Bisschen aufDeutsch, but Geert is used to speaking for Ton, and he soon got back to hisstudio. Geert explained that the garden may look carefree but it involves a lotof emotional as well as physical effort – and that the sound of Ton shoutingand swearing as he gardened was not uncommon. I know the feeling. I also knewalmost before I waded out into it, that it was my kind of garden. I’ll let thepictures speak for themselves.

Ton ter Linden's website is here.
We went to lots of other good gardens and nurseries on the trip too... you can read about them on Gardening Gone Wild.

Historic Andrew Chatto archives now published online!

2011-08-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

Dry meadow above Mikulov in Czech Republic, on a rather grey day last autumn. Knowledge of what grows in rather difficult places like this can be a guide to what will thrive in similar conditions at home.

BethChatto’s position as a leading garden guru of the latter half of the 20^thcentury rests on the realisation of something which we now think of as obvious– that garden plants should be selected on the basis of habitat. Her gardenconsists of a series of gardens situated in dry, spring-fed and dry shade areasusing combinations of plants adapted by nature to these difficult conditions.But finding out natural plant associations involved a close collaboration withher late husband, Andrew. Indeed the entire Beth Chatto planting philosophy wasvery much a joint effort.

Gardenreference books, then and now, have never said very much about where plantscome from, or their habitat. The only way to find out is to comb through journalsand scholarly works. This is what Andrew Chatto did, over many years, fromaround 1940 until his death in 1990. He read the scientific literature in German and French, and in order to beable to read the extensive material on the plant life of the Soviet Union, helearned Russian. The result of his researches is twelve binders of closelytypewritten text, probably a little short of a million words. Each collectionof notes covers a different part of the world’s temperate zones, and coversmost of the regions from which our garden plants come from. There are lyricallydescriptive passages of local geography and vegetation, and extensive lists ofspecies of each habitat and region.

So,when Beth was creating her marvellous garden, from 1960 onwards, and cameacross a new plant, or found herself with a particularly inhospitable problemarea, it was to Andrew she turned for advice. During his researches he compiledindices which enabled him to find many plants relatively quickly. The result isa garden where plants are at least approximately matched to conditions similarto their homes.

For many years Beth worried about what to do with Andrew's papers. She approached me several years ago, and after a while it occurred to me that we should get them all put online. A note in the newsletter of the Hardy Plant Societybrought forward 55 responses, from which I selected eight to type up the notesinto a digital format– mostly retired people, skilled copy-typists, allfamiliar with scientific plant naming. The next stage was to put the textonline, so that anyone can read it.AND HERE IT IS!!

Seeing familiar plants in theirnatural habitat gives the gardener a particular thrill – and as more of ustravel, further and further, it is something that is becoming a more widelyshared experience. But what can we learn? Sometimes it seems, seeing a plant inthe wild offers real insight, at others it seems to contradict our experience.One factor which muddies the waters is that the British climate is so differentto that experienced by the ancestors of many of our garden plants. Plants arealso often very tolerant of a widerange of conditions , but are associated with a particular habit, not becausethey particularly like growing there,but because the fierce level of competition between plants in the wild meansthat may be the only place where they are can establish as seedlings or canescape from more aggressive species.

Thebottom line is that seeing a plant in the wild can show you the worst it candeal with. I remember having a holiday in northern Pakistan, an area with a climate of enormous extremes of heatand cold, and finding Perovskiaatriplicifolia growing in the dry stonewalls of farmer’s fields. In the garden this perennial with its attractivemid-summer mauve-blue flowers seems to grow anywhere, as does another familiarplant growing in the same place, Clematis orientalis, a robust late-flowering species with thick yellowpetals. But both were scrawny and much reduced in size compared to theirappearance in our gardens. The lesson seems to be that these plants are greatsurvivors but really prefer the bounty of good soil and adequate moisture.

Knowledge of wild conditionsoften surprises. Many of us grow Verbena bonariensis, often as a gravel garden plant, its seedlingspopping up between stones or paving slabs, seeming to thrive in hot, dryplaces. So I was astonished to meet a Uruguayan garden designer (Amalia Robredo) who told methat back home on the pampas it is a marshland plant – she even showed me aphoto with Dan Pearson standing in front of a mass of the plant to prove it.The reason for its success in our gravel gardens is probably due to favourableconditions for germination, andlack of competition.

Itis often possible to tell what sort of environment a plant comes from by itsappearance – dry habitat species tend to be compact and have tough, often grey,leaves, wetland species to have soft lush growth and big leaves. But beyondthis, local knowledge can be very important. A good example are moisture-lovingplants. Many species like it wet, but not waterlogged, such as rodgersias andligularias, which flourish on wet slopes in mountain areas in Asia – the wateris always moving and aeriated, never stagnant. Or some will survive winterwaterlogging but not summer; I shall never forget walking in the wildflowermeadows of Cerknica in Slovenia, where a wide array of wildflowers flourish ,including Euphorbia palustris,well-known for its greeny-yellow flowers in our springtime gardens – but whereeverything is under two metres of water when a temporary lake forms everywinter. At Cerknica, Iris pseudacorus flourishes, but moisture-loving Iris sibirica is not to be found – but can be found on hummocks inwet meadows nearby – clearly it cannot cope with several months of inundation.

The sun may have (thankfully) set on the British Empire but not on its most successful invention.

2011-07-26T13:35:00.000-07:00

It is often said that a lawn makes a good foreground but German garden designer Petra Pelz has got other ideas.

A recent post by a colleague on Gardening GoneWild (Tovah Martin) about planting up her lawn with plantsrather than the heavily-shorn green stuff deals with what history may yetrecord as one of the great shifts in garden culture. Here I would like to takea hard look at this green tyrant and alternatives to it. Read on....

Sheffield - city of flowers?

2011-07-05T01:33:00.000-07:00

Sheffield. Once 'steel city', then 'The People's Republic of South Yorkshire', now just another post-industrial regeneration site. BUT for those in the know in the garden and landscape world, a centre for good and wonderfully colourful ideas.

About 12 years ago Nigel Dunnett (know Professor) in the university Dept. of Landscape started working on annual seed mixes. The idea being to develop something which could be used by local councils to quickly and cheaply do something bright and uplifting, not just on roundabouts and parks but problem housing estates. These pictures were taken on the Manor and Castle Estates.

They have been very successful, and hugely morale-inspiring to the folk who live in what can be very forlorn areas. I'm not suggesting that passive enjoyment of beautiful flowers significently reduces the rate of car theft, drug taking and the other traditional local pastimes, but it may do something. Nigel's experience in talking to local people is that the flowers are a huge morale-booster.

Actually, the annual flower mixes are part of a much larger package of environment-led community regeneration organised by Green Estates, a not-for-profit who sell the seed under the brand name of Pictorial Meadows.

There are now about half a dozen different mixes, based on colour or height. Each one includes around a dozen species, which flowers in succession. From a March sowing, flowers can be expected from June/July through to November.

Annuals actually vary in how long they live, from 'ephemerals' like field poppies which are nine-day wonders to longer-lived species like Californian poppies which can flower for months, and well into the winter given mild weather.

Nigel has also worked on perennial mixes, such as these, although they are slower to establish.

From left, Sheffield PhD students Jia Yuan and Ye Hang, Nigel Dunnett and Amalia Robredo.

I had gone to Sheffield for a flying visit with Amalia Robredo after a Gardens Illustrated tour of Berlin and eastern Germany. Amalia is a pioneer garden and landscape designer who works in the coastal area of Uruguay. She has recently published the first popular guide to wildflowers of the area, with a view to encouraging their use in landscaping, and planted the first locally-native green roof. Sheffield gave her lots of inspiration.
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I am now publishing e-books through Amazon, for Kindle, smartphones, iPads etc. There are currently two available, both collections of writings for Hortus magazine, from the early 2000s. Click here for Amazon North America or Amazon UK.

The 'Special Relationship'

2011-07-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

About a month ago the leading flag on the ‘flag counter’ on my blog finally tipped from the Union Jack to the Stars and Stripes. So perhaps this is a good moment to reflect on Anglo-American relations in the garden. With the recent visit of Mr. Obama (who we Europeans by the way all adore) there has been yet another spate of politicians and commentators discussing the so-called ‘Special Relationship’. There certainly is one in gardening, and like the political version, it is complex, constantly changing, and sometimes controversial.
Read more ............

BREAKING NEWS – Oudolf rips out hedge shock …and the joy of pleasing the inhabitants of Bexhill-on-Sea.

2011-05-22T10:36:00.000-07:00

A lot of us will know the famous hedge at the back of Piet Oudolf's garden... well it's gone..

Read all about it here........

Wisteria

2011-05-13T23:49:00.000-07:00

Four year old wisteria on our house. Rather raggedy Tibetan prayer flags in front.

Wisteria tunnel at Antony House, Cornwall

There’s a house just down from the Garden Museum in London’s Lambeth where in April you can smell the wisteria quite a long way before you see it. It is a vast plant, covering three stories of a 19^th century house with flower. The scent is really something, especially as it is on an otherwise rather dreary road.

Flowers are produced on old wood.

We are actually rather proud of our wisteria – it is now four years old and has flowered well for the first time. Yet the plant is notorious for not flowering. What happens is that it just grows masses of stems and foliage. Think of wisteria as a temperate zone liana – an immense woody stemmed climber with more in common with tropical Tarzan vines than tame old clematis and honeysuckle. It basically wants to climb to the top of large trees, up to 25m, where it can then flower. On houses, there is rarely the space available for them to develop anything like their full size.

No not our house - worse luck, but Wisteria running up the tower of the Landesmuseum in Zürich - 20-25m high.

Pruning is normally used to restrict size of the plant, and to stimulate flowering, on younger and smaller plants than would happen in nature. You have to be ruthless – in fact I think we have taken off 90% of the plant’s growth over the years.


Restricting the growth of the plant to a framework is crucial to develop a tidy plant and flowering.

Important to cut back all fresh stems from the main stem, otherwise you'll end up with a tangled mess.

Wisteria will twist any vertical support wires around it

So, you need to have an adjustable link to the bottom of any vertical wire supports.

A finger in the ocean - Cornwall

2011-05-13T22:35:00.000-07:00

A classic Cornish garden view of rhododendron with bluebells and wild garlic - Antony House.

Vast rhododendrons, vaster than you ever imagined you’d see, magnolias with their impossibly large flowers on as yet leafless branches, camellias forming virtual forests, Gunnera manicata spreading like an ambitious triffid along a valley floor, sheets of bluebells and other wildflowers, bamboos with stems as thick as drainpipe, cordylines spiking the sky, banks of azaleas beckoning with that scent you could almost drink, and oddities, things you have never seen before and send you scurrying into the leafage to try to find a label, and failing that starting off earnest discussions with your gardening companions.
Read on............

Daffodiliphilia

2011-05-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

Daffodils are somehow the quintessential spring flower. The appearance of their distinctive yellow flowers is a sure sign that winter has either ended or is about to soon. Unlike the tulip, which appears to be dependent on us for its continued re-emergence in the garden, daffodils re-appear faithfully every year; and not just in the garden but in places such as roadsides, churchyards and parks where they have been planted, often decades ago – in some cases over a century ago. These plants are clearly great survivors, as witnessed by the number of flowers which appear in places where they have clearly been accidentally dropped or discarded – the flowers frequently mark where someone emptied the boot of their car of garden waste into a ditch or hedge, little thinking that the event and scene of their crime would be annually and flamboyantly marked for so many years to come. Read on.........

A weekend in Hummelo

2011-04-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Piet Oudolf laying bricks to mark out a new perennial planting bed. Dragon back hedge in the background.

A weekend with Piet and Anja Oudolf. We need to discuss collaborating on another book, reflecting Piet’s increasingly sophisticated planting design. He has to a considerable extent broken away from the blocks of planting which has always so dominated the thinking of garden designers. So we spend a lot of time looking through plans groping for words to describe the different ways he mixes plants to get them sparking off each other, which is not easy as he is a very visual person and words and concepts don’t always match up. And photographs – by the end of Sunday we've looked at hundreds, and then on Monday morning I go through a big pile of his slides, looking for good (but unpublished) shots of plant combinations, and am rapidly reminded of how it used to be looking at slides through a loupe on a lightbox, and now even harder now as my eyesight isn’t what it was. Hurray for digital technology. Piet takes vast numbers of pictures of his projects, at every stage, talking to the funders and politicians, earth-moving, laying out, planting.


New book out - Monacelli Press, a monograph of 25 of Oudolf projects, public and private, see my online bookshop.

Looks a bit of a desert, but it won't be for long. Anja watering a newly planted Calamagrostis in what was the old nursery area

An interesting weekend to be chez Oudolf, both the boys are there: Pieter who runs a business selling repro Delft tiles (Dutch made) and Hugo who lives in Ecuador, in his wife’s village running an eco-tourism and community ranching business. And to see the first planting in a big new space; Anja has decided to retire from the nursery business, so the old nursery area is a vast expanse of sandy soil. The next day saw some Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ going in and some young trees – Sorbus sargentii. Piet told me that the plan was to sow perennials in between some planted material, and develop a big prairie look. I look forward to it.


Mertensia virginica runs in my garden and the Oudolf's. In Hummelo it has spread amongst perennials in conditions of great competition pressure, even in the middle of a Panicum clump. Like a bulb this exquisite flower is summer dormant.

Ranunculus ficaria (Lesser Celendine) is also summer-dormant. I've never seen the point of weeding it out, I'm glad Piet agrees.


Viola canina has sown itself into some of the perennial borders.

A clipped Pyrus salicifolia outside the new office building.

Garden or Museum - what’s the big deal with heirloom veg?

2011-03-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

Heirloom vegetables and flowers (or as well call them over here in the UK – heritage) have been big for some time now. Much more so in North American than home. In fact I am always really surprised about how enthusiastic American gardeners are about ‘vegetables our grandmothers grew’. The love of heirloom veg however goes along with a certain hostility to modern varieties, and modern breeding methods such as F₁hybridisation, particularly claims that heirlooms taste better; there is also an undercurrent that heirlooms are somehow better for the world, more ethical. Here I’d like to challenge this and stand up for modern scientific plant breeding. There is also a political point I’d like to make. Read on..........

Singapore - Garden City State

2011-03-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

How to describe the city state of Singapore? Downtown is like an American downtown (with even more malls – yes really!), the suburbs like….well a kind of tropical multiracial version of Sweden with a rather bossy government – the same well-designed but rather bland housing estates of modestly tall tower blocks, all separated by amazing amounts of greenery. Which is why I’m here of course. The place really does live up to its reputation as the Garden City of Asia, or indeed the world. I really think they are the global leaders in integrating planting into urban spaces and in making almost seamless connections between wild spaces/nature reserves and conventional urban parks.

Read on.......

Life before Hellebores?

2011-03-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

There was once a time before hellebores. Well there was only Helleborus niger, the Christmas Rose, and a few other oddities, mostly green and murky. There were some pink and spotty creations courtesy of Helen Ballard, a rather grand nurserywoman of the English midlands, available for what seemed like exceptionally large sums of money for a perennial. Ballard had actually done rather a good job, with what turned out to be limited genetic material, giving her creations cultivar names, and of course propagating them as one does with cultivars – dividing them. This was the 1980s.

Hellebores do not form large clumps, and depend on seed to distribute themselves through the rocky woods of their (mostly) Balkan homeland. So there wasn’t very much to divide, which explains the price tags. Today’s hellebore passions are based on two things: one is new genes from the wild, hugely extending the range of colour and the other is the realisation that you can get very good plants from seed. So, forget the sharp knife, and the trauma to a plant which does put up with being dug and up and split like most other perennials. Forget the cultivar names too. “Do not propagate your cultivars from seed” is a mantra in the garden and nursery world. Turning the hellebore from an elite possession into an item of mass production required that this mantra be resisted, and so too that ego-driven urge of every nurseryman to name plants.

I remember a report in (I think) the Hardy Plant Society journal in the very early 1990s reporting someone bringing back seed (or maybe plants) of a near-red hellebore from Slovenia, maybe newly independent, or maybe awaiting its short war of freedom against Milosovic. The place was not exactly off the beaten track, indeed it (as Yugoslavia – some countries change names more than plants do) was part of package-holiday land, yet my memory of the article had a tone of deering-do plant intrepid hunterdom about it. Others followed. Piet and Anja Oudolf went further south, to Bosnia, remember people discussing imminent war, and came back with some plants with black flowers. Will McLewin, retired mathematics professor turned botanist/nurseryman, carried on travelling in the region, whenever peace and wherever landmines allowed. He took his van to places which were never part of package-holiday land, like Kosovo, usually basing himself in the increasingly prosperous Euro-spending Slovenia, with Stane Susnik, a television producer with a passion for gardening and his country’s rich, varied and beautiful flora.

The results of all this travelling was a huge range of genetic diversity. Hellebores are easy to breed, if slow to germinate and grow. John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries and Roger Harvey have been particularly good breeders. The plants now come in a huge range of colours, with spotted and striped and picoteed variants. Devotees attend hellebore days and compete to buy the best-looking plants. Being seed-raised you cannot just buy a plant with a good name, you have to buy it in flower in order to know what you are getting. Or you can be patient and buy seed, and hope that your investment produces some good returns.

In my current garden it seems that every hellebore seed which hits the ground grows. We have to weed them out. Which seems terrible. Three years ago I transplanted a load, and lined them out. The breeding is not very sophisticated (one nurseryman breeder once said to me – “who’s Mendel?”) so I had high hopes that there would not be too much genetic backsliding. Which indeed has turned out to be the case. Most are dark red (no blacks though – L ), which are the most vigorous, some lovely spotties (I LOVE spotty flowers), a decent number of picotees, some big whites and the occasional pale pink. So I either give them to friends or distribute them around the garden.

Growing on your own hellebores from seed (if you have the space) is actually vital. The plants do not go on for ever. Rember these are not ever-marching-forward in steadily-spreading clumps, chop up and put bits in yogurt cartons for the church fête type perennials. Plants I bought from Ashwood 12 years ago are now very much declining, to some extent their seedlings replacing them, but some replanting is now necessary.

From the Balkans to the World. I have always wondered whether we would grow them if they flowered in June. Probably not… or well no-one would have bothered sleeping in vans by roadsides in Bosnia in order to gather their seed. But for the end of winter their dusky, sometimes rather mournful, sophisticated shades are perfect.

Second career guidance

2011-03-08T10:01:00.000-08:00

For a couple of years now we've had trainees from the WRAG scheme,

Read on.....

Indian trails.......

2011-03-01T11:27:00.000-08:00

A visit to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad region of Kerala in south-

west India is a real inspiration and a very special place. Its basically a private trust who own a slab of virgin forest (in the Western Ghats bio-region, where only 3% of the original forest is left) and who are involved in habitat restoration on former tea and coffee plantations. They do also have a very good display garden of tropical flora (local, Indian and global) for educational purposes. Their conservation and research work is clearly rooted in a lot of good horticulture. I have a fantasy of coming here and spending time learning about the very different ways that have to be used to manage tropical species; there is clearly a lot to learn. Read on........

Planting up is a nerve-wracking job.

2011-02-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Most of this went in 3 years ago, some 2. Mostly filled out nicely. Its actually a north-facing slope but gets sun for most of the day. Grass is Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’

Planting up a client's garden the day before yesterday. The third winter I have done this particular one. Good design jobs go like this – it’s an illusion, partly fostered by TV design and 'make-over' programmes that you can go in and plant up, and before you can say "Bob's yer uncle" the garden is "done". No garden in ever "done". And ideally, you and the client build up a relationship, you come back and see how it all turned out, you make suggestions, they ask your advice, you come back with more plants, and so it goes on, hopefully with an annual visit.

       In this instance, a friend and colleague had done the levels and basic spatial stuff, and I came in to do the planting - three years ago. Quite a big site, so we all agree it would have been very foolish to plant up all at once. We agreed a section and I returned a few months later with the plants. The house has a spectacular view, as it is on the top of a hill with a steep drop below, and you can see the house when you drive into their property below. It needed to make an impact at first sight - so lots of big grasses for a long season of impact.

   Most of my initial planting was a series of perennial combinations, each one designed to have a particular colour scheme but to have some interest at all seasons, along with willows and dogwoods for winter stem colour. Doing a planting scheme like this, where the beds have very rounded, flowing shapes is quite a challenge for working out quantities. In any case it is actually very difficult to match a plan with reality on the ground, unless you lay out a grid and relate that to a grid on the plan. The reality of soils and clients is that the ground never really matches the plan - slopes can create distortions, some patches of soil turn out to be unusable, setting out plants can often accumulates errors over large areas, clients shove in their own plants (annoying, but there is nothing you can do about this - I know Wolfgang Oehme would rip such plants out with his own hands while lecturing the client (following to be read in a heavy Saxon accent) "this is not your garden, this is my garden" but most of us are too nice to do this.

     In this case I did not use a plan, in fact I very rarely do these days, I work out lists of plants, work out what proportions of one to another there should be, and then calculate on the basis of how much space they take up. All on an Excel spreadsheet. Its about a planting combinations, the overall effect, not a precise, 'this looks nice next to this' kind of approach. It saves a lot of time, and therefore the client's money; in particular it makes a lot of sense for big jobs.

   The big stress on site is worrying about whether you have brought enough plants, whether I have got the decimal place right in the calculations etc. But its usually ok. Surprisingly usually ok. But this first time we had far too many plants - so we just carried on planting another area.

   Next year, you are back, because the client likes it, and the maintenance has worked out ok, so they want more. Hurray! So you do another area. But this is more difficult as there are young trees, and its even more difficult to work out quantities. This time around there aren't enough plants, so the best thing to do is to leave some large gaps - thin planting looks awful so you might as well make the gaps look deliberate. Next summer I came to have a look and to estimate the size of the gaps so as to order more of the same to fill in, plus some others. This is serious guestimating but to my astonishment the other day when I came back with the plants, the quantity was all but perfect. None of this very unprofessional squeezing things in too tightly, or working out how to pad out big spaces between plants. Come on, admit it, every designer has been here.

   This being the west of England the main issue long-term issue has turned out to be geranium management - Geranium x oxonianum management to be precise. This plant, parents from southern Europe (long mild wet winters) is tailor-made to cover gardens in the English south-west, and it seeds. Few complain - it flowers pinkly for a month in June and then again September to November. There are so many hybrids/varieties produced by nurserymen who obviously think "I can name this after my pretty niece and put it in the catalogue and boost my own ego into the bargain rather than throw it onto the compost heap", everything from not-quite-white to the well-known 'Claridge Druce' screaming magenta-pink. The bottom line is this, the worst thing that can happen is that the garden just becomes geranium city. There are far worse fates.

For those of you who don't read Groei & Bloei

2011-01-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

The magical 'Katje's Garden' at the late Henk Gerritsen's Priona Garden

I don't either, but I have had a piece translated and published in the leading Dutch garden magazine - about the Dutch exhibition at the Garden Museum. So here, is the original text:

Visitors at Piet and Anja Oudolf's Hummelo garden

The Dutch are arguably the nearest neighbours of the British – quite apart from language, history and culture, we are both gardening nations. The period of the late 17th century, when Dutch forces invaded Britain (with our permission!) to install William of Orange on the throne, was a particularly important one for the exchange of ideas about garden making, with William taking time out from his march on London to go and look at new gardens.
Nowadays Dutch influence on British gardening is most obvious through sales of plants from the hightly efficient Dutch nursery industry to British commercial growers and gardeners - any of the bulbs, perennials, shrubs and trees planted in parks and gardens began their lives in The Netherlands. But there are other influences too. Amongst the ‘opinion-forming’ elite of gardeners and garden professionals, it is probably Dutch designer Piet Oudolf who has made the most impact as a garden maker; although many of the gardening public would not know his name, the fact that they will probably have a few ornamental grasses in their garden is largely down to him.
For much of the 20th century the British were largely self-sufficient in their gardening. Some American garden makers came and went, but by and large a locally-evolved blend of formality and informality known as the Arts and Crafts garden held sway. Its combination of firmly clipped hedges, geometric layouts, and lush relaxed borders of perennial and annual flowers answered the need of a nation with a rather conservative artistic temperament, for gardens which evoked a romanticised ‘Merrie England’ past of sturdy yeoman farmers and chivalrous aristocrats. The Modern movement in architecture and design made little impact, except in a watered-down and mediocre form in architecture and landscape planning. The fact that most Britons had their own gardens meant that there was little interest in public spaces.

Hardscape/softscape at the Mien Ruys Garden, Dedemsvaart

    By the 1990s, the less formal successor to the Arts and Crafts garden, a poorly-characterised, and rather spineless form of gardening built around wavy-edged borders and curving lawns was succeeded by an obsessive interest in re-discovering traditional and historic garden styles – the Arts and Crafts garden was brought out of the cupboard and dusted off for re-use. Interest in foreign models of gardening was minimal. Then rumours began to spread of a “Dutch nurseryman, with wonderful perennials, who also designs gardens”. A few brave ones amongst us took the ferry to Calais to drive up and see him, and in my case to go much further and visit parks and gardens in Germany too.
    It was of course typical that the plant-obsessed amongst British gardeners discovered Piet first, and rather ironical that many of his plants had originated in British nurseries. Articles about Piet and his gardens began to appear in the more upmarket garden magazines, and then articles about some other Dutch practitioners and places. Marijke Heuff’s wonderfully romantic and atmospheric photographs of the late Henk Gerritsen’s Priona Garden in Overijssel and Ton ter Linden’s garden in South Limburg also began to appear in books and magazines. There were even a few articles about the parks of Amstelveen with their wonderful wildflowers.

    What the British gardener saw in these photographs was something they responded to. The mass perennial plantings in German garden shows and parks did not make the same impact – they were too formless, and no-one quite saw how they could recreate similar effects on a smaller scale at home. Contemporary Dutch planting styles however were homely and contained, the use of plant colour and form exuberant, the clipped hedges gave a sense of ‘backbone’ and the occasional wild excesses of seedheads and rank herbaceous growth appealed to a desire amongst many for a more ‘ecological’ style. Above all, the balance between formal structure and burgeoning plant life had the same appeal as the Arts and Crafts garden. Ton ter Linden’s stature as a painter gave him an added credibility too ; the final phase of the British Arts and Crafts garden in the 1990s was a period when there was a great deal of experimentation with colour, and the thoughts and plantings of artists carried great weight.
    The wildness appealed too. During the 1980s and 1990s there had been a burst of interest in growing native wildflowers in gardens and parks, but the hard fact that the British flora is extremely limited and not very ornamental, led to many people sowing hay meadow seed mixes and getting messy pasture grass instead. A more ornamental alternative was needed; seeing Dutch gardens with wild-looking perennials gave gardeners permission to go a bit wilder too. Particularly with grasses, such as varieties of Miscanthus, Molinia and Pennisetum; grasses had been around a long time but they never looked their best in the conventional British border where a ‘tallest at the back, shortest at the front’ style had meant that they were often not shown off to best advantage. Dutch (and German) planting styles allowed more flexibility and openness and few could resist the site of grasses like Stipa gigantea when they were back-lit by the sun, sparkling and shimmering with gold.
    Henk Gerritsen’s acceptance of dead foliage into the garden and Piet Oudolf’s showing the value of late autumn sun on dead grass and perennial seedheads made a huge impact. November has traditionally been seen as the dreariest month in the British garden, with driving rain and storms competing with the shears of the gardener to reduce perennials to ground level as soon as possible. Grasses, and many of the more robust Oudolf-style perennials were seen to stand the autumn weather better than traditional border perennials – the idea then spread that cutting back should be delayed and the warm sunlight of late autumn and winter be seen to work its magic. Piet’s own photographs of plants covered in hoar frost were also hugely influential, sending many garden photographers scurrying out hours before dawn when frosty weather was forecast. The Amsterdam-based photographer Marijke Heuff also made an impact in British books and magazines with her dreamily romantic pictures of wild gardens.
    The Dutch influence on the British planting palette extended well beyond grasses. The herbaceous plants of traditional British borders had been very labour-intensive: manuring, staking and regular dividing were all essential. The ‘new perennials’ were often much less work: plants like Aster divaricatus, Veronicastrum virginicum and Persicaria amplexicaulis will flourish for years with virtually no attention. Even the more short-lived ones such as the varieties of Echinacea and Monarda which Piet and others bred and introduced    do not need staking or feeding to perform well. Now that the gardener need not be a slave to their herbaceous border, there has been a huge revival of interest in this garden feature and herbaceous plants dominate many of the new generation of small nurseries which have sprung up over the last twenty years.

more Mien Ruys

    Piet Oudolf’s style is rooted firmly in the work of Mien Ruys, a name unfortunately almost unknown in Britain (there is very little information on her in English) – so British gardeners are getting, through the back door so as to speak, a gentle dose of Bauhaus-derived modernism. They are also getting, through Piet, a dose of the German nurseryman and writer on gardening, Karl Foerster, who was immensely influential in developing the use of perennials in Germany; one of Foerster’s insights was to look at plants which had not been a traditional component of ornamental planting schemes, such as grasses and ferns, and see their potential. Piet has been particularly assiduous in using umbellifers, members of the cow-parsley family, which he rates for their long season of structure. Many of these are appearing in British gardens now too, and it was an umbellifer - Cenelophium denudatum which was the star of the 2010 Chelsea Flower Show in designer Tom Stuart-Smith’s garden. Now probably Britain’s leading garden designer, Stuart-Smith’s debt to Oudolf is strikingly clear.
    For younger up-and-coming designers, Oudolf’s work is often one of the most important models, for both concrete ideas about putting plants together and sheer inspiration. Sarah Price, one of the team involved with the design of the Olympic Park (to be completed in 2012), and a rising star in the design world, described seeing Oudolf’s new double herbaceous border at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley soon its completion in 2001, and feeling “that this was a revelation, so different to anything I had seen before” and admiring its “scale and its repetition, it made everything else at Wisley look so twee”. It turned out to be a pivotal moment in her decision to become a garden designer.
    In terms of square metres, the biggest influence on British gardening life has actually been in public space. Not that we are seeing perennials spread into parks (there is unfortunately no money for this, and no political well to increase budgets) but instead there are some highly successful mixtures of annuals which local councils can use – cheap to apply over large areas and immensely popular with the public. These have been developed by Dr. Nigel Dunnett of the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield, but the original idea came from Rob Leopold and Dick van den Burg who established the seed company Cruydt-hoek in 1978, originally to see native plants, but branching out into annual seed mixes in 1990. Leopold’s idea – to use mixtures of hardy annuals which could be sown to create a series of flushes of bloom through the summer, has been scaled up by Dunnett so that roundabouts and parks in deprived residential areas become a sea of colour for up to five months.
    Having run out of ideas in the mid-1990s, the British gradually began to look abroad for them. In the work of contemporary Dutch designers we found plenty to like, and in a nation we had good feelings about. The Dutch approach to gardening, combining a love of plants and a clear sense of architectural structure, is so similar to our own, so it should not be surprising that the ‘Dutch wave’ should be so readily accepted.

BOX
Christopher Woodward is the Director of the Garden Museum in London. His decision to hold an exhibition on the Dutch Wave (a term originally coined by Swedish horticulturist Rune Bengtsson) came about because “we may be a museum, but we are a centre for the exploration of contemporary garden culture too… we have had exhibitions on great British gardeners, like Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, but when doing these it struck me that when you talk to garden people about influences they talk about the Dutch more than anyone else”. “It was in the mid 1990s when everyone was really excited about these gardens” he says, “and the American writer Derek Fell wrote that “the future is Dutch”. For many he thinks, the Dutch influence is “an escape from the British tradition whereby the apex of achievement is the garden of the grand country house”. Woodward recognises that a lot else has happened in The Netherlands, “to which the Dutch seem oblivious” but which others recognise as very important, such as the ruin garden of Louis Le Roi”.

Time for the CHOP

2011-01-17T11:26:00.000-08:00

I think everyone on the garden lecture circuit has a least favourite, but frequently asked question from the audience. Mine is “what about small gardens?” my own fault as the most dramatic pictures I show are usually of larger ones. Piet Oudolf’s is “when do I cut my perennials back?” There is a somewhat pained look on his face, as to him this is a rather absurd question. His reply is always “when you want to”....read on....

You've gotta "read on" because I've recently been asked to make some guest contributions to Gardening Gone Wild, a leading garden group blog. I'm the only non-American in the group, so that's a great honour (even a great honor!) to be included. So, many, but not all, my blogs will now link to GWG. Which has a great rollcall of writers and photographers to check out.

THE COLD

2010-12-21T09:49:00.000-08:00

So with temperatures down to –13C (which I suppose might be regarded as a rather pleasant day in some places where this is being read), what else is there to talk about. We have had several weeks of this, which seems to add insult to injury.

Last winter was pretty bad too. Anyone who wants to see what survived and what didn’t should have a look a the RHS report, based on a nationwide survey. Losses as interesting as survivals.

I wonder just what impact this winter will have on the fashion that has developed over the last twenty years for growing tender stuff. During that time a whole generation of people have become gardeners without knowing what a ‘proper’ British winter is (though in fact this is worse - a central European winter) – this 20 years has co-incided with a time when the garden industry went on its great expansion.

I’d better put my hand up. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s I was certainly one of the early pioneers of the great gardening boom’s promotion of the less-than-hardy. I was actually primarily interested in widening the range of cool conservatory plants – that great swathe of flora which just needs protection from freezing (and in many cases are ok above (round about ) –5C. Selling plants at RHS flower shows in London (remember them, before the RHS decided it could make more money renting the halls out than running flower shows – which some of us naively thought was their core mission) I remember being vaguely shocked by people saying that they have planted some of my stuff out and it had survived. We began to realise just what a warm microclimate London has – and indeed any big city is warmer than its surroundings.

I long ago moved onto hardy perennials, which are nearly all from climates far more severe than ours, and living in the Welsh borders I am not tempted to be too experimental on the hardiness front. Maybe one day I’ll live by the sea and have one of those fabulous west coast gardens where you can mix and match from different climate zones. Maybe in my old age. But back then, I was certainly part of that zeitgeist, and I remember thinking that some of my colleagues who just got deeper and deeper into the whole hardy exotic thing were doing something which was just going to end in tears.

Anyway, what happened in the 1990s was a coming together of several things: a long run of mild winters (assume global warming, probably on top of cyclical climate change), an increase in plant introductions from borderline frost climates all over the world which went hand-in-hand with the great consumer gardening boom. Lavandula stoechas was never seriously regarded as hardy, maybe a few folk in Cornwall grew it. Mild winters created an opening for introductions from different parts of its range – we got aware of the concept of provenance, where something came from, how (in some species) there are appreciable genetic differences in ability to survive cold depending on between plants over an altitudinal and latitudinal range. And then of course you can hybridise, so Lavandula stoechas blossoms into , quick look at RHS Plant Finder – 55 taxa in commercial cultivation in Britain.

By the way I do like Lavandula stoechas, but I am going to use it to illustrate my point. Wholesalers started selling it, probably run by people too young to remember a cold winter (am I sounding like a grumpy old man here?), what with those little rabbit-ear ‘flags’ on the flowers the gardening public just love it. I remember, years ago, looking at some in a garden centre, at the little plastic tag which tries to give information without actually using any language (like IKEA flat-pack furniture), and no mention of (lack of) hardiness.

So here we are, with a whole new diversity of plant life in our gardens, being subjected to a big experiment. There will be lots of surprises when the big thaw finally happens. I just hope that the growers of ‘plants on the edge’ make notes and let the rest of us know about survivals and casualties.

"I'd give it three years"....... how perennial are perennials? and other awkward questions.

2010-11-27T06:26:00.000-08:00

Ever bought a 'perennial' from a garden centre and then wondered why it drops dead after a number of years? You like the thing so you try it again. Ditto. Naturally you blame yourself/the soil/the fact that the dog peed on it, but then you discover that everyone else has the same problem.

Welcome to the world of the 'not-perennial'.

Annual, biennial, perennial - three words which actually represent points on a gradient - from ephemeral to Bob Brown's "bomb-proof". Between 'biennial' and 'perennial' there are a host of short-lived perennials which do generally die after a few years. Their saving grace is that often they self-seed. If they don't its a bit of a con the hort industry telling us they are perennial.

How often do the garden reference books tell you that a perennial is short-lived? Or if it runs about, and if it does, how rapidly or its mechanism of spread. Lots of questions the books don't tell you the answers to.

But go to something like a Hardy Plant Society meeting and the air is thick with anecdotal material on just these kind of questions. So, I thought, why not design a research questionnaire which aims to get experienced gardeners answering carefully targeted questions on just these issues? As it happens there was an EU project: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), European Territorial Cooperation 2007-2013.Interreg IVB North Sea Region Programme, which I was able to join and get (pretty decent) funding. Hurray for the EU! And of course to the Landscape Department of the University of Sheffield, in particular Nigel Dunnett and Mel Burton.

So, here are the results.

There is the 'lite' version, reprinted from the Hardy Plant Society journal (long-term plant performance), and for those of you who feel up to it, the full report.

Take a look at the garden

2010-11-06T01:36:00.000-07:00

Here's the garden at Montpelier Cottage, best shots from this summer.

Come on into the garden.... but don't feed the perennials.

Those Robinia logs, and the Dutch Wave

2010-10-30T23:26:00.000-07:00

Lots of queries about how Monique & Thierry Dronet at Berchigranges (see last blog) use robinia logs to build up slopes. Philippe Ferret kindly sent me some pictures of the technique soon after construction:

Meanwhile back home, the Garden Museum have launched their Dutch Wave exhibition, funny to see one's life become history, The exhibition probably would not have been there if it hadn't been my plugging away telling everyone about the Dutch garden scene back in the mid 1990s. There have been a series of events featuring Piet Oudolf, "they sold out quicker than anything else we have ever organised" said museum director, Christopher Woodward. Back in the 1990s we bewailed the chauvinistic inward-looking nature of the British gardening scene. How things have changed!

See an article in The Daily Telegraph. to hear some reminiscences.

Is this the most beautiful garden ever? Travels in Mitteleuropa part5.

2010-10-22T01:26:00.000-07:00

Well I have been back home now for a week, and le Jardin de Berchigranges, isn’t in Mitteleuropa, but in France, on the way back home, but the Vosges mountains do feel a bit like central Europe. It is a lovely setting in which to create a garden, and this particular one blends into its landscape perfectly. It is the garden I think I would like to create if I had the time, the commitment to opening it to the public, and an endless source of robinia logs.

I was absolutely blown away, which to be honest I am very rarely these days.

Knew the garden was going to be good when i met these box

The planting, needless to say is very naturalistic, with some bold new departures, such as asters growing in rough grass, lots of self-seeding, and the feeling that the plants have a large say in deciding where they grow. There are lots of just the kind of additional elements I love - slightly whacky, imaginatively creative touches in the form of buildings, sculptures, odd structures, unexpected views. There is hardly a straight line in the place, so the massive hornbeam hedge ‘structure’ at one end of the garden which reads like a fortress has all the more impact. What I particularly like is how they have achieved structure without using cement, brick and the usual array of ‘hard landscaping’ materials (I have a deep loathing of hard landscaping). Much of this is by using logs rammed vertically into the ground with the gaps between them filled with soil, and needless to say plants - so dealing with elevations. Its all so inventive. And technically, really well done. I love it! I love it! I love it!

Gärtneri Hügin

The house, is so like our own ‘pavilion’, even down to the angle of the roof and the ornamental ‘dagging’ fascia. Clearly people after my own heart. I can’t wait to get back here.

Before leaving Germany

I dropped in on Ewald Hügin, who is one of the most talked about nurserymen in Germany. His nursery is reassuringly British, which is a way of saving its idiosyncratic, rather untidy and full of really unusual plants. He has created some very good display gardens since I was last here – perennials and annuals together, wonderfully colour schemed.

And on the way back.

France’s reputation for good summer planting is now well-known and appreciated this side of the channel. I dropped into Metz on the long drive home, which markets itself as a ‘ville de jardin’. The plantings I saw were in a way nothing special for France, but streets ahead of anything you see back home. What I like about them is the sheer inventiveness and range, and they look very well trialled, in terms of composition, getting height and spread right – that kind of thing. There is obviously a whole genre of planting design here . Why isn’t anybody in Britain doing anything like this? I mean, why?

Spot the celery!

To illustrate the inventiveness, in the park I looked at in Metz, there was a very glossy leaved plant which looked vaguely familiar, obviously an umbellifer – a bite proved it to celery. This lateral thinking approach to planting design is what I love about the French style – and you see it in Germany sometimes too.

Final stop en route to the ferry was Chris Ghyselen just outside Bruges in Belgium (or perhaps I should say Flanders). I’ve wanted to meet him for years, as Belgium has not figured highly in the new perennial movement; he combines a classically Flemish love of hedges with a passion for plants. And some very clever little secret paths through the garden, so very much a garden where there is so much more than what you see at first.

Swissinnovation - Travels in Mittleuropa part 4

2010-10-16T23:34:00.000-07:00

Experimental 'perennial hedge'

Lots of good things happen at Hochschule Wädenswil. The ‘integrated planting system’ for one, which aims at making randomised mixes of perennials and bulbs, and annuals for the first two years, and some other ‘mixed planting’ systems where again the emphasis is on choosing plants compatible with the site, and each other and then randomising them. Works well in slabs rather than conventional borders. And they are trialling a ‘perennial hedge’ too, with Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ as the main element, oddly flowering component not randomised, but interesting idea – more of a summer-autumn screen planting than a hedge. I’ve always thought tallish perennials work well as shallow screen type plantings.

Doris, maestra of the urban annual mix

They have also started working with annual mixes, using them on sites left temporarily vacant in the constant rebuilding which seems to afflict Zürich. Public love them. They work here as the country gets quite high summer rainfall (which I remember only too well from childhood holidays); stress annuals with low soil moisture, and they go into seed-production mode and an early death, a trajectory difficult to stop, but keep them moist and many will flower all summer. Annual mixes don’ t work in eastern Austria or further east as the summer is too dry and they will all be dead by the end of July.

Doris Tausendpfund who designs the annual mixes (and the very promising looking perennial mixes) describes how she sees the mixes working on two levels – one colour dominates from the distance, perhaps as you drive by in your car, but then if you stop and look more closely, like whilst waiting for the tram, you see that there are many other colours.


Climbing plants in containers in Basel (Hochbergerstr.)

On the subject of building sites, it never ceases to amaze me how much the Swiss love cement, in fact the smell of wet cement always reminds me, in a really Proustian way, of Switzerland, as I spent several months here as a child and the frenetic building with cement clearly impacted the hard-wiring of the scent bit of my brain. Perhaps all this rather unsustainable use of cement is one reason for the counter-reaction, that the country is the world leader in green architecture and engineering; green roofs are everywhere, climbers are used to dramatic effect on buildings, whilst slope stabilisation using plants is increasingly seen, or actually not seen, as it is a lot less obvious than great concrete bastions or gabions.

Whilst I’m having a moan about my recent dear hosts, it also never ceases to amaze me how much the Swiss smoke. Like the proverbial chimneys, so unless you have an alp to yourself you can forget about the pure mountain air. Although, smoking in restaurants has finally been made Verboten. Putting two things together, perhaps the country should be symbolised note by the alpenhorn, the Emmentaler cheese or the Swiss army knife but a re-inforced concrete ashtray.

What do you do when the Schau is over? Travels in Mitteleuropa part 3.

2010-10-11T23:49:00.000-07:00

What happens when the last Stein has been drunk, the last leaflet on bio-dynamic slug control handed out and the last Tagetes wilts in autumn's first frost?
Gardenshows are a big part of the German garden scene, lasting all summer and (key thing this) leaving behind the legacy of a regenerated urban space. Many of the best parks are former Gartenschau sites. We tried it in Britain during the Thatcherreich but no attempt was ever made to keep them as public spaces, and in the sad case of Liverpool, the show site is now quite well-known for its grafitti daubed ruined Chinese garden.

Playground - durability all right! Had to stop myself running up it.

How you turn a one-summer event into something permanent is a challenge, one which has apparently been met pretty well here. Of course I tend to visit the successful ones, but I have seen places with artworks that look like beached whales, avenues which go nowhere, and perennial borders run amok. A couple of days ago I dropped in on a 2004 Bavaria State show at Burghausen. On the whole a successful transformation, 8 out of 10, I think Herr (or Frau) Burgermeister. One series of perennial borders pretty well abandoned – why not just replace with ground cover? and some strange objects which could only be artworks, but a fantastic children’s playground – the kind of really inventive place which can be one of the best features of these events, overall a good urban green space, and a whole series of little gardens between beech hedges – nice intimate spaces (assuming the good folk of Burghausen don’t go in for too much spliff-rolling or needle-based activities, which is always a problem if you create too much quiet space in urban parks). These were all designed by design practices, a bit like Chelsea Flower Show gardens, but permanent. Some looked really good, the others … well, I am sure the designers would be horrified if they could see their names attached. There is always a real problem with these individual gardens in places where they become permanent and get maintained by the same staff – they all sink to a common level. On the whole though they make for garden vignettes you would never get normally in a public park.

Panicum virgatum grass with Aster dumosus at Weihenstephan

Quick visit to Weihenstephan, home to the world’s leading collection of perennials, meet the new prof. of planting design, Swantje Duthweiler, whose interest in early 20^th century planting styles heralds the prospect of some interesting new takes on plant use (watch this space?).

Now in Switzerland where I have spent a fascinating day at Hochschule Wädenswil, a teaching and research centre in canton Zürich. They have done a lot of work on perennial mixtures – randomized combinations of plants for particular visual effects or management techniques, sometimes just perennials, but sometimes including bulbs and annuals too. Some very high tech means of teaching plant ID too – you use an iPhone app. to zap a code on a pillar and your phone downloads a plant list, plant information and other stuff about the planting; meanwhile some nicely designed little leaflets give you plants lists too.

Most stunning of all though are the vertical gardens they are working on for indoor environments, including some wonderful ‘plant pictures’, exploiting the fact that a lot of tropicals perform well when growing vertically.

A lot of fruit growing happens at Wädenswil too – it has a mild climate, being on Lake Zürich; some fascinating unusual fruit here too. Actinidia arguta makes tiny sweet little Kiwi fruit – much nicer than the normal kind, and I never realised you can eat Schisandra chinensis berries – although to be honest the flavour made me think of what it would be like if you bit into a chunk of incense – a challenge for the truly innovative cook perhaps.

Odd how in the German- speaking world, it is public horticulture which is where innovation happens, and private gardens are relatively unsophisticated - mirror image of back home. Our nearly all having private gardens (in the UK) has meant, sadly, a lack of political pressure for quality public space. But given the very different agendas of private and public gardening, there is so much scope for cross-fertilisation of ideas.

Travels in Mitteleuropa 2

2010-10-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

Jo and I try out the exercise machines on Bratislava's new Danube river promade - a real boost for the way you can enjoy the city and the river.

The perennial revolution marches on! The Czechs and Slovaks are now doing research into public use of perennials, very much inspired by the German randomised mixing technique. Extremely interesting afternoon at the Landscape Dept. of the Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. Jo worked at Bratislava Comenius Univ. from 1993-5, so we now all about alcoholic Stalinist heads of department, reinforced concrete buildings , dead hand of Marxism-Leninism exams etc, etc. So delighted to find lovely new building, ditto perennial border, ditto prof, and young staff well clued up on all the German research, on Oudolf, and ‘the Sheffield school’. On the subject of profs. a sure sign of age is when the professors start to be younger than you are.

Reading Prof. Hallova’s research I realise that she’d brought up an issue none of the rest of us have ever considered – that plants engage in chemical warfare through ‘allelopathy’ amongst themselves and that this impacts on planting combinations, so for eg. nepeta and euphorbia suppress the growth of asters and geraniums. I immediately think of all the Euphorbia cyparissias I let rampage in my borders. Fascinating! I think I should set up some trials back home this winter and really see if it is an impact we should really worry about in a practical sense.

Perennial beds in every town I drove through! Plus trusty Renault Kangoo

Given that it's a long time since I’ve driven round Austrian roundabouts it is just amazing to see how much perennials (in the 40-60cms height range) are used in traffic islands and roadside environments. Really just about every place I have driven through in Oberösterreich seems to. Wunderbar!

A misty, soggy, chilly stomp around some dry meadow habitat near Mikulov in Czechia, Scabiosa ochroleuca and Aster linosyris flowering away in profusion. Sabine Plenk (a colleague from Vienna’s BOKU) and I agreed it was a ‘second spring’ effect as autumn rains re-moisten very thin stony soils. Nice to see the local flora (Pannonian-Pontic) used in the grounds of the castle in town in an ornamental way. Not so sure about the monstrous Christmas tree in the town square and all the artificial snow – but it turned out to be a film set. Made me freeze just looking at it.

Dialectic of locally native dry meadow plants with box parteer at Mikulov Castle, CZ.

More soggy foggy in Austria, can’t see the mountains! Furchtbar! Schade! However thinking long-tmer garden visiting in Austria is looking up. There is a new guidebook, published by Callwey Verlag and based on the very thorough Gärten Reiseführer for Germany. Lots of really rather nice sounding Privatgarten open too – how soon can I get back to check them all out? Only managed Linz Bot. Gdn. (good, some nice mature rarely-seen shrubs) and Christian Kreß’s nursery – Sarastro – at Ort-in-Innkreis. FAB, FAB, FAB. If this nursery were outside Guildford, you’d be blown away by it. Its not just plants, its really funky architectural salvage, kinky walls, alpines grown in all sorts of weird rubble. Its Berlin grunge meets Alpine Garden Society. Its cool. Ain’t nothing like it back home.

Forget the Sleazyjet flight to ‘Vienna’ (in reality Bratislava). Get the car out – the GB sticker, the green card, the ferry/chunnel ticket, the headlight deflectors, and thrash down the autobahns (yes, you really can drive as fast as you like) and load the car up with plants. There’ll be loads here you’ve never seen before. And while you about it you can load up with Austrian wine, all of it totally gluggable and varieties like Grüner Veltliner you never find amongst the Chard and SauviBlank in Sainsbury’s, and the time spent on the autobahn will feel like its worth it. I did one better, stocked up with Slovak wine at the Nitra Tesco – just as good and miles cheaper. Stuff the Dordogne, up the Danube!

Mitteleuropa

2010-10-03T23:00:00.000-07:00

An invite to lecture at a new garden event in Vienna – Flora Mirabilis. Very stylish, in the way that these things usually are over here. The posters for it are shown above. Wonderfully kitsch-Botticelli, and rather naughty (look at the guy’s pants). Probably wouldn’t be acceptable in prudish Britain.

Over here – on the mainland. I drove over, a long way, but having the car enables you to be so flexible and you can just throw all your possessions in the back and not worry about squeezing everything into a flight bag; and you can stop at nurseries and buy plants, ditto winemakers and cases of wine etc. I used to do this a lot – drive all the way to central Europe, but haven’t done so for years. Back in the mid to late 1990s it was when I discovered the wonders of what was going on in German and Dutch gardens – crucially Jo was working in Bratislava 1993-1995, just after Slovak independence, and so I got into the habit of driving, which enabled me to visit gardens on the way – and if you take a kind of broad corridor from disembarking at Calais to say Munich, there are just so many stunning examples of horticultural innovation on the way. And so many great historical gardens too – if the sight of perennials and grasses gets a bit much after a while.

I made the first trip in June 1994. This was a month after my mother died, which was kind of symbolic, as she had been a great traveller in Germany and Austria in her youth. It is one of the curses of the human condition that we burst with questions for our parents when it is too late. There is so much now that I would have liked to ask her. She came over with a bicycle and made several big trips in the 1930s – the last time a month before war was declared in 1939. This was a time when educated Brits were far more likely to spend time in Germany than France; it seems strange now – the Brit summer middle-class rush to their second homes/gîte in France now takes on the appearance of the annual departure of the Gadarene Swine – but most of them come back complaining - about a) too many other Brits and b) the French. Now Germany is just seen as a large car factory with a bit of rather gloomy forested scenery attached.

I have my mother’s diary of her German cycling travels – I have thought about trying to retrace it (although how much I would do on a bike is debatable). Reading it now, I inevitably do so with the knowledge of the horrors that came after, which I think is a real problem in dealing with anything to do with 1930s Germany. On the garden front, Karl Foerster had the sense/decency to go into exile (Sweden), Willy Lange accepted a Nazi medal – do we trash his reputation as a result? Anyway back to my mum’s diary – most of it is actually pretty boring, she wasn’t a very political person and anyway life in ‘interesting times’ goes on much as the same as it always does. She complains a lot about how dirty places are, and how friendly everyone is.

As a kid we often had family holidays in Switzerland, where my mother’s German proved invaluable. Her first trip back to Germany was in 1966? when we did one of those boat cruises down the Rhine. I remember standing in a bomb site in Cologne which just seemed to go on for ever – it must have been a deeply emotional moment for her. Another time we did the Romantishe Straße through all those fairytale towns in Bavaria (now signposted in Japanese by the way), and I remember a lot of her memories came back. I have her photograph albums – which are fascinating to look at, especially when you realise that much of the cityscapes she photographed were bombed into ash in 1944-5. There are a number of photographs missing – just as I’m sure you’d find with many surviving German/Austrian albums of the time too.

Students at BOKU show off their planting design projects

Since 1994, I think I have been back to Germany almost every year. There is so much to see here in the garden world, but in a kind of mirror image of back home – the interesting things, the innovation, is all in the public sphere: garden shows, urban planting schemes, parks, green roofs. The same is largely true of Austria and Switzerland, which makes events like Flora Mirabilis, aimed at the private gardener, all the more interesting. I hope it succeeds, I’d love to come every year. And those posters – well – maybe these will become the garden equivalent of the Pirelli calendar.

Mob rule in Bexhill

2010-09-20T00:46:00.000-07:00

It is not often I have to face a baying mob whilst planting. But I did last week in Bexhill – a small and quiet town on England’s south coast, one of those middle-middle places between the better known bohemian/down-at-hill Hastings and trendy Brighton. The town’s chief claim to fame is the De La Warr Pavilion, a superb early modernist building; it’s just had a refurb and of course it is now the surrounding landscape, including a section of seaside promenade which is getting some attention from the local council.

There has been local opposition – there probably has been a failure of community consultation (a mixed blessing at the best of time, see below), but you can’t help but feeling that there are a lot of folk here who just dislike any change - Bexhill does not feel like a go-ahead with-it kind of place. The planting in question was right behind the walkway that runs along the top of the beach – right in the teeth of salt-laden winds and spray. I’ve looked at a fair number of coastal gardens over the years, with varying aspects, and got a good feel for the tough wiry sorts of plants which survive, a lot of them Mediterranean sub-shrubs like lavenders and cistus and grasses. And I took advice from Naila Greene, a garden designer in Devon, whose garden is in a very similar location on the south coast – and is a superb mix of intermingled perennials and low-growing shrubs.

The Bexhill locals who gathered on the other side of the Harris fencing where we were setting the plants out maintained that nothing would survive here. I went out to meet “the local residents”; some of them were prepared to engage in a discussion about what would work and what wouldn’t, but one woman got into a total frenzy and started to shout at me about the whole development, with her gang adding in their halfpenny’s worth in the background. She was just short of abusive. You end up feeling like a scapegoat for everything they don’t like about the new development, which by the way includes play areas, seating, shelters and shower points - scarily trendy stuff - replacing grass, a low wall and strips of annual bedding.

I suspect there could have been more ‘community consultation’. But this does cost a lot of money to do properly – which means less to spend on the actual development, and you will never satisfy all ‘the community’. Besides which ‘the community’ have a variety of views, and many of these are conservative, unadventurous and driven by prejudice. I think many of us felt sympathy with the well-known garden designer at a Vista evening who declared “f*** the community”. If all landscape designers were led by ‘the community’ we would never get anywhere further than beds of petunias and grass. My own feeling is that it is important to listen to people: their ideas, experiences of the locality and fears, but at the end of the day, a landscape designer has to be allowed to be creative, without which there will be no innovation.

Awarding Rewarding Plants

2010-09-17T11:54:00.000-07:00

I got invited to an interesting meeting the other week, a gathering at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley to take part in a ten-year re-evaluation of the plant trials system. An interesting gathering – felt good to be amongst so many people who just know so much stuff, mostly members of one RHS committee or other, and a few from the nursery trade. I think I was the only one there who didn’t fit into either category. Felt a bit like I’d joined the grown-ups.

The RHS awards an ‘Award of Garden Merit’ to plants which it deems “outstanding excellence for ordinary garden decoration or use” after subjecting them to a trial – usually at the Wisley garden. The AGM’s credibility tends to decline the further away from Wisley you go – which is perhaps not entirely fair, as a lot of the characteristics for which something gets the AGM are genetically-determined factors, which will show up wherever the plant is hardy enough to survive. Actually, life beyond Planet Surrey is recognised - to answer an obvious question – a hardiness rating is integral to an AGM award.

As part of some research I did earlier in the year (of which more later in a future blog) I did a comparison between the very different RHS and German systems. They are actually very different, with different objectives; there’s more money for trialling in Germany I think – how else could you trial something in 14 different places (which include Switzerland and Austria), and the German system is not aimed at an award but a grading (3 stars, 2 stars, 1 star, “for collectors” (i.e. second rate plants for nerds) and then a final grading which I understood to be a polite way of “to the compost heap”. I liked the objective set of criteria which was used to judge the plants in Germany, and was rather puzzled by the lack of anything like this for the RHS system. A certain amount of prejudice as well perhaps – visions of RHS committees of blazer-clad old buffers voting in a post-Jolly Good Lunch stupor are, to be honest, rather a thing of the past. The RHS system seems to be entirely relative, but the reports are thorough and are in fact the very best sources of information on garden plants available.

So there we go. Invigorating to be amongst so many experts, and to have our opinions really respected. Let’s see if this actually very useful system can be fine-tuned and made even more useful.

Pic above by the way is of ‘Uchiki Kuri’, a Japanese winter squash, a group which does not appear yet to have been trialled; bred on Hokkaido and at 150m up in the Welsh borders the only squash worth growing. Its flavour is also really good - I suspect its dry matter content is higher than any of the others. 21 fruit from 8 plants and more to come.

I don't usually do this kind of thing

2010-09-09T12:20:00.000-07:00

I don't usually do this kind of thing – summer bedding that is, but with some empty beds in front of my office building I thought I'd give it a go. Specifically I wanted to do something with a Mexican theme; having made a couple of visits to the country over the last few years I wanted to play with some colours I'd got to particularly associate with the place, in particular a very strong carmine pink which you see a lot, in fact my Mexican friend, Dr. Cruz Garcia Albarado, describes it as the national colour. We wouldn't dream of combining it with yellow, but the Mexicans love to.

So, with a backdrop of corn (a sweet corn variety) and amaranthus, two of the crops which fed Aztec and other Mesoamerican civilizations, I splurged out with some outrageously colourful flowers, all bred by the Aztecs (dahlia, tagetes, tithonia, zinnia), or of Mexican origin, nicotiana and bidens. Mostly started off in plugs sown March or April in the polytunnel and planted out May.

A few lessons for if I ever do it again. One is that it is almost impossible to get hold of a tagetes marigold which isn't ridiculously compact, although my friend Blair Priday saves seed every year of a very loose-growing one which would have been better. Same problem with the tithonia, but that might have been my problem choosing the variety. What happens is that compact plants get swamped by the sprawling bidens and nicotiana, quite apart from the irritating parks department look of compact annuals.

Everyone LOVES the zinnias, they don't seem to be a particularly fashionable flower right now, but the colours are so intense, and brings together that real Mexican pink and yellow.

sweet corn

Amaranthus 'Marvel Bronze

Amaranthus 'Autumn Palette'

Bidens ferulaefolia 'Golden Goddess'

Tithonia rotundifolia 'Fiesta del Sol'

Agastache mexicana 'Sangria'

Tagetes 'Legion of Honour'

Zinnia 'Scabious flower mix'

Nicotiana affinis

and although you can hardly seem them in this pic: Dahlias Dahlia 'Gallery Art Deco', 'Princesse Gracia', Bishop of Auckland, 'La Recoleta', ‘Ellen Huston’.

Northwind

2010-08-25T14:59:00.000-07:00

A little while ago I had my second visit to Northwind Perennials in a year, they are just outside Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Run by three people who all take different roles in the company, it is Roy Diblik who is known as the plantsman - he was a real pioneer in the containerised production of native perennials.

Colleen Garrigan does some wonderfully artistic or even wacky assemblages of old tools, architectural salvage etc.

Roy has developed a sophisticated take on the art of putting together native and non-native perennials - all explained in a neat little book - 'Small Perennial Gardens: The Know Maintenance Approach'. The pun is based on the fact that what so many (American) gardeners seem to want is NO maintenance, but Roy is keen to stress that if you KNOW your plants then you can reduce maintenance - and this is key, without smothering the ground with wood chip mulch.

The plant combinations are very much about creating a complete canopy so grasses shoehorn in between flowering forbs like liatris and echinacea and sprawly (but not actualy spreading) low things like calaminthas can fill in the gaps. The display gardens around the nursery are very accomplished with a good 'field' type effect, and nicely integrated with shrubs and small trees.

Now - the wood chip. A good example of how a 'good thing' becomes a 'bad thing'. Not so long ago mulch was seen as solving a lot problems - like reducing moisture loss and smothering weeds, but of course like all good things (chocolate cake, beer etc.) can be overdone. Wood chip has become one of Roy's pet hates, and I can see why - a lot of folk around Chicago seem to think that wood chip is an end in itself, any plants standing out looking rather lonesome. The stuff is dumped on every year, so not surprisingly plants underneath can be completly buried, and in the hot humid summers, all sort of diseases get going. What's more, a lot of the wood chip gets shipped up from Georgia, so the transport miles are pretty crazy.

Jim Archibald

2010-08-22T11:38:00.000-07:00

Jim Archibald, who died last week, was one of the 'last of the great plant hunters'. This is what I wrote about him for an obituary to be published in The Daily Telegraph.

    For those of us in the gardening world who enjoy the challenge of growing unusual and rare plants, the annual arrival of a seedlist from Jim and Jenny Archibald was keenly awaited. Unillustrated, and consisting of A4 sheets stapled together, it would inevitably list scores of intriguing plants, mostly offered as seed collected in the wild. Some would be new forms of familiar species, some species of groups we know and are familiar with, but many would be completely unknown. However it was the introduction that many of us would read most keenly. Who would be Jim Archibald’s target this year: a botanist whose opinions on plant naming he disagreed with, the Royal Horticultural Society, Kew Gardens, or someone being holier-than-thou about the ethics of collecting seed in the wild? The introduction was always erudite, well-informed, witty and often very hard-hitting; in the world of gardening, where there is little openly-expressed disagreement they were a true tonic.
    Archibald’s career as a freelance plant hunter and seedsman extraordinaire began, appropriately, with another plant catalogue. That of Jack Drake, a famous grower of perennials and alpines in Aviemore. As a teenager Archibald was a keen gardener, and it was the listing of some plants grown from an expedition to Nepal in 1954 which fired his enthusiasm. His holidays were spent working at Drake’s nursery, and even at university (Edinburgh), where he read English Language and Literature, he continued to grow, and even sell, unusual plants. Early trips to look at plants growing wild and collect seed followed, to Corsica and Morocco.
    Travelling, often in out of the way places, looking for plants was soon established as a lifestyle. He would make light of the process, I remember him telling me once that “seed collecting in the past might have involved intrepid hikes or perilous adventures on donkeys but these days the road system makes it a lot easier, we rarely need to go anywhere more than a few hours from at least a track”. But soon he would talking casually about collecting alpine plants from the “mountains of the Iran/Iraq border region”. Then there is the story, legendary amongst alpine plant enthusiasts, of ‘the van to Van’, when he and Jenny towed a caravan to eastern Turkey, to use as a base for seed collecting.
    The only period Archibald was not spending at least part of the year travelling, it was running a nursery – The Plantsman, near Sherborne in Dorset, from 1967 to 1983. Working in conjunction with Eric Smith, it was the forerunner of the great many small specialist nurseries which make the British gardening scene so vibrant. The Plantsman was famous for its hellebores and hostas, many varieties bred by Smith. Unable to make a success of the nursery as a business, Jim turned to his first love, of travelling.
    Usually accompanied by Jenny, who he had met in the early 1970s, Archibald established an annual cycle of summer and autumn seed collecting, selling the seed in the winter and spring. With a clear focus on alpines and small bulbs, JJA Seeds sold primarily to enthusiastic amateurs, but also to botanic gardens (at least until the restrictions of the Convention on Bio-Diversity made this difficult) and nurseries. Some of his bulb introductions were used by Dutch breeders to produce new varieties for the general public, but it was commercial growers of alpine and rock plants who relied on him for a constant supply of interesting plants; it is reckoned that almost anyone growing such plants today will have some which originated as JJA seed.
    Famed for his memory, Archibald seemed to have an almost photographic memory for the plants he collected, even able to take fellow travellers back to the exact rock where he found a particular plant, many years after he first visited the spot. His favourite hunting grounds for the plants he loved were the mountains of Iran and Turkey; occasional run-ins with military check-points or secret police did little to dent his enthusiasm. In later years he spent more time in the mountains of the western USA, often working alongside the growing number of local botanist-gardeners who were passionate about both seeing their native flora in the wild and growing it.
    Archibald was resolutely not commercial. Many times I tried to persuade him to pay more attention to collecting seed from larger herbaceous plants – apart from anything else they could have been more remunerative, but he stuck to what he loved.
     Many of us also wished that Archibald had taken up journalism. Those seedlist introductions were always worth re-reading – barbs flung (but always politely) at the pomposity of botanists who concealed data (supposedly in the name of conservation), at the effects of political-correctness on horticulture, at the dogmatic application of ill-thought out quasi-legal concepts like the Convention on Bio-diversity or Plant Breeders Rights.
    Archibald’s knowledge and ability to communicate it was recognised by the Alpine Garden Society, who in 2003 gave him their highest award – the Lyttel Trophy, given annually in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in contributions to the growing of alpine plants, their culture and botany. His incredibly wide circle of friends and colleagues in the garden and botanical worlds will remember a man of great intellectual integrity, enormous and infectious enthusiasm, who combined real erudition and learning with an ability to communicate it, and great personal warmth. Eloquent too, one seedlist introduction ended - “we sell dreams to ourselves and hope to pay for their reality by work and knowledge…what are seeds but dreams in packets?”

Great prairies.............but stick to the smoothies

2010-08-04T12:46:00.000-07:00

All pictures are of Shoe Factory Road prairie, near Elgin, IL. A dry to mesic site.

When Europeans go to the USA 99.99% of them do the same three things: go to NYC and go "ohmygodohmygod, look at those buildings" or the Grand Canyon and go "ohmygodohmygod, isn't it big, you could fit the whole of London/Paris/canton of Zurich in there" or they drive from San Francisco to NYC and all you ever hear is "ohmygodohmygod it is so boring driving across Nebraska". But we all complain about the coffee.

The other 0.01% tend to have a nerdy interest in something American like those people who know every single Indian tribe or every single Civil War battle. But there is a growing number who get obsessive about prairie. Personally I love it. This is the most fantastic habitat. It sums up what I love about being in the Midwest. It and the wooded surrounding landscapes are familiar enough to make you feel at home, but foreign and exotic enough to be give you a real thrill of excitement and novelty.

Silphium terebinthinaceum leaves

A dry habitat form of Phystostegia virginiana

Prairies are like Euro-wildflower-meadows but more diverse, with richer flora and an incredible level of difference between them. They are very beautiful but over a surprisingly long time, with flushes of different wildflowers from May to September. There are wet prairies, big and lush, right across to dry prairies, often on sand or gravel moraines - where the vegetation is short and sparse. Exploring any of them is an extraordinarily rich aesthetic/ecological experience, as it seems like every single bit is actually different to every other single bit, with different species or combinations of species.

Spotting mighty bright yellow silphiums with their sandpaper-textured leaves or deep purple/violet Dalea purpurea is like meeting old friends, and they always look so much better in nature than in the confines of a border. Bit like having a proper cup of coffee instead of the stuff that comes out of the tub the size of an oil barrel which says 'makes 240 cups'.

I only had a day and a bit to look around this time but you can pack a lot in. Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennials in southern Wisconsin took me round to look at some of the local wildflower sites. Hot and humid, so a bit like walking around in mosquito soup, but who cares. At Kettle Moraine you can see how the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources is trying to buy up parcels of land to create a 30mile long prairie corridor. Its places like these that make give you a feeling about what this country looked like before fields of soybeans, highways, malls and as-far-as-the-eye-can-see suburbia took over. And on the way to the airport we scrambled through a fence to look at a fantastic site at Shoe Factory Road.

Its just a shame about the coffee. But then if it got better I might be tempted to emigrate.

Check out Shoe Factory Road Prairie, at:
http://chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/spring2004/weekendexplorer.html

Visionaries and ground elder

2010-07-23T04:40:00.000-07:00

A visit to Waltham Place in Berkshire is a good opportunity to confront some of the dilemmas of the nature-inspired garden. Owner Strilli Oppenheimer employed the late Henk Gerritsen to help her ‘naturalise’ parts of the 1920s Percy Cane layout, all pergolas and walled and hedges and walled off garden rooms. Henk’s own ‘Priona Garden’ in eastern Holland had been her inspiration to get him over, as he was obviously good at gardening without making war on nature (although I don’t recall much food growing at Priona, I think it grew in the local supermarket where there was no nature to go to war with). Priona was wonderful for the balance between wildness and hedged and trimmed and mown order – a very Dutch balance, so it was right he should be involved at Waltham.

Ground-elder is a problem at Waltham, and since the garden staff cannot rid the garden of it using the bio-dynamic methods they are instructed to use (chemical warfare is actually little better either in my experience) the pragmatic decision has been taken to accept it. In one big courtyard area it is allowed in part (but heavily suppressed by lots of seriously big perennials) but kept from spreading by a cordon sanitaire of box, ingeniously Henk-clipped into a caterpillar shape – so much more fun than self-consciously trendy cloud pruning. In another garden it is allowed free-rein, but has to face vigorous perennials and so is too kept in check; earlier in June I think this is a very effective naturalistic perennial blend but by July it has gone over. A gravel garden is a riot of self-seeding, whilst the most successful part of the garden as far as I was concerned was an allee edged by walls, where shrubs and climbers had been allowed to spread just so, perennials to spread and intermingle and self-sow – the whole looks just so perfectly on the edge of tumbling into wildness. Head gardener Beatrice Krehl and her staff have managed to create a perfect embrace of the wild and the formal here.

Not all works, or has achieved such balance yet. A perfectly good terrace has been almost entirely lost to cistus and lavender and much other shrubbery in the final stages of the rangy senile decay to which many Mediterranean species seem to suffer, while a long border seems a long way from having a successful mix of species (nothing in flower in early July!). All in all, though, an immensely brave experiment in letting formality go to seed skillfully and gracefully.


Radical idea..... plant out some wildflowers in turf, maintain by "grazing like a cow" (Henk Gerritsen) - pulling up tufts of what you don't want and the add definition by deep edging between the wildy bits and the mown lawn.

A brief hop across the ditch

2010-06-27T02:32:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been to France for 7 or 8 years (I’m rather embarrassed to admit), but am on the way back from a visit to the Chaumont garden festival, where I took part in a conference on naturalistic planting design. Back in the mid-1990s there was a flurry of such events with a loose group called ‘Perennial Perspectives’ – with an event organised at Kew by Brita von Schoenaich in 1994 a notable watershed, as it introduced British gardeners to the astonishing virtuosity and technical skill of planting designers in Germany. The half-dozen or so PP get-togethers involved Brits, Scandinavians, German-speakers and Dutch. No-one from Latin Europe ever showed up, which on one level was a puzzle, as we all new that there were some individuals in France who were very keen on wild-style gardening, including of course the incredibly gifted Giles Clement; but on another level confirmed our prejudices about Gallic landscape dirigisme, and the very different garden traditions of Latin Europe …. yes it does involve a lot of straight lines, and a strangely obsessive desire to separate the garden from nature.

    So, an invitation to speak in France, alongside James Hitchmough from Sheffield University and Cassian Schmidt from Heremannshof in Germany was very welcome. But to us it felt like we were in a timewarp, with speaker number one (president of the French landscape association) pompously describing a park project which supposedly involved nature – nature being confined to an inaccessible wilderness area and a few bits of unmown grass. What is it about French landscape culture which seems unhappy with any public space which looks empty with less than 5,000 people in it? Tired by endless slides of vast mown grass spaces and thrusting walkways, speaker number two (a garden journalist) addressed us with the kind of “love your weeds” hippy ramble which we last heard about 20 years ago. He did however end up with a spirited critique of ‘natives-only’ planting, reminding us of its fascistic history. Then it was over to me, and then James and Cassian.
      We all agreed that the Chaumont garden show this year was more planty than in previous years, although only one garden made us go “wow”. In previous years the boundary between ‘garden’ and ‘installation art’ was a pretty fluid one, with many of the gardens combining art-school abstruseness with a use of materials which bore little relationship to what anyone could achieve in a permanent garden. One of the show mottoes is ‘ideas to steal’, but whilst there was some good planting to inspire visitors, so much of the non-planted elements simply don’t have permanence : willow, willow, willow, and plastic, and while Corten steel is pretty damn permanent it is beyond most people’s pockets and (yawn) we have just seen so much of the stuff in show gardens of late.
   The Chaumont site however is fantastic, kicking any British garden show into the compost heap, as the show gardens are shoehorned into the landscape by hedges, and blocks of permanent perennial planting. The whole event is a delightful experience, and surprisingly intimate. All terribly tasteful and stylish and so very French.

The whole thing though does reinforce my feeling of many years that French garden style is very good at the cosmetic - the stylish but not necessarily durable, whereas what Dutch and German garden style is more about combining style with technical proficiency and practical longevity. I suppose we are in the latter camp, but scoring lower on all counts. The bedding schemes which French munipalities invest in may belong to the cosmetic camp, but oh, they are so good, very high quality, and there is clearly no problem with funding them; that any British town council would stump up such funds is sadly unthinkable.


This was jolly clever, on the edge of the parkland to the south east of the Chateau de Chaumont, bedded out plants in ribbons so that when you see them sideways or diagonally on, there appears to be a field of planting.

On to a night at a grotty hotel in Paris, and a meal in a pavement café with James in which we go into raptures about French food culture, and vengefully remind myself that escargots are merely a cover for butter and garlic. Dutifully set off for Parc la Villette, one of the most important parks made in the latter years of the 20th century. Trudged around, admiring the red steel ‘folies’ but cursing the grey gigantism of everything else, more spaces which needed 5,000+. Yes, there are some wonderful little corners too, and a fantastic variety of spaces, but not a perennial or a flower to be seen anywhere. The whole place feels oddly sterile. Came back to grumbling, I hope not too xenophobically, about French landscape culture: form over all else, a fixation with hard materials and straight lines, a general lack of softness. Lets hope the little signs of interest in wilder styles take root. I’d love to see a real French take on naturalistic planting.

The Wild Garden - June 2010

2010-06-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

Here are some pics of our wild garden, early June. Click below:

photos

Cow Parsley gardening

2010-05-30T02:31:00.000-07:00

This year’s Chelsea Flower Show seemed to mark a return to horticulture, rather a relief after the show becoming increasingly dominated by sculptural assemblages (I’m trying to be polite here) or flocks of statuary. A lot of the gardens were just well planted, with a refreshing lack of pretentiousness. Andy Sturgeon’s winning Mediterranean Garden (for The Daily Telegraph) was a model of all that is best about British garden design – the classic balance between strong structures and exuberant planting – but all in a very contemporary style.

No cow parsley though. I’d like to put in a bid to do a cow parsley garden. Queen Anne’s Lace to American readers (I think). This cream-white flowered umbelliferous plant dominates a vast proportion of British roadsides, seemingly able to compete with the grasses which, fed on nitrogen pollution, more or less suffocate the rest of our limited wildflower flora. In my last garden, I conducted an experiment in letting it seed one year, and then controlling by pulling up after flowering. It worked, in that I got a respectable amount of cow parsley but without it competing with anything else. So, now I’m repeating the experiment here.

What I like about cow-parsley is the delicate flowers and, because it is such a common element of the British countryside, brings the landscape into the garden. The colour is also a buffer, toning down and blending the brighter colours of border plants. In theory I’d be quite happy for the stuff to distribute itself around the garden, but only if it isn’t going to become a weed and out-compete my border plants.

Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) is a biennial which survives year to year by seeding and apparently (though I have not verified this myself) by the production of bulbils at the base of the plant. It has a very narrow profile, doesn’t spread sideways or sprawl about, and dies from July onwards. Not something which could become a major problem then, and its reproduction can be controlled by pulling out before it seeds. Welcome to the naturalistic border!

The Rabbit's Eye View

2010-05-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

Doing a lot of teaching this spring. Groups of keen gardeners, garden design students or practising designers. English Gardening School, Society of Garden Designers regional groups, that sort of thing. Great fun, and terrific response from students. I love it. As for “teaching”, anyone who has to face a class of 30 inner-city kids five days a week is entitled to turn around and ask me to use a different verb – everyone is so keen and so appreciative. And always learn stuff from my groups as well.
   I’m currently pushing what I call the “rabbit’s eye view”, getting people down on their hands and knees looking at plants, really closely, trying to observe things they might not have seen before. It’s my belief that it is possible to predict how a plant will perform (spread, longevity, drought tolerance etc) from looking at key features of its shape, form, etc, and especially the bit where the stems join the roots. I try to pass this ‘reading the plant’ onto my students. Its about relating
   But they’ve got to get onto their hands and knees. You can’t observe plants from standing up. At the Hillier Arboretum, I have divided a group of 30+ up into groups of 4/5 to select plants to describe in their immensely long Centennial Border, “get on your hands and knees” I have to shout at some of them – this is where the sensible types get sorted out from those who brought unsuitable shoes or are afraid of tearing their tights. At least British students will work in groups. Did that with a group of mostly Chinese at Sheffield University once; as soon as you go to talk to one group they all sneak up behind you, and you turn around to see the entire class – ‘the teacher as the fount of all knowledge’ is so fundamental to them, which it isn’t to us.
   I studied adult education when I was teaching English as a Second Language back in the 1980s. The current dogma then was that a much as possible should come from the students, which is actually good, as it empowers classes and makes for a good interactive atmosphere. You don’t get a chance to nod off in my classes, there’s too much expected of you.
Photos Annie Guilfoyle, at West Dean, July 2009

Timelessly wandering in Spetchley Park

2010-05-03T06:16:00.000-07:00

Cyclamen repandum and cowslips in grass by the lake at Spetchley

I’ve only recently got to know this delightful garden, www.spetchleygardens.co.uk

and will try to make repeat visits through the year. It’s one of those places which feels timeless: lots of big old trees, walled gardens, box-lined beds and paths which lead through a pleasantly bewildering variety of spaces, just full of wonderful plants. This is the perfect ‘plantsman’s garden’, lots of rarities, often very well-established, and very thorough labelling. You can just wander around, at random, crossing and re-crossing your previous routes through, getting different perspectives through the trees, continously finding little nooks and crannies. It is something of a miracle how the staff of four keep on top of it all, and it has to be said that a bit of an atmosphere of faded grandeur is all part of its very characteristic feel.

Owner John Berkeley was one of my customers when I had my nursery north of Bristol many years ago, as head gardener Kate Portman said to me, “I think he knows every nursery in the country”. There are some wonderful plants here, and some lovely combinations. What is particularly interesting is seeing sizable and very well-established examples of garden plants, the most spectacular being what must hundreds of square metres of partially-shaded lawn invaded by self-sowing Lilium martagon.

A total absence of modern design ideas or self-conscious fashion gives this place real character, and a very restful feel. Just as well, as any plant-conscious gardener is also going to be very excited by so much of what is growing here.

More Chinese travels

2010-04-26T12:01:00.001-07:00

Just come back from a two week trip to China, leading a Gardens Ilustrated tour group with a colleague from Sheffield, Lei Gao. I went to China last year (see blog **), so we re-visited all those places, but added a few more. One was the new city museum in Suzhou, designed by I.M.Pei – the central courtyard lake was stunning, especially this backdrop ‘rock garden’.

Had a proper look this time at ‘Viewing Fish at Flowering Harbour’, though very crowded (a weekend), a park in Hangzhou by the Western Lake, designed by Sun Xiaoxing, China’s first really-acclaimed park since 1949, built in the mid-1950s to incorporate western and Chinese elements. Struck by how good the planting design was, a mix of unclipped and clipped shrubs largely.

The Western Lake at Hangzhou is really beautiful, but to appreciate it you need to be on the eastern built-up side, not the greener and much nicer western side. You could be on Lake Geneva, all very smart lakeside; you look across to the mountains with the clouds drifting between them. The Hangzhou Botanic Gardens include some good 1960s design, framed garden vignettes, between various buildings and walkways. Modern, but still invoking so much of the traditional approach to combining inside and outside.

High point was going to Anhui. Lei’s home province. So green and lush. Mount Huang Shan was stunning although overrun with tour groups. Everyone in our group I think understood just where Chinese aesthetics comes from: the naturally bonsai pines, the dramatic rockfaces, the clouds. We were familiar enough now with Chinese landscape painting to feel that we had finally walked into the painting.

Also in Anhui, we went to a couple of UNESCO heritage villages: Hongcun and Xidi, with some exquisite little gardens, all owned by local people (i.e. not Shanghai yuppies), some now run as B&Bs or restaurants, others were people Lei knew from research here years ago. Genuinely vernacular and made the famous Suzhou gardens look like museum pieces.

SPRING IS KINDOF HERE

2010-03-30T07:07:00.000-07:00

Spring is slowly happening. Hellebores been out for several weeks now, but so much later than normal. In this garden every seed which hits the ground grows, so unlike my last garden, even though the soil was so similar (slightly sticky red sandstone). So 2 years ago we dug up loads of seedlings and planted them out in nursery beds, thinking I might use them in a planting to raise the tone of some of the public borders I do in Bristol. But the city seem to have run out of dosh for public planting and have just beheaded the chief of parks, or something along those lines, so the good burghers of the city will have to do without my hellebores. Anyway I did not expect them to be as ‘good’ as the parents (Ashwood Nurseries) but to my surprise they were. No really good dark ones, but lots good reds and spotties and this picotee.

Interesting to see an obvious genetic linkage between vigour and flower. The picotee are slow, rather weak plants, the reds very vigorous. The most vigorous is a double, which I am pretty sure I got from Wendy Perry at Bosvigo. Probably sterile as no sign of seedlings.

Lots of Barnhaven polyanthus flowering. Such wonderful deep colours or unusual and sophisticated tones. The story is well-known – they were bred by a lady in British Columbia (Canada) in the 1930s, but seed is now available from a nursery in France. www.barnhavenprimroses.com

The seed is hand-pollinated and jolly expensive, but they all seem to grow. The contrast with the offerings from the garden centres and the big money breeding programmes is total. Modern polyanthus seem to get more hideous by the year, as flowers progressively more enormous and colours cruder. I should imagine the breeders are investing in the latest everything-but-GM breeding technologies. The results are truly hideous. Let's save modern genetics for stuff we can eat shall we?

One relatively modern hybrid which is fantastic is Narcissus 'Tete a tete' which is a cross-sectional hybrid, so doesn't fit into the various classes which daff-folk have divided the genus. Its incredibly prolific and early and tough and just comes up to brighten the dreariest post - winter border. It is one of those plants which is so easy and now so commercial that some are already turning their noses up at it. But me, I'm going to buy a sack of them for next autumn and stick them in everywhere.

Also on daff-talk, I see some seedlings of the wild Narcissus pseudonarcissus from the famous wild daffodil area of Newent in Glos. flowered for the first time this year - five years from seed. That's the quickest any daffodil seems to take.

Just had to share this. It's from Tony Avent’s website, he of Plant Delights nursery in North Carolina. I once got an award for an entertaining catalogue when I had my nursery but this is far better, laugh out loud at your desk stuff:
www.plantdelights.com/New/bad.html

INVADERS FROM THE EAST?

2010-03-18T23:57:00.000-07:00

A recent news item confirms what has been in the pipeline for some time, that a bug, of Japanese origin is about to be released in carefully-selected sites in the UK, to control Japanese knotweed. A friend in Japan tells me it has been collected in her area, Kumamoto, right on the southern tip of Kyushu. Here’s a local newspaper story:http://www.47news.jp/CN/201003/CN2010030901000230.html
Given the disasterous history of introducing predators of pests (like Australias’ cane-toad problem) some have expressed alarm at introducing the insect. This does sound like it has been thoroughly researched though, apparently for several years, to ensure that the bug doesn’t affect native flora - so let’s stop worrying and get on with it.
Knotweed is a magnificent plant, which is why the Victorians introduced it - William Robinson in The Wild Garden suggests planting in ‘the pleasure ground’ and by the waterside. Maybe we should blame him? Call it ‘Robinson’s knotweed’ instead of blaming the Japanese.
The press of course love Japanese knotweed. They love stories about foreign exotics causing trouble generally. Something about the triffid nature of the story appeals to that elemental need for journalists to frighten people. And of course an excuse for a bit of subliminal racism - have you noticed that the country origin of these scare-plants or pathogens is always emphasized: Spanish bluebells, Dutch elm disease etc. By the way, if you ever see buddleia being called ‘Chinese buddleia’ then you can be sure that someone has decided its a bad thing and is to added to the list of proscribed plants.
Japanese knotweed is undeniably a huge problem in a few areas, and an irritant in many more. It is not going to take over the country any more than the entire population is going to be eating raw fish for breakfast, or even spreading miso on toast like I do. There is an unattractive eco-fascist tendency which tends to see all non-native plants as problems waiting to happen, and the knotweed as simply the tip of an iceburg. Some ecologists however have pointed out that some spring wildflowers like wood anemones are able to co-exist happily with knotweed and others that growing alongside rivers it is very good otter habitat.
The spread of knotweed since its introduction in the latter 19th century is of course a warning to all in horticulture, that we do need to be responsible with what we grow and where we plant it, but the reality is that the problems we have with invasive aliens is pretty minimal compared to those faced in many other countries. Our long growing season which enables our aggressive grass flora to make vigorous growth for most of the year sees off most potential invaders. And some others, like buddleia, are a positive benefit.
I’d be quite happy to see knotweed as yet another part of our flora, kept well in check by the little Kumamoto-bugs or whatever they are called, just popping up now and again by the waterside, just like William Robinson would have intended.

What’s survived the worst winter in 30 years in the veg garden

2010-02-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

-10C, 300m up, snow off and on for 3 months

Kale – Ragged Jack/Red Russian
rubbish, totally dead

Kale – Darkibor
poor, but will recover for spring greens

Cabbage - red Huzaro
poor, several rotted off

Cabbage - savoy Tarvoy
very good

Leeks - Sultan, Flextan
very good

Pak Choi – Joy Choi
very good (surprisingly)

Mizuna
mush

Swiss chard
mush

The goat-chewed steppe

2010-02-20T09:20:00.001-08:00

Didn’t quite know what to expect from the Atlas mountains, where we recently went, more in the search for somewhere to get away from during the truly dismal period that is a British February, than anything seriously botanical or horticultural. First impression is that, being dry and high altitude, it is a bit like the short-grass prairie on the Colorado/Wyoming border Scott Ogden took me around back in October – all short grasses (Festuca mairei) and spiny little shrubbettes. The reason for the predominance of the spiny species is of course the goats, the curse of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern habitats, at least where poverty still encourages goats and overgrazing – I can’t remember what language this is from – “My great-grandfather had trees, my grandfather sheep, my father goats… I have nothing”. Only richer countries are able to appreciate just what an eco-crime goat-possession is.

Funny thing is though, that at slightly lower altitudes (1000-1500m), is the presence of ivy and brambles, two absolutely quintessentially British wild plants, which are not a particular feature of the European mainland. It is that Atlantic climate I suppose, I can imagine that there is a real connection between the floras of North Africa, the Iberian peninsula and the British Isles; in addition we all have species of bluebell (Hyacinthus). It would be interesting to come again, further north, where they have more rain and see what else we have in common.

What is it about heritage seeds?

2010-02-06T11:16:00.000-08:00

Or as you would say in North America – heirloom seeds?

I’ve just been on a British radio show – The Food Programme – the tone was set by a recording taken at heritage seed swap and ended up with a recording of my fellow interviewee collecting traditional varieties in India (chap called Geoff Tansey - nice enough guy, I'm just glad he's no-one's Minister of Ag.) . I can’t help feeling I had been shipped in to provide a kind of scapegoat. Scowls from the presenter made me realise that my suggestion that modern vegetable and crop seed varieties are better was definitely 'a failure to tow the party line’.

It can be fun growing heritage varieties, the feeling that you are growing something that people grew a hundred or so years ago. But I have never been very convinced that they are in any way better than modern ones – I mean if the old ones are so good, why aren’t we still growing them? The fact that they taste better is often given as a reason for growing old-fashioned vegetables. Not in my experience. Sometimes quite the opposite. I once grew ‘Nero de Toscana’ kale, now a very trendy plant amongst heritage veg growers. Its tough leathery leaves were greatly inferior to any other kale I’ve ever grown, old or new. I have tried some of the blue/purple potatoes currently being touted in vegetable catalogues; they have a distinct flavour all right – ‘astringent’ was the first word that came to my mind, ‘horrible’ was another I heard around the dinner table.

Preserving genetic diversity is often advanced as a reason for us to grow heritage veg. Diversity is important for the breeder, and it is vital that old varieties are preserved in (publicly-owned)seed banks and research stations, so that their genes are available to future breeders. But diversity per se is not of much use to the gardener at home. Far more important are factors such ease of growth, productivity and disease resistance. For these, modern varieties nearly always win hands down. The reason so many old varieties have died out is simply that people have stopped growing them because more recently bred ones were better.

‘F₁’ varieties are particularly despised by the vegetable luddites. They are the result of two very distinct varieties being combined, in order to produce plants which bring together good growing qualities and uniformity. Nearly all are produced for commercial growers, which can sometimes be a disadvantage; having peas or broccoli which all produce at once is very useful for a farmer who wants to harvest a whole field at once, but not much good for us, who want to harvest over a period. However with vegetables which are harvested over many months: carrots, leeks, cabbages, etc. F₁ hybrids have huge advantages. Particularly for gardeners with small plots, who need consistently vigorous, predictable, healthy and high-yielding plants – which is just what F₁s give you.

It is something of an irony that many of the people most interested in heritage veg are organic, but then logic has never been a part of the organic philosophy. Much of the thrust of modern plant breeding is towards the production of pest and disease resistant varieties, which minimise or eliminate the need for pesticides. Amongst the varieties recently made available to British gardeners are carrot-fly resistant carrots ‘Resistafly F₁’ and ‘Flyaway F₁’, and blight-resistant tomato ‘Fernline F₁’.

The future in the veg plot could be really exciting, especially if we drop our ill-founded suspicion of genetically-modified crops. Who knows what the future may hold: Chinese cabbage which won’t bolt, aubergines you can grow outside in the Welsh border, really tasty high vitamin tomatoes, even hardy rice?

Growing perennials in grass

2010-01-20T09:56:00.000-08:00

A question at a public lecture at the University of Gloucestershire (bet you didn’t know that Glos. had a Uni. …. well you do now!) last night made me think I should write this up from my PhD. A long time ago (late 1990s) I decided I would run a small-scale experiment on growing perennials in rough grass. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a ‘perennial meadow’, where the grass was cut only once a year. Around the same time James Hitchmough (now at the Uni. of Sheffield) had a similar idea. He, needless to say, was larger-scale and more scientific. Our hope was that we could come up with an alternative to just boring mown grass or long shaggy, but rather untidy grass.

Not actually a great success, but not without some hope.

Problem is, nearly all ornamental perennials have a dormant season, during which our native grasses (which makes up both lawns and pasture) and pasture forbs (like dear old creeping buttercup) are growing, give ‘em a mild winter and the things will grow for 365 days a year. So, perennials are immediately out-competed. This is why you get (or one reason why) you get such fab wildflower meadows in places with freezing winters where nothing can grow Oct/Nov to April, like the Alps, eastern Europe etc. – everything here starts off on a level playing field. Our British/NW European long growing season is just too grass/creeping buttercup+other winter-green forb – friendly.

So, we sprayed off (with Roudup) or dug out circles of grass and planted and watched results. Almost inevitably, both James and I found that plants in year 2 and onwards were so much smaller than we were used to seeing them in borders, out-competed and weakened by the grasses. Very few were able to survive and prosper. My conclusions in my thesis say:

• Effective basal cover, combined strongly with:
• Early emergence
• At least some ability to effective spread by ramets, (ie. new shoots)
• Root competition may also play a part – further research is indicated.

Which means geraniums, especially G. endressii, G. versicolor, G. x oxonianum types,(see pic at top) big inulas (e.g. I. racemosa - see pic below), Rudbeckia laciniata and that's about it. Asters did ok for a few years then got slugged. Euphorbia cyparissias did ok with its manic runner production. Meanwhile James found that Lychnis chalcedonica and Papaver orientale did respectably well too.

Those on planet Academia can check out these:
Hitchmough, J.D. (2000) Establishment of cultivated herbaceous perennials in purpose sown native wildflower meadows in south west Scotland. Landscape and Urban Planning. 714, 1-15

Woudstra, J. and Hitchmough, J.D. (2000) The enamelled mead: History and practice of exotic perennials grown in grassy swards. Landscape Research. 25,1, 29-47

Hitchmough, J. and Woudstra, J. (1999) The ecology of exotic herbaceous perennials grown in managed native grassy vegetation in urban landscapes. Landscape and Urban Planning. 45, 107-121

SO WHAT’S HARDY NOW?

2010-01-10T10:25:00.000-08:00

Its hardly crept above freezing anywhere in the British Isles for some ten days now. Last winter was an old-fashioned event, with a frost every morning here for two months, but this one is so like the winters of my childhood, in the Kent/Sussex border area, where every winter in the 1960s and early 1970s there was at least one massive snowfall.

So, where does this leave us with plantlife? ‘Zonal Denial’ to borrow a phrase from American (Oregonian) gardeners has been all the rage over the last twenty years, planting stuff out from warmer climes in the hope that it will survive. And much of it did: vast mimosa trees turning brilliant fragrant yellow in London squares, agaves in urns, olive trees in gardens. Gardeners have always liked to push the possible, and with so much new plant material coming into the country, at a time when we have had a run of mild winters, there have been temptations aplenty. I was (note WAS) part of the trend – indeed perhaps helped start it off. All that exotica that we began to play with in the 1980s and 1990s. In my case, selling plants on a regular nursery stand at RHS shows in London (in the days when these events used to happen) made me realise just how good the city was for growing plants – the urban heat island effect, and a fairly dry climate. People started buying supposedly tender plants like Abutilons and Banksias and then coming back next spring to tell me that it had survived the winter with no protection/ flowered all winter, etc etc.

The architectural plant craze helped as well. Importers of palms, yuccas, bananas and tree ferns had a field day: mild winters, a rush of new plant prospecting AND lots of young folk who had no memory of cold winters with lots of money to spend. Big of a boy thing this – the rather macho world of big exotic-looking stuff, when you could boast of what you could get away with next spring – a bit of defying the ruling gods.

I got out of all this a long time ago, round about the mid 1990s. For me the future lay in stuff which you did not have to worry about every winter or celebrate its survival every spring. The stuff that began to excite me was the perennials and grasses I saw in Germany and Holland, for which a British winter was nothing. Part of me just lost interest in the stress of growing borderline hardy plants. After all, I was now gardening in Hereford, not the south Devon coast.

This winter will probably leave a lot of vegetable mush. Its important we learn from it, about the plants that survive and why they did. It won’t mean we’ll have to go back to the garden world of the 1970s, because there really is a lot of new plant material we now have, a lot of which will probably be ok. But at least the sillier excesses will hopefully be curbed. Like the fool who planted an olive orchard in Devon, and hopefully (and this makes me cross) the wholesale nurseries who sell things like Lavandula stoechas with no warning on the label about its borderline hardiness. A periodic reality check is definitely a good idea.

I can’t help point out though that Mexican Salvia coahuilensis was still flowering before getting covered in snow!

Is England just a bad road movie?

2009-12-30T08:11:00.000-08:00

Correspondence following a comment on

Felicity Waters blog - Gardenbeet
http://gardenbeet.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/landscapes-in-the-se-of-england/

Noel - thanks for the comments on my blog. I once cornered one of the senior managers at the roads authority in the UK and gave him an earful - I am from Australia and worked at the road authority for 5 years - we were doing amazing projects - the UK is 50 years behind. And we always worked with Horticultural experts - sometimes from Burnley Horticultural Colleges (Peter May et al)
Amway not meaning to sound egotistically its just that I find the road system is THE LANDSCAPE for so many people these days. It deserves as much consideration as any outdoor area. The UK roads authority has not got a clue about its design responsibility - the UK roads systems is the definition of bad design- its non design- its not even thought about - you get a catalogue of plant mixes and stamp them over the country! These guys need to visit France.

Felicity Waters

Hi Felicity

Thanks for your thoughts – I agree with you that British highway landscaping is crap. In fact an awful lot of British landscaping is crap. My own bugbear has been the massive decline in the quality of planting of our parks and urban green spaces – a group of us did some campaigning about this a few years ago but did not go very far. I was lucky though and managed to do some good projects in Bristol (see my website). And there is one enlightened landscape company (HTA of London) who occasionally employ me as a horticultural consultant.

You are very right about roads being THE landscape for many people. But in fact we are not used to thinking of them as being potentially interesting landscapes – your mention of France is hopeful, I have not been there for years, but will be going this summer so I look forward to some inspiration. One problem we have in the UK is that currently there is some real dogmatic thinking about native planting which an ecology lobby has ended up foisting onto the landscape profession via local govt. and planning requirements. Our native flora is very limited and pretty boring – for landscape purposes anyway. There are a few places I can think of where unplanned nature has done some fantastic things – but very dependent on chance comings-together of low-nutrient soils and the local flora:
April – cowslips along the M5 between Bristol and Gloucester
June – pyramidal orchids ditto
April – early purple orchids and primroses along A38 west of Totnes in Devon
All are great at 70mph!

Do you know Rick Darke – Pennsylvania-based plant-orientated whizz-kid? He has been researching native plantings for highways in Delaware? He has even written a manual on the subject which is really good hardworking stuff. You must see it.

How do you feel about me putting this correspondence on my blog?

Cheers

Noel

Wet, Wet, Wet

2009-12-30T08:06:00.000-08:00

I haven’t been in the garden for weeks. It was incredibly wet here (Welsh borders) for practically all of November and well into December – and now it is so cold not much can be done outside either.

The rainfall is high here,nearly 2,000mm per year, and the soil, overlaying Old Red Sandstone has enough clay/silt content to slow down water absorption – so it gets saturated very quickly. When really wet, springs appear, and water can actually flow over the surface of the soil. Pooling for several days after rain is normal. In areas where subsoil or near-subsoil is exposed, it is even worse. The whole garden is on a gentle south-facing slope however so there is constant water movement through the soil and no long-term waterlogging.

So, given all of this, and the fact that we have had three cool, exceptionally wet summers, it is amazing what survives – or put another way, how little fails. Even Mediterranean plants like santolinas and lavenders flourish in sticky poor-quality soil with pools of water around them for days. It is hard to think of any failures: Lilium regale definitely, and I think the raspberries, although there was a complicating factor here, as we dug in loads of manure to ‘improve’ the rather poor-quality soil and I think phytophthora may have killed them.

The year before last there was an exceptional period of high rainfall, in, I think, June. A friend, who lives not so far away, Charles Chesshire, had huge losses, despite being also on a south-facing slope – but in his case, springs or at least great upwellings of water from underground (he has the very substantial Clee Hill just behind him) must have completely de-oxygenated the soil, and at a crucial period of very active growth. Thinking about places where you see plants in the wild, wet slopes are often a good habitat for a wide range of species. The conclusion I think must be that plants do not object to very wet conditions at the roots so long as there is dissolved oxygen in the water, so that they can respire, and that means that the water must be moving. This is more crucial during the growing season than the dormant.

Anyway, we’ll probably have a terrible drought this year, which’ll give us something else to think about.

2009-11-20T13:04:00.000-08:00

WHY I WROTE HYBRID – THE HISTORY AND SCIENCE OF PLANT BREEDING

I’ve always been interested in food. Been ahead of the game, but nobody knows this apart from family and friends who over the years have been made to eat all sorts of weird vegetable matter. Like couscous, which nobody in England had ever heard of when I first cooked it in 1977, having found it in a French supermarket, and now finally it is all over the British supermarket shelves too. And wild garlic soup, which I first served up to dubious looking faces in c. 1982, and now it’s rather galling to see that Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has discovered it, and it is all over the celebrity chef programmes, pretentious restaurant menus - and I dread to think what wild garlic leaves cost now down in trendy greengrocers in Islington.

One day they’ll realise just how scrumptious stir-fried Japanese knotweed is too. And perhaps one day I’ll find a recipe for ragi that doesn’t stick in your teeth.

Having concentrated on innovation in the garden world, and let’s face it, been jolly successful at it, I finally decided that I had to try to get some new thinking going in the food world too. I think the germ of the idea behind Hybrid came when the GM crops debate hit the headlines around the turn of the century. I only had A level Biology but I was appalled at the nonsense that came from so many people whose opinions I otherwise respected. So many seemed prey to the most bizarre journalistic fantasies – as if Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a genetics textbook. I wanted to read some background on the methods used in plant breeding up to now, but couldn’t find anything. And since other folk had written successful books with titles like Salt, Cod, Porcelain etc, I thought that perhaps there might be a market for Hybrid.

Travelling was another thing. Loving to see what people grew in their fields, how they grew it, what they did with it. Buying all sorts of weird dried vegetable matter in Indian markets. Getting slightly non-plussed guides to quiz market ladies about the exuberant but puzzling greenery they were selling. Trying out any new grain, new vegetable, new spice I could lay my hands on. But also seeing how, in much of the world, the downside of agriculture was the destruction of natural habitat for the other species we share the earth with. And here there is a paradox, because what I found myself being most disturbed by was not intensive agriculture – fresh fields of densely-planted crops, but the bad agriculture much of the world’s poor find themselves shackled to – fields where the crops were hardly visible behind weeds, crops shredded by pests, measly and dried-up looking rows of corn. Anyone who in their own garden has lost a row of pea seedlings to mice, seen their nicely-maturing lettuce demolished by slugs, or suddenly smelt the nauseating odour of potato blight can relate to this, and magnified a hundred fold to those third world farmers who can’t just replace their lost crops with a trip to the local supermarket but who might actually starve as a consequence. Apart from anything else the amount of time poor farmers spend on tending crops which give such meagre results. The sight too of how many farmers in marginal areas are forced to fell every bit of forest and terrace every bit of hillside, and let their goats eat every last scrap of not-completely-laden-with- toxin wild plant in order to produce enough to feed themselves. A land of poor farming is a land denuded of natural habitat, of wildlife, and almost inevitably losing its fertility, its water and its soil. This is what so utterly depressed me about Rajasthan in India – an overpopulated Medieval rural slum in a state of ecological collapse.

Researching Hybrid, wading through 450 books, leaflets, articles, research papers, newspaper stories, political tracts, I came to realise just how much we owe the plant breeders of the past, from the scientists to the observant tribal peasant - via the gentleman farmers of the 18th century Enlightenment. And how, with the pressures of population growth and climate change we must go on breeding plants, using every available method, and of course every available crop: manioc, ragi, buckwheat, quinoa, amaranth, urid. Biotechnology opens the whole of creation to the plant breeder; we are learning to mix and match genes to our hearts delight, which is a wonderful and magical thing, and so full of hope. Who owns and controls the technology may be a vexed question, one there are no easy answers to, but there is no doubting our need to grab the technology with both hands - and fearlessly. By researching the history of plant breeding I lost any residual worries I had about GM crops, and I hope my book will give modern biotechnology a historical background and context, and encourage a more positive attitude. And if you did Frankenstein rather than Mendel at school, you can even brush up on the good monk’s basic laws of genetics too.

2009-11-05T23:41:00.000-08:00

Giant acorns, bromeliads and dodgy mayors

Another conference in Mexico, or perhaps I should say ‘congress’ as that is the word they use. I roll up right at the end for a final keynote, so I don’t get much sense of what has been going on, except that it is about preserving biodiversity through horticulture.

It looks like these big gatherings are clearly incredibly important here. I suppose in a large and very diverse country they are a good way of getting people together to share experiences and information, learn about new ways of doing things etc. To my eye it all seemed very formal, lots of speechifying and sitting behind important-looking desk signage. An inordinate amount of time and effort promoting the venue for the next congress – Monterrey. The Head of Tourism from Monterrey was there – he showed a video about the wonders of the place and all the activities you can do there: water-skiing, diving, looking at giraffes in the zoo – all the stuff you have no time to do if you are there at a conference (or indeed a desire to); projected so that you couldn’t see half of the image.

On the subject of biodiversity, here in lushly tropical Veracruz province it is truly incredible. Steep hills are covered in dense forest – very little sign of deforestation here, and there is so much to see, very easily. Hilly forest is a much better environment to see plants, and life generally than lowland forest. Slopes allow you to look straight into tree canopies and appreciate the thick growth of bromeliads, orchids, ferns and other epiphytes. The climate is so humid that tillandsias even grow on electricity and telephone cables. Hill forest also gets a lot more light at ground level so the ground flora is a lot more interesting than in lowlands.

One day we had a bus trip to the botanic gardens at Xalapa, one of the few in the world in cloud forest. Needless to say it rained, and while we sheltered in the potting shed listening to Phil Brewster, the English head of hort. we got the occasional deafening rattle of a giant acorn hitting the corrugated iron roof. There are apparently around 150 species of oak here. What is particularly wonderful about the flora here is that northern temperate (like oak, hornbeam, walnut, liquidamber etc) meet tropical and where north meets south.

For a country with such eye-popping levels of floristic diversity, plant availability in the nursery trade is abysmal. I looked through the national catalogue of ornamental plants grown in Mexico’s nurseries – very few were Mexican, it was the same boring list of global ornamental plants. My friend Cruz Garcia Albarado is doing his best to promote more trialling of Mexican natives, and there must be others doing similar things – I spotted a big and impressive book in the Mexico City University Botanic Gardesn on ‘Plants with ornamental potential in the state of Morelos’. At the congress, Cruz got elected to be Il Presdente of AMEHOAC – the Mexican Association for Ornamental Horticulture – pretty good for a chap in his mid-thirties. Got talking to a few people about the whole business of getting Plant Breeders’ Rights onto some cultivars of Mexican plants so that the economy might benefit – tangled topic, but good to make a start. We even talk about trying to get an international congress off the ground – on the subject of introducing wild plants into cultivation.

Veracruz is also pretty safe. So much of Mexico isn’t – owing to the drug cartels’ domination of much of the countryside. On my last visit (Feb 2007 – see blogs) I had given a lecture in Uruapan, introduced by the Mayor (with a great bearhug for the benefit of the local press) – who I thought at the time was a man I wouldn’t trust further than I could throw him. It turns out he is now in jail, on charges of involvement with a particularly nasty cartel who operate in the state of Michoacan – they caught the national headlines once when they flung five decapitated heads onto the dance floor of a disco. One does occasionally meet unsavoury types in the otherwise gentle world of gardening.

Where the plains meet the mountains

2009-10-26T17:19:00.000-07:00

An end to some extensive travelling in the US in Colorado, visiting Lauren Springer and Scott Ogden, consummate plantspeople both, with an immensely richly planted and very naturalistic style garden in the burbs of Fort Collins. Its odd looking at the planting here, as it is such a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar - basically the kind of grass/deciduous/conifer type planting you might see anywhere in northern Europe or much of the US, but with added cacti and agaves.

Its dry here, and although it can jolly cold in the winter and hot in the summer, the reduced moisture level means that it is possible to grow a whole range of plants which would rot in a damper area. Not just possible, but essential, as it is so dry that very little would survive without some irrigation during the growing season.

The Great Plains begin, here - utterly desolate (on a cold day with snow threatening), almost frightening in their emptiness and vastness. No-one seems to want to live here anymore, hardly surprising, and their are deserted houses, whole little townships virtually derelict (including Hereford!), and occasional little cemetries with no sign of any habitation in sight. The short-grass prairie is not much to look at at this time, but instructive to see the visual importance of yuccas, indeed you never feel far from a yucca over vast swathes of the American west.

Short grass prairie at Pawnee Buttes is not that inspiring at this time of year, but there are plenty of flowers May to June.

This is actually quite a nice climate to live in, especially as summer nights are always cool, which Scott thinks is very beneficial to plant growth. Light intensity is incredibly high here (at 1500m in very dry air) so bulbs can perform spectacularly from late winter onwards. The skiing in Boulder where the Rockies begin so dramatically is a pull too, so there are a lot of people living here now - and its seems to be becoming one of those points of good gardening you find in the States; Lauren probably has a lot to do with this, but fundamentally it probably comes down to Panayoti Kelaides, at the Denver Botanic Gardens, a name I have known for years. So nice to meet him at last, for his reputation is truly formidable; an expert on alpine flora, and on natives of the region, and on getting them into cultivation.

So is this just vicarious enjoyment of an exotic garden style? Or can I take something home from here. Probably not me personally, from soggy Herefordshire, but the drought-tolerant look and lessons are a great inspiration for drier parts of the country. It is also useful to see an extreme version of a situation you are familiar with - it somehow emphasises new possibilities and ways of thinking.

Lauren and Scott's book Plant Driven Design, was published by Timber Press earlier this year, and was one of 2009's best garden books.

So why do we all love prairie?

2009-10-04T16:06:00.000-07:00

I have just finished taking a party of Gardens Illustrated readers around the Midwest – based on Chicago and St. Louis. It’s been more or less the same group who have accompanied me to Holland, Germany and Sweden before – so something of a reunion, and all rather jolly. Wonderful hospitality in the Midwest – you kinda feel they don’t get too many visitors from Europe looking at gardens or showing an interest in prairie wildflowers.

No-one in the US asked me the obvious question – what interests a group of Europeans (2 Germans, 1 Italian, 9 Brits + 3 Americans and an Argentinian) in a purely North American habitat. It’s a good question and seeing as nobody asked it, so I’m going to try an answer.

“Prairie” has become, over the last three or four years, a much abused word in both English and German garden-speak, with lazy journalists using it to describe any planting based on herbaceous perennials with a few grasses thrown in and a vaguely naturalistic aesthetic. The popularity, and consequent debasement, of the word started with folks like me, and James Hitchmough and Cassian Schmidt, using it to describe an essentially ornamental but very strongly naturalistic and bio-diversity-friendly planting style using a lot of North American species.

So, the hypothetical American asks, why do all these Europeans so love our prairie?

1) Much of our herbaceous border flora is North American in origin, introduced mostly during the 19th century: asters, goldernrods, rudbeckias etc. We have a history of more than a century of cultivating and hybridising these plants. It’s not surprising we want to see them in the wild and find out about new ones we might want to grow – like the vernonias (ironweeds) which were never introduced until recently.

2) Word has got out that prairies are fascinating natural habitats, so like our much-loved European meadow habitats – but bigger (all things American are bigger of course), more diverse and, crucially, with a fantastic late flowering season. Every prairie is subtly different, and within itself there is a great ebb and flow of species, depending on factors soil moisture, depth, chemistry, shade etc. To anyone who loves plants and plant communities, prairie is endlessly fascinating and beautiful.

3) Our own flora is a bit limited – thanks to the chilling and scraping action of frequent ice ages and the geographical boundaries placed on plants’ reconquest of old territory, the European flora is just less diverse than North Americas, particularly on more fertile soils and at the end of the season. Britain’s flora is just plain impoverished (only 100 more than the 1,400 strong flora of the Grand Canyon National Park).

4) We don’t have to worry too much about invasive aliens. Our flora has colonised vast areas of North America, changing, damaging, and in some cases eliminating, entire ecosystems. The truth is that the North and Central European flora is an incredibly aggressive one, and at home very effectively excludes ‘intruders’. Anyone who gets hot under the collar about Japanese knotweed needs to spend a few days in the company of the enormous numbers of European species which have spread over thousands of miles of North America. So, we can feel relatively relaxed about having fun with other people’s ‘natives’ in our gardens, confident that they won’t jump the garden fence and smother a few hundred acres before you can say ‘William Robinson’.

5) Then there is the odd familiarity/unfamiliarity of the North American flora and much of the landscape – the wooded hills of eastern Missouri look like much of France and the lumpier bits of Illinois could easily be Norfolk; Wisconsin practically is southern Sweden. The plants are all members of familiar genera or at least families. There isn’t too much of the feeling like you have landed on another floral planet. But there is still the excitement of new species, but growing in familiar-looking habitats. Being in a prairie itself is like being a kid again, amongst grasses that are at or above head height. It is familiar enough to feel safe, different enough to feel gently exotic.

Back to Cambo

2009-09-22T05:03:00.000-07:00

Scotland has always had a reputation for being more 'European' than England. Nowhere is this more true than at Cambo House, near St. Andrews where head gardener Elliott Forsyth has gone for Dutch and German-inspired naturalistic planting in a big way, wonderfully framed by the walls, old apple trees and surviving structures of a typical 19th century walled garden. The grasses and perennial mixes are at their best from August through to October, with repetition and rhythm key elements in creating some wonderfully harmonious plantings. Not everything thrives up here of course, and the northern latitude may create problems for a few species in the new prairie area which Elliott has recently laid out. Most of the perennials of the New Perennial movement however seem fine.
Another, more original element still, is the summer 'potager', which Elliott works out in great detail over the winter, It is a mix of perennials, half-hardies, grasses, annuals and veg; every year there is a different theme (colour, structure etc.) and the overall visual aesthetic (dotting, blocks, drifting etc.) changes too. Its gorgeous and a great inspiration. It is the nearest thing to the summer plantings you see in the German garden-shows, although a lot looser and wilder, where incredible plant combinations are put together by designers like Christine Orel and Christian Meyer, just for the 3-4 months of the event. Unlike the perennial plantings, these don't seem to have had much influence over here.

Cambo is featured in the September issue of Gardens Illustrated.

A response to ‘little prairie amongst the houses’

2009-09-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

At last, someone has taken some critical notice of what I have been up to Bristol for the last eight years. Every winter I create about 2 or 3 perennial plantings for Bristol city council. Most of them have been successful. In the following blog, they have had a review.

www.thinkingardens.co.uk/Bristol%20Roundabouts,%20review%20by%20Rober%20Webber.html

To summarise what the author thinks can be summed up his saying that:
What emerges overall is that, while these new herbaceous plantings can be a charming enough interlude on a journey, I find the simplicity of trees and shrubs more pleasing, less fussy and more relevant in scale and strength to the urban context

The author is good enough to recognise that anything done in conjunction with a local authority is going to be severely constrained – very little money, very little maintenance. But perhaps he doesn’t appear to recognise the history of this kind of planting. What my naturalistic perennials are a replacement for are two sub-Victorian horrors: The Bedding Display and The Municipal Rose Bed. Bristol City Council parks and open spaces managers have decided to try to go beyond these and do something different. Both involve a lot of bare ground for much of the year, indeed The Municipal Rose Bed seems to involve lots of bare ground for nearly all the year, as the roses almost inevitably seem to be on their last legs. The Bedding Display always looks ridiculous, because no-one has the money now to do it on such a scale as to make it look anything else than a postage-stamp on the side of a shipping container.

It is all very well to carp about the ‘little prairie amongst the houses’, but at least the ‘prairies’ can make a jolly good colourful splash for four to five months at a fraction of the annual cost of bedding out. And a jolly good colourful splash is actually what a lot of people want. But you can’t have them all year round. And you can’t have them on a traffic island in Malago Lane, 'cos nothing else there has ever survived, until I did my urban-grit-minimalist Rudbeckia fulgida, Crambe maritime, Nepeta x faassenii and Phlomis russeliana combination, which I must say I think is actually something of a triumph.

The author of the review seems to enjoy driving around some of the drearier stretches of south Bristol’s industrial estate and mall-land admiring the ‘simplicity’ of the kind of plantings of evergreens which those of us who are interested in real urban gardening have been desperate to get away from: slabs of laurel which look the same 365 days of the year, swathes of cotoneaster, pointlessly mown into wobbly rectangular slabs with CO2 and pollution belching kit, unimaginative strip-plantings of the ten dreary shrubs which is the limit of most landscape architects plant knowledge.

But at the end of the day, I feel that what we like in urban areas is so subjective. The author of the piece rather lets the cat out of the bag when he says why not have no plants at all? Oh no, he’s talking about public art! Aaaargh. Yes, there is good public art, but very little of it seems to get done in Britain, because the people who commission and make the stuff are so out of touch with what the vast majority of the population want – which is stuff they can relate to and which cheers their lives up, not the angst-ridden outpourings of privileged art school graduates. They want the jolly good splash of colour in the midst of the urban wilderness, which is what my perennial planting tries to give them, cheaply, sustainably, and in a wildlife-friendly way.

One final point - about why guerrilla gardening has so taken off – note that the guerrilla gardeners usually sow or plant flowers not landscape architect approved laurel bushes.

Living wall disaster

2009-09-03T12:57:00.001-07:00

Here is the Sure Start Centre at Paradise Park in Islington, London (photo courtesy of http://vegitecture.blogspot.com - a very good website on green architecture), and how it was when I went two years ago.

Architects (not normally renowned for their understanding of plant life) seem to think that you can take the green roof concept, spin it through 90 degrees and stick it on a wall to make a ‘living wall’. And there are folks out there brave enough to give it a go – Patrick Blanc in Paris is the best known, and let’s be honest, he’s a genius (even if he is a bit of an ego-maniac, striding across the pictures in his book like he is a rock star), and there are those who perhaps ought to stick to planting window boxes. Making plants grow vertically is a challenge which can be done, but needs a lot of techno-kit and lots of money, and lots of maintenance, and if the system breaks down in a heat wave, lots of skips to put the dead plants in. But if you have the dosh and the nerve, why not give it a go?

The other way of making a green wall is the facadegreening technique (see my blog on the subject a few blogs ago). It’s a bit boring because it is so simple and natural – you simply take advantage of the fact that a lot of plants are good climbers and you give ‘em something to climb up. Unless they are planted in window boxes, a drought will only slow them down, not kill them. Its an approach which is far more natural, need far less maintenance, is far far more reliable and cheaper:

Living walls cost $807 per m2

Facadegreening costs $122 per m2

for materials and installation

according to the figures, suppliers have given me.

Now, I am not against living walls, they are great in the right place, like in boutique hotels, designer clothes stores and £20 for a mingy starter restaurants – places where most of us don’t hang out, unless someone else is paying. But I object to their nature-defying machismo, the obvious sense that here are people trying to run before they can walk. For the vast majority of landscape applications, give me some wisteria and some stainless steel rope and let nature do the rest.

A good new border plant - but not quite?

2009-08-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

Senecio fuchsii (S. nemorensis seems to be more or less the same).

One of those plants that should have been a British native, but isn't, and although it does a fantastic job of brightening up the dark and dreary hedge bottom at a time of year when not much else does, is not the sort of thing which leaps out at you as the perfect new border plant.

A plant which raises questions then.

First of all, why is it all over woodland edge habitats in hilly areas from Belgium down to Bulgaria (from whence comes my stock) but not Britain? And why doens' it look quite garden worthy.

Its absence from the British flora can only be put down to everything having been scraped off by the last Ice Age and it not having a chance to blow back in, when the English Channel effectively pulled up the gangplank on the full flora of northern Europe re-establishing itself.

And its looks? Too much like ragwort for some (related of course, but completely different in its details of leaf and flower shape, and not toxic). The leaves are a lovely dark green, the flowers plentiful and a good yellow, but there are petals 'missing' so there is a kind of scruffy feel. And a re-design would definitely make it a bit shorter than its current 1.2m, and therefore less likely to flop.

One for some selection and improvement?

The Landscape Architects' Revenge

2009-08-06T12:45:00.000-07:00

It’s the Swiss national day, so all the shops are shut and the multi-storey carpark at Sihlcity on the outskirts of Zürich is deserted, apart from us, and an idiot in a red Ferrari who is amusing himself screeching around the deserted building – a peculiarly Swiss form of social deviance.
I am with Rudolf Lehmann from the Swiss company, Jakob, who make the steel rope and other support mechanisms for the climbing plants that occasionally appear on contemporary buildings. Zürich is the best place to see them. Many climbers will go well beyond the modest two storey structures of wire and vine eyes timidly put up by gardeners. At Sihlcity, Fallopia baldschuanica and wisteria have already reached the top of a 25m high set of cables at the side of the car park in 4 1/2 years. At another location, a series of apartment buildins, climbers including akebia, celastrus, lonicera and clematis species have romped up 13m in 3 years.
The beneficial environmental effects are considerable, particularly for cooling buildings, all now being shown to have a strong evidence base with research being done at various Germany universities. But to many of us greening the side of a building, especially one which is inherently pretty ugly, like a multi-storey car park, is just a very nice thing to do. Green roofs are often invisible, green walls can make much more visual impact. Perhaps they are part of the landscape architects revenge against the architect, or a softening of the architects love of hard surfaces.
In what might be seen as the ultimate example of the architect turning landscape architect, Rudolf also took me to Futuro Liestal, outside Basel to visit a new office complex. Which I couldn’t see at first, because I appeared to be on gently sloping hill with walkways over it, and occasional green cube buildings. Walking onto the hill I realised I was on top of the building, which was covered in an enormous green roof, apparently contiguous with the surrounding landscape and planted up with dry meadow and dry garden flora. The green boxes housed various lift mechanisms etc, and access to the offices was through them or down stairs – the offices and laboratories etc. opened out onto large landscape courtyards, which of course you look down onto from above. Get it? It is a building turned upside down, instead of a footprint on the landscape with a desert of a roof, this is a building that you go down into from a new landscape. Needless to say it is all designed with maximum sustainability in mind. Utterly revolutionary, wonderful, quite one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen. Oh, and there is a new green wall of climbers running for what feels like several hundred metres along the side.
The next day I took myself off to see the MFO Park, a real favourite, where a giant pergola (35m long, 17m high) has been constructed in a square, to form a new public space. Inside the steel structure, there is a mysterious green light, a bit like that you get in a woodland, and plenty of bird song too. Its an outrageously innovative place – I cannot think of anywhere even remotely like it. A wonderful hint at a new coming together of architecture and horticulture.

See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36856545@N02/sets/72157621840358015/
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36856545@N02/sets/72157621971808922/

GREEN PORRIDGE

2009-07-19T10:43:00.000-07:00

There is no getting away from the fact that it is difficult to photograph many wild-style plantings – like my garden. I sneak around with the camera and I always seem to end up with the yurt in the shot. It adds scale and a focal point. Without it, so much seems to be, well, green porridge. There is very little formal structure in the garden, and although there is a variety of foliage shape, texture etc. there clearly isn’t really enough to make obvious focal points, which photographs seem to need. And there aren’t great blobs of colour, as in many more conventional gardens.

The fact is that wilder gardens are very experiential – they need to be seen in three dimensions to be appreciated; the experience of actually being there is even more impossible to convey with a photograph than with a conventional garden. Which is frustrating as we have come to rely so heavily on photographs to convey our experience of gardens. Maybe video?

So many strongly structural plants look so gardenesque, or suburban, or exotic, by definition if you are trying to create a garden that fits into the Herefordshire (Wales/England borders) then so much of this stuff isn’t going to fit in. The ethos here is to create a garden which whilst very global in its plant origins belongs in a very unspoilt rural landscape. Things like Sanguisorba species or Telekia speciosa are consequently very useful for their ability to provide foliage structure/texture but not stand out like a sore thumb - or a Phormium in a hedgerow.

YOU CAN CALL ME DELIA

2009-07-13T08:15:00.000-07:00

For those you (American readers perhaps) who don’t know who Delia Smith is – she is our equivalent of Martha Stewart, except that she only does cookery, hasn’t done time, and is, let’s fact it, a bit of a frump. So it was a bit of a double-edge sword when I heard that Alan Titchmarsh said that “having Noel Kingsbury visit your garden is a bit like having Delia Smith to supper” on this year’s Chelsea Flower Show TV coverage. The person who was being threatened with a visitation was Joe Swift.

In the end I never did get to see Joe’s garden, but have had to write it up for a book I’m doing on designers’ own gardens blind. He’s very busy, I only come to London once a month etc etc. Plus there was the article I found online, in either the Mail or the Express website about his garden. Neither of these is my favourite publication, so I didn’t take it too seriously, to be fair the photograph was only of the front ‘garden’, and featured some bare concrete, empty beer bottles, a bag of rubbish and an upside own milk crate – and a couple of local types saying things like “that Joe Swift outa get down here and tidy up his garden (to be read in cockney accent). A total gutter press non-story in other words. You should have seen our ‘front garden’ in Bristol.

Its been an interesting book to do, as a lot of designers have gardens which are real personal spaces. Somewhat surprisingly, Joe Swift did not do his garden for a TV make-over, but Penelope Hobhouse did (well part of her old garden at Bettescombe). Its been interesting too, hearing about design approaches too. Like Joe Swift’s ‘modular gardens’ concept which sounds like a complete negation of what many designers see as design (genius of the place and all that) – but I now can appreciate the rationale so much better. Cleve West has been my latest victim. Again a bit diffident about letting me in, but a wonderfully green oasis in the suburbs type garden, tiny, very intensely designed, contemporary but very planty.

Some designers use their gardens for experimenting with lots of new plants, or trying out new concepts – but none of the living ones do this on anything like the scale of the late Mien Ruys in Holland, whose garden was several acres of design laboratory (but she did inherit her father’s nursery), or the late Roberto Burle Marx, who had what amounted to a private botanical garden. Others are just very personal spaces where they simply do what they want to do, without worrying about clients. None yet features a rectangular lawn with yard wide borders around the edges.

Trusting the National Trust?

2009-07-08T13:40:00.000-07:00

At the Hay festival back in May, I was on a panel with Dan Pearson, Tim Richardson, and Simon Jenkins – the leading political commentator on The Guardian, writer on historic churches, castles and houses and now Chairman of the National Trust – and according to my spies, very much a new broom. “So” said Simon, innocently trying to make small talk before the event, “are you writing about many Trust gardens these days?” “No”, said I through gritted teeth, “its almost impossible to find a photographer to work in a Trust garden, your system of licensing has put them all off”.

What had happened a few years ago was that the Trust decided to try to make some money out of all the images of its properties and demanded that all commercial photography had to go through its picture library. Photographers were only allowed in if they had a definite commission or were given agency status. So much garden photography is done ‘on spec’ by a growing army of people, very few of whom could get the coveted agency status. The result of the regulations was the killing of the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs. Photographers were either not allowed in, or couldn’t make much money when they were. Writers and editors began to see fewer and fewer trust gardens – which must have begun to have a pretty negative impact on media coverage of the Trust – and a loss of income. The trust is heavily dependent on this kind of unquantifiable goodwill and promotion – the kind of thing which the bean counters at head office never thought of when the whole system was instituted.

Now, I have a kind of shop steward tendency, so I gathered a few submissions from photographer colleagues, one of which was headed ‘National Distrust’, attached them to a letter to Simon, cc.ed emails to Head of Gardens, Head of Communications, Head of Publications. Most gratified to have responses in a couple of hours. Long conversation with Head of Publications on the phone – I’m not going to divulge details, but he was effectively saying that the Trust had screwed up big time and needed to renegotiate. What a relief. Felt a bit like I had pushed at an open door and cleared a log jam, to horribly mix metaphors. Lovely warm glow of goodwill all round after lots of bitchiness. So hopefully we can see a new more generous set of arrangements and we can all start writing about the Trust's wonderful gardens again.

Only 24 hours in Ireland

2009-06-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

It’s embarrassing. I realise that it is 27 years since I was last in Ireland. *o**! and my son’s called Kieran an’ all. And I just went for only 24 hours, to give what felt like a very successful workshop on designing with foliage for the Garden and Landscape Designers Association. I hate doing FIFOs (Fly In, Fly Out is the polite version), but schedule doesn’t allow much else at the moment.

Dublin is in a post-tiger-economy hangover, but the coastal strip looks great. Fantastic seaside exotic-looking gardens. Interesting to talk with people about what you can do/grow and what you can’t do/grow. Generally too cold and windy to sit out and treat the garden as an outside room for one thing. Reports that late herbaceous stuff like solidagoes just don’t perform – so little warmth, so little seasonality. Would be interesting to hear from other people about that. People’s complaints about the weather reminded me of Mark Twain about San Francisco, and the worst winter he ever had was a summer there, in that famously cool but never cold all the year round city.

Ok, this isn’t California, but there are similarities with the amazing range of exotica which does so well – practically anything from the Atlantic Islands and NZ, and a lot of South African. Just so long as it doesn’t want either a proper winter or a proper summer. Gardens can look really exotic, and echiums and Geranium maderense naturalise.

Met up with Oliver and Liat who run Mount Venus Nursery, which has an amazing range of plants. They’re German, not that you’d ever believe Oliver was anything but Irish – Liat sounds like Nico though). Trained with Dr.Hans Simon near Würzburg – owner of the world’s most untidy nursery. So were thoroughly grounded in all the right way of garden thinking. Catalogue looks very exciting.

Must go back.

‘Go Forth and Multiply’

2009-06-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

The self-sowing of plants in borders has always fascinated me – and increasingly I’m inclined to think that it is crucial to the long-term stability of naturalistic plantings. There is a real thrill in suddenly seeing the seedlings of desirable plants popping up in the border.
Most of us are familiar with those plants which always seem to produce seedlings, like aquilegias and verbascums. The latter are a good example of self-sowing as too much of a good thing – how many of us have frantically hoed off thousands of their tiny seedlings, alarmed at the prospect of a take-over bid by big furry rosettes. Aquilegias though are generally better behaved, their behaviour illustrating what many of us welcome about self-sowing – the spontaneity of desirable plants occasionally popping up of their own accord.
A lot more species do self-sow however, indeed in theory any reasonably genetically diverse plant population should. Many garden plants though are not ‘genetically diverse’ but genetically identical clones (i.e. cultivars), which don’t self-fertilise. Even if plants produce viable seed, the likelihood of the seed germinating does seem to be contingent on soil conditions – but what those conditions are – well who knows? The unpredictability of self-sowing is one thing which makes it so fascinating. In theory, self-sowing is more likely on lighter soils, but then there is the case of a friend whose heavy clay produced remarkable crops of seedlings of just about anything. And then there are my hellebores – my last and present gardens are both on Old Red Sandstone, although this is quite a varied geological formation; in the last garden there was virtually no self-sowing, but in my new garden, almost every seed which hits the ground turns into a seedling. Most have to get hoed off!
One ‘rule’ of self-sowing is the inverse relationship between lifespan and seed production – the longer-lived the plant is, the fewer seeds it produces (and very often the slower they germinate). Short-lived plants put far more resources into seed production, and those seeds tend to be rapidly-germinating. The reasons are pretty obvious – short-lived species need to make sure they leave plenty of youthful replacements around to keep the species alive, long-lived plants don’t need to, and producing lots of seeds might even be counter-productive, taking resources away from more effective methods of reproduction in a competitive environment, like producing running roots or new shoots.
If things go well, seedlings of desired plants fill gaps, producing a steadily denser plant community, which helps to limit weed infiltration, and is probably better invertebrate habitat. A dense plant community, with a near complete canopy is far more ‘natural’ than the traditional border with big gaps between plants at ground level – even though there may be no gaps at foliage level. Self-seeding helps to produce a nature-like visual continuity; in my last garden Geranium sylvaticum ‘Birch Lilac’ self-fertilised and spread everywhere; I didn’t know this was going to happen, but the results were delightful, a continuous drift of purple in May. Ideally, several species will self-sow, so that one does not dominate, and a relative balance develop between them.
Self-sowing is a chance to see natural process in action, a sharing of the design and management of the garden with the energy and life-process of the plants themselves.

Some good nurseries

2009-05-17T01:11:00.001-07:00

I haven’t bought many plants from nurseries for ages, but I’m now so aware of gaps in the planting in key areas around the house and the fact that so much of what has established is ‘tried and tested’, that it is time to try some new material.

Nurseries in Britain have got pretty boring of late. An explosion of small nurseries mostly selling perennials in the early noughties has meant that new and ‘ordinary’ gardeners now have lots of choice. Trouble is – they sell nearly all the same stuff and the plantsman gets increasingly frustrated in their search for the new and unusual. “They all sell the same plants because they buy them all from me” is the comment of one of the country’s leading supplier of small plants – in other words they are buying in, not propagating themselves.

Derry Watkins of Special Plants near Bath www.specialplants.net was, is and, inshallah, will continue to be a great source of the new and good. She still does a few plant sales, as much as to pounce on new plants from other nurseries, as much as to sell, I suspect. Walking around her sales area her transatlantic whoops and screams of enthusiasm about her new plant varieties makes customer heads turn. For example, she has a form of Ranunculus aconitifolius ‘Flore Pleno’ which she says, “doesn’t just die out, but is really vigorous”. Derry has always done a lot of tender/half-hardy species – and her range is just as lively as it always was. On the edge of a wonderful stretch of country too.

Kevock Garden Plants <www.kevockgarden.co.uk> I have not been to yet, but their plant selection online looks really good. Lots of stuff I’ve not seen before, and of course many which thrive in cooler northern climates. Particularly good on Himalayan primulas, with quite a few recent introductions. Can’t wait for a trip up to Edinburgh and get to see them.

Beeches Nursery in Essex www.beechesnursery.co.uk appears whenever you do an RHS Plant Finder search – their list is absolutely ginormous. But I have always been sceptical about how much of it they actually have, so on the way back from Stansted airport last week I dropped in. Still not sure about how much of their list is actually available on the nursery, but it is a huge selection and the site is nice and tidy, a pleasure to look around. I found a lot which was totally unfamiliar. Well-established plants too. From now on, every trip abroad via. the infamously inconvenient airport will include a visit here.

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Thoughts on visiting Suzhou, China

2009-04-14T19:57:00.000-07:00

Looking around classical Chinese gardens in Suzhou has been utterly fascinating. They are so different to any other garden spaces I have seen. What I love about them is the way that the challenge the axial symmetry, the obsession with perpendicular geometry and the perspective-focus of the European and Islamic garden tradition. If you like the sound of established paradigms being ripped up, and accepted notions being trampled underfoot, you will love these gardens.

Enclosure is a key part of the visual appearance of the Suzhou ‘scholar’ gardens, most of which date to the Ming dynasty -1368 – 1644.
Many western visitors are put off by the sheer unfamiliarity, the passion for extravagant rockwork, and the apparent artificiality and contrivance of much garden design and structure; to say nothing of a lack of grounding in the basics of Chinese culture.

The ‘rockery’ in The Mountain Retreat Garden is so vast that it includes a cave halfway up.

In fact, I think these gardens have an enormous amount to teach us, which is not to say we should all start building little pavilions with upturned roofs and heaping up rocks. What we can learn is a lot more fundamental, in particular about spatial relations, which, given that more and more of us are living in places with only tiny garden areas, is actually jolly important. There are also important lessons for a more integrated garden-as-art practice, as classical Chinese garden making was part of a rounded artistic practice which also involved poetry, painting, and often music too. They were created by a highly cultivated scholar-bureaucrat class, for whom an appreciation of landscape was central to their artistic interests.
A pavilion in The Mountain Retreat Garden – such places might have served either individual contemplation or a more social artistic activity.

Gardens are dominated by buildings, but very light, almost ‘transparent’ ones: pavilions with lots of windows or openings, and covered walkways, which play a major role in guiding garden exploration and understanding.
A covered bridge in The Garden of the Humble Administrator

Examples of window openings, and one door in the walls of covered walkways. The windows appear to be made of stucco.

Buildings often offer highly complex multiple viewpoints – the effect is often breathtakingly clever, and very tantalising, as you don’t know which one of the several proffered vistas to go and see. Covered walkways physically guide the viewer, and control how different garden areas are seen, which often means that an area will be seen from several different angles. Since the same elements tend to be repeated, the multiple viewpoints and the multiple pathways from point to point often induce a feeling of mild disorientation – the visitor is brought into a dreamworld.

A series of vistas in the Xian Yuan, Mudu, showing how multiple glimpses of different parts of a garden are visible from one point, using door-openings, window-openings, and spaces between pillars in walkways. The following shot of a model of this part of this garden illustrates this non-perpendicular spatial complexity.

The above two pictures are in the Master of Fishing Nets Garden, and show the centrality of water to garden areas. Water is not necessarily the centre of the whole garden, but is often found at a the centre of discrete and definable garden areas - it serves to link different garden features and to provide a way of seeing across areas without interruption. In fact in many ways it serves a similar function to lawn in conventional western gardens - but a lawn you don't walk on!
Bridges are nearly always ‘staggered’ – in fact it seems to be a fundamental rule of garden-making that you never go directly from one point to another; the effect is to slow down progress, enhancing the illusion of greater space, and encouraging observation of the surroundings.

‘Dreamworld’ is a key to understanding Chinese gardens. Much Chinese landscape-related art is about encouraging the viewer to imagine themselves somewhere else – the classic landscape art of mountains, forest, lakes and little buildings is designed to make the viewer imagine themselves to be in the image. The garden, with its rockworks evoking the extravagant shapes of the various mountain ranges dotted around the country and fragrant vegetation, is designed as space to help the viewer be transported somewhere else.

The Chinese love of rocks is something which we simply do not share – but it is very important. Single specimens are regarded almost as if they were pets, or friends, endowed with personalities, or seen as almost spiritual entities. Fine rocks are even set on tailor-made wooden pedestals and used as ornament in the home; I saw specimens priced at =£5,000 in antique shops. Rocks may also be combined to make miniature landscapes; at one location in Suzhou (Tiger Hill) there are several dozen such examples. Planted up with ‘bonsai’-trained trees they become true living miniature landscapes.

Right - one of the largest individual specimen stones in a Suzhou garden, the Lingering Garden.

'Bonsai' originated here, and you can't help feeling that some Chinese feel a bit annoyed that we think of them as Japanese. But of course, the period during which bonsai became popular in the west is the period when all traditional arts in China were under sustained attack; Mao Zedong is known to have denounced the growing of potted plants as a sign of bourgeois ideas. Seeing all these magnificent, and no doubt very ancient, bonsai, does make you wonder how they survived the destruction of the Cultural Revolution period, when anything old was liable to be destroyed or vandalised.

The bonsai collection here is at Tiger Hill, Suzhou.
Right - there are also 'giant bonsai'.

Left - and substantial dry miniature landscapes.
Most dry mini landscapes are tray size though:

Planting – liriope rules! Plant interest in the gardens is actually pretty low. It may well have been greater in the past, but nearly all these gardens have been changed extensively since they were created, and have undergone periods of neglect. Restoration has been meticulous, but with little attention to diverse planting – landscape and amenity planting in China tends to be extensive but uninteresting in the extreme.

What the Americans call ‘lily-turf’ – species of liriope and ophiopogon, are used extensively in public spaces as ground-cover, often to great effect. I’m certainly going to start exploring their use much more. I do not know if they were used originally in the Suzhou gardens – possibly not.
Peonies are the classic perennial for these gardens, but they were generally grown in separate dedicated beds.

Conclusion
I would argue that the complex sub-division of space and creation of micro-habitats in the Scholar gardens is ideal for creating interesting planting spaces, so the lack of interesting planting in these gardens is not to be held against them. The Suzhou-style garden in Portland, OR, shows how plantsmanship and Chinese design work very well together.

Thanks to travelling companions, my partner Jo and friend Yue Zhuang, who has been with us on her annual trip home and has been a brilliant guide. My photos are on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/36856545@N02/