Old lady plants

Let’s get something straight at the outset. I have no desire to disparage old ladies. Civilisation, in my opinion, has been built, sustained, and will long survive largely due to the influence of old ladies. Sadly though, and for reasons unfathmomable to me, old ladies don’t, on the whole, get to write history books, and so their part in the shaping of the modern world remains, for the most part, unacknowledged.

However, having thusly tabled my preemptive defence against a charge of disrespect towards the elderly and female, I find myself unable to deny that I have, on more than once occasion, sought to impugn the reputation of a group of ornamental annuals, perennials and shrubs by applying to them the soubriquet ‘Old Lady Plants’ – albeit a pattern of behaviour not seriously indulged in since childhood.

What qualifies as an Old Lady Plant? Anything with large blooms, the blousy, the frou-frou. The mophead hydrangea is an archetype, though the hollyhock and paeony fall comfortably into the same group. Somewhat confusingly, smaller flowered specimens are not excluded, so brightly coloured fuchsias, trailing dwarf campanulas and the charteuse splash of Alchemilla mollis would be equally welcome, as would any flower that you might find scenting soap, or drawer liners. Lavender, and Lily-of-the-valley, then.

But the characteristic possessed of the most excellent recommendation to my childish sense of logic, was that the plant should be found growing in the garden of the old lady who lived on the corner of the street in which I grew up. Old lady? She was probably sixty, if that. You have to hang around a bit longer to be an old lady these days. You can be a mad cat woman as soon as you like, though, unless you’re a feller. In which case, should you find yourself living on your own, you’d best get a dog if you want to avoid suspicion and abuse from the local ragamuffinry.

Looking back, I wonder if it was possible that I was trying to define cottage garden style, while never having heard of the concept? Or perhaps, at the very least, making some effort to distinguish this particular garden aesthetic from the other fashionable look of the seventies and eighties, the one heavily reliant upon bedding plants and pampas grass. I remember proudly tending rows of alyssum and african marigolds along the front edge of the narrow flower beds which edged our back lawn. I don’t remember anything except bare soil between those rows and the fence behind, except a deep red paeony at one end, and a choisya at the other, the latter of which, mum would say, wrinkling her nose, “smells of cats”.

The thing is, having looked with disdain upon these plants in my youth, I now love each and every one. Perhaps I’m slowly transforming into and old lady?

I think I probably flatter myself.

Cut-leaf cranesbill

The rear third of my garden is a wilderness, in which long meadow grasses and wildflowers frolic with abandon. I imagine the neighbours must hate it – this being the only part of the garden they can see from their windows. Bill, on the other hand, loves it, sniffing about for traces of fox and cat, and self-medicating by consuming vast quantities of cleavers – which makes him immediately sick – and then reappearing with the fur around his muzzle ebellished with clusters of tiny green seed capsules. I know he will complain with plaintive whines as I pull these free, but the memory of this procedure never seems to deter him from repeated forays into the undergrowth.

The wildflowers here are, of course, not the kind of wildflower that anyone seems to want – certainly not to be found as constituents of the more fashionable of wildflower mixes you might find in a garden centre or online, but rufty tufty native fare. You know – weeds. So if goosegrass isn’t your thing, we can do you buttercup, dock, woundwort, rosebay willowherb, ribwort plantain, and several varieties of thistle. And nettles. Lots of nettles.

And romping through this lot a kind of wild geranium that I haven’t noticed here abouts before. I’m used to working in the company of Herb Robert, with its pink flowers and red stems like strawberry bootlaces (I’m noticing an increasing habit to draw my metaphors from either the confectioners or the cake shop), but what struck me most about this obvious relative of that worthy weed was the discrepancy in size between the leaves (up to two and a half inches round, and so heavily dissected that the lobes appear almost like antlers), and the pink flowers which, by comparison, are tiny. This is Geranium dissectum, the cut-leaf cransebill, and the disparity just mentioned appears ludicrous, like some comic character in a cartoon strip with a burly frame and shrunken head. But the flower itslef, with its is five heart-shaped, sugar-pink petals, contrasting with the noticably hairy sepals, is exquisite.

The Plants for a Future database records a whole host of medicinal uses, both internally and externally, and both the leaves and roots are rich in tannins, and can be used to create a brown dye. All parts of the plant are edible, though it’s probably not something you’d want to seek out as a delicacy.

It’s all gone over now, at least in my garden, doubtless a few weeks early due to the particuarly dry conditions. This is rather a shame as I’d have liked to have got some better pictures of it. Looks like I’ll have to wait until next year, though I have my camera ready in case I catch it lurking in the shade under a hedge somewhere before this summer’s out.

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 1

They could at least have turned the fountains on for me

I have been fortunate enough to have spent the past two days at Hampton Court, helping Fibrex Nurseries to set up in the Floral Marquee on Sunday (another gold winning display for them, hurrah!), and attending press day on Monday. 2015 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Show at Hampton Court. This is a truly stunning location, bisected by the the Long Water with its fountains, spanned by four pontoons, with the royal palace forming the focal point at the end. No matter how warm it gets – and, to my memory, Hampton Court is always hot and sunny (clearly I’ve blocked out the rainy years) – there’s always a cool breeze by the water, and a shady spot to sit beneath the lime trees which flank it in avenues on either bank, an ideal place to pause and to mull over the many things to see during the day.

This year the Show has been organised into three zones: Grow, Inspire and Feast (or respectively, Plants, Gardens, and Grub, if I was in charge of things. Fortunately for the RHS, I’m not). The first of these, the Grow zone, consists of the plant village, Floral Marquee and Plant Heritage areas, and here you’ll find wonderful plants, details of national collections and a wealth of expertise generously given from many of the best nurseries in the UK. You could easily spend your entire visit here, but just over the water the Inspire zone beckons, playing host to the show gardens and the trade stands, the Festival of Roses marquee and the Country Living pavilion. Further up the path from the smaller Summer Gardens you enter the Feast zone. Initially, I’ll admit I felt a little disgruntled. In the past this whole section has been given over to small gardens, so to discover that half of them had been replaced with cafes and restaurants could give the impression that the horticultural and design aspects of the show are being dumbed down in favour of commercial considerations. However, there’s more to Feast than eateries – the presence of the the Cookery Theatre and a full programme of talks from speakers including Alys Fowler, James Wong and Greg Wallace indicates that the RHS are looking to ramp up their evangelical efforts concerning the link between plot and plate, which can only be a good thing. On Monday, I narrowly missed a demonstration given to a group of schoolchildren by Raymond Blanc in the children’s community garden of Henri Le Worm (I would have loved to have attended, but couldn’t quite tear myself away from the plants in the Floral Marquee).

One final general note before I get on to specifics, which I record here largely for my own benefit in the hope that it might also be useful for someone else. Navigation is a big issue for me around the showground – on past visits I’ve lost my bearings and only discovered a huge section just before I was due to leave. It really helps to carry a map of the Show with you, but if you don’t fancy paying almost a fiver for the catalogue in which it appears (much of which is available for free on the RHS’s excellent website), then use your phone to take a photo of one of the free-standing maps along the main route. Without a map, the rule of thumb is this – if you’ve not yet made your way over the water and to the opposite gate to the one by which you entered, you haven’t seen all there is to see. (Coming from the car park end via the Long Water Gate, the place where I would invariably get confused is a little choke point at the lower end of the Summer gardens, which takes you through an avenue of trees before opening out into an area leading down towards the conceptual gardens and the Thames Gate.)

Onto the gardens. There are over thirty in all over four categories, show, historical, conceptual and summer gardens. Here is a taste of those that made the biggest impact on me.

Green roofed wheelie bins and permeable paving on the Community Street

The Community Street, designed by Nigel Dunnett, illustrates the current RHS campaign, Greening Grey Britain, which is promoting the use of plants to enliven the hard, grey areas of our towns and cities, transforming unloved areas of harsh concrete and paving into healthy, productive and engaging spaces for the whole community. As housing density increases and our natural green space is eroded, this is a vital initiative if we’re to preserve our wellness and sanity in an increasingly crowded world, and I’ve been keen to see how the issues are addressed at the show.

All rather grey on the Community Street

You enter the space through a recreation of a very grey, rather unloved street in Bristol, complete with abandoned car, litter and a fridge in one of the front gardens. Wall art depicts three of the main issues with our grey city space – rainwater runoff and consequent flooding, the urban heat island effect, and particulate pollution of the air. The garden goes on to demonstrate – with many information boards and an army of keen planty evangelists – how an informed use of horticulture coupled with appropriate hard landscaping can combat each of these problems.

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Detail from the Community Street

Plenty of places for bugs and bees to set up home on the Community Street

Wildlife friendly hawthorn hedge and log piles on the Community Street

The planting here was magnificently bold, dense and rich, and if Nigel Dunnett takes the props for coming up with the ideas, then great credit must also go to Kitty Wilkins and her army of volunteers for implementing the intricately detailed plans.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

The Macmillan Legacy Garden is the gentlest tour-de-force. Ann-Marie Powell has created a tranquil, edge-of-woodland space, lush foliage and white birch bark contributing to a soothing pallet of greens and whites – which just happen to be the sponsor's primary brand colours, also including copper/apricot tones from their secondary pallet in the planting, for example with the verbascums and the russet tones in the epimedium foliage.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

As a response to the turbulent and emotional journey followed by any family whose life has been touched by cancer, it’s a perfect place in which to seek sanctuary, to pick your way through the plants across the ribbons of water which weave through the paving, past the avenue of birches with their seating, and across the stepping stones to the seclusion offered by the softly rounded structure whose surface has been planted with ivies and ferns and other woodland plants.

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

Detail from the Macmillan Legacy Garden by Ann-Marie Powell

A lush and slightly sinister note is introduced by the arisaemas, and perhaps even the gunnera has a slightly spikey, other-worldly feel which suggests elements of confusion and uncertainty. Maybe it’s easy to read too much into the individual choices of plants, but the overall effect manages to be at the same time soothing and stimulating. Just the kind of place I'd like to wander in, lost in thought.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

It was interesting to see my old college represented, Hadlow’s ‘Green Seam’ garden, designed by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams winning Best in Show. This garden presents us with an allegory of how horticulture can play a part in improving the lives of those living in areas of social and economical deprivation, mirroring the work of the Hadlow Group with the Betteshanger Sustainable Parks initiative seeking to bring regeneration to the ex-mining community near Deal in east Kent. Big business and politics, rather than grassroots gardening, but it was encouraging to see the designers illustrate nature’s ability to reclaim post-industrial sites by depicting the colonisation of the old spoil heaps by pioneering wildflower species.

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

Detail from the Hadlow College ‘Green Seam’ Garden by Stuart Charles Towner and Bethany Williams

Another particularly accomplished effort was Vestra Wealth’s Encore – A Music Lover’s Garden, by Paul Martin. A sinuous path of consolidated hoggin between Corten steel edging winds through a landscape of sandstone rocks and lush planting, accompanied by a narrow rill, before descending into a small amphitheatre for musical performances surrounded by a curved pool.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Some beautiful rusted steel sculptures nestle among the plants, their shape and form reminding me of pollen grains under the microscope.

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

Detail from Vestra Wealth’s Encore Garden by Paul Martin

The small space from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles might not win great plaudits for originality of design, but I loved it.Neat boundary hedges, cottage garden borders, with the centre of the lawn given over to a wildflower meadow and bounded by a mown grass path, and a red brick path leading between twin seating areas to catch the morning and the evening sun, it represents a vision of what is achievable in a typical small domestic garden. A wonderful, wildlife-friendly space.

Detail from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles

Detail from Squires Garden Centres – Urban Oasis by Mark Charles

I would have liked to have seen more in the way of community gardens. Not to say there weren’t community spaces – there were some beautifully designed ones incorporating many a thoughtful idea but, as with Chris Beardshaw’s garden at Chelsea this year, they were posh, expensive ones, clearly designed by professional garden designers. While I’m aware that one of the reasons to come to an RHS show is to see how the professionals can push boundaries and use the latest, cutting edge techniques, materials and thinking, I can’t help but think that including more grassroots gardens, created from the ground-up by enthusiastic end users, would help to circumvent the uncomfortable feeling that these gardens are being bestowed upon grateful paupers by professionals, however well informed and intentioned (last year’s A Space to Connect and Grow from Jeni Cairns and Sophie Antonelli was a great example of how to get this right). While I think this could be a valid criticism of spaces like the Community Street and the Vestra Wealth garden, it’s less applicable to the Macmillan Legacy Garden which, while being conceived partly as a communal space and undeniably high end, is not designed as a living space, but more of a therapeutic space rather like the gardens of the Maggie’s Centres.

In past years, there’s been a definite feeling  that people without pots of money to throw at the garden were being catered for. I wonder if that might have been lost a bit this year. It would also be good to see more on elegantly practical solutions to the kind of real-world problems that the garden and home can throw up, as with Mike Harvey’s A Room with a View from 2013’s Show, which built a wonderfully terraced garden on the spoil heap of soil excavated for the foundations of a typical home extension.

These small criticisms aside, it was good to see that the Conceptual gardens section is as bonkers as ever. It might not be everyone's cup of tea – not everything here is always my cup of tea, to be honest – but it’s good to see some interesting ideas being explored. I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of synaesthesia, ever since hearing in a university lecture how the composer Oliver Messiaen, who experienced the condition, once demanded that the violins should play a particular section of his score “a little more pink”. So it was fantastic to experience the DialAFlight: Synaesthesia Garden by Sarah Wilson, which presents a heady mix of sensory stimulation with a creative combination of coloured lights, projected trigger words, sculpture and planting, inside a white canvass dome representing the mind of the synaesthete. Sadly I was enjoying myself so much I neglected to take any decent photos (please do let me know if you have any and I’ll feature one or two here, with appropriate credits, of course!).

Another garden I found particularly powerful in this section was Steve Smith’s SMART Vision garden, which portrays the attitudes of society to those suffering from mental health issues by enclosing the entire space in an austere, grey wall, wrapped in yellow and black hazard tape. Through peepholes in the wall you glimpse a tranquil space inside, a white, zen like circle of raked gravel surrounded by lush tree ferns and foliage plants, prehistoric flora that shows the resilience of nature left to its own devices. The inner walls are mirrored, so the space inside appears vast, and a strange feeling of fellowship succeeded the initial shock of discovering that you weren't the only person peering in on spying many other inquiring eyes among the plants.

Detail from Steve Smith’s SMART Vision Garden

Detail from Steve Smith’s SMART Vision Garden

Please click here to read the next part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015, part 2

Why would you go to a flower show – for the the gardens, or for the plants? It’s true that some people go for the experience – event and retail marketing seems to be all about ‘experiences’ and ‘destinations’ now – but while these are animals I can identify in a crowd, quaffing their fizz* and seemingly more interested in being seen than in seeing, I have little to no real understanding of them. So...gardens, or plants? The show gardens can be inspiring, stimulating, frustrating and disappointing – I’m sure on occasion I’ve felt all of these emotions while pondering a single garden. But as for the plants on displayed in the floral marquee? I’d have no option but to laugh in the face of anyone who would dare to suggest that they are ever anything less than wondrous.

Wonderful textures and plants on the Todd’s Botanics stand

While working in the Floral Marquee on Sunday, I’d spent a lot of time trying not to tread on the trailing parts of Geranium 'Dusky Crug', one of my all-time favourite cransebills, which was on the beautifully planted stand of Todd’s Botanics. All purple, chocolate foliage and soft pink flowers, it’s like a deliciously sepia version of a vibrant garden favourite.

Geranium 'Dusky Crug', Todd’s Botanics

Imagine my delight on finding the very similar Geranium 'Dusky Rose' at Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants – so similar in fact that I’m having trouble telling the difference, and will have to wait till someone more knowledgeable can enlighten me!

Geranium 'Dusky Rose', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Cosmos sulphureum 'Diablo', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

The Hardy’s display also featured the fabulously flame orange of Cosmos sulphureus 'Diablo' – I’ll definitely be growing this next year  –

Verbascum 'Firedance', Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

and, while we’re on the subject of the infernal, the metre high flower spikes of Verbascum 'Firedance'.

A few  plants appeared to be following me around. This is a common experience at flower shows – you engage with a particular variety, and then can’t help noticing it as you move around the marquee, and even out into the showground. 

The first of these was an interesting Rose 'Hot Chocolate', first sighted by me on the stand of Madrona Nursery, and then seen again in the marquee for the Festival of Roses. It’s a floribunda rose with a long flowering season, about 90cm high, with very good disease resistance, striking blooms of a deep coppery red shade  on deep green leaves. Yet another for my wish list.

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate', Madrona Nurseries

Rosa 'Hot Chocolate'

Another apparently ubiquitous rose was 'Blue for You'. Not being a huge fan of roses in the lilac areas of the colour spectrum, it’s a source of interest to me that I've managed to end up planting both 'Twice in a Blue Moon' and 'Harry Edland' in our own garden. Perhaps I should go for this one and make it a clear hat-trick.

My next planty stalker was Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', which looks to me very much like a pink tinged Annabelle. I wonder if it does the green and cream colour change thing like the better known variety?

Hydrangea arborescens 'Invincibelle', The Big Plant Nursery

There was another pink tinged hydrangea on the stand of the Big Plant Nursery, with the vomit-inducing cultivar name 'Love You Kiss'. If you can keep hold of your dinner, however, it’s an attractive lacecap, with a reddish tinge around the rim of the petals.

Hydrangea 'Love You Kiss', The Big Plant Nursery

It’s always good to see local nurseries, and another Kent representative is Plantbase. Graeme had brought his party piece, the terrifying Solamnum pyracanthum, with its violet flowers, glaucous foliage and bright orange spikes. The Sid Vicious of potatoes.

Solanum pyracanthum, Plantbase

There was also my favourite tea tree plant, Leptospermum scoparium 'Red Damask'.

Leptospermum scoparium 'Damask Red', Plantbase

By now, it was probably time to cool off after all these hot colours. Nowhere better for this than the display of heucheras, heucherellas and tiarellas from Plantagogo. I was charmed by the dark purples and silver tones of Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', with its creamy white flowers.

Heucherella 'Cracked Ice', Plantagogo

A similar cooling effect can be had with Heuchera 'Silver Celebration'.

Heuchera 'Silver Celebration', Plantagogo

I was also interested to see the new introduction, Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie' – not a million miles away from 'Sugar and Spice'.

Tiarella 'Emerald Ellie', Plantagogo

While on Sunday I was busy assisting Heather and Fran of Fibrex Nurseries with their pelargonium display, Richard was putting the finishing touches to the adjacent stand featuring their ferns and specimens from the national collection of Hedera (ivies) which they hold. A lush and shady work of art, I’ll be carrying a photograph of this around with me to flourish on the very next occasion (there will be several) when someone looks bored or rolls their eyes upon my suggesting ivies for their dark, north facing wall or fence.

Ivies and ferns, Fibrex Nurseries

I’m keen to go an explore both of these collections on the nursery – if I can just avoid being waylaid by pelargoniums – but the selection on show here demonstrated the range and variety available, and what can be achieved in a small space.

Ferns Asplenium scolopendrium and Adiantum venustrum surround a terracotta pot filled with Hedera helix 'Goldfinch', Fibrex nurseries

Hedera helix 'Ivalace', Fibrex Nurseries

The splendidly named Hedera 'Pink and Curly', Fibrex Nurseries

Hedera helix 'Spetchley', Fibrex Nurseries

And what of the pelargoniums? Here I have to exercise some restraint, else I’d be posting photos of everything in the display!

The first spot goes to regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', with its outrageously frou-frou ruffles – salmon pink with  maroon centres. Gloriously flouncy.

Regal Pelargonium 'Beryl Reid', Fibrex Nurseries

Still with the regals, I met two similar varieties, 'Fringed Aztec' and 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', both with large white blooms with respectively red and deep pink markings in the centres.

Regal Pelargonium 'Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Regal Pelargonium 'Arnside Fringed Aztec', Fibrex Nurseries

Possibly as showy, but more delicate, is 'Fairy Orchid', with carmine blotches to the top of the two upper petals, and the characteristic ‘false eyelash’ markings to the centre of the flower.

Angel Pelargonium 'Fairy Orchid', Fibrex Nurseries

Used on the display for its fabulous cut foliage, Pelargonium 'Charity' has vivid green variagated leaves, with an orange citrus scent. The mauve flowers are probably the least spectacular thing about this plant.

Scented Pelargonium 'Charity', Fibrex Nurseries

Scented Pelargonium 'Ardwick Cinnamon', Fibrex Nurseries

My final offering from the Floral Marquee is an unassuming plant, that takes hold of you by stealth. I’m rather fond of its compact habit and small, glaucous leaves, a perfect backdrop to its small white flowers. But its the unexpectedly spicy scent of cinnamon from the crushed foliage that really sets this particular pellie apart. One that needs to be smelled to be believed.

All this has left me with the not unpleasant task of prioritising my plant wish list. I have a feeling that they're not all going to fit back in the greenhouse come winter, but that’s a worry for another day.

Please click here to read the first part of my blog on RHS Hampton Court Flower Show 2015.

* This isn’t to suggest that gardeners eschew the quaffing of fizz. In fact, we’re far from an abstemious lot, and are as good at this as we are at tracking down and consuming cake. It’s just that we do this as an adjunct to viewing gardens and drooling over plants, not an alternative.

Salvia ‘Kate Glen'

Salvia plugs on the potting bench. (The beer is for the slugs!)

Those awfully nice people at Unwins have sent me some plants to review.

Having been warned of their imminent arrival, today the postman brought me a small cardboard box continain three healthy looking plugs of Salvia 'Kate Glen'. Unwins are the sole distributor of this variety in the UK, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the plants perform.

I’m assuming that this is the same cultivar of Salvia nemorosa described on the website of Lambley Nursery in Australia, owned by David Glenn, who named the variety after his daughter. If this is the case, a letter 'n' appears to have gone astray somewhere in the journey from the antipodes, but the description of the plants seems to be more or less the same.

I’m particularly excited about these plants as I’ve recently had a run in with some voracious rabbits in one of my client’s gardens – rabbits who stubbornly refuse to read the literature which advises whether or not they should find a particular plant palatable. They’ve had a good go at just about everything, with the exception, I’ve noticed, of the achillea. While I now view lists of rabbit-resistant plants – on many of which salvia appears – with a degree of cynicism, I find that I’m encouraged by the rabbits’ apparent lack of enthusiasm for a plant with strongly scented leaves. Perhaps the salvias, like the achillea, will survive the onslaught of the critters.

Rabbit resistance is all very well, but unless you plant something with some aesthetic merit, you might as well cultivate a field of thistles. Salvia 'Kate Glen purports to reach a good 90cm in height, with bright green leaves on deep purple stems, and two-tone flower spikes – half the total height of the plant – pink in bud at the top, and opening violet lower down. The flowering period is reputedly long – well into autumn, apparently, and the plants are drought tolerant and frost hardy. Having initially potted the plugs on into 9cm pots, I’ll be trialling them in my garden at home before I consider exposing them to a site plagued by fearsome Leporidae. Here, we’ve only the slugs and snails to worry about. And a famously ravenous border terrier.

I’ll post again later on in the summer to let you know how they’re getting on.

Hole Park Gardens

To Hole Park near Rolvenden this afternoon, ostensibly to have a good nosey around the gardens under the expert guidance of senior gardener Louise Nicholls, although today I was just as interested in the cake and company. I’ve had cause to observe in the past what a fantastic cadre of gardening folk congregate on Twitter (and lately, Facebook too – though perhaps I’m a little late to the party on that particular platform), and today I got to meet several of them in person. Happily, I can report that, once again, I found them just as friendly, supportive, and knowledgeable in real life as they are online. And to think, someone once said that social media was no good for gardeners.

A gathering of gardeners among the generously airy planting in the Millennium Garden

There are three species of newt found in Britain. Apparently, they all live in here

But first things first - the cake had to be earned, and the prospect of refreshment was held out before us by Lou as an incentive to keep us moving through the garden – a necessary cruelty, since as a group we displayed on more than one occasion an inclination to linger in a particular space, the better to appreciate it in all its fulness. However, the desire to tarry in any one spot being incompatible with the imperative to gain an overview of a large garden within a set period of time, we were kept moving.

Rocky pauses to fondle a geranium

The gardens at Hole Park cover 15 acres, laid out and planted in the inter-war years by the great grandfather of the current owner, and featuring many distinct garden spaces (“garden room” doesn’t seem an appropriate phrase when including lawns, meadows and woodland). These include a tropical border, a sunken Italianate garden sitting between two long herbaceous borders, a lawn with exquisitely pruned standard wisterias, the rockery, camellia walk, wildflower meadows (known as the Policy) and bluebell wood with a brick ice house, and a formal lawn complete with yew topiary, a pool with fountains and a stunning backdrop of the wealden landscape. I made a rough running tally of at least 15 separate spaces – though I’ve probably missed one or two – all bound together by miles of tightly clipped yew hedging and views out into the Kentish countryside. And to keep all of this in check – just two and a half full time staff, including head gardener Quentin Stark. This is bordering on feat of superhuman degree – although I did notice that Lou drinks an awful lot of coffee.

Lou, coffee mug in hand, demonstrating that at least the sundial doesn’t wobble

The estate occupies a position on the map almost exactly half way between Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, although I’m not entirely convinced how useful it is to make a comparison with either of these. In feel and ambiance, it seems to me to be more akin to the gardens of its other near neighbour, Scotney Castle, only without the single, breathtakingly romantic picture-postcard view (the picture postcard view here, from the front of the house with a windmill on the left and a monument on the right, harks back to an earlier age of landscape design). It possesses a similar rolling topography, the sudden, Rousham-like plunge of the land towards the water course in the valley – perhaps a much wilder interpretation of a picturesque landscape than the national trust property – after all, Hole Park is a much later garden. We were of course too late for the magnolias and the bluebells in the woods, but we caught the tail-end of the display of the azaleas and rhododendrons, again providing echoes of Scotney. There’s also a similar interplay between parkland and garden – the more intimate, enclosed spaces opening out onto wide lawns, with the Policy, the dell and the woodland beyond.

The gardeners do a fabulous job of tending the formal hedges, lawns and border in the vicinity of the house. But it’s in the less manicured areas where the magic really starts to happen, along the grassy paths mown through swathes of wildflowers, in the glades and rides in the woodland area, beneath a giant gunnera beckoning from the further side of a pond apparently filled with vichyssoise, and fringed with candelabra primulas. These are the places I want to come back to and explore.

The gunnera and Persicaria 'Red Dragon' framing the pond of leek and potato soup

The long-awaited cake, by the way, was excellent.

With thanks to Louise Nicholls for leading the day, Quentin Stark and Edward Barham and the AllHorts Facebook group for their support.

Lou is planning to trek to Machu Pichu next year on behalf of Marie Curie. Do visit her justgiving page if you’d like to make a donation in support.

Running for Perennial

On 12 July 2015 I shall be running the British 10K through the streets of London in aid of Perennial, the Gardeners Royal Benevolent Society. I run regularly – albeit rather slowly – enjoying the time and space it gives me to think things through, and often wondering if there can be any conceivable link between the enjoyment I get from plodding along pavements and country lanes, and that which I feel when engaged in horticultural pursuits. This post has been languishing half written in my draft folder for over a year now. Time to polish it it up and share it with you.

Running and gardening. Two activities you might not consider to occupy much common ground. I enjoy both, though I'm not about to advocate that every gardener should take up running. And I certainly can’t claim ever to have attempted indulging in the one while simultaneously being immersed in the other – in fact, rather than dashing about at breakneck speed on the other end of a hoe, it could be argued that I can be a bit too cerebral in my own garden; it’s good to stop and think, and dream about how the garden could be, but the vision won’t even begin to be realised until you get down to it. And as for gardening while out running, I couldn’t so much as hazard a guess how that might be done.

But, for me at any rate, there are similarities between running and gardening; if not in the outworking of each, then in the processes I observe within myself, as well as in some of the external factors which govern the results of my efforts.

There are three things about running – three limiting factors, if you like. Breath. Legs. Mind. When I get these three in balance and under control, I almost feel as though I’m flying, speeding through the landscape powered by nothing other than sunlight and my own body’s energy, each foot strike simulataneously grounding me to the earth and pushing me off from it. But the three things are not often in balance, and they’re rarely under my control; either I’m not quite sucking in enough oxygen with each breath to power me efficiently through to the next, or my leg muscles are tight; the outside of one knee is grumbling (tight illiotibial band), the inside of the other is sore (tight inner quads), or my feet are thudding into the ground like jack hammers, but with none of that marvellously elastic recoil that powers me along on the good days (tight shins). And, on the rare occasions where I’m breathing well and my legs are springy and strong, my mind will start casting about for problems, running through increasingly neurotic self-diagnostic routines, and trying to convince me that a nice rest by the next field gate would be just the thing, and hardly knock anything off my time at all, if it didn’t help me to run the next leg even faster. The physical factors – hills, weather, ground conditions – can seem as nothing to the combined double whammy of body and brain when I’m out on a run.

As with running, so with gardening. It looks like an entirely physical occupation, but part of the attraction is the constant mental engagement with your garden. You’re continually on the lookout for signs, those points of information that alert you to the presence of a pest, disease, or some form of environmental stress. And, should you be in the fortunate position to have relieved your plants from the limiting factors which threaten to stunt their healthy grown – light, warmth, water, nutrition, the absence of nasty things – then you’ll no doubt be battling physical restrictions – insufficient space, quirks of design and landscaping, lack of time... a seemingly endless list, each item extending an accusatory finger in the direction of the gardener. I ask myself,  (trying very hard not to sound too much like Carrie Bradshaw); with my own personal resources, how much of a limiting factor to the development of my garden am I?

That’s a big question, and probably one of the main reasons I’m often to be found standing up to my knees in goosegrass in the middle of a flower bed, apparently lost in reverie.  I know my own abilities and vision place a limit on the potential of my garden, but I can take steps to minimise this effect. I can put in the time training, expanding my horticultural skills through reading, pracitising, and talking to more experienced gardeners, and – as with running – I can look after my own personal fitness level. I want to be supple enough to garden well into my old age, so I intend to keep active. I eat a good diet, I run, I stretch – I try not to take my body for granted. I even dabble with yoga from time to time – but if I’m a journeyman gardener, and a pretty bad runner, I’m utterly terrible at yoga. I’ll keep at it, though, in my own (unbendy) way.

I’ve had a few gardening related niggles – pulled muscles, sore knees, tennis elbow, nothing too serious, but enough to remind me how important our bodies are to us gardeners. But while we can do our utmost to guard against the injury and illness that would curtail or even put an end to our favourite activity, sometimes things can happen that are beyond our control – devastating to the keen gardener, and financially crippling to the professional. In such cases – as well as in instances where those dependent on a living in horticulture find themsselves in straightened circumstances for whatever reason – the charity Perennial is there to help, and I’m proud to be able to run for them in July. There are, of course, a wealth of good and deserving causes, but if you’re reading this it’s likely that you have some interest in gardens, and I would urge you to have a look at the Perennial website at perennial.org.uk to see the important work that they do. And if you’d like to sponsor me for the British 10k, please visit my justgiving page here. 

RHS Chelsea 2015. Inside the Great Pavilion

I’ve spent the past few days on the blog blathering on about the show gardens at Chelsea this year, and have still only scratched the surface, concentrating on some small details in a selection of the main avenue gardens. That’s not to say I didn’t spend time in the with the Artisan and Fresh gardens, but there’s only so much my mind can grapple with before my brain explodes, let alone my cameras memory card. Quite apart from which, the gardens are only part of the story, for, just as a space needs a human presence to qualify as a garden, its need for plants is arguably just as great. (Some argue that it’s entirely possibly to have a garden without plants. They are wrong.) Of course the Great Pavilion at the heart of the Chelsea showground is a true paradise for a plantsperson and, while I can only aspire to that moniker, it’s a source of endless fascination, inspiration and, I’ll admit, a certain degree of bewilderment to me.

I spend a lot of time ricocheting about the inside of the enormous tent, constantly losing my bearings, my attention being focused entirely on the plants, rather than where my feet are taking me. I try to keep a note of which nursery is responsible for which plant but, inevitably, I get carried away, and my camera is full of shots of orphaned specimens, which I then try to locate by the style of writing on the label, or some clue in the corner of the frame.

More informed plant folk will be able to tell you what was new, and what was interesting at Chelsea this year. As for me...well, I can only share with you photographs of those plants that caught my magpie eye, and hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

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There were a couple of sock-exploding splashes of blue out on main avenue on the Royal Bank of Canada Garden by Matthew Wilson. One was Iris 'Mer du sud', and the other, seen here on the stand of Bluebell Cottage Gardens & Nursery, was from Anchusa 'Loddon Royalist' – a stunning blue flower, with reddish purple stems and bright green leaves.

Anchusa 'Loddon Royalist'. Bluebell Cottage Gardens & Nursery

The same display featured a chocolate leaved hardy geranium with pink flowers, which reminded me that I still have to buy 'Dusky Crug'. This one is 'Orkney Cherry'.

Geranium 'Orkney Cherry'. Bluebell Cottage Gardens & Nursery

Last year the RHS shows seemed to have been besieged by the admittedly splendid Geum 'Totally Tangerine', so it was pleasing to spend some time in the company of something else - a scarlet, semi-double flowered variety, Geum 'Flames of Passion'.

Geum 'Flames of Passion'. Bluebell Cottage Gardens & Nursery

Harveys Garden Plants had something entirely new to me – an exquisite red-stemmed Solomon’s Seal called, with unerring accuracy but little imagination, Polygonatum odoratum 'Red Stem'...

Polygonatum odoratum 'Red Stem'. Harveys Garden Plants.

...as well as something I seem to see at every RHS show, but of which I never tire, Tiarella 'Sugar & Spice'.

Tiarella 'Sugar & Spice'. Harveys Garden Plants.

The stand of Barnsdale Gardens posed a question in my mind regarding the naming of cultivars with a couple of well known persicarias side by side. Why would you give two such different plants of the same genus, but different species, the identical cultivar name? Persicaria bistorta 'Superba' grows to 90cm tall, with pale pink flowers, while its diminutive cousin Persicaria affinis 'Superba' grows to only 20cm in height. Sounds like a recipe for confusion!

Persicaria affinis 'Superba'. Barnsdale Gardens

Persicaria bistorta 'Superba'. Barnsdale Gardens

On to the stand of Hewitt-Cooper Carnivorous Plants, where I spent some minutes gazing at marvelously hairy. sundews. They look like precisely the kind of thing that would quickly expire in my care.

Drosera binata 'T form'. Hewitt-Cooper Carnivorous Plants

Drosera regia. Hewitt-Cooper Carnivorous Plants

Drosera cuineifolia Hewitt-Cooper Carnivorous Plants

And here’s where I really let myself down. So excited was I to see friendly plants and faces from Kentish parts – Dyson’s from Great Comp – I just snapped away and forgot to get any of the plant details. Still, they’re only round the corner, I have another excuse to go and visit now.

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvia 'Dyson’s Joy'. Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

Salvias from Dyson’s Nurseries, Kent

The National Collection of Digitalis is held by The Botanic Nursery in Wiltshire, and their stand was a vision of spikes and spires in all manner of colours and textures. I practically ran up to it.

The Botanic Nursery stand with the plants from the National Collection of Digitalis.

Digitalis purpurea 'Pam’s Choice'. The Botanic Nursery

The texture of Digitalis 'Polkadot Pippa' is something I’d not encountered in a foxglove before, appearing as though somebody had knitted the flower or, better still, made it out of felt. This hybrid perennial foxglove is sterile, which makes for an extended flowering period and a longer lived plant, although it won’t establish colonies of pleasingly random offspring.

Digitalis 'Polkadot Pippa'. The Botanic Nursery

Avon Bulbs had at the very least three things that I’ve added to my plant wish list. Firstly, this honesty, Lunaria annua 'Chedglow', with deep, maroon leaves and almost violet flowers. I suspect it will cross-pollinate with the usual white and purple varieties, but it’s worth the effort, I think.

Lunaria annua 'Chedglow'. Avon Bulbs

Next, Topaeolum tricolor, a fragile-looking climber with vibrant orange, purple and yellow flowers sporting a long spur.

Tropaeolum tricolor. Avon Bulbs

And then I was rather keen on this creamy green allium, which appears to be too lazy to raise its flower above the foliage. I’m not quite sure where or how I’d use it, but it’s got me thinking.

Allium 'Ivory Queen'. Avon Bulbs

No visit to the Grand Pavilion would be complete without several trips to the stand of Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants, this year garnering a truly well-deserved 20th Chelsea gold for Rob and Rosy Hardy who labour so tirelessly to produce plants of such quality. Having been stunned by vivid cerulean blues elsewhere at the show, it was paler shades of that hue that really caught my eye here, notably Amsonia ciliata – a variety of the North American bluestar.

Amsonia ciliata. Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

Also on the pale blue theme, how about Veronica gentianoides x intermedia? Rosy’s blog informs us that these can be quite variable, with the colour verging on the palest blue, almost a cold white, but the shade selected for the show was bang on the money.

Veronica gentianoides x intermedia. Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

I can’t help but wonder if all this concentration on blue shades somehow forced my subconcious to compensate by grabbing a shot of the wonderful pink ragged robbin as I left the stand.

Lycnis flos-cuculi. Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants

All this was enough to make my head spin, not to mention to add several pages to the already lengthy tome that is my plant wish list. But my absolute highlight of Chelsea 2015 was being invited by the lovely folk at Fibrex Nurseries to help them with the set up of their display of pelargoniums, of which they hold the national collection. I was enormously relieved to discover that my inclusion in the proceedings didn’t count too dearly against them in the eyes of the judges, and they were able to continue their impressive run of gold medals. Of course, knowing my soft spot for these plants, I have a whole host of images from the Fibrex display, which I’m sure will form the body of another post. But to end this lengthy ramble, here are just a couple.

Pelargoniums from the national collection. Fibrex Nurseries

Pelargoniums from the national collection. Fibrex Nurseries

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015, part 2

That in which the devil sits

Being the second part of my blogged coverage of RHS Chelsea 2015. Please click here for the first part

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

Continuing the theme of water and stone which runs through the gardens at Chelsea this year, James Basson has created A Perfumer’s Garden in Grasse for sponsors L’Occitane. Modelled around the communal space of a traditional Provencal lavoir, aromatic herbs and flowers  tumble about in the semi-arid soil around a stone edged rill which feeds the main pool. For a Kentish gardener who spends much of his time keeping lavender in its fluffy, juvenile state, it was incredibly refreshing to see the Mediterranean plants given the freedom to grow long and leggy – you could almost imagine them shaking themselves free of the sandy ground and taking a loping stroll about the garden.

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

A small, blue-topped cafe table and chairs sit invitingly in the shade of an olive grove, while low mounds of thyme  border the water channel, the stones of which provide a home for foliose lichens. Details, again.

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

The weather was pretty filthy while I stood here. But I was imagining it in the summer sun,  the air filled with hum of bees and the complex bouquet of smells from the herbs. A place for midsummer dozes, poetry and...other things. Magic.

Detail from James Basson’s Perfume Grower's Garden in Grasse for L'Occitane

I’ve long been a fan of Chris Beardshaw’s show gardens, particularly impressed by the way he combines beautiful and practical gardens with community spaces. In fact, I think it’s the way that he puts communities of people at the heart of his design that informs the whole process and brings integrity and meaning into the spaces he creates. And if that sounds like waffle, it isn’t – gardens are entirely about people, utterly anthropocentric. Even Dan Pearson’s is a managed space. Chris’s Healthy City Garden for Morgan Stanley has been created for a community project in Poplar, East London, and it will be installed there once Chelsea is over. It’s a modern take on a formal knot garden, referencing the area’s historic ties with the shipping industry.

Detail from The Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities Garden by Chris Beardshaw

The low, tightly clipped box edging outlines a modified cross paved with smooth, polished limestone, in the centre of which one of those fountains that bubbles up from the slabs plays happily, threatening to shoot water up your trouser leg (though it’s supposed to stop when you walk over it).

Detail from The Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities Garden by Chris Beardshaw

The standout features for me are the four beautiful field maples (Acer campestre), a fresh, spring green now clothed in their young leaves and dripping with bunches of ‘keys’, but come autumn, this tree provides one of the most stunningly rich yellows in the British countryside – how fantastic to bring it into the heart of the city.

Detail from The Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities Garden by Chris Beardshaw

The planting around the base of the trees is a joy – frothy, but with lots of strong vertical accents from lupins and verbascums, with slightly more laid back uprights from the cirsiums.

Detail from The Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities Garden by Chris Beardshaw

The rusty orange tones of the weather steel on the walls is a perfect foil to the lush green of the hedging, reflected in the coppery tones of the sculpture of an adult holding a child on its shoulders.

Detail from The Morgan Stanley Healthy Cities Garden by Chris Beardshaw

This is all harmony and delight, though a second full sized sculpture of a human figure – apparently a man eating an octopus with some apparent difficulty – is a bit more of a puzzler, and I’m not entirely convinced it adds anything to the experience.

Man eats octopus? Big bowl of udon noodles? What’s going on here?

My only concern about this garden is that, if anything, it’s rather too beautiful and well manicured for an inner city space, especially compared to the Urban Oasis gardens he produced for Groundwork and the RHS in 2012. It will be interesting to see how this fares in Poplar over the medium to long term.

Detail from The Homebase Urban Retreat Garden by Adam Frost

The Homebase Urban Retreat Garden from Adam Frost again presents a pleasing palette of oranges and greens – burnt oranges from the weathered corten steel of the main structure and its cladding in strips of red cedar, the main path constructed from the same timber, and the strong greens, deep green from the yew panels set into the concrete wall, with mounds of the same plant dotted throughout the planting. There’s a freshness about the use of the yew here which I really enjoy – it’s been tightly clipped, but the first flush of brighter green spring growth has been allowed to remain, feathering the edges. I’ve christened it #waftyyew, and declared it A Thing.

Another urban community space, in plan the garden is a set of parallel strips running across the site, bisected by a serpentine timber walkway leading from the front of the garden to the building at the back, which sports a green roof of wildflower turf. Two of the strips are formed of long pools fed by vertical water features set into corresponding panels in the wall – a simple but effective geometric conception.

Detail from The Homebase Urban Retreat Garden by Adam Frost

The remaining panels are either turfed, or planted with wildlife friendly perennials.  Katsura trees (Cercidophyllum japonicum) have been used to provide the height, as well as fabulous autumnal colour, and tree ferns Dicksonia antarctica at the back lend an exotic feel to the communal space.

Detail from The Homebase Urban Retreat Garden by Adam Frost

I thought the planting here was delightful – well executed, and visually uplifting, a perfect fit for the brief.

Detail from the Cloudy Bay garden by the Rich brothers

Wafty yew was featured again in the neighbouring Cloudy Bay garden by the Rich brothers. The space also featured a moveable shed constructed from oak, glass and steel, with a system of rails and turntables to transport it around the garden. The bumf describes this as the garden’s pièce de resistance, and who are we to argue?

Detail from the Cloudy Bay garden by the Rich brothers

Detail from Matt Keightley’s Sentebale, Hope in Vulnerability

Further accomplished planting was in evidence on Matt Keightly’s Sentebale garden, Hope in Vulnerablilty.

Detail from Matt Keightley’s Sentebale, Hope in Vulnerability

Stone, water, rusty metal again, and a palette of familiar plants, but used here to invoke the atmosphere of the Lesotho landscape in which the Sentebale children’s home sits.

Detail from Matt Keightley’s Sentebale, Hope in Vulnerability

Detail from Marcus Barnett’s Daily Telegraph garden

Marcus Barnett’s garden for the Daily Telegraph grew on me, if you’ll pardon the non-intentional pun. I’m not a huge fan of modernism or the De Stijl movement from which the key inspiration has been drawn, although I can appreciate the purity of the clean lines.

Detail from Marcus Barnett’s Daily Telegraph garden

Such a rigid approach to gardening at the micro level is something I find troubling – too clinical for my tastes and somehow politically worrying. However, I did like the way that the natural materials were already fighting back, the foliage softening lines, the surface of the water rippling in the breeze. That gave me some hope, and I enjoyed the tension. Even I have to admit, the details were very well resolved. And that, as we’ve already established, is what it’s all about.

Detail from Marcus Barnett’s Daily Telegraph garden

For part one of this blog on the RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015, click here. Still more to come...

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2015, part 1

All in the detail

“Details, darling” has became something of a tongue-in-cheek catchphrase, uttered with a knowing sparkle in the eye of Mr James Alexander Sinclair on the recent The Great Chelsea Garden Challenge. Too right. A garden – any garden, but especially a show garden – stands or falls by the degree to which the finer details are resolved; the edges of things, the points at which materials and surfaces meet, the finishing touches, the finessing of the individual plants into the ground, and the complexity of the layers of both soft and hard landscaping that can be built up without detracting from the impact of the garden. I love working at a detailed level, the space I have in front of me, but a good gardener can flip quickly and repeatedly from the micro to the macro level, and I often have to remind myself to take a step back and survey the whole. With show gardens, though, I delight in the details, so today I fitted a short telephoto lens on the camera, and deliberately denied myself the wider view. Here’s what caught my eye.

Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden occupies the oddly shaped triangle plot in the showground, and the masterly representation of a semi natural space – inspired by the trout stream at Chatsworth House and surrounding landscape – is entirely down to the balance between the wider scale, represented by the mass of the boulders, mature trees and huge oak trunk sculpture, and the detailed level, evidenced by the entirely convincing communities of wildflower seen in the smallest six inch square of ground space.

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Detail from Dan Pearson’s Laurent-Perrier Chatsworth Garden

Staggeringly good – I could happily have spent all day in this one spot, and still not have finished seeing everything.

Just over the way on the rock bank site, Darren Hawkes' garden for Brewin Dophin initially appears very different, largely due to the striking impact of the blue grey platforms constructed with thousands of pieces of cut slate, complemented by reclaimed granite flagstone paving. But first impressions aside, this is another garden of water and stone, softened by naturalistic planting. An underground river flows through the site, punctuating the flow of the garden by appearing through various well openings, before cascading into a pool through outlets in the dry stone wall. I was delighted to see the may blossom on the hawthorn hedge wrapping around the site, and even more so by the inclusion of the elm trees of a height an girth comparable to that which you might still see today, before they reach the height at which the pathogen-spreading beetles become interested in them as a food source.

Detail from Darren Hawkes’ Garden for Brewin Dolphin

Detail from Darren Hawkes’ Garden for Brewin Dolphin

Detail from Darren Hawkes’ Garden for Brewin Dolphin

Right at the other end of main avenue is Jo Thompson’s garden The Retreat, for M&G. This is a place in which to get lost for a day or so, to wander and think, to relax, and be alone with your thoughts.

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

If ever a show garden had a sense of place, it’s this – I wonder if I relate to it particularly strongly since Jo has conceived it from the start as a setting for a writer’s den and, to be honest, I just want to move in, sit with my notebook and gaze at the surface of the natural swimming pool, or stroll along the plant fringed, familiar hoggin paths to the luxurious seclusion of that wonderful oak cabin.

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

Detail from Jo Thompson’s M&G Garden The Retreat

The sudden heavy downpours that were a feature of the morning had even hardened press folk running for cover. I took advantage of one such interlude to have Matthew Wilson’s Royal Bank of Canada Garden to myself – well, at least the front edges of it – and lingered a while, enjoying the sinuous intertwining curves of the water channel and the raised wooden deck, with a ribbon of carved stone playfully following along the margin where they meet.

Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden. The end of the stone ribbon

Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden. Tiered water feature, marginal and dry garden planting

The rain seemed appropriate (which was just as well, it was hammering down by now), as this garden has been designed with water conservation at its heart. Rain water fills the central channel,  feeding the three tiered water feature while also providing sufficient irrigation for the edible plants and the hedge of pineapple-guava. The main feature of the dry garden area which borders the front edge of the garden is a stunning micro-bonsai olive tree, quite the show stopper on main avenue.

Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden. The fabulous micro-bonsai olive

There are wonderful textural details here; the contrasts between the roughness of the crushed stone and the smoothness of the cedar deck, the rough-hewn sandstone blocks of the walls and the smooth, substantial limestone coping stones, the playful mirroring of the large, white allium heads in the form of the smaller flowers on the santolina, and the harmony between the needle-like leaves of rosemary and teatree Leptospermum scoparium 'Manuka Honey'.

Detail from Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Detail from Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Beautiful Rosa glauca on Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Rosemary (left) and teatree (right) on Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Detail from Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Detail from Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

And then there’s that olive. It might have taken many man-hours to prune the tree into that shape. But when it comes to texture, nature does best.

Detail from Matthew Wilson’s RBC Garden

Plenty more photos and gardens to get through, please check back on the blog for part 2, coming soon...

Fishy smell herb

Either the plant, or the photographer was swaying at the time. It’s a very windy site.

This handsome devil is Houttuynia cordata. There is a rather showier cousin, ‘Chameleon’, the same green, cordate (heart-shaped) leaves with an overlay of a creamy yellow and scarlet pink variegation, but I rather like this, slightly more sensible but just as beautiful for all that. Look at that gorgeous deep, burgundy red on the underside of the leaves and the stems, starting to marble its way through the surface of the lamina. If that’s not precisely like the wing of a dragon, then I don’t know what is.

Just have a look at what this is growing through

Both the species and the variety have similar infloresences; a pale yellow central cone of tiny flowers, rising 2-3cm above the four white, petal-like bracts. And both are utter stinkers.

I’m not saying you can’t make Houttuynia work in your garden, it’s a fine ground cover plant, but vigorous doesn’t even begin to describe it, and it takes quite a bit of work, to the extent that you might wish you hadn’t begun. It definitely comes into the category of beautiful-plants-to-give-to-people-you-don’t-really-like, in which group it can rub shoulders with such rampant lovelies as alstromeria, golden rod, Lysimachia puncata, and that nice variegated ground elder of which I’m actually quite fond, especially in the gardens of other people.

It’s the rhizomes that do it. They can creep for yards under the surface of the soil, migrating their way from the original planting site and pushing up through lawns and even concrete drives. (I was quite impressed when I saw the latter, thinking the plant must have self-seeded into the gravel. But upon examination, no - it was growing up through the concrete below. It’s nowhere near as beefy a plant as, for example, Japanese knotweed, which eats tarmac and roadstone for breakfast, so I imagine it had exploited a weakness in the material that it found. But hats of to it, all the same.)

Houttuynia will revel in a damp soil, but also romp away quite happily in the dry. Should you fall out of love with it, mechanical extraction is nigh on impossible due to the brittle rhizomes, the tiniest piece of which will inevitably give rise to a new plant. Translocated herbicides seem to have limited efficacy too – you might think you’ve got the upper hand, but it’s been known to make a reappearance after several years of absence. Here’s Johny!

While hoiking it out by the handful – a necessary task, even if you’re a fan, or have resigned yourself to coexisting with the thing – you’ll notice another of houttuynia’s key attributes – its scent. Native to southeast Asia, its Chinese name translates literally as “fishy smell herb”, and a common name within these islands is fishwort. The scent reminds me far less of fish than very potent coriander. Which leads me to introduce a thought that runs on a fairly constant loop inside my head – if a plant’s vigour is held against it to the extent that it’s often considered a nuisance, then, by all the cosmic laws of fairness and karma, surely one should be able to harvest it in handfuls and eat the stuff? It’s a working hypothesis, and I’m understandably slightly wary that I might not survive long enough to publish the full thesis, but I’m counting on careful research before dinner to see me through.

It turns out, you can eat houttuynia, indeed it’s quite popular in the cuisines of China, India, and Vietnam. Both leaves and roots are used, either cooked or raw. I’ve not done it yet, but I’m sorely tempted to start to use it in place of fresh coriander stems, for example in a kind of salsa verde marinade I use for a fish curry (with ginger, garlic, tomatoes and chilli). Ask me in a few weeks how I got on. If you don’t get a reply, please send help.

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grow is a local gardening service with a passion for creating and mantaining beautiful outdoor living spaces for our clients.

We are fortunate to live in Kent, the Garden of England. But a beautiful garden rarely stands still, and gardens have a habit of, well...growing. Each of us may see our own garden in a different way – as a space for entertaining, a place for the children to run around and to play in safety, as a haven for wildlife, or our very own piece of the natural world in which to potter between well-stocked borders bursting with flowers and produce. Sometimes, we require of our garden to be all these things together. But, however we use our garden, most of us lead busy lives with many demands upon our time. We would welcome a hand in keeping things looking their best, so that when we are there, we can truly relax.

This is how grow can help. From taking care of time-consuming tasks like watering and weeding, planting up stunning containers or looking after your garden while you’re away on holiday, to creating beautiful planting schemes or meeting with you to devise ways in which you can get the most enjoyment from your outdoor living space – grow can help you enjoy your garden to the full.

If you would like to spend more time enjoying your garden than wondering about finding the time to manage it, then please do give Andrew a call on 01732 838 755 to see how we can help.

Interesting but unlovely

Right around the end of April, when streaks of cobalt blue begin to intrude on the peripheral vision of any creature moving through the countryside, signifying the arrival of the bluebell season – as if the gangs of burly Spanish interlopers in our gardens hadn’t already alerted anyone with even half the usual complement of occular equipment in their head to this event in the calendar – right around the time, in fact, that most of us with a mind to are celebrating the appearance of a jewel bright, elegantly arching, exquisite flower, which has the power to be captivating as a solitary specimen, and breathtaking in number – something rather less gorgeous pushes its way up through the leaf litter.

This is toothwort, Lathraea squamaria, a parasitic plant that lives on the roots of hazel, alder, and beech. I’ve written before about this area being renowned for cobnut production; between that and the amount of hazel in the understory of our local mixed woodland, it’s not too hard to find an example of this unloveliest of plants, nestling at the base of a tree trunk.

Now, I’m a lover of weeds, and of nutrient cycles and food webs, fungi and detritivores – I’ve even got a soft spot for wasps, and consider them greatly beneficial to the gardener, at least until they get a bit lairy in late summer –  but I have to confess that I’ve yet to work out quite how parasites fit in to things, unless it’s as a control mechanism to control populations of  a particular organism in order to preserve the balance of an ecosystem. Perhaps it’s that. Do they always have to be quite so revolting? I am not including mistletoe in this group – apart from the fact that it’s a hemiparasite, gaining some of its nutrients from the host plant but also possessing green leaves and therefore the ability to photosynthesis some sugars of its own accord, it’s nice for us human types to look at (or stand below), and the berries provide food for birds, such as thrushes and blackcaps. But I’m afraid to say, the poor toothwort prompts an almost visceral reaction within me.

There’s something rather unwholesome about its appearance. Its leaves remain obdurately subterranean and lacking in chlorophyll (why would they need any when they can pilfer all the nutrients they need from their host?), so the only part readily visible is the short flowers stem. The common name reflects a supposed resemblance to a row of teeth – ghoulish enough, perhaps, but to my mind it’s suggestive of nothing so much as pile of old, partially exsanguinated meat that’s been left out in the rain for a couple of weeks. And before I’m accused of allowing my discomfiture at the concept of the parasitic to influence my opinion of the plant (it does), I was somewhat wary on my first encounter with it, at which point I was entirely ignorant of its identity.

Imagine my delight on discovering it’s also known as corpse flower, reputed to grow wherever there’s a dead body. Perfect for a goth’s garden. My teenage years coming back to haunt me.

Forget me not

Regular visitors to these pages may have formed the not entirely inaccurate notion that, while I am a person who revels in the company of all manner of plants, I am not always in a position to identify the vegetables in question. In this respect I feel rather like a forgetful old gentleman, delighted to find himself surrounded by crowds of grandchildren, and without the vaguest hope of putting a name to any one of them. In fact, when it comes to plant recognition, I have prudently left myself ample room for improvement, the better to guard against the possibility of knowing too much, and thereby becoming bored with the subject.

It’s true that, in this respect, while I know more than most non-gardeners, I often feel that I know considerably less than my horticulturally-inclined peers. In an excess of public feeling I’ve even been known to flaunt my ignorance before a keen amateur gardener, allowing them to bathe in the warm glow of feeling that invariably accompanies the knowledge that you have just ‘got one over’ an individual who, by virtue of their professional occupation, really ought to know better.

All this wordy preamble is really by way of setting the scene for last week’s plant-ID hiccup, which occurred when I got myself into a right old pickle over my Boraginaceae. This is a fabulous family if you’re fond of the colour blue*, including the forget-me-not (Myosotis spp.), lungwort (Pulmonaria spp.), vipers bugloss (Echium vulgare), and Brunnera macrophylla – all of them instantly recognisable, even by me. I’m fine with comfrey too, whether the tall, gangly wild comfrey Symphytym officinale – of smelly-leaf and compost-tea fame – or the much more dwarf, cottage garden favourite, Symphytym grandiflorum, which now oddly seems quite tricky to get hold of.

Comfrey, Symphytum officininale

But when a photo was posted to Twitter depicting a handsome plant with deeply veined leaves and forget-me-not blue flowers, I managed to career about like a demented pinball, bouncing from borage itself, to anchusa – both of the hairy leaf and stem with blue flowers persuasion – before being gently guided towards green alkanet, Pentaglottis sempervirens. For this I’m grateful as always to my kindly twitter friends for taking pity on me, even if some were having trouble hiding their apparent amusement at my floundering.

I should have known really – I have it in my garden and it’s now, I think, firmly imprinted on my mind. Hairy stems, with alternate, deeply veined leaves, also bearing hairs, and rather fat clusters of flower buds with a pinkish tint. The flowers themselves have five, sky blue petals (hence the latin name of the genus), raised at the base where they meet in a central white boss.  A plant of hedgerows and woodland edges, it has a deserved reputation for getting a little unruly, being a rampant self seeder with a long tap root. However, I find it such a handsome presence in the borders that I allow it to stay, if only as a token presence.

And now the next person who asks me about it will be treated to a lengthy explanation of its features, and doubtless its uses as a source of a rich reddish dye extracted from the roots, and used in the colouring of furniture and stringed instruments, among other things.  How fascinating and informed I shall feel, for at least two minutes, until they stump me by pointing at some other specimen and demanding the name, which will, of course, have totally eluded me at that point. At which juncture I shall skillfully change the subject, and distract them with tea and cake.

* Or pink. There's often quite a bit of variation with this gang, sometimes even on the same plant. Flower buds are often pink, even with blue flowers. And then there’s the white and the cream. But I don’t think any family beats it for startling sky blues.

The Great Comp Spring Fling, and The Lump of Green

Glorious sunshine, albeit a bit chilly with a gusty breeze, for this morning’s plant fair at Great Comp. Such a fabulous setting, particuarly in spring, when the burgeoning borders and the upper layers bright with camellias and magnolias charm you to a state where you feel able to smile with benignant forgiveness even upon the ghastliness of of the folly-like mock ruins which are a the only jarring feature of this garden. In a few weeks time, drifts of hellebores in the woodland garden will be succeeded by the epimediums and geraniums mac that are gathering strength, while in the more formal areas paeonies thrust purposefully through the soil, rich with deep red hues and the promise of things to come. It’s a great time of the year to experience a mature garden, especially one as well planted, curated and maintained as Great Comp, and the Spring Fling is certainly worth making the effort to get to if you find yourself within striking distance of North Kent toward the beginning of April.


We arrived twenty minutes after opening, to find the first two car parks full and a good crowd already picking their way around the various nurseries’ stalls, spread out on the square and lower lawns. Louise (she of Rude Border fame) met us on the steps between the two sections, clutching our goddaughter Jenny in one hand and a giant pot of alexanders (Smyrnium olusatrum) in the other. The plan is to get this to colonise a shady area of the garden – it looks like a beast, so I’m sure she’ll have no trouble there, although to be honest it was happily romping away down by the railway line in Rye in full sun when we were there earlier in the week.

Jenny had secured for herself a rather pretty pot of muscari, which is destined for the rockery. Another colony in the making there, for sure. This came from the well-stocked stall of Rose Cottage Plants, on which I also spied the splendidly odd Campanula 'Pink Octopus'. It was on this stand that I first encountered Persicaria 'Red Dragon', which I love, though have yet to plant.

Muscari 'Bling Bling'

Persicaria 'Red Dragon'

Campanula 'Pink Octopus'

I’m always keen to see what Madrona Nursery from Bethersden have brought with them, having still not managed to get to the actual nursery, in spite of it being only an hour or so away. They always have something which has me reaching for my wallet and, today being no exception, I found myself enamoured with a pot containing a lump of purest green. A perfect, verdant dome, I was hooked on this firm, moss-like cushion, and Scleranthus uniflorus was coming home with me. It’s an evergreen ground cover plant from New Zealand, commonly known as Knawel Cushion, and my instincts are telling me will suit a free-draining growing medium, perhaps planted together with a range of alpine plants. Which is just as well, as the next thing to catch my eye was the diminutive-leaved Roaulia australis, another mat-forming apline native to New Zealand. Two plants, then, to add to my haul from Madrona – I made my escape at this point, though not before casting a longing glance at Ranunculus ficaria 'Brazen Hussy'. Surely I’d be nuts to introduce another lesser celandine to my garden when then native variety does so well? I walked away.

Scleranthus uniflora

Raoulia australis

The sheer variety of succulets from Blueleaf Plants was staggering – aloes, haworthias, crassulae, echiveras, graptopetalums, aeoniums to name but a few. Quite rightly the stand was attracting a huge amount of interest – the interior design world seems to have gone mad for succulents, and you can’t open a magazine at the moment without finding glossy lifestyle photos of terrariums or box frames planted with them, the examples on show today being beautifully executed. It’s also interesting to note that Fiona and her team offer a green roof service from their offices in Warehome, on Romney Marsh.

At this stage I cast about with no luck for Pineview Plants, probably the closest nursery to Great Comp with the exception of Dyson’s Nursery in the grounds themselves (run by the curator of the garden, William Dyson, and specialising in salvias, alongside some rather choice hardy and half hardy perennials – worth a visit in its own right). Pineview will be at the RHS Great London Plant Fair later this week, so I imagine they’re busy getting things together for that. I’ll have to catch them later in the year.

Several times I strolled past the stand with a sign bearing the legend “Usual and Unusual Plants”. It seemed to have an inordinate variety of bronze leaved specimens of all different description among the plants on offer. This is a colour for which I have a particular weakness – ideally as a foil to green, though if I’m not careful I shall be over-run with the things. I was tempted by rather fine primula (if I’m honest, I’m a bit fuzzy as to where primula finishes and auricula begins – something I need to look into, as a matter of urgency), then a dicentra – in the end, the charms of Ligularia dentata 'Osiris Fantasie' proved too much to resist. Surely this will be just as delicious to slugs as the L. dentata 'Desdamona' I planted last year. We shall see.

Still on the subject of bronze plants, I thought I’d resisted Brazen Hussy. The crafty little celandine caught up with me while discussing a selection of alpine sedums with Philip Johnson of Johnson's Sweet Peas – we needed one more plant to reach the five-for-a-tenner mark, and the rest is history. I can’t wait to unleash it in the garden (you may remind me of that in a year or two, when it’s become a bronzed menace).

Ranunculus ficaria 'Brazen Hussy'

Sedum album 'Coral Carpet'

Sedum spathulifolium 'Purpureum'

Altogether a goodly haul...but my favourite has to be the lump of green.

Bumbles in the willows

Last year around this time I wrote a post about bumble bees swarming high up in the crown of a pussy willow (Salix caprea, aka goat willow). I knew nothing. Nothing. Since that time I have read Dave Goulson’s excellent A Sting in the Tale which, if nothing else, has served to give me some appreciation of the depths of my ignorance.

These are queen bumbles, newly waked from hibernation from which they emerge famished, having used up all their stored energy resources over winter. The female pussy willow is one of the few sources of rich nectar at this time of year, and must be a welcome sight indeed to the nearly knackered queenies. No wonder so many of them descend upon each tree, they must be gasping, the poor things. So, drink up ladies. Ovaries to swell, nesting burrows to find, and eggs to lay. Fortunately for the shagged out queens, no energy will need to be spent upon the tiresome business of mating – that was all done before the winter, the males now less than a distant memory, their sperm being stored within the body of the queen. It will be needed to fertilize eggs to produce daughters, who will become the first generation of worker bees, and later, the next generation of queens. Male bees are produced from unfertilised eggs, their only function in life being to mate. It’s not a massively interesting life – the tend to hang around in groups on the top of hills, waiting for a lady to arrive – but they have it better than the male honeybee. The last moments of a sexually successful male honeybee are somewhat dramatic, involving mid-flight sex, exploding genitals, and death. Way to go, chaps.

But all that is months away. Spring is newly arrived – perhaps a week or two late this year – and the willows are abuzz once more.

More sobering is the revelation that the government’s own research into the effects of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees does not support the conclusions that they drew from it at the time. A recent article in The Guardian describes how Dave Goulson has taken another look at the study from 2012, finding that the evidence gathered strongly suggests a negative correlation between the presence of common neonicotinoids and the number of queen bees. You can read the full piece here; I was particularly drawn to the following quote from Professor Goulson,

“The conclusions (the government) come to seem to be completely contrary to their own results section.

“They find that 100% of the time there is a negative relationship between how much pesticides were found in the nest and how well the nest performed, and they go on to conclude that the study shows that there isn’t a significant effect of pesticides on bee colonies. It doesn’t add up.”

Even a spokesman from the Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA), who carried out the research, concurs that the wrong conclusions were drawn.

You often hear both scientists and politicians speaking of the importance of good, reasearch-based data upon which to base policy decisions. When the research is conducted by individuals and organisations manifestly less than impartial to the outcome, the studies are not exposed to the rigours of peer review and the resulting data are apparently wilfully misinterpreted, one could be forgiven for wondering how well this process is working.

The Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair

A wet and very windy weekend for the Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair. In all honesty I arrived far too late on Sunday afternoon – by the time I’d had a quick peak around the garden to see what had grown since my last visit only three weeks ago, people were starting to think about packing up. I spent all my cash on The Walled Nursery’s stall (Emma had brought scented pelargoniums, amongst other things – any attempt at resistance was clearly going to be an exercise in futility), where I had the pleasure of making the real life acquaintance of a Twitter friend, Philippa Burrough of Ulting Wick near Maldon in Essex, who had come to lend a hand for the day. Philippa and her husband, incidentally supporters of the Great Dixter Trust, open the gardens at Ulting Wick under the National Gardens Scheme several times a year (the next open day being Friday 17 April – more details on the NGS website here). Emma seemed to be doing brisk trade even as the stalls were packing up around her, which was just as well. Back at the nursery, Monty had found it necessary to close due to the high winds, which always carries with it the danger of falling glass (for the latest on the progress of the renovations to the Victorian glasshouses at The Walled Nursery, click here to visit the website).

Emma from The Walled Nursery (left) and Philippa from Ulting Wick

It was also great to catch up briefly with Jill Anderson of growingnicely.co.uk (do pop across to her blog for some cracking garden writing and for details of her book, Planting Design Essentials) – Jill, her husband and I converged upon the wonderful pot display by the porch as I arrived. There’s always such a fabulous splash of colour here, with the different forms and textures of the plants and the play of light and shadow around the various containers; never the same on any two visits, I sometimes think it would be great to have time-lapse footage of this single view of the house and garden, especially for those who aren’t so fortunate to live close enough to make the pilgrimage on a regular basis.

A brief visit then, with lots of weather, but what with meeting friends, buying plants and soaking up a fabulous garden – who could ask for more?

The structure here is always impressive, whatever the weather

The phlox here is much further on than mine – I did divide it quite late

Things to plant with Arum mac. #1 – oriental hellebores

Things to plant with Arum mac. #2 – scilla

Feathered friends

A jackdaw keeps a beady eye on what’s occurring down below

I always thought I was an autumn/winter person. Solitary by nature, it seemed appropriate that I’d gravitate toward a time of year that hardly anyone else appeared glad to see arrive – and it’s true that I feel much more at home in the cooler months. But...these last few days, it's like I've been mainlining spring; within moments of stepping outside, the heart is thumping, spine tingling, and all the while I’m breathing so deeply I wonder if I’ve grown a third lung. Must be the sap rising in me. That can happen when you hang around plants too much.

The spring equinox is now past, and although the clocks won’t change until the weekend, already the longer days make a big difference to how a gardener feels – there’s so much more time to get things done, and you can even get in a quick stint in the garden or greenhouse before work. I wonder if it might be the activity of the birds that makes the most difference in the March landscape, although perhaps this is easy to miss as we rush about our daily business. But the outside world has become a much noisier place over the past few weeks – it’s a racket, albeit an invigorating one. The garden is full of jackdaws plundering the still untidied borders for nesting material, while our resident pairs of collared doves flap about, cooing rather stupidly with a renewed sense of urgency. Sparrows commute every few moments between the pyracantha hedge in the courtyard and the gaps under the eaves, and the hedgerows are packed with blue tits, their bobbing flight keeping pace with you until they lift themselves above the top of the hedge to perch on the branch of an oak tree, a comfortable vantage from which to trill a sound scolding in your general direction.

We have wood pigeons too. Just daring us to plant brassicas

Robins have been keeping me company all through the winter, shadowing my tickling fork and gratefully extracting earthworms of unlikely length from the worked soil. But now, having kept a low profile over the winter, muttering away to themselves in a hedge, the blackbird is starting to become my regular garden companion. I have missed his song, and his bright, black, gold-ringed eye, glimpsed in the corner of my peripheral vision as I furtle about in the beds. Mrs Blackbird too, growing ever more confident until she becomes quite tame, sticking close by while the gang of much larger jackdaws have taken flight, cawing, to their perches on the chimney pots. I’ve not seen a thrush in the garden for years, though I live in hope.

Mrs Blackbird, gathering nest material

There’s a competition running at the moment to decide Britain’s national bird. You can vote at www.votenationalbird.com/ for your preferred option from the shortlist of ten – the robin (odds-on favourite) is joined by the blackbird, hen harrier, swan, barn owl, red kite, puffin, kingfisher, blue tit and wren. Some impressive contenders – I’m unlike to forget the red kite that hung in the air over above my head as I worked a few weeks ago  – but I can’t help feeling that winner should be more ubiquitous than necessarily handsome. Mercifully the feral pigeon, which would surely be returned as the result under this criteria, is not on the list. I think I’d go with the blackbird, but don’t let me sway you. I will say this, however: the puffin’s never going to get it, let’s face it. It’s a wonderful bird with a fascinating song, but who wants their country to be represented by a creature that looks like Dustin Hoffman in a dressing gown?

Sadly, the sparrow didn’t make it through to this stage. I keep hearing that the sparrow population in the UK is in terminal decline. I think they’re all in my garden.

A fluffy-looking female house sparrow – a bit too early for a fledgling

The male sparrow, having a peck at the flowers on Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn'

A good day at Great Dixter

If you’re a keen gardener, it’s not unreasonable for you to expect the plants in your care to flourish and thrive. After all the attention and effort you lavish upon them, it would be a bit galling if they were to turn up their toes and die. It does happen though, and even those of use who earn our living from gardening are not immune – no matter how sanguine I try to be in such situations, the walk to the bonfire with my latest vegetative cadaver is rarely undertaken with the jauntiest of steps. And so I was immensely encouraged to hear Fergus Garrett, Great Dixter’s head gardener, confess that much of his considerable wealth of knowledge regarding plant combinations has been acquired not, as you might imagine, from years of study and painstaking observation, but rather “the bitter experience of killing things”.


The context of this comforting revelation was a consideration of the thuggish nature of allium leaves, and the detrimental effect their luxuriant and haphazard canopies can have on perennials which take longer to muster their strength – specifically in this case the notoriously competition-shy phlox, but also other plants with basal leaves, such as asters and heleniums. Not all alliums are guilty – the narrow leaves of Allium sphaerocephalon, for example, are quite well mannered, but ‘Christophii’, ‘Globemaster’ and A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ are all guilty as charged. And it’s not just alliums we should be careful with – how many of us consider the foliage of tulips when making a selection, rather than simply the flowers and stems? Big, lax leaves are less useful in a garden situation, whereas a tulip like ‘Ballerina’ has a tidier habit, and can be planted at greater densities.

Fergus had taken an hour so out of his morning working on the Long Border to talk to a room full of garden writers and photographers, an event kindly hosted by the team at Great Dixter for the members of the Garden Media Guild. A perfect spring morning began with tea and lemon drizzle cake (two of the gardener’s basic food groups) and a chance to chat with friends in the education suite, part of the complex of farm buildings recently converted by the Great Dixter Charitable Trust in order to provide a learning environment and accommodation for students. Education lies at the heart of Dixter, and it’s no more than a couple of minutes into his talk before Fergus illustrates this.

“Teaching is what Dixter is about. With Christo, it used to take me three and half days to do the exotic garden. But teaching with students, it takes seven to eight days. Things take longer now, but they’re the future, these kids."

It’s hard to think of a better environment in which this next generation of gardener will hone not just their horticultural skills, but also their understanding of how a complex and multilayered garden works from day to day. With a small team of five full-time gardeners, plus volunteers and students, Fergus relies on a succession of complicated-looking flowcharts (he refers to these as ‘maps’), so that every member of the team knows how their current task fits within the context of the estate, which includes the borders, meadows and vegetable beds within the garden itslef, and the 52 acres of pasture and woodland beyond. Even a brief acquaintance with one of these maps serves to illustrate the intricacies involved in managing a garden on the scale of Dixter’s six acres, the sheer number and variety of the tasks seeming overwhelming at first. But one of the advantages of setting the work out in this fashion is that it allows you to see where the ‘crunch times’ will occur in the gardening year – the end of October and November being one, with another in January to March., and so Fergus is continually on the look out for any jobs which can be brought forward to relieve these busier times. (Any of those unfortunate, ill-advised folk who dare to suggest that gardeners have nothing to do over winter should be made to memorise one of these charts.) To this end, cuttings will be taken in September when light levels are high and rooting is better, and the team will start thinking about clearing and cleaning greenhouses in August in order to move in tender plants the moment the frost warnings suggest, so avoiding the chaotic bottleneck which might otherwise occur.

The wildflower meadows are now key to the look of the gardens at Great Dixter. While for the most part the public has got used to them, there are still some who complain later on in the summer months.  “Why have you left the grass like that?!” The staff seem to take this in their stride, treating this kind of encounter as another opportunity to educate the wider community about the
biodiversity work which has become an increasingly important facet of their role here. The meadows are cut when the latest flowering plant – usually the common spotted orchid Dactylorhiza fuchsii – has had the opporunity to drop its ripened seed, around the last week of August. Fergus is experimenting with a mozaic system of management, which involves creating diverse areas of habitat within the meadow area, leaving some areas uncut, and allowing sheep to graze others. The hay is raked off by hand, a slow process, but one which avoids the detrimental impact on habitat management often involved with mechanised raking.

Ursula Cholmley, taking a day off from Easton Walled Gardens to make notes on the meadows at Great Dixter

Gardening at Great Dixter is clearly a cerebral activity, and the gardeners are encouraged to adopt a mindset of continually analysing successes and failures. Having in the past had indifferent success in getting the seeds of Tetranapax papyrifer to germinate, 15 pots were sown, each placed in a different location. The one which was treated to a combination of both misting and bottom heat was the only one to show signs of life, but when all 15 pots were placed in these conditions, germination was 100 per cent. “Don’t believe what’s on the seed packet,” Fergus tells us. “They say you should sow zinnias in March.” At Dixter, they sow the seeds in the first week of June, get germination within two days, and have plants ready to plant out by the end of the month. It’s important to know what works in your location, and this only knowledge comes through experimentation.

Evidence of this rigorous process of experimentation and review is also seen in the approach to plant combinations, which Fergus tries not to repeat, but rather to vary. We were treated to slides of different tulips through a variety of floral ‘carpets’ – aquilegias, arabis, foxgloves, anthriscus – the general idea remains consistent with each iteration, but the look differs dramatically as the principles are varied. On occasion, a combination will get an encore, due to a palpably manifest irritation that the first time round it hadn’t quite gone right. So, after an absence of several years, the pairing of Papaver commutatum 'Ladybird' with Orlaya grandiflora with receive an encore, with the relative ratio of one plant to another adjusted to achieve a more balanced effect. There’s no point in making rules if you can’t break them now and again.

Orlaya grandiflora with Ladybird poppies (detail from Cleve West’s Brewin Dolphin garden at Chelsea, 2012)

Later in the afternoon we were treated to a tour of the gardens by Rachael Dodd, one of the full time staff, a likeable and ebullient guide whose horticultural knowledge is evidently equalled by an enthusiasm for communicating her passion for the plants and for Dixter itself. Standing in the peacock garden, she became almost apologetic about the level of detail into which she had descended while telling us about trimming the topiary. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I was fascinated to learn that  the gardeners use lightweight, electric consumer-level hedge trimmers made by Stihl for this job, largely due to issues of balance, finding (as I often do when attempting something slightly intricate) that the heavier petrol machines are sometimes inclined to sink into the body of the piece, rather than skimming lightly over the surface. I’m not sure I could be doing with the trailing electric cables, but portability and versatility are probably of secondary consideration to the gardeners here.

Electric hedge cutters are used on the yew 'peacocks', light enough to skim across the top surface of the topiary in a smooth plane

How fascinating to learn, too, that the borders in the peaccock garden – normally chock full of plants billowing romantically between the tightly clipped yew forms – are actually the stock beds for the nursery. The plants used to be grown in rows, ostensibly for practical reasons, until Christopher Lloyd decided to lay them out with more of a concession to aesthetics, in layers, organised in sections according to season of interest. In early March, everything feels very calm and controlled, the beds marked out with long canes along the surface to indicate the various plant groupings, and short canes in the soil to flag the location of plant that has yet to emerge above ground. It’s an entirely necessary discipline with a team of gardeners working the same area, and will prove its worth over the months to come, particuarly once the plants start to bulk up.

This year, the far path is guarded by skeletal sentinals – an alarming sight, but a reminder of the resiliance of yew as a conifer that will rejuvinate from being cut back hard. These topiary pieces are old, and have reached a point where drastic measures are sometimes required. Fergus tells us that it will take a good ten years, perhaps more, for each piece to achieve its former stature, so it’s as well that they don’t all require this treatment at once.

We make our way through to the vegetable garden where, after a winter of mulching and soil amelioration, the compost heaps are still of a prodigious size. The use of this compost is restricted to certain areas, as they don’t get hot enough to kill all the weed seeds. In addition, Rachael tells us that they get through spent mushroom compost “by the truck load”; 25 tonnes of organic material is brought in each year. Fergus has phased out the use of inorganic fertilizers, relying on bonemeal and fish, blood and bone, and the nursery is now entirely peat free.

By the time we reach the end of the long border my brain has turned to jam from all the information, but it’s always a joy to walk this path, greeting like old friends the stalwart, ever-present characters – the towering golden ilex at the far end, the pinus mugo in the middle, and the pair of aucubas nearer the house – while peering with a mixture of curiosity and delight at the more ephemeral tennants of the various bedding pockets incorporated throughout for seasonal interest.

Male and female spotted laurels. Aucuba japonica 'Crontonifolia' and f. longifolia

Towards the end of the tour, by popular request we get to poke our noses into one of the cellars, where a new use for fish boxes is revealed – stuffed with dahlia tubers and cannas and stretching from the entrance through another doorway and beyond, no doubt shortly due to be potted up and making their way to the cold frames.

There was plenty more to the day. I’ve not found time to write about the tour of the house, nor the work done with by the guys in the barn using coppiced chestnut from the woodland – pieces which are used in the garden, or sold on to offset the cost of their employment. It’s all up here though *taps head*, and in here *taps notebook*, to be used at a later date, no doubt. I’m especially glad to these last two chaps, as they kindly helped to get me back on the road after I'd stupidly left my car headlights on and drained the battery flat. But that’s another story.

With especial thanks to the Garden Media Guild and the team at Great Dixter for a thoroughly interesting day.

Tight clipped

‘Various things poking up through the peacocks’ Rachael

Fluffy pruning

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The Great Dixter Spring Plant Fair marks the opening of the gardens, on Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th March 2015. Admission £8.00 including entry to the gardens.
www.greatdixter.co.uk