The English Garden April/May 2022 - US Edition

100 PAGES OF GLORIOUS BRITISH GARDENS & PLANTING IDEAS

THE

english

GARDEN MAY 2022

For everyone who loves beautiful gardens

Time for

TULIPS Spring’s brightest bulbs put on a show

Creative ways to preserve your flowers

Sophie Conran’s Wiltshire garden $7.99

Stylish alliums for spring and summer

ALWAYS MADE IN THE UK. carriercompany.co.uk

CONTRIBUTORS

Cinead McTernan Cinead is a garden writer, author and television horticultural researcher. Her third book, Grow Your Own Botanicals, was released last year. She visits Derry Watkins’ Special Plants Nursery on page 75.

Catriona Gray Catriona is a freelance journalist and author based in Ireland, where she spends her time tending a seven-acre garden on the River Blackwater. She chats to Sophie Conran about her Wiltshire garden on page 52.

Welcome T

hat tulips really need to be planted afresh every year for truly spectacular displays puts these bulbs among the most theatrical of plants.

The stage is set anew each spring for a display that can be changed and tweaked, polished and perfected, while the colours and flower shapes allow annual experimentation and the garden’s supporting cast can be honed. Whether it’s an incredible show on a large scale like that at Arundel Castle, or something more achievable at home, like Matthew Sprigg’s gorgeous garden at Lancaster House, or luxuriant containers packed with bulbs, to my mind colourful tulips are one of the very best things about spring and make April one of my favourite months.

Until May arrives that is, and I remember that, actually, May is surely the most glorious month in the garden: burgeoning foliage in those fresh emerald-green shades of spring, the first alliums, a rising chorus of birdsong and the smell of mown grass in spring sunshine. Happily, I don’t have to decide which I like best because the gardens in this issue celebrate the best of both months and this most joyous season. Spring really does know how to put on a show.

IMAGES NEIL HEPWORTH; STEVE LAWTON PHOTOGRAPHY

CLARE FOGGETT, EDITOR

Britt Willoughby Dyer After her photography degree, Britt embarked on a career as a travel PR photographer and now focuses on gardens, flora, nature and makers. Her photos of Sophie Conran’s garden are on page 52.

ON THE COVER Bold Dutch style and masses of tulips at Lancaster House, the colourful town garden of florist Matthew Spriggs in West Sussex. Photograph

by Mimi Connolly.

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May 2022

CONTENTS

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Gardens 12 Arundel Castle When the world ground to a halt in 2020, this West Sussex garden’s tulip festival went ahead unseen, flowers bloomed and new projects continued apace.

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23 Lancaster House Florist Matthew Spriggs has applied the formality and containment of gardens seen on buying trips to the Netherlands to his narrow Sussex garden.

30 Westbrooke House Joanne and Bryan Drew fell for this neglected Victorian walled garden in Leicestershire, and their sensitive restoration has added a contemporary touch.

38 Fulbrook House Considered plant introductions have enhanced and formalised Simon Gill’s Cotswold garden without diminishing its historic essence.

44 Gowan Cottage in Cambridgeshire, photographer Zara Napier’s sizeable organic garden incorporates a wealth of inspiration from favourite gardens she has shot.

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52 Sophie Conran’s Garden The designer’s homeware is adorned with exquisite floral motifs, and her abundant Wiltshire garden is a true reflection of these talents.

60 Mothecombe Anne Mildmay-White and her son John have planted their Devon garden with nectar-rich blooms and native wildflowers to create a haven for wildlife.

Plants

52 6 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

74

69 Plant Focus There’s more to alliums than the familiar purple globes of late spring, says National Collection holder Jackie Currie.

74 Plant Swatch The diverse verbena genus offers go-to border plants loved by designers as well as superb choices for summer pots.

30 ll

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UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY FOR LEARNING FROM BRITISH GARDENERS ONE YEAR GOOD GARDENING DIPLOMA September 2022 – beginning July 2023

Covers the best in planting design while training in the more serious aspects of horticultural techniques. Practical sessions held at Arundel Castle under the guidance of head gardener Martin Duncan and at Sandhill Farm House, Rogate.

Lectures by many leading gardening personalities and regular visits to exclusive private gardens. Students also learn to draw up planting plans.

(1 day a week (Tues), 10.30am–3.15pm, over three terms)

THE ESSENTIAL GARDEN DESIGN DIPLOMA January – March 2022

Based at the Chelsea Physic Garden and led by Rosemary Alexander and architect Catriona Rowbotham, the course is an overview of Garden Design, covering all the elements needed to rethink an average garden. Taking students step by step through site surveying, using the grid, horizontal and vertical features, garden layouts and planting plans, costing and specification, plus drawing tuition and homework on design and plant portfolios. Tutors are well respected in the industry and will guide students on how to succeed in this diverse profession.

(2 days a week (Wed & Thur) 10.30am-3.15pm, plus 2 days homework)

GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS

Wednesday & Thursday 20,21,27,28 April 2022

One of our most popular courses, led by master horticulturalist Ben Pope, which aims to take each student through all the practical elements of caring for a garden from soil, tools, maintenance, seed sowing and propagating, weed control and pests and diseases. The first 3 days will be spent at the Chelsea Physic Garden and the final day will be spent gaining practical experience in Rosemary Alexander’s much praised garden near Petersfield and the garden nearby, where Ben is in charge. Participants will be given a chance to prune, plant, sow seeds and regular maintenance tasks will be discussed. A light lunch and refreshments will be provided daily.

75 Nurseries In Wiltshire, Derry Watkins’ Special Plants sells favourite plants grown from seed or propagated from cuttings.

IMAGES MIMI CONNOLLY; BRITT WILLOUGHBY DYER; ANNAICK GUITTENY; SHUTTERSTOCK; NICOLA STOCKEN

83 Preserving Flowers The techniques and ideas behind pressing flowers and making herbaria are easy to learn and apply.

89 Craftspeople Bex Partridge dries home-grown flowers to make incredible everlasting art and arrangements.

GARDEN DESIGN & CARING FOR YOUR GARDEN

Distance Learning Courses study anytime, anywhere in the world

A stepping stone to a new career. These two correspondence courses are a step by step guide to either designing your own garden or learning how to plant and maintain an existing garden: drawing up plans, hard landscaping, site analysis, planting, month by month tasks etc. Taught through a comprehensive course book, with projects submitted to us.

1-3 years to complete and individual assessment.

Regulars 8 On Location Steeped in myth and legend, the county of Somerset boasts fine gardens.

10 Out & About News, events, jobs to do – and the country’s best tulip displays.

98 Last Word The move towards sustainable gardening reflects our concerns about sustainability in general, says Katherine Swift.

Offers 80 Great British Holiday Competition Your chance to win a holiday for two worth £5,000.

88 Subscribe & Save Subscribe to The English Garden and save money.

Garden of Medicinal Plants – Chelsea Physic Garden

Photo: R Alexander

Not sure which Diploma course is for you? Come along to an information session to see our location and find out more.

www.englishgardeningschool.co.uk Email: info@englishgardeningschool.co.uk Tel: +44 (0) 207 352 4347 Long established as the leader in all design and gardening tuition and based at the unique and historic Chelsea Physic Garden

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 7

ON LOCATION

SOMERSET

Timeless Landscapes Steeped in myth and legend, this ancient county features some fine gardens

A direct train from London Paddington to Taunton takes one hour forty minutes, and to Bath it’s an hour and twenty minutes.

I

f one place evokes the spirit of ancient England, it is the county of Somerset. This is the beginning of the West Country, where cider apples hang thick upon boughs and the deep vowels of the traditional West Country burr shift minutely from town to town. Its landscape is by turns deeply wooded and expansive, bordering Dorset and Devon in the south, Wiltshire in the east and metropolitan Bristol in the north.

8 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Central to the county is Glastonbury Tor (nationaltrust.org.uk), a prominent 158m hill rising sharply from the surrounding flat landscape.

Visible from miles around, this striking landform is steeped in legend: Jesus is supposed to have visited it as a young boy and the Holy Grail, the cup used at the Last Supper, is rumoured to be buried here.

The legend has made it a place of pilgrimage over millennia, and the remains of the monastic St

Great Escapes Explore ancient Wells, visit The Newt, and stop at the Pig, a boutique hotel serving home-grown produce VISIT WELLS CATHEDRAL The 850-year-old cathedral is a delight. Smaller and less wellknown than others, its Gothic interior possesses an appealing intimacy, with a stunning stained-glass east window dating from the 14th century.

Explore the moated Cathedral complex, and look out for the swans trained to pull a bell at feeding time at the Bishop’s Palace. wellscathedral.org.uk

IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; MEHAU KULYK; THE NEWT

The atmospheric ruin of monastic St Michael’s Tower tops Glastonbury Tor in Somerset.

Michael’s Tower are a reminder of its long history. It also inspired William Blake to pen ‘Jerusalem’, later set to music by Hubert Parry. The hymn, so integral to English identity, has been the unofficial anthem of the Women’s Institute since the 1920s.

The Somerset Levels are tracts of coastal plain drained for agriculture but richly biodiverse: willow for weaving is grown here. In contrast, the Cheddar Gorge (nationaltrust.org.uk) to the east is a striking arrangement of limestone cliffs: a drive along the hairpin bends of the gorge is a rewarding adventure.

Breathtaking gardens abound. Margery Fish’s former cottage garden at East Lambrook Manor (eastlambrook.com) is a masterclass in this planting style. Penelope Hobhouse gardened at Tintinhull, (nationaltrust.org.uk) now open to the public. ■

A GARDEN TO VISIT Formerly Hadspen House, The Newt in Somerset has won acclaim for its magnificent gardens that have been developed around the footprint of grounds designed by its former occupant, Penelope Hobhouse. Having explored the walled Parabola garden, filled with trained apple trees, consider a luxury overnight stay in the remodelled country house. thenewtinsomerset.com

EAT The Pig near Bath offers

seasonal menus (left) using select produce largely grown in the hotel’s kitchen garden.

Further south, Bruton is earning a reputation as an artist’s town. After visiting the Piet Oudolf-designed garden at Hauser+Wirth, stop for lunch at the gallery’s Durslade Farm Shop. thepighotel.com; dursladefarmshop.co.uk MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 9

MAY

Out & About

Phoebe Jayes recommends some of the UK’s best gardens for tulips and rounds up outdoor jobs to do in spring – as well as the latest news

Spring jobs ● Start increasing the

amount of water given to houseplants as they respond to increased light and day length with new growth. ● Feed roses to

ensure lots of flowers this summer. Scatter granular rose fertiliser around the base of the bush and work in with a fork; water in the feed if there is no rain. ● Mid-spring is a good

time to sow lawn seed to repair bare patches or thicken the grass.

Tulip FEVER

● Sow tender crops

It’s the most colourful time of year, with gardens all around the country rolling out special displays of vibrant tulips in a range of hues

such as tomatoes, beans and sweetcorn under cover. ● Pot up dahlia tubers

Chenies Manor House Gardens These award-winning gardens in Buckinghamshire (above) open from mid-April, to coincide with the start of the colourful tulip displays that continue into May. Tel: +44 (0)1494 762888; cheniesmanorhouse.co.uk

Hole Park

Morton Hall Gardens

In late spring, Kent’s Hole Park boasts 16 acres of tulips, roses and clematis, while the vineyard garden is filled with wisteria. Wild orchids flower in the meadows alongside star-shaped camassia. Tel: +44 (0)1580 241344; holepark.com

This Worcestershire garden holds its annual Tulip Festival from 30 April to 2 May, in collaboration with the Royal Shakespeare Company. See RSC costumes and swathes of tulips in borders and meadows. Booking essential.

Tel: +44 (0)1386 791820; mortonhallgardens.co.uk

Hever Castle Head to Kent this April and May for displays of glorious tulips in the historic grounds of Hever Castle (right). Some 21,000 tulips will be in bloom, usually along with beautiful tulip arrangements inside the castle. Tel: +44 (0)1732 865224; hevercastle.co.uk 10 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Pashley Manor Gardens During the Tulip Festival, from 20 April to 4 May, over 35,000 tulips bloom in these Sussex gardens, separated into colour themes within a patchwork of atmospheric garden ‘rooms’.

Tel: +44 (0)1580 200888; pashleymanorgardens.com

and start them into growth in the warmth of the greenhouse. ● Try sowing some

hardy annual grasses such as briza, hordeum (below) and lagurus to add movement to summer borders.

Kinsman’s

STORM ARWEN

KEW RANGE

hits northern UK Gale-force winds caused by Storm Arwen brought down many of the UK’s special trees. The National Trust has been assessing damage caused by the storm in its gardens and estimates restoration will amount to at least £3 million. Many trees were uprooted at Bodnant in Wales (right), including a 51m ‘champion’ redwood, the largest of its kind in Wales. At Wallington in Northumberland, thousands of veteran trees were lost as winds reached 98mph. The Trust has asked for donations to help with restoration. Visit nationaltrust.org.uk/woodlands-appeal

NEW HOSTAS

from Proven Winners

New additions to horticultural supplier Kinsman’s 2022 range have been inspired by fine British gardens. The firm already stocks Spear & Jackson tools used by gardeners at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, but now has a range of Kew Gardens Gift Box sets, and Kew-inspired china mugs.

The gift boxes of soap, hand cream and handwash in a range of lovely floral scents, are the perfect present for a gardener. The mugs feature botanical drawings from Kew’s archive and make a pretty set. There are also new Kew placemats, tea towels and oven gloves. kinsmangarden.com

Two brand new hostas join Proven Winners’ line-up of new plants for 2022.

Look in garden centres this year for Hosta Shadowland ‘Miss America’, with lilac flowers and the perfect amount of cream variegation on each heart-shaped leaf. Hosta Shadowland ‘Hope Springs Eternal’ (left) has petrol blue leaves with creamy, slightly ruffled edges.

Meanwhile, Hosta ‘Diamond Lake’ is the firm’s ‘Hosta of the Year’, an unusual variety that has corrugated leaves with crinkly margins. provenwinners.com

IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; NATIONAL TRUST IMAGES/PAUL HARRIS; RHS

RARE WORSLEYA flowers Gardeners at the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden, Wisley in Surrey, coaxed a rare, blue flowered-plant from Brazil into bloom for the first time. The specimen of Worsleya procera has been growing at Wisley for 13 years, so staff were delighted when it finally showed signs of producing its eye-catching, vibrant, lilylike flowers. In the wild in eastern Brazil, it grows on steep granite cliffs, often near waterfalls, so it’s a tricky plant to grow. “The key is to replicate these environmental conditions and provide the plant with a very moist but free-draining growing medium,” says Glasshouse Team Leader Christopher Young. Worsleya procera is one of the rarest members of the Amaryllis family and is considered endangered in its native habitat. It is rarely cultivated and the Society know of only one other worsleya flowering in a public garden in recent years. rhs.org.uk/wisley MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 11

Silent SENTINEL

When the world ground to a halt in 2020, this West Sussex garden’s tulip festival went ahead unseen, flowers bloomed and new projects continued apace, all watched over by the imposing edifice of Arundel Castle WORDS HELEN YEMM PHOTOGRAPHS MIMI CONNOLLY

12 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

This image Pots of tulip

‘Foxtrot’ are dotted through the Cut Flower Garden for extra colour.

Opposite ‘Apeldoorn Elite’ tulips in the beds that border a pathway next to the glasshouse.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 13

Above Italianate fountains bring a flamboyant touch to The Collector Earl’s Garden, with pots of tulip ‘Pink Impression’.

Right Head gardener Martin Duncan, with members of the Arundel Castle garden team.

T

he original 12th-century Norman castle, frequently battered, restored, and finally substantially rebuilt in the 19th century, has been the seat of one branch or other of the same family – that of the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, the Fitzalan-Howards – for almost all of that time.

The castle enjoys a commanding position above the river Arun that gave its name to the castle and to the town that sits beneath its walls. In the 19th century, the picturesque town was further embellished with a gothic-revival cathedral. Between castle and cathedral, two grand and dominant edifices, a most intriguing garden consisting of some 40 acres has evolved, much of it developed since the succession to the title in 2005 of the current Duke and Duchess, who take a keen interest in it.

Since 2009, the head gardener has been Martin Duncan, a plantsman and garden designer who won the Kew Guild Medal in 2018. He works with a team of seven full-time gardeners and some vital volunteers and, over the past 12 years, between them they have planted 1.2 million bulbs in the light and chalky soil. They hosted the castle’s first Tulip

14 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Between castle and cathedral, two grand and dominant edifices, a most intriguing garden has evolved

The Potager’s mixed tulip display, with Narcissus ‘Thalia’, is surrounded by brightstemmed rainbow chard.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 15

Festival in 2015, an event that went from strength to strength – until the pandemic struck. It was, of course, devastating that Arundel’s annual, monthlong celebration, one of the best in the country, was cancelled in 2020. But for the castle’s owners and the small gardening team led by Martin, the cancellation provided a privileged opportunity to enjoy the peace and tranquillity of the garden’s spring flowers in abundance, the birdsong and the blossom, during a brief period when the sun seemed endlessly to shine on an increasingly frightened population holding its collective breath.

“The tulips were,” says Martin, “the best they have ever been – and nobody came.” For him, of course, future planning carried on as normal: that autumn he and his team planted 126,000 spring bulbs, 60,000 of which were tulips, in anticipation of the spectacular festival’s return in 2021.

At the entrance to the castle gardens visitors are greeted by a joyous display of massed tulips in huge terracotta pots, a taste of a keenly anticipated floral colour-binge to come. Walking upwards and into what is essentially a 19th-century landscape, all grassy banks and precipitous castle walls, the ancient keep and barbican set to one side, a different picture begins to emerge. The wide gravel path is flanked by grass bejewelled with tulips, just one element of a long-season, informally planted melee of spring flowers augmented over the past few years: aconites, snowdrops and the earliest narcissus will have led the march out of winter, with fritillaries, primulas and first blue, then white camassias closely on their heels with later-flowering daffodils in attendance. Overlapping these come the early-flowering tulips, followed by hordes of alliums floating above clouds of cow parsley, with laterflowering tulips bringing up the rear.

The colours ebb and flow with every twist and turn of the path and, as the season progresses, the bulbs are overtaken by a spreading population of native perennial wildflowers. Whole areas that formerly sported undulating sheets of grass between trees are thus rendered colourful for weeks on end, with paths mown between the floral drifts enabling the visitor to explore further.

The gravelled path leads gently upwards. Not to be missed along the way is the small, walled White Garden, attached to the Fitzalan Chapel, where ‘White Triumphator’ tulips and ‘White Dame’ wallflowers, the essence of tranquillity, combine beautifully in all-white borders of shrubs, roses, clematis and later perennials.

From here, a door leads into an extensive walled garden that was previously the castle’s vast

Above In a wide border buttressed by yew, alliums are just starting to raise their heads above tulip ‘Passionale’.

Right The dainty flowers of Tulipa ‘Little Beauty’.

Below Mixed woodland planting in the unusual Stumpery; the ancient stumps are from the Norfolk estate.

“The tulips were,” says Martin, “the best they have ever been – and nobody came.”

16 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

vegetable garden, into Above Circles of ‘Thalia’ daffodils with red tulip a theatrically formal ‘Apeldoorn’ and a few space, The Collector ‘Purple Dream’ form The Earl’s Garden, designed Labyrinth, with a view of

by Julian and Isabel the cathedral behind.

Left The Roundhouse Bannerman and opened is wrapped in a dreamy

by HRH Prince Charles meadow of ‘Passionale’ in 2008. A bubbling and ‘Paul Scherer’ tulips. fountain and rill here are flanked by enormous pots of ‘Pink Impression’ tulips underplanted with irises and forget-me-nots.

Beyond, and viewed through a massive hornbeamclad pergola, is the otherworldly Oberon’s Palace, both hefty structures hewn from green oak.

Together with deep and curvaceous foliage-rich tropical borders littered with huge rocks, they powerfully vie for attention with the lofty cathedral beyond. Three years ago, Martin transformed the square central lawn, creating a spectacular grass labyrinth planted with massed ‘Thalia’ daffodils and scarlet ‘Apeldoorn’ tulips. The whole grassy expanse is mown in June, when it becomes a green, open-air theatre auditorium.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 17

Bespoke sculpture for the home, garden and public spaces Handmade in Scotland — slate, glass and bronze T: +44 (0)7729 705257 E: enquiries@jamesparkersculpture.co.uk www.jamesparkersculpture.co.uk

Head TURNERS Arundel’s most colourful and flamboyant tulips and some equally eye-catching partners

DICENTRA SPECTABILIS

TULIPA ‘MICKEY MOUSE’

A superb partner for tulips, flowering in April and offering fresh, feathery foliage.

Small flowers have massive impact thanks to their bright combination of colours.

PULMONARIA OFFICINALIS

TULIPA ‘FOXTROT’

Ideal for shadier borders, this bee-friendly early perennial grows in Arundel’s Stumpery.

Opulent double and lightly fragrant flowers open in a shade of rose pink that gets darker as the flowers age.

PULSATILLA VULGARIS

TULIPA ‘APELDOORN ELITE’

Grow this sun-lover in very well-drained soil; silky seedheads follow the flowers.

A Darwin hybrid with huge orange blooms, flushed red on the outside, in April and May.

Once-solid hedges have been sculpted to echo the shapes of the spires and buttresses of the cathedral And so, finally, still within the original old walls of the garden, to a series of more formally laid-out areas and a beautifully restored tropical glasshouse.

The traditional herbaceous borders here are studded with a range of tulips in gorgeous combinations.

Martin dislikes hard edges, and prefers borders that ‘spill’, but each of these borders (lofty, later, with cardoons, lupins and delphiniums) is separated from the next by once-solid hedges that have now been sculpted to echo the shapes of the spires and buttresses of the cathedral beyond.

The mildness of the garden’s microclimate (there is seldom a hard frost here) is nowhere so much in evidence as in the highly unusual Stumpery: here, smaller spring bulbs, including little bright Turkish tulips, nestle between huge acid-green heads of euphorbias, the slowly unfurling fronds of the Above Outside the Hunting Lodge in The tree ferns and numerous Collector Earl’s Garden magnificent, self-seeded stand massed ranks of echiums reaching for containers, filled with a the sky. mix of colourful tulips.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 19

Planting BULBS Practical advice from Arundel head gardener Martin Duncan In the grass, bulbs are laboriously planted by hand and foot. To make life easier, Martin has modified longhandled bulb planters, adding metal plates, welded on to each side of the hole-cutting cylinder, which can then be relatively easily trodden into the ground to remove plugs of soil (“tulips have to be planted at least four inches deep”, he insists), before plopping the bulbs into the resulting hole and replacing the soil plugs.

Bulbs are cast on the ground and planted where they land to ensure they look ‘natural’.

Left A gateway to the gardens, flanked by tulips ‘Apeldoorn’ and plum-purple ‘Passionale’.

Below Away from the Walled Garden, in the Castle’s wider grounds, a beautifully lumpy hedge is picked out by rays of early-morning sunshine.

Martin initially uses a turf cutter to remove the rough grass, replacing it after planting the bulbs with specially grown wildflower turf and subsequently using the seed-rich, late-summer mowings to spread the wildflower population around.

To lengthen the flowering period of the castle’s large pots, tulips are planted close together in a single layer, with up to four harmonious varieties per pot, with different heights and flowering times.

Bulbs in borders are left in situ and their numbers topped up annually. Big display beds are rotated to keep disease at bay: tulips one year, iris the next, then back to tulips and so on.

Familiar tulips such as the Apeldoorns and lily-flowered varieties usually last well from year to year. Doubles and the exotic ‘parrots’ do not and must be replaced each year.

20 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Even during lockdown the work quietly continued here. A small shady woodland border was created close to the Barbican with rustic benches to relieve the weary. The latest project, the restoration of the Stew Ponds, the castle’s mediaeval fish ponds, beyond a circular spinney of slim, charmingly wonky white birches and made accessible by wooden walkways, is now home to breeding swans, all

manner of wildlife and maturing water-garden plantings. Its scope and success has resulted in the project winning the Sussex Heritage Award for Landscapes and Gardens. n Arundel Castle, Arundel, West Sussex BN18 9AB. The castle and gardens open from 1 April to 1 November, 9am to 5pm. Tel: +44 (0)1903 882173; arundelcastle.org.

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In spring, Prunus ‘Royal Burgundy’ trees are a highlight of Matthew Spriggs’ garden in Petworth.

Going DUTCH Florist Matthew Spriggs has applied the formality and containment of gardens seen on buying trips to the Netherlands to his narrow garden at Lancaster House in Sussex, with triumphant results and lots of bold tulips WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS MIMI CONNOLLY

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 23

M

atthew Spriggs’ walled town garden in Petworth, West Sussex, is made for spring. The compact space is only 5.5m wide, but Matthew’s clever use of its 40m length means it is far more than the sum of its parts.

And when spring finally comes around here, it brings with it a thoroughly celebratory array of candy-pink cherry blossom and jewel-bright tulips.

Colour is so important for Matthew, who, with his sister Samantha, runs Petworth’s Spriggs Florist, a business that has been in the family since 1980. The shop on Golden Square was part of a townhouse that had been divided up with the shop on the ground floor. “Although there were windows and French

24 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above A long gravel and basket-weave brick path creates an important vertical axis down the length of the garden.

doors going out into the garden, we couldn’t see any of that because there was a leylandii hedge obscuring the view,” Matthew recalls. “It wasn’t until the year 2000 that the property upstairs became available, and I moved in here the following year. I practically got rid of the hedge on the day I moved in!”

There wasn’t much else in the garden besides the hedge, a scrappy lawn and too-narrow borders on either side of the garden. “There were a few shrubs, including one Hydrangea anomala subsp. petiolaris, which I’ve kept, along with a rather nice yew tree at the end of the garden,” Matthew explains.

As the creative director of Spriggs, Matthew has a keen eye for design. He began work on the garden by establishing a strong vertical axis and fashioning

Left Fresh green fern fronds unfurl at the beginning of spring.

Below Hyacinths, hostas, auriculas and narcissus are part of a spring tableau Matthew likes to use to ring in the season.

Bottom Purple tulips are accented with a hit of lime-green euphorbia.

two large borders off a long central path that he laid himself. “I used brick I found in the garden and gravel from a local quarry to fill the gaps,” he recalls.

The bricks are laid in a basket-weave style: “I wasn’t confident enough to do herringbone pattern, but a basketweave is a nice easy one.”

The property faces south but is bounded on all sides by garden walls and buildings that cast shade.

Even at the height of summer the garden catches the sun only from mid-morning to late-afternoon, meaning a lawn would have been difficult to keep in good condition. “I started with a lot of annuals in the borders because they were inexpensive to grow – sunflowers, cleomes, tobacco plants – but I was really finding my style,” Matthew observes.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 25

Joys of SPRING The new season brings a confection of colour to Matthew Spriggs’ West Sussex garden

FRITILLARIA IMPERIALIS

NARCISSUS ‘THALIA’

Glamorous crown imperials make a bold statement with their striking 1m tall flowers.

This graceful, creamy-white, multi-headed daffodil blooms from March to April.

CENTAUREA MONTANA

TULIPA ‘DESIGN IMPRESSION’

A tough perennial that thrives in sun or semi-shade and flowers from May onwards.

These bright carmine-pink tulips make an impact in Matthew’s containers.

PRUNUS ‘ROYAL BURGUNDY’

MYOSOTIS SYLVATICA

With its striking upright habit and year-round interest, this cherry is ideal for small plots.

Cheery forget-me-nots selfseed to fill nooks and crannies in Matthew’s garden.

26 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Buying trips to the Netherlands instilled in Matthew a passion for traditional Dutch planting styles, with their blend of formality, clipped forms and general containment. It’s a discourse that lends itself well to his own garden and so, with that on his mind, he introduced four large yew hedges to establish a horizontal axis. Resembling buttresses holding up the garden walls, they add drama and scale and contribute to the sense of enclosure here.

They allude to much grander gardens, but this is the trick with small gardens: to create a sense of space, it always pays to be bold. “I love Great Dixter, of course. It’s stunning with the topiary and hedges and Christopher Lloyd’s planting style and what’s been going on there more recently,” Matthew enthuses.

Box balls came in, too, and there are now 37 of them in all, with 12 positioned along the garden path and others planted close to the house and terrace.

Then, about 15 years ago, as the style settled in, Matthew enhanced the garden’s layers with four Prunus ‘Royal Burgundy’. “I adore the trees and I knew I wanted to get more height into the garden,” he admits. “I chose these because they have a very upright growth habit and don’t cast too much shade.

When they’re in bloom it is blossom heaven, it really is. There is the anticipation of watching the little flower buds swelling, the few days of perfection, and then gradually the confetti starts: you’ll stand near the trees and be aware of the odd petal falling down. They also provide fabulous colour in autumn when the leaves turn bright red.”

An important element of the garden is a terrace by the house that Matthew decorates with seasonal displays. In spring he brings it to life with an assortment of auriculas and small bulbs such as muscari, Iris reticulata, hyacinths and dwarf narcissus. “I buy these through the shop, already potted and growing. It’s a really nice thing to ring the changes and more spontaneous than the rest of the garden,” he notes. In summer, a fig tree shades a table on the terrace, its broad, deep green leaves and nutty, honeyed scent filling this enclosed space.

Tulips are essential to the spring garden and with more time at home last autumn, Matthew added bulbs to his borders. He is increasingly using tulips

inclined to be perennial, such as ‘Purple Dream’, ‘Design Impression’, ‘Black Hero’ and ‘Queen of Night’.

“I’m a bit tied to the colour of the cherry trees, which flower at the same time, but my taste has definitely got richer and richer over the years, rather than trying to be too tasteful with green and white.

Lately I’ve ramped up the colour, but I have to restrict myself to buying just one or two varieties and that’s really difficult when you’re a tulipaholic.”

By May and June there are alliums here, not least Allium cristophii, which bob along the borders above the box balls. By summer, herbaceous plants have come to the fore and provide a fresh, green backdrop to summer life in the garden. They include Solomon’s seal, ferns, hostas and, according to Matthew, “clumps of obligatory Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’, which I love”. Euphorbias, so distinctive in their structure and acidic colour, are a counterpoint here to more solid forms elsewhere.

With the sun not hitting the garden until latemorning in summer and gone from most of the

“My taste has got richer and richer over the years, rather than trying to be too tasteful with green and white” Above left Spanish

bluebells, Hyacinthoides hispanica; Matthew is trying to replace them with native English ones.

Top left Matthew likes to use Muehlenbeckia complexa in his floristry.

Above Layers of texture, form and colour make this garden more than the sum of its parts.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 27

garden by 5pm, Matthew has set up a seating area in a spot at the far end of the garden that catches the last rays. There is a small stumpery beneath the old yew tree and, visible from the length of the garden, a terracotta pedestal and urn found in an antiques shop in Petworth, which makes a focal point.

Matthew regularly opens his garden as part of a local Petworth charity event, and has the garden maintenance down to a fine art. Faced with clipping all the box balls and yew hedges, many people would be tempted to call in a specialist garden service, but, with his exacting eye, this is the last thing Matthew would outsource. “I’m far too much of a control freak to allow anyone else to do it,” he says, laughing. He takes a measured approach to the process, though, clipping two balls a day, for instance, or, under duress before an opening, clipping every other box ball in the name of it being a design technique. “I do all the clipping by eye because of the old stone walls – working straight to 28 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above left Petworth’s

many antiques shops are an excellent place to source gardenalia – including old containers.

Top right The unusual honey-scented flowers of Euphorbia mellifera.

Above right Tulipa ‘Design Impression’ with T. ‘Purple Dream’ behind.

the spirit level would look wonky. I also do it all by hand because you get a much crisper finish than with electric hedge trimmers – and it lasts longer, too.”

No matter how much colour or structure there is in a garden, it remains only half-finished without wildlife. “It’s lovely having a garden to look at, but birds and butterflies animate it,” Matthew agrees.

During the first lockdown of 2020, when the shop closed for weeks, he fed garden birds: “We’d have up to six blackbirds coming into the garden from neighbouring territories, followed by blackbird punch-ups… and then amazing singing all around.”

Spring is probably the busiest time of year on Golden Square, but it’s never overwhelming. “The garden is of a size where there’s just enough there for me to do for it to be a pleasure,” Matthew insists. n Spriggs Florist, Lancaster House, Golden Square, High Street, Petworth, West Sussex GU28 0AP. Tel: +44 (0)1798 343372; spriggsflorist.co.uk

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A large, locally forged arbour makes a fitting centrepiece for the Victorian walled garden at Westbrooke House.

Modern ANTIQUITY Joanne and Bryan Drew bought Westbrooke House in Leicestershire having fallen for its neglected Victorian walled garden. Their sensitive restoration has added a contemporary touch WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS NICOLA STOCKEN MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 31

A formal arrangement of beds radiates from a central arbour, brimming with tulips, honesty and euphorbia, offset by hefty yew columns.

32 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

F

south-facing walled garden was part of six acres ew spectacles in the gardening that surround Westbrooke House, a late Victorian calendar are as dramatic as the sight of property built in 1887 on the outskirts of Market myriad tulips caressed by the slanting Harborough, and backing onto undulating arable sunbeams that pierce the crisp first land. “After lengthy discussions with the previous light of a spring dawn. It is a dazzling owners, we purchased the house – but primarily for vision that unfolds annually in the walled garden at the walled garden,” she explains.

Westbrooke House, when thousands of shimmering The walled garden had long been a grass tennis tulips stand proud in colour-themed beds amid blue court, but over time the lawn had worn out and camassias, pink honesty and acid-green euphorbia. attempts at putting in box hedging and planting “Planning our annual tulip display is my favourite borders were not very successful. The Drews task of the year,” explains owner Joanne Drew. determined to restore it as a Victorian-style cut“Every August, I spend a day sifting through a flower garden, with beds contained in period ropebulb catalogue, envisaging the different colour twist edging or low box hedges. “I wanted a design combinations.” Planting the bulbs throughout the that was in sympathy with the era of the house,” 30 beds and borders that comprise the walled Joanne maintains. Local garden designer Rebecca garden’s flower parterre lasts from November’s first Winship suggested a formal arrangement focused frosts until nigh-on Christmas Day. “With such a on a circular arbour at the centre, which delighted high-maintenance garden as ours, you settle into Joanne: “I loved the idea of a big circle in the middle, a reassuring rhythm of doing the routine tasks for surrounded by curving paths and beds,” she says. each season,” says Joanne.

By spring 2014, the intricate tracery of beds was One of those tasks involves sorting the 9,000 bulbs marked out on the ground and the beds dug and into labelled baskets – one per bed according to her filled with imported top soil and compost. A metal ground plan – ready to plant out. “In each bed we arbour was commissioned from a local blacksmith, plant between four to six different, mid- to lateGeorge James & Sons, and placed in the centre. “It flowering varieties that will blend well together,” was very exciting going out each day, and seeing how Joanne explains. “The display is intended to peak it was evolving,” Joanne recalls. “For permanent for our NGS opening; we love sharing the garden.” structure, there are eight great yew It falls to Joanne and her part-time Below Bryan and Joanne columns. They were bought at this gardener, Juliet Douglas, to then work Drew in the walled size, and it took two men to inch each systematically, one bed at a time, garden they’ve restored one into position.” lifting, dividing and moving perennials over a decade at their Hundreds of knee-high box plants where necessary, in preparation for Leicestershire home. were positioned along planting the tulips. “We the perimeter of the make a good team. Juliet beds and borders, while digs the holes, and I Bourbon and Gallica follow, dropping in the roses were established bulbs,” adds Joanne. among perennials such Faced with spring’s as monarda, achillea, fabulous array, it is astrantia, thalictrum, hard to picture the sea hollies, delphiniums scene almost a decade and phlox. Finally, in late ago when Joanne and autumn, the tulips were her husband Bryan, planted. “I love the depth a property developer, of colour that you find first set eyes on the with tulips. Even when three-quarters-of-anthey are in bud, there are acre walled Victorian still tinges of colour,” garden. “It was for sale notes Joanne. as a building plot with The tulips’ companion planning permission, planting is key, providing but it had such a special fresh new growth for feel that we fell in love a textured backdrop. with it as a garden,” “I find honesty is most recalls Joanne, a dance useful as it self-seeds teacher and examiner everywhere, and simply who increasingly juggles pops up between the her career with her tulips,” says Joanne. love of gardening. The MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 33

Rope-twist edging is perfectly in keeping with the property’s era, while low hedges of box bring a fitting formality.

34 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Mediterranean spurge is another wondrous plant, forming great outcrops at key axes between the borders. “Last year, I cut back 200 spent flowerheads from one plant,” she marvels. Drifts of tulips negotiate mounds of herbaceous peonies, angelica and shrub roses, while perennials such as aquilegias, geums and centaurea flower in tandem.

Inside the main doorway are four square beds with obelisks for clematis in which clumps of blue camassias and nectaroscordum mingle among tulips such as dusky ‘Ronaldo’, pinkish ‘Blushing Girl’ and ‘Shirley’.

Joanne not only combines the colours, but also the different tulip forms, such as parrots with singles, or multi-flowered with doubles.

“Pink ‘Cummins’ with deep-plum ‘Gorilla’, both fringed tulips, works rather well,” she muses.

In the first year the bulbs were left in the ground, but some rotted away while those remaining were smaller and not so prolific. “Now we always lift the bulbs, planting some out in the meadow, and last

Top To the east of the

house, a contemporary garden takes its turn to supply colour in summer.

Above Lunaria annua or purple honesty, makes a superb tulip partner.

Right Joanne ties in clematis with part-time gardener Juliet Douglas.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 35

year we donated them to our local gold club for a border behind the putting green.” Once the tulips are lifted, dahlias take their place, and any gaps in the planting are filled with perennials and annuals that Joanne grows from seed: “Seeing the greenhouses packed with seeds and seedlings is a great joy to me – it puts a smile on my face.”

A doorway on the northern wall leads to a fruit and vegetable parterre laid out in a series of square raised beds overlooked by a greenhouse. In the central area are large, oak-framed cloches, built by a local cabinet maker, for brassicas and salads, plus a broad strawberry bed and a fruit cage. “It’s very productive and functional,” points out Joanne.

From the kitchen garden, a doorway leads to a natural lily pond, edged with hostas, ferns and Japanese maples. Nearby stands a huge weeping willow, dawn redwood, Ginkgo biloba and, under the kitchen window, an Acer davidii. “We are blessed with some magnificent mature trees – those near the house have tree preservation orders,” Joanne observes. The drive is flanked by giant 36 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Top Next to the entrance,

four square beds feature obelisks for clematis, and camassias with the tulips.

Above A euphorbiaflanked doorway frames the fruit and vegetable parterre beyond.

Left Limes and giant redwoods line the drive.

NOTEBOOK

Old & New

Timeless accessories are carefully chosen to match this Victorian walled garden’s heritage and to complement its beautiful planting

1

redwoods alternating with lime trees.

It is no surprise to learn that Joanne’s parents were keen gardeners. “My dad focused on vegetables, while my mum loved flowers.” Previously, she and Bryan had a half-acre garden, but even there Joanne ran a greenhouse and developed a love of propagating which, with so many beds now to fill, is invaluable. “I’ve learned as I’ve gone along – you can’t beat hands-on experience.”

While she masterminds the planting, it is Bryan who cares for the lawns, maintains the water features and prunes countless metres of box hedging. “Then Juliet prunes all the rose bushes and fruit trees,” says Joanne. “She has been involved from the outset, and we’ve worked together on every project.”

Once the walled garden was established, Joanne and Bryan looked at the lower garden, wedged between the house and a small river that marks the boundary. Twin perennial borders are inspired by the Great Broad Walk at Kew, and beyond them lie modern features such as a slate water feature and rill. “Although the borders were planted in 2016, they’ve filled out surprisingly quickly,” notes Joanne.

These features add a very different dimension to this traditional garden, bringing it firmly into the 21st century. And, a project that started out simply as a yearning to restore a Victorian walled garden has taken on a life of its own. “The garden is now so important to us,” says Joanne. “I’m out there most days. In fact, I plan more what’s happening in the garden than in the house, but then it was the garden that brought us here in the first place.” ■ Above Bespoke oak cloches protect crops in the kitchen garden with a Victorian-style greenhouse from Alitex and espaliered fruit.

Westbrooke House, 52 Scotland Road, Little Bowden, Market Harborough, Leicestershire LE16 8AX. Opens for the National Garden Scheme on Sunday 1 May and Sunday 26 June, 10.30am to 5pm, by prior booking, but check ngs.org.uk for updates.

2

3

4

1 The hand-forged central arbour in the walled garden incorporates designs copied from pargeting on the house, with additional motifs such as English roses and twisting clematis. 2 A cistern panel lead fountain

by Redfields English Leadwork adds the soothing sound of water.

3 Nicknamed ‘Sid the Stag’, this life-sized, bronze-finish sculpture stands in the shade of a mature copper beech. 4 Height is added in the walled garden with a screen of pleached crab apples, Malus ‘Evereste’.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 37

At One With

THE LAND

A few considered adjustments and thoughtful plant introductions have enhanced and formalised Simon Gill’s Cotswold spring garden without diminishing its historic essence WORDS JACKY HOBBS PHOTOGRAPHS JACKY HOBBS & MICHELLE GARRETT

This image In a font

from Haddonstone, ‘Angélique’ tulips complement Prunus ‘Kanzan’ blossom.

Opposite ‘Uncle Tom’ tulips in a parterre by the thatched barn.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 39

T

he Cotswolds are renowned for their rolling countryside, glorious gardens and quaint, stone-clad villages. On the outskirts of Burford, part way up a single-track lane, with views across adjoining meadows to the picturesque village church, this 17th-century former farmhouse and its one-acre garden seem to single-handedly encapsulate the springtime spirit of the Cotswolds. “The character and location of the property were irresistible – almost part-and-parcel of the landscape,” explains its owner, Simon Gill.

In spring, the garden’s skyline is fringed with clouds of blossom from mature, ornamental cherries, their boughs thick with candy-floss-pink or snow-white flowers.

Neighbouring lilacs perfume the garden’s air and masses of naturalised bulbs enjoy the free-draining, stony soil and spread 40 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above Prunus sargentii in the orchard, where swathes of daffodils are naturalised in the grass.

Below Ribes sanguineum, the flowering currant, is a classic spring shrub.

thickly through the garden. Daffodils dominate the rough grass of the orchard, while wild garlic, grape hyacinths and bluebells fringe the parterres and stony pathways of the main garden. Tulips adorn urns, fonts and box-edged parterres and bring an early flush of colour to awakening beds and borders.

None of this was apparent, however, when Simon moved to the property in December 2006.

It was midwinter, and the appeal of the house, with its exposed beams and open hearths, overshadowed the merits of the south-facing garden, which merely provided an appropriate setting. Simon had noted the swathes of lawn, orchard grass and the trees along the boundaries that afforded some privacy and a barrier to noise. “I was drawn to the house, the thatched barn and outbuildings, but I knew very little about gardens and plants,” he confesses.

Fortunately, he inherited an expert: Tony Davies, the gardener who had tended the plot here for over two decades and understood it almost as well as his own. Tony has continued to dig, prune, train, tie in, pull out, nurse, weed and feed the garden, advise Simon on new introductions and keep everything looking better than it should.

The bare bones of the garden, essentially the same stone landscaping that is intrinsic to this part of the Cotswolds, lay fully exposed in winter: a stone-clad terrace and several dry stone walls, some in a state of poor repair. Two rectangular, low-walled garden rooms were also visible, the remnants of ancient barns no longer standing. “My neighbour and longterm resident, Joan Smith, who is 101, has a painting that indicates how the barns once looked,” Simon reveals. Later on, he keenly embraced this historical anecdote and, after waiting a year to see what actually grew in the garden, he designed and planted

Top A craggy old lilac,

in full, perfumed bloom.

Middle Ruffled, plumpurple tulip ‘Uncle Tom’ has peony-like flowers.

Bottom Grape hyacinths, Muscari armeniacum.

Above right Box-edged parterre beds are full of peony foliage, plus drifts of bluebells, their pink forms, and wild garlic.

flower-filled box parterres in the area incorporating the former barns’ footprints.

“My predecessors had created a peony garden in one partition; the other was overrun with Japanese anemones that were cleared to make way for the box-edged parterre,” Simon explains. “Directly opposite, in the elbow of two outbuildings, was a neglected, gravel-filled, south-facing corner, used for drying washing.” He removed the whirligig washing line, brought in a small digger and carved out a second, matching parterre. The mirror-image gardens were planted with herbs – rosemary, thyme and purple-leaved sage, Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurascens’ – interspersed with tulips in spring, followed by ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ roses in summer. “We chose deep raspberry-pink, peonyflowered tulip ‘Uncle Tom’ to complement the preexisting, pink-flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum, and to reference the colour and form of the adjacent MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 41

Beautiful BULBS A selection of pretty spring flowers for formal areas of the garden or for naturalising

TULIPA ‘YONINA’ This lily-flowered variety with elegantly reflexed, deep pink petals flowers from late April, on 45cm tall stems.

NARCISSUS POETICUS One of the last to flower in May, pheasant’s eye daffodils are delightfully fragrant.

peony garden,” adds Simon, who is now experimenting with interplanting tulips in the peony bed itself to give the illusion of peonies a month before their due date.

In keeping with the garden’s stone infrastructure, Simon positioned an aged stone font between the two parterres. This is planted with pink and white tulip ‘Angélique’ to mimic the haze of pink and white cherry blossom in the sightline behind.

Billowing with blossom, the pink cherry, Prunus ‘Kanzan’, was planted by Tony over 20 years ago.

The garden’s former owner regularly returned from garden visits with new, must-have plants and this cherry was one of them. “Design didn’t really come into it. My task was to find the most suitable planting spot in the garden,” Tony recounts. Then a whippy, five-foot specimen, the cherry has matured to a fulsome six metres. “Its Barbara Cartland pink blossom is a bit messy,” confides Tony. “It’s like confetti at a wedding.” A second pink ornamental cherry, Prunus sargentii, was already in the orchard.

“It’s one of my favourite trees,” says Tony. “It cheers you as you walk along the lane, waving its blossom in spring and illuminating the garden with foliage in autumn.” He admits that the twisted old medlar at the back of the garden comes a close second.

The original stone terrace flanking the house has been sympathetically extended to accommodate Above Beyond clumps of daffodils in the orchard, the pleasing, old, dry stone walls that divide sections of the garden can be seen.

TULIPA ‘WHITE TRIUMPHATOR’

HYACINTHUS ‘BLUE JACKET’

This 50cm tall tulip’s flowers have a purity that belies their strong and sturdy nature.

A very heavily scented hyacinth, with dense flower spikes of deep Prussian blue.

HYACINTHOIDES HISPANICA

ALLIUM URSINUM

Both English bluebells and the Spanish kind (above) can pop up in pink or white forms.

42 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Be warned that wild garlic is quite invasive, but if you have room to let it romp, expect carpets of spring flowers.

an outdoor dining table and chairs. Two square, boxedged parterres are stuffed with incredibly fragrant, bright-blue hyacinths ‘Delft Blue’ and ‘Blue Jacket’. “Their perfume wafts right into the house,” says Simon. These are shot through with white, lilyflowered tulip ‘Triumphator’ to complement the fragrant white flowers of Mexican orange blossom, or choisya, that are moulded to the house.

Two weathered stone planters, bought at auction, stand either side of the main entrance; a third sits in the left-hand parterre. “We are looking for a fourth,” acknowledges Simon, glancing at the mismatch.

The stone vessels contain an accidental cocktail of tulips, “by virtue of placing late bulb orders,” he confesses. “We were too late to secure enough of our preferred pink ‘Angélique’, so we substituted similar but shorter ‘Foxtrot’ and combined it with a complete newcomer to us, lily-flowered bi-colour ‘Yonina’.” It was a resounding success.

The handful of ‘Angélique’ bulbs Simon did manage to procure were planted in beds by the house, refreshing those already interred. “We only lift potted tulips; the rest stay in the ground and many successfully reappear the following year,”

Top right Old stone fonts

are planted with tiers of tulips – ‘Yonina’ and the shorter, peony-flowered variety ‘Foxtrot’.

Above An inherited ancient flowering cherry, with confetti-like white double flowers.

explains Simon. They are engulfed with an eruption of baby blue forget-me-nots, which complement the pastel pink of the tulips. In the main rose border, battalions of tall single tulips bring colour to otherwise leaf-green beds. Bold, raspberry-plum ‘Pretty Princess’, huge-headed, rose-pink Darwin hybrid ‘Mystic van Eijk’ and glowing goblets of dark pinky-orange ‘Avignon’ add jolts of colour and pick out the reddish hues of emergent rose foliage.

These more formal alterations and introductions, geometric parterres, architectural stone planters, clipped box hedging and precisely planted tulips bring gentle order to an otherwise largely relaxed and sprawling garden that has evolved over time.

There’s an ever-increasing colony of over 20 different narcissus in the orchard, including swathes of pheasant’s eye daffodil, Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus, and the late 19th-century introduction, golden-flowered ‘King Alfred’. “I’m pleased to have some of the older varieties, none of which we have planted – they are just part of this Cotswolds garden’s vernacular,” says Simon. Like the authentic stone framework, they are intrinsic and in keeping with the overall sentiment of this lovely garden. n MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 43

The Bigger PICTURE

When garden photographer Zara Napier took on a sizeable organic garden in Cambridgeshire, she was keen to incorporate inspiration from favourite gardens she had shot while maintaining its established and wildlife-rich ecosytem WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS ZARA NAPIER

44 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Zara loves the froth of cow parsley that adds informal charm in late spring, while the long grass is studded with red tulips and other blooms.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 45

‘‘I “The previous owners grew everything organically, so there’s a lot of wildlife. The garden has its own happy little ecosystem”

46 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

’ve been keen on plants ever since I was a teenager,” confesses Zara Napier, admitting that she used to grow spider plants and busy Lizzies in her bedroom at school.

Her interest was fuelled by visits to her keen gardener grandparents and their garden in Ireland, which had banks of primroses in spring, and a walled garden full of plums and raspberries in summer. It’s a passion that has endured and is now entwined with her working life. Having studied for a degree in publishing and spent time working at the National Trust’s photo library, Zara now specialises in photographing gardens – her work regularly featuring in the pages of this magazine.

Almost 20 years have passed since her first garden feature was published, but it’s clear that the thrill of visiting and photographing other people’s gardens hasn’t dimmed. “People are so generous about letting me go into their gardens at all times of day, and I’ve made many friends – particularly through the National Garden Scheme, which is such a wonderful organisation. Support for their charities has never been so important,” Zara enthuses. “And people open up. They may be shy, but then suddenly, out in their garden, they are full of stories.” Then, of course, there are the myriad ideas picked up along the way – happily, Zara has a large garden of her own in which to try out the planting and design that catches her eye while she’s at work.

It’s almost 21 years since she and her family moved to their thatched cottage between Newmarket and Cambridge. Zara was brought up in Newmarket, her family having long-standing links to horse racing, so when she and her husband Francis, who is originally from the Scottish Borders, decided to relocate with their young family from London to the countryside, this part of Cambridgeshire was the natural choice. They rented at first, then looked for somewhere to buy. “It was between this house and one with a tiny garden that was like a building site, so it wasn’t a hard decision!” Zara recalls.

The garden the Napiers took on wasn’t the famed ‘blank canvas’, but neither was it full of unwanted features and plants that weren’t to their taste. In fact, much of the garden today is very similar to how they found it. “The previous owners had brought up their family here. They were very keen on growing fruit and vegetables, so we inherited a lovely garden. They’d grown everything organically, as do we, so there’s a lot of wildlife. We don’t have problems with pests Top The apple trees are and diseases because smothered with pale the garden has its own pink blossom in May. happy little ecosystem,” Left Carefree beds of Narcissus ‘Starlight Zara explains. Enviable Sensation’, Geranium mature plants like phaeum and stipa a ‘Madame Alfred surround a seating Carrière’ rose on the area next to the house.

This image Cowslips and oxlips have popped up in grass kept long.

Below right ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ is one of the roses Zara inherited.

Below left Stands of alliums bloom close to the vegetable garden.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 47

house walls, or yellow-flowered ‘Canary Bird’, gave her a beautiful backdrop for introducing new planting and ideas from the gardens she visits.

In long grass between her garden and the neighbouring field, red tulips and white Narcissus poeticus var. recurvus emerge each spring, inspired by planting Zara remembers seeing beneath cherry trees in the gardens of Trinity College, Cambridge.

A few years ago, she planted a white flowering currant, Ribes sanguineum ‘White Icicle’, recalling one she’d admired at Beth Chatto’s garden in Essex.

“This is just luck, but leucojums are coming up underneath it now and together they make a happy pair,” she notes. Not too far away, the garden at Anglesey Abbey also offers plenty of inspiration – especially its Winter Garden. “I always know it’s going to cheer me up, even when it’s freezing and grey.” Following last year’s visit, Zara is keen to plant more trees and shrubs for winter interest: red-twigged limes, Above Shade-loving birches with orange planting below this Rosa bark, unusual hazels ‘Canary Bird’ includes and willows.

Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ and Geranium phaeum.

A trip to Parsonage Right Much of the grass House in Essex sowed has been ‘no-mow’ since the seeds of an idea 2018 when a hot summer for one of Zara’s turned the lawns brown.

48 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

The ‘boiled sweet’ border of lily-flowered tulips is added to each year and includes magenta ‘Mariette’ and purple ‘Burgundy’.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 49

garden’s loveliest late-spring features: a border of lily-flowered tulips in pink, purple and pale yellow.

“I remember starting it with my daughter when she would have been nine or ten. You’ve got to think of something that will light up their inspiration at that age, and at Parsonage House there was a ‘boiled sweet’ border – I thought that would inspire her.”

Refined lily-flowered tulips such as primrose-yellow ‘Sapporo’, ivory and pink ‘Elegant Lady’, pink ‘Mariette’ and purple ‘Burgundy’ mingle with the pink and green viridiflora tulip ‘Florosa’, as well as white daffodils including ‘Sailboat’ and ‘Pueblo’.

Perhaps it’s because of her line of work that Zara is so closely attuned to the wider movements within gardening. Reading James Rebanks’ book, English Pastoral, has endorsed her belief in the importance of taking care of the land and, last summer, following advice from gardener and author Charles Dowding, she made forays into ‘no-dig’ gardening, enjoying a successful squash harvest as a result of the trial, which, she says, saved time, while also being kinder to the soil and leaving its structure undisturbed.

Several years ago, after a long, hot summer left much of the grass brown, she and Francis decided to adopt a ‘no-mow’ approach as well, and now much of the lawn is left to grow long as meadow.

“At first it was full of dandelions, which some people 50 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above left Foxgloves are

an enduring favourite, grown by Zara in every garden she’s owned.

Top right Behind a lilac in full flower sits a bench that’s over 100 years old and originally belonged to Zara’s grandparents.

Above right An unnamed red pulmonaria with ‘Segovia’ daffodils.

would have considered a nightmare, but they were beautiful, especially when the seedheads would glow in the evening light.” Then came buttercups and ox-eye daisies, and Zara has noticed that there are now far more butterflies.

“Bats dance over it in the evenings and I’ve seen hares moving along the mown path,” she enthuses.

“There was always a lot of clover in the grass, which attracted the bees, so it made sense not to cut it. It has been a wonder – not just to us but to all the insects and other life that depends on them.”

Recently she has been listening to the advice of bee expert Dave Goulson, who maintains that the best thing gardeners can do for wildlife in their garden is to ‘leave it’. “It is difficult to do this because I think our instinct is to tidy and control and make patterns, but it is freeing when we don’t have to worry about being too tidy,” Zara explains.

Despite drawing inspiration from so many wideranging sources, Zara’s garden is a cohesive whole: the perfect combination of a light touch and a sure hand. “I’m conscious of having a rhythm to the garden by repeating plants,” she says. “And while I love spring, I try to ensure there are things that add interest all year round, something I know is going to look good each season. You need something exciting to look forward to – like a party!” n

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52 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

The Artist’s PALETTE

Designer Sophie Conran is renowned for producing homeware adorned with exquisite floral motifs, so it’s little wonder that her abundant Wiltshire garden is such a true reflection of her talents WORDS CATRIONA GRAY PHOTOGRAPHS BRITT WILLOUGHBY DYER

A series of rectangular beds behind Sophie Conran’s smart Georgian home feature a stylish combination of latespring performers.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 53

A

nyone who is familiar with Sophie Conran’s range of homeware knows that the designer has a deep love of nature. Floral motifs blossom across linen napkins and twine their way around candle holders. There are abundant vases, in different shapes and sizes, designed to hold everything from a couple of delicate stems to an armful of abundant branches. Even her most wellknown line – the long-running tableware collection for Portmeirion – sees a simple white dinner service elevated by a nod to the outdoors, its organic, concentric pattern evoking the ripple of water in a pond or the circles in a tree stump.

It comes as no surprise, then, to discover the care and attention that Sophie has put into her own garden, set in the heart of the Wiltshire countryside.

You approach it via a long winding drive, past cherry trees laden with frothy white blossom and underplanted with masses of bulbs, the early snowdrops giving way to wood anemones and fritillaries as spring progresses towards summer.

By the time you reach the front of the house – a Georgian manor in honey-coloured Bath stone – you can tell that Sophie is passionate about gardening.

Climbing roses cover the mellow, neoclassical facade, and the steps up to the front door are flanked by an array of terracotta pots, planted each season with an ever-changing display of blooms.

Sophie bought the property in 2013 and, over the past nine years, she has been restoring and adding to the original

Roses cover the house’s mellow, neoclassical facade, and steps are flanked by terracotta pots

Clockwise from top

Alliums and bearded iris with ferny fennel; huge windows look out onto the terrace; the sweeping driveway; euphorbia with ‘King Canute’ lupins.

54 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

On the lawn, a set of furniture is perfectly positioned to take in the meadow views and a lovely specimen Judas tree, Cercis siliquastrum.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 55

The beds next to the house brim with alliums, lupins and euphorbia, with large box balls for a sense of solidity.

56 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

planting scheme. “The garden had been quite neglected – there hadn’t been much done to it for about 25 years,” she says. “So we’ve been piecing it back together again, bit by bit, as well as adding some new features.”

The sheer scale of the project might have felt daunting to some: aside from the gardens that surround the house, there is a separate vegetable garden, a fern garden, a pond, a meadow, and some 30 acres of woodland. However, Sophie, the daughter of famed designer and restaurateur Terence Conran, grew up watching her parents embark on a very similar journey of their own.

“When I was younger my family moved to a house in Berkshire not all that far from here,” she recalls. “There were falling-down greenhouses and dilapidated walled gardens filled with Christmas trees. I saw it as my playground and watched my parents as they slowly rebuilt everything, from the vegetable garden to the fruit cages. It gave me a blueprint of what I could do here.”

Having completed several courses in horticulture and honed her eye at her previous gardens in West Sussex and Dorset, Sophie was well-placed to begin the transformation at her new home, although she has allowed it to evolve gradually rather than making a rigid plan. “This place talks to me – it

“I’m really trying to make everything as alive as possible, filled with flowers and buzzing with bees”

Above Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ grows on the wall of the house.

Left The late-spring blossom of Cercis siliquastrum is first borne on bare branches – until the season’s new foliage begins to burst its buds.

Below The swelling heads of violet globe artichokes in Sophie’s vegetable garden.

tells me what to do,” she maintains. “I suppose it’s a mixture of instinct and a sympathetic view of the house and its surroundings. I want to create a feeling, so I’m really trying to make everything as alive as possible – filled with flowers and buzzing with bees, butterflies and birds. It’s a place to enjoy, and to be immersed in nature.”

One of the first things she did was to put in a new set of beds at the back of the house, which, in May, brim with a sea of alliums. Their pompon heads, in hues of pink, purple and white, add a playful and colourful note, especially when set alongside velvety irises, purple lupins, and frilly masses of hesperis.

The rounded shapes of the alliums are echoed in the clipped box balls and euphorbia, which add yearround shape and structure to the borders.

Traditionally, 18th-century manors like this one would have been surrounded by acres of parkland with the gardens kept well away from the house.

By introducing planting immediately around the property, Sophie has created the maximum possible impact when looking out from the huge, floor-toMAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 57

ceiling windows on the ground floor, as well as integrating her home with the garden.

This is particularly in evidence when you step out of the drawing room and onto the long stone terrace that runs along the back of the house. From there you can look out across the borders to the fields beyond, while Sophie has made a virtue of the slightly dilapidated nature of the terrace itself. “The terrace is made from bits of old stone floors – great big slabs that are completely falling to pieces – so I’ve interplanted it with erigeron, creeping thyme, and aquilegias,” she explains. There’s even some hollyhocks and Verbena bonariensis dotted among the paving stones, while ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ roses spread across the walls, adding to the sense that the place is literally blooming with life.

To the right of the house the land sweeps up a hill that is covered in woodland, consisting mostly of old beeches. Every May, this delightful area is carpeted with drifts of wild garlic, which scents the air with its distinctive tang. Sophie – who is a keen cook and has written several cookery books – picks and uses it in the kitchen, using it to make pesto and garlic butter and to flavour everything from soups to sautéed mushrooms. She also obtains an 58 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above Peonies rub shoulders with sweet rocket and foxgloves.

Top right Self-seeded plants in stonework and a relaxed clipping regime give the garden a wonderfully laid-back air.

Right White camassias with red campion.

Below Clematis montana var. wilsonii in full bloom.

abundance of produce from her vegetable garden, which is another ongoing project. “We’ve just had a fantastic new greenhouse reinstated on the site of an old one, using the existing foundations,” she says. “It was made by Woodpecker Joinery, and we’re thrilled with it.” Raised beds contain rows of brassicas, root vegetables and globe artichokes, and close by are two tunnels made from coppiced hazel, one of which is covered in sweet peas, the other with different varieties of beans and gourds.

Yet despite all this activity, Sophie has more plans afoot, working alongside the two fulltime gardeners who keep the grounds running smoothly. The fern garden, long neglected, is being replanted, as are the borders at the front of the house. Existing plants are being catalogued throughout the garden and new ones are constantly added – she’s just put in an order for three paulownias, commonly known as foxglove trees because of their clusters of spectacular lilac blooms.

“I get very excited about plants – I want all of them,” she says, laughing. “I’ve just planted masses more white alliums, including ‘Mount Everest’, and I love Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’, which just goes on flowering for months on end. One of my absolute favourites is a peony called ‘Coral Charm’

Above The land around Sophie’s Wiltshire home includes a pond and meadow, as well as 30 acres of woodland.

Right ‘Mount Everest’ alliums bring a cool freshness to late-spring planting schemes; add clusters of their bulbs in autumn for a display of stylish globes.

“I get very excited about plants – I want all of them. I’ve just planted masses more white alliums”

– it’s particularly beautiful because it starts out a wonderful coral colour before fading to pink and then ends up turning almost white.”

Alongside the careful planting are plenty of selfseeders, including red campion and linaria, which have been given the freedom to romp through the garden, filling in gaps and creating a cheerful abundance of flowers that feels both romantic and quintessentially English. It’s the sort of place that you never want to leave – and, for now, Sophie certainly isn’t planning to. “I really love living here,” she concludes. “It keeps me fantastically busy – there’s always so much to do!” n MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 59

60 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

A weathered urn overlooks Mothecombe’s secluded pond, with the green, leafy planting lending an exotic air.

Nectar POINTS

Anne Mildmay-White and her son John take their custodianship of Mothecombe House in Devon seriously, planting with nectar-rich blooms and native wildflowers and working with conservation groups to create a haven for bees and other wildlife WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS MARK BOLTON

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 61

Above Mothecombe and its walled garden date from the 1700s, but only recently has the garden’s focus shifted to wildlife with naturalistic planting such as these Iris sibirica.

Right The white, papery, bell-shaped blooms of the snowdrop tree, Halesia Monticola Group.

R

egular visitors to the South Hams in South Devon may have seen signposts to Mothecombe, but perhaps never taken the turning down the winding lanes to visit this quiet country estate.

The house, a beautiful Queen Anne jewel box, is built with local grey stone, and its facade features ten sash windows that overlook a wooded valley carpeted with spring flowers and studded with fresh blooms of camellias, rhododendrons and azaleas as it wends its way down to a picture-perfect beach.

The grounds consist of a formal walled garden in front of the house, a walled vegetable garden that is now planted to attract bees, an orchard and a woodland garden that leads down to the sea.

Mothecombe was built in the early 1700s with parts of the walled garden being laid out at that time too. The house has been owned by the Mildmay

62 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above John MildmayWhite pictured with his mother, Anne, and head gardener Martin Haxton.

Below Foxgloves, alliums and silvery stachys in beds in the walled garden, where red valerian has seeded into the old stone walls, which also support a lovely old wisteria.

family since 1873, with the latest generation to take over being John Mildmay-White, his wife Lily and their three boys, Hector, Ted and Kyffin, ably supported by John’s mother, Anne, who, while no longer living at the house, still works as the garden’s director.

The house is at the centre of a farming estate and the local village has always been home to its gardeners and workers as well as local families. In 1925, eminent architect Sir Edwin Lutyens was engaged to make improvements to both the house and garden. He remodelled the wisteria terrace to include a bed of agapanthus at each end and designed two garden buildings to house generators that would provide electricity – these buildings are now a shed and a gardeners’ bothy.

Anne spent time in Bermuda during her early years as a doctor, and it was there that she became interested in gardening: “It was so easy to grow seeds in that climate, and I filled the house with trays of seed as I experimented. However, taking on my husband’s family home at Mothecombe in 1982 was a different undertaking altogether!” She set about making her mark on the gardens and spent years clearing and replanting, using mixed native species to protect the magnolias, and adding flowering cherries and ornamental crab apples to the orchard. She also opened up the woodland, letting in much-needed light and planting shelterbelts to protect the more exotic shrubs.

The creation of woodland walks encouraged drifts of foxgloves, red campion and bluebells to flower, and these now thrive beneath a mixture of silver birch, cherry, whitebeam and crab apple. Gardening in a sheltered Devon valley has its advantages, but it makes sense to be watchful. As Anne notes: “I love the magnolias, which do so well with us, but I now examine the swelling flower buds with an eye on the weather forecast after losing most of the Magnolia campbellii subsp. mollicomata and Magnolia ‘Felix Jury’ buds to the Beast from the East in 2018.”

A path that meanders through the orchard leads onto the woodland walk, which is part-covered by huge, arching camellias, crinodendrons and cornus, which offer structure and interest even in winter.

This path then cuts back past a romantic pond that

Anne opened up the woodland, letting in much-needed light and planting shelterbelts

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 63

Paths wend their way through the woodland parts of the garden, ultimately leading to a secluded beach.

64 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above A stand of mauve-blue camassias in the walled garden.

Left The vibrant double flowers of Crataegus ‘Paul’s Scarlet’; in the clean Devon air, its bark is covered in lichen.

Below Gunnera does well by the romantic pond, overlooked by pink rhododendrons.

reflects the crimson flowers of the surrounding mature rhododendrons. There’s an almost exotic feel to it, enhanced as it is with plantings of gunnera, lysichiton, Darmera peltata and zantedeschia.

The soft gurgling of the stream fills the air and the garden feels hidden and somehow lost in the soft folds of the Devon valley. Next to the pool an urn stands sentinel, and Anne mentions that they once found a pre-war pack of cigarettes beneath it, perhaps secreted by one of the gardeners or an errant family member! Skirting round the pool and heading down the woodland path, shaded by aged trees and shrubs, it comes as a lovely surprise to emerge in bright sunlight onto an utterly tranquil and gloriously sandy Devon beach.

Since 2013, the emphasis in the garden has been on attracting pollinators. Having read Dave Goulson’s seminal work, A Sting in the Tail, about bumblebees and the threat to their existence, Anne immediately set about replanting the two walled gardens with bee-friendly plants. Gone are the showy, cut flowers (she’s not a big fan of dahlias), now replaced with swathes of lavender (15 types including ‘Ashdown Forest’ and ‘Grosso’), towering echiums and blocks of phacelia, borage and allium. The original fruit cages are no more, and while some flowers for cutting remain, used mostly in the holiday cottages that dot the valley, the rows of scented lavender positively thrum with bees on their endless quest for pollen.

The rows of scented lavender positively thrum with bees on their endless quest for pollen

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 65

The orchard is being carefully managed, its understorey slowly filling with self-seeded wildflowers and grasses, while the old horse paddocks are also being turned into wildflower havens under the watchful eye of John and head gardener Martin Haxton. These areas are showing positive signs, with various indicator flowers starting to pop up: red and white clover, bird’s foot trefoil, self-heal, dove’s foot cranesbill and even a solitary bee orchid that amazed the family with its exotic-looking flower and sudden appearance.

Yellow rattle, a plant that helps suppress grass when preparing a wildflower meadow is being seeded every year. The grass is left at a medium length to encourage the shorter wildflowers and, as Anne points out, “We leave areas of nettles and brambles, which host more varieties of butterfly and moth caterpillars than most flowers do.”

Such is the success of the bee initiatives that the Bumblebee Conservation Trust will be running identification training days here. Honey bees, leaf-cutters and miner bees have all been spotted, and there are plans afoot to bring in local primary schools for education days. Also involved is Andy Byfield of Plantlife, a conservation charity promoting native wild plants, as well as the Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. He has been very enthusiastic about Anne’s efforts and is trying to encourage local landowners to create ‘bee corridors’ – areas of land that join together to help support populations of insects and other 66 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

The patina shows through here but the emphasis is not on perfection Top left Wisteria and

matching bearded irises thrive in the shelter of the walled garden.

Top right Long rows of lavender are gearing up to flower in summer.

Above right Plant bulbs of Scilla peruviana, Portuguese squill, in well-drained soil and sun for their showy flowers.

Above left Bright Rhododendron ‘Percy Wiseman’ fills the garden with colour each May.

animals. A community network called More Meadows is also intending to use the gardens for plant identification and scything training days.

Anne and John take their privileged roles as custodians of this historic garden very seriously, both preserving the work of their ancestors and adding to and improving it in a thoroughly modern way. The garden is a much-loved heirloom: the patina shows through here but the emphasis is not on perfection, rather the wildlife and the spirit of the place – something that the bees and the insects will be eternally grateful for. n Mothecombe House, Mothecombe, Holbeton, Plymouth, Devon PL8 1LA. The gardens usually open every Tuesday from 1 April to 30 September, and for charity open days each year, but check flete.co.uk/gardens for updates.

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PLANT FOCUS Allium lusitanicum ‘Summer Beauty’ boasts pretty heads of soft pink flowers that appear from June to August.

WORDS CLARE FOGGETT

Know Your Alliums There’s more to alliums than the familiar purple globes of late spring, and nobody knows this better than National Collection holder – and allium devotee – Jackie Currie PHOTOGRAPHS ANNAÏCK GUITTENY MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 69

PLANT FOCUS

B

obbing above late-spring borders, their perfect purple spheres brilliantly filling the gap between April’s tulips going over and June’s roses and perennials getting started, it is no wonder that alliums are so often recommended. They’re a garden designer go-to on account of their chic looks, but they’re also popular in ‘old-school’ gardens – if ever a plant could be called ‘essential’, alliums are it.

As a result, most of us are pretty familiar with the purple, globe-shaped alliums, those stalwart May-flowering varieties such as Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’. But with familiarity comes a certain ubiquity, so it’s not surprising that many

70 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above A mixture of

deep purple Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ and the paler flowerheads of Allium hollandicum.

gardeners seek out something different: alliums in colours besides purple or those with quirky flower shapes beyond the spherical.

Unfortunately, that’s also when many of us come unstuck. This vast genus comprises more than 1,000 species from varied habitats across the northern hemisphere and because of this diversity, not all alliums grow the same way.

That’s what Jackie Currie quickly discovered when she decided she wanted to get to know alliums better. “I’m a garden designer,” she explains, “and my business partner and I always used A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ in the gardens we worked on. I wanted to expand what we were using and I thought there must be others.” Before planting anything unfamiliar in a client’s garden, Jackie likes to trial it for a few years first, so after a bit of research, 50 allium hybrids were duly planted at her allotment. “I fell in love,” she says. “They were all so amazing – I just bought more and more. I found them fascinating, but the big problem was how to keep them all alive – they aren’t all easy.”

Researching their origins and growing requirements took her to Wisley’s libraries, where she was introduced to Plant Heritage. By that point, Jackie was already growing around 180 alliums, and once she’d discovered that they weren’t represented in the charity’s network of National Collections, becoming a collection holder was a foregone conclusion. Trips to the Netherlands followed – almost all the allium bulbs we buy are Dutch – including a visit to the largest grower of alliums in the world, where Jackie really got to grips with their care.

It turned out to be a revelatory visit. Having observed the Dutch commercial growers, Jackie realised we’ve been growing our alliums wrong.

While they will usually do well from an autumn planting, putting on an impressive show in their first spring, if you’ve ever been disappointed when the same display fails to materialise in the second year, or the flowers seem to be dwindling, it’s time to have a closer look at their growing requirements.

Jackie splits alliums into three groups depending on what they like, one of which is her ‘lift, dry and bake’ group. “What kills an allium isn’t winter wet,

Above left Starry flowers

IMAGE CLIVE NICHOLS

of Allium cristophii begin to open from their bud.

Above right Allium nigrum is a good choice for fresh white flowers.

Below right ‘Purple Rain’ bulbs can be split and replanted to create big drifts of vibrant colour.

Below left A. obliquum is an easy choice in green.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 71

PLANT FOCUS

it’s summer wet,” she reveals.

“They need a summer rest.”

Now, Jackie emulates Dutch growers and these bulbs’ natural habitats and lifts the alliums in this group once they’ve finished flowering, letting them dry off and bake in her greenhouse (or garage if the greenhouse gets too hot – 23-26ºC is ideal).

She simply places the bulbs in sawdust-lined trays, which she covers with newspaper to protect them from direct sun, then replants, ideally in mid-September.

This group includes many of the familiar purple alliums: A. aflatunense and A. giganteum for example. Happily, stalwart A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ can be left in the ground. “It is still the best allium for colour,” she notes, recommending you plant the bulbs in autumn, then plant top ups each autumn for the next two years. After that, seedlings from the first lot of bulbs will have reached flowering size, and you’ll never have to replant. “You’ll have hundreds,” Jackie confirms.

Offering an even greater return is ‘Purple Rain’, a variety Jackie rates highly. This one belongs to her second group: alliums that can be left in the 72 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Top left Delicate Allium

roseum flowers in June.

Top right An emerging

flower of A. stipitatum.

Above right ‘Hair’ is quirky but invasive, warns Jackie; red bulbils at the base of the flower help it spread widely.

Above left Impactful ‘Globemaster’ is sterile so won’t seed around.

ground but should be lifted every three years and divided (see also ‘Summer alliums’ on page 73). Lift ‘Purple Rain’ and you’ll find large bulbs that split apart generously, giving you trugfuls to replant.

‘Globemaster’ belongs to this group too. “This is a lovely old hybrid. It’s good because it’s sterile, so if you like to leave the seedheads on but you don’t want an allium that’s going to seed everywhere, ‘Globemaster’ is the one for you,” Jackie advises.

She recommends lifting the bulbs after three years because they become congested, and replanting the individual, viable bulbs. It’s the same for A. stipitatum ‘Violet Beauty’. “If you lift and divide after three years, you’ll have lots of small bulbs to replant, but do it as soon as it finishes flowering because the bulbs drop down deep in the soil to a good 20cm, which means they can be hard to find!”

Jackie’s final group comprises alliums that don’t flower every year. “Their bulbs are a bit like garlic,”

Summer alliums

she explains. Alliums such as A. ampeloprasum or ‘Mercurius’ will flower in year one, but then the bulb splits into six to ten smaller ‘cloves’, which won’t flower the following year. The solution is to lift the bulbs, pull them apart and plant the bulblets individually. Do this in conjunction with planting new bulbs for a few years for continuity.

For white flowers, Jackie says Allium stipitatum ‘Mount Everest’ and A. nigrum are the best, with ‘Mount Everest’ flowering in mid-May and A. nigrum taking over at the end of the month and into June. “Neither of them need to be lifted and baked,” she says, “but A. nigrum doesn’t bulk up, so after about three years it does tend to disappear.” For blue flowers, she recommends A. caesium and the smaller species A. sikkimense and A. cyaneum. For limegreen flowerheads, look to easy A. obliquum.

Years of study have given Jackie encyclopaedic knowledge, to the point where she can identify many alliums from their bulbs alone. “You get to know their quirks when you work with them all year round,” she says. Avoid A. vineale ‘Hair’, she advises – “it’s a real weed”. A. roseum is “one to be careful with because it spreads around and can be a bit of a pest”. Allium schubertii, with its exploding constellations of starry flowers is “a weird one”. The bulbs we buy of this species are already five years old, and it only lives eight to ten years then “drops dead”, so it doesn’t have the longevity of others.

Jackie’s group of alliums that need to be lifted and divided every three years also includes many summerflowering varieties, which are well worth exploring for their ability to extend the display. Look out for Allium lusitanicum ‘Summer Beauty’, which has pale violet-pink flowers loved by bees and butterflies, or white-flowered A. tuberosum (also known as garlic chives). Jackie recommends dainty pink A. angulosum (mouse garlic) and A. nutans, which also goes by the common names of Siberian chives or blue chives, for underplanting roses to hide their bare stems, and A. cernuum, the nodding onion, for its flowerheads of pendent bells (similar to those of Nectaroscordum – now Allium siculum).

Then there’s dark purple A. wallichii, which flowers even later, from August to September – imagine, an allium in late summer’s prairie schemes! All can be lifted and their clumps split by a spade for replanting.

Above left A. stipitatum

‘Mount Everest’, another excellent white variety.

Top right ‘Beau Regard’ has lovely, strongstemmed flowers.

Above right Egg-shaped Allium sphaerocephalon flowers are produced in June and July.

‘Eros’ is the “allium for people who don’t like alliums”, while shuttlecock-shaped, wine-red A. atropurpureum should be grown as an annual, since British gardeners haven’t a hope of replicating the summer baking it gets in its native Iraq – even putting its bulbs in an egg incubator over summer failed to work for Jackie. Quirks aside, it’s clear that if you only think of alliums as round and purple, you’re missing out on a wealth of other possibilities.

“You can really extend the flowering season by using quite a mixture,” Jackie says. It’s just a matter of getting to know them better. n Jackie’s National Collection of alliums opens by appointment – visit plantheritage.org.uk for more information. Visit euphorbia-design.co.uk for Jackie’s garden design practice.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 73

PLANT SWATCH

Perfect Pots

Verbena rigida Hailing from southern Brazil and Argentina, Verbena rigida is, as you might expect, not completely hardy. That’s one of the reasons it’s usually grown as an annual bedding plant, but it will come through British winters as long as temperatures drop no lower than -5°C. It has a spreading habit, and in borders its stems often run underground, rooting as they go and building into lovely clumps.

It thrives in containers and you can take cuttings in late summer to ensure plants for the following year’s pots, and as an insurance policy against a cold winter. One of the best things about this plant is its long flowering period, from June right up until the first frosts, and it also has a delightfully airy appearance. ‘Santos’ is a bright purple variety, but there’s not much between it and the species.

74 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MARCH 2022

Verbena ‘Sissinghurst’

Verbena ‘Cake Pops Pink’

This vibrant pink variety has the sort of erect yet trailing habit that makes it a container gardener’s dream. Plant two or three in a pot or urn and let it billow outwards, its wiry stems laden with clusters of ombré pink flowers. It fares best in full sun, and the container needs to be kept amply fed and watered, or it could succumb to mildew, but otherwise expect flowers from June right through to November. For a pot with flair, follow the example of cut-flower doyenne Sarah Raven and team it with Euphorbia ‘Diamond Frost’ whose tiny white flowers will add a contrasting haze, or with other verbenas in different colours. Rich ‘Superbena Burgundy’ would look nice, or deep purple ‘Showboat Midnight’.

This brand new variety of Verbena rigida from supplier Proven Winners features spherical clusters of baby-pink flowers and extra tolerance of heat and humidity, making it a superb choice for the southern US. Ideal for pots or hanging baskets because of its attractive trailing habit, it also shares other verbenas’ long flowering nature, producing blooms continuously, especially if regularly fertilised and watered.

Should plants start to look tired, the stems can be trimmed back by around one third, and a dose of liquid fertiliser applied – within a week or two there’ll be fresh growth and new flowers. Also launching this year is ‘Cake Pops Purple’, with flowers in a delicate shade of mauve.

IMAGES PROVEN WINNERS; SHUTTERSTOCK

The diverse verbena genus offers go-to border plants that are loved by designers as well as superb choices for summer containers, such as these three varieties

NURSERIES

Something Special Only plants that are loved by Derry Watkins are available from her Wiltshire nursery, Special Plants, which sells highly covetable perennials and other fascinating plants, many grown from seed or propagated from cuttings WORDS CINEAD McTERNAN PHOTOGRAPHS REBECCA BERNSTEIN

Derry Watkins has a preference for tender plants, finding “the rewards are far greater”.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 75

NURSERIES

W

hen Derry Watkins speaks of her nursery, Special Plants in south-west England, it brings to mind the proverb, ‘If you do what you love, you will never work a day in your life.’ In Derry’s case, this is just as well, since running a nursery is not for the faint hearted: early starts, late nights, backbreaking lifting and wrangling wheelbarrows are all part and parcel of this particular day job.

A passionate gardener and self-confessed plantaholic, Derry got the bug for selling her surplus home-grown plants at weekly Women’s Institute markets, where she met fellow enthusiasts and revelled in the experience. However, it wasn’t until she’d met Alice Doyle, owner of Log House Plants in Oregon, in the early 1990s, that she decided to take the plunge and start her own nursery.

“My family and I were on a six-month sabbatical in the States,” Derry recalls. “I was volunteering at a local nursery to keep busy, and that’s where I met Alice. She was truly inspiring – we shared the same passion for plants and I learned so much from her. She also helped me to understand that it was possible to build a profitable business around growing and selling the plants you love.”

According to Derry, opening Special Plants was more of an organic process than a ‘ta-dah’ moment. “It felt like the right time,” she explains. “I had turned 40, the kids were old enough for me to have the freedom to work, and I already had the infrastructure in our garden.” A large 40-foot greenhouse had been on Derry’s rider when she and her husband chose to move to Bath, rather than back to the States, ten years earlier.

“Staying in England was one thing,” says Derry, “but I put my foot down about gardening through another English winter without a greenhouse. I love growing tender plants. They need a lot of attention compared to hardy varieties, but the rewards are far greater: they are more beautiful, have more interesting foliage and flower more prolifically too.”

Derry started out selling conservatory plants, but within a few years she had expanded her stock to include hardy herbaceous plants, rockery plants and annuals, with a particular focus on unusual varieties from all over the world since she felt there was little point in competing with garden centres. Growing around 80 per cent of her stock either from cuttings or saved seed, she made up the remainder with new varieties and plants that were too hard to propagate herself.

“I enjoyed the freedom and flexibility of growing

76 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above Nurserywoman Derry Watkins, who set up Special Plants some 30 years ago; it’s now based near Chippenham in Wiltshire.

only plants I loved,” she says, “and my customers benefitted from an ever-changing plant list.”

She describes her choice of plants as ‘intuitive’, and her exquisite taste and sense of style is testament to a life dedicated to hands-on growing – years of getting her fingernails dirty as well as visiting gardens. “I decided to learn about non-vegetable gardening by setting myself the challenge of going to Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds once a month for a year, to try to follow the logic of the planting,” she recalls. She was also inspired by leading names in the horticultural world: “Christopher Lloyd, who wrote the first gardening book I fell in love with,” and the doyenne of gardening, Rosemary Verey.

“I met Rosemary at the Chelsea Flower Show before I opened the nursery,” Derry explains. “She had created a beautiful vegetable parterre, but I couldn’t help wondering how it would look after the first few harvests – so I asked her.” Agreeing that in a real-life setting the garden wouldn’t remain so pristine, but that “it was Chelsea, after all”, Rosemary and Derry struck up a friendship based on their mutual love of plants, and it was thanks to Rosemary that Derry put together her first plant catalogue. “She wanted to know what I sold at the W.I. markets,” Derry recalls, “but I didn’t have a plant list at the time, so I had to put one together from scratch.” It was a significant moment, not just because Rosemary would become a long-standing customer, ordering on a monthly basis for her glorious garden at Barnsley House, but because it gave Derry confidence, helping her to believe in herself as a plantswoman running her own nursery.

Nine years on, Derry was in desperate need of more space to accommodate her ever-growing nursery, and she and her husband made the move to their current home, just north of Bath. “It wasn’t a perfect site,” says Derry, matter-offactly. “Sure, it was bigger and had more space for a garden but that space was a derelict field on a steep hill, which proved to be a daily pain.” Evidently not enough of a pain to dent Derry’s indomitable spirit, and any problems were swiftly overcome. “I reorganised the nursery so we were ferrying the plants down the hill rather than up it, and although I’ve never managed to put in a decent watering system, we coped with watering by hand because we displayed the plants according to their needs – ‘plants for damp shade’, ‘plants for dry sun’, ‘tender plants’. That allowed us to keep the drought-tolerant varieties at the top and the moisture lovers at the bottom where the water collected.”

Above left Derry’s large

greenhouse with its curved roof houses tender plants for sale.

Above right Nearly 80 per cent of the plants are propagated from cuttings or saved seed.

Below right Moisture -loving Primula vialii.

Below left A selection of plants for sale at the nursery; mail order is also available between September and March.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 77

NURSERIES

More plant fairs Above left A greenhouse was on Derry’s rider followed, The Hardy when the decision was Plant Society and the made to stay in Bath.

NCCPG (now Plant Above right Hedysarum Heritage), which was coronarium has fragrant cerise-red flowers held a lifeline for Derry. “It above vetch-like foliage. gave me an idea of the Below right Elegant type of plants people Salvia ‘Blue Note’. liked,” she explains. “It Below left Bright pink Silene armeria ‘Electra’. was also quite a solitary existence on the nursery in those early days, so doing these fairs meant I could be sociable – even if it was just once a week.”

Never one to shy away from a challenge, a few years after opening Derry started attending prestigious Royal Horticultural Society flower shows. “I remember that time as a whirl of running the business, doing the marketing and PR and designing the stands and growing the stock. I was doing 47 shows a year all over the country – I look back at that period now and wonder how I did it.”

An unexpected bonus of the shows turned out to be the success of Derry’s seed business. “When I did the Chelsea Flower Show I wasn’t allowed to sell plants, so to offset the cost I sold a few seeds. It was so popular that I always took a box of seeds to each of the shows from then on. Finally, in around 2005, I made myself a basic website where you could see pictures but had to ring me up or email me to buy the seeds. It wasn’t until 2015 that we finally added a shopping basket. What luxury – and the seed sales started to go through the roof! To our complete surprise, seed sales are now a third of our income.”

Throughout her years of running Special Plants, Derry has always found time to travel – on her own 78 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Left Tender plants including cannas and begonias line up on the greenhouse’s benches.

Right Quirky, rusted eyecatchers in the garden.

Below Origanum ‘Kent Beauty’ perfectly encapsulates Derry’s knack for finding unusual but beautiful plants.

Sowing Hardy Perennials Derry Watkins shares her experience of growing perennials from seed for the most reliable results and with friends, like Alice Doyle – in search of new plants. “I won a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship in 1993, to spend three months plant hunting in South Africa. It was an astonishing opportunity and taught me the value of getting out and meeting like-minded people. I knew nobody when I arrived; by the time I left I had made life-long friends, found exciting new plants and discovered a new outlet for my passion.” Trips to India, Nepal, Chile, Turkey and Bulgaria have resulted in many new plants, but when asked if she sees herself as a plantswoman or a plant hunter, she replies modestly: “I am a very amateur plant hunter – it’s more go look and see than to collect.” Well, amateur or not, Special Plants continues to influence and delight designers and gardeners all over the world. n Special Plants, Greenways Lane, Cold Ashton, Chippenham, Wiltshire SN14 8LA. Tel: +44 (0)1225 891686; specialplants.net

Seed is almost always best sown fresh, so hardy perennials, which bloom in spring and summer and set their seed in late summer and autumn, are best sown then. Some can be dried off to wait for a spring sowing, but most will germinate better if sown as soon as they’ve ripened and left outside over winter. After all, nature designed them to ripen in autumn and fall on the ground to sow themselves.

I tend to always sow in pots, unless I have handfuls of seed. There is too much competition from weeds, birds, squirrels and slugs for seeds that are sown in situ.

Sow seed thinly and shallowly. I usually sow in a layer of vermiculite on the top of the pot, ensuring a sterile, free-draining environment for those first new roots.

Soak the pots after sowing and drain them well to settle the seeds in. If you then cover them with an airtight lid, they probably won’t need watering again until the seeds have germinated, and hardy perennials don’t need any extra heat. If left outside, rain and snow will look after them.

Remember, seed wants to grow.

Just don’t get in its way.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 79

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PRESERVING FLOWERS

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY IMAGE JAMJAR EDIT

Preserving flowers through pressing or other means is a way to cherish prized specimens.

Still Life Whether you are making a scientific botanical record, preserving memories or simply creating beautiful art, the techniques and ideas behind pressing flowers and making herbaria are easy to learn and apply MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 83

PRESERVING FLOWERS

Above Equipment used

for the herbarium at RHS Wisley includes colour charts that ensure ornamental hybrids are described accurately.

W

hen Philip Miller, chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden, collected a sample of Lavandula x intermedia subsp. intermedia in the summer of 1731, he could scarcely have imagined it would still be in a collection some 300 years later. Yet today, pressed and labelled, Miller’s specimen is the oldest entry in the herbarium collection at RHS Wisley. What’s more, Lavandula x intermedia is now widely grown, being especially good for oil extraction. In this lies the brilliance of

84 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

preserved flowers and herbaria specifically: they provide a window on the past and help us consider what the future might look like.

With about 90,000 pressed plant species, the herbarium at RHS Wisley is not the largest in the UK but it is unique. “RHS Wisley’s is special because it contains only cultivated or ornamental plants,” explains keeper Yvette Harvey. “There are around 400,000 ornamental plants being grown in the UK and we intend to acquire as many of these as possible. We’re actively increasing the collection.” Established in 1916 with a bequest from the Reverend George Henslow, erstwhile lecturer in Botany at St Bart’s medical school and honorary professor of Botany to the RHS, last spring the collection moved into a brand-new, state-of-the-art building, Hilltop, which opened to the public in June 2021.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these studious spaces, sequestered from throngs of visitors and crowd-pleasing herbaceous borders yet so integral to them. In 17th-century Bologna, Luca Ghini decided it was better in winter to refer to pressed flowers rather than drawings and established the first herbarium as a teaching aid. Since then, herbaria have provided the benchmark for species identification. There are now roughly 3,000 herbaria around the world collectively housing 300 million specimens.

At RBG Kew, where total acquisitions number between seven and eight million – the full number will become known when digitisation is complete – the herbarium is the ultimate point of reference at the institution. For example, any seed entering the Millennium Seed Bank must also have a full pressed entry in the herbarium.

“We have between 25,000 and 30,000 incoming specimens in an average year,” explains Nina Davies, senior curator of the herbarium at Kew. “The specimens come from all over the world, depending on the projects we’re running at the time. The list of uses of the herbarium is endless but mainly this is a collections-based research facility. Staff and visitors from across the world use the collections to classify plants for taxonomy but also for other things.

Digitising specimens opens up opportunities for new research and can be used by anyone looking for information: students, historians, ethnobotanists, researchers, artists… We have around 400 visitors a year from all over the world and if you look at the history of the British Empire and of Kew, you can see why we have so many enquiries.”

IMAGES RBG KEW; RHS WISLEY

On a somewhat more domestic scale at Wisley, Yvette points to the close relationship the RHS enjoys with Plant Heritage, the umbrella body for all the National Collection holders. Every holder of a plant collection must submit a selection to the RHS. This is a way of making sure that there is a record impervious to the whims of fashions and markets that can render certain varieties all but extinct. “The collection holders are so knowledgeable about their plants and, crucially, they know the provenance of their plants, something that is extremely important for us,” Yvette says.

The RHS herbarium is also a keeper of nomenclatural standards and is the definitive reference in terms of interpreting the name of a cultivar and providing notes on colour. It is an essential resource in compiling the ever-popular RHS Plant Finder. “Our molecular biologist uses plant DNA to look at the relationships between taxa,” says Yvette. This can be useful in wideranging scenarios, including settling court disputes between plant breeders. “The herbarium also helps botanists working in ecosystems services by helping to determine invasive species,” she adds.

Top There are around 400 visitors to the extensive herbarium at RBG Kew every year.

Above right A passiflora specimen at RBG Kew. Above left Neat rows of archive boxes stored at Hilltop, the RHS herbarium at Wisley.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 85

PRESERVING FLOWERS This image Helichrysum

bracteatum lends itself to lasting displays.

Left Consider keeping a journal using favourite pressed flowers.

Below Flower-pressing equipment.

Start a personal collection Herbaria are by no means the exclusive domain of institutions. There is nothing to stop you beginning your own modest herbarium, and both Nina and Yvette point to the value of specific regional herbaria. “A personal herbarium could certainly become a resource for preserving UK plants, but it’s important to record whether the plant is wild or cultivated,” says Nina.

While herbaria are grounded in science, they can also be extraordinarily intimate. Nina enjoys the labels that accompany each preserved specimen.

These contain as much information about the plant as possible, as well as where, when and by whom it was collected, but they are also a snapshot in time.

“I always like thinking about what was happening in the world when the plant was collected,” Nina reflects. In this, even simply pressing or drying flowers, or collecting seed, is a meaningful way to record an event such as a birthday or wedding, a summer to go down in the annals, or the last season in a garden tended over a lifetime.

Pressing flowers was popular among Victorian women who compiled exsiccata – volumes of pressed plant specimens arranged to a theme.

Kew’s collection of these volumes dates from the 18th century, and it has at least one distinctive entry. Writer Marion Adams-Acton (1846-1928), in addition to walking from London to Arran over seven weeks with a nurse and six children, including a baby in a pram (Adventures of a Perambulator, 1894), compiled a red velvet-bound volume entitled Art and Nature. The book’s provenance is uncertain, but from the plants it contains, it is believed AdamsActon assembled it during a summer on Arran.

86 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Press flowers like a pro For the press Cut two pieces of board or finely corrugated card. The RHS size is 26.5cm by 42cm. Two cake-cooling racks and a tabloid newspaper opened out will do the job of a board. In the same size cut two pieces of 2cm-thick foam, four pieces of blotting paper, and two pieces of pH neutral parchment, called a flimsy, which will be in contact with the plant.

Method 1 On the label note the plant name, whether it’s cultivated or wild, location, collection date and plant size. Colour is important in cultivated plants, and the RHS uses a unique colour chart. “We take the specimen to a north-facing window, so the light is always the same. We look at the colours of the stems, leaves and the different shades of flowers,” says Yvette.

2 Place the floral parts on the bottom flimsy, fixing the leaves so one front and one back is pressed. Pull apart one flower and lay the individual parts. Cover with the top flimsy and blotting paper.

Above Selected framed,

pressed flowers by London-based JamJar Edit (jamjaredit.co.uk)

IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; JAMJAR EDIT

Further reading Carolyn Dunster explores ways to preserve and present special flowers in Cut & Dry (£17.99, Laurence King).

These include drying methods and allied techniques including growing ‘dry’ flowers such as Helichrysum bracteatum, making pot-pourri and displays under glass.

Preserving flowers has become increasingly popular. Few know this more than Amy Fielding of JamJar Edit, a fashionable purveyor of pressed flowers and dried arrangements. Amy has collected and pressed flowers from the Dartmoor garden of a private client, but she’s also worked closely with Sketch restaurant in Mayfair. Special arrangements stem from JamJar Edit’s desire for sustainability: instead of throwing out leftover flowers, they’re hung upside down to dry. Workshops are perennially popular with a younger crowd. “We’ve all got a bit obsessed with our screens and going at a hundred miles an hour. People who come to our workshops just want to slow down and flower pressing forces you to do that. It’s a slow process, but it’s a beautiful thing to do,” she says. Amy points out that you don’t need more than a balcony to grow flowers to press, an appealing aspect of the pastime for city-dwellers.

“There was this fusty Victorian image but it’s not that anymore. It’s wonderful and cool.” n

3 Dampen the top blotter with a mist spray.

Place the foam and board on top, doing the same in reverse beneath. Tighten press straps: use webbing, string or elastic bands.

4 Place in an airing cupboard for 24 hours then replace the foam with a piece of blotter to continue drying. Remove after three days.

To Finish Mount onto 220-240gsm acid-free paper.

Brush acid-free PVA onto a sheet of newspaper. Press the specimen and the label onto the glue then transfer to the archival paper. Use too little glue and the edges will crinkle, too much and it will press out from the sides or wrinkle the paper. Cover the specimen with a sheet of wax paper then flatten it with your hand or rolling pin. Use a small bag of gravel to weight the specimen if needed and leave to dry. Secure any thick stems with a stitch through the paper.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 87

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CRAFTSPEOPLE

Bex Partridge in her former Surrey studio, crafting wreaths and wall hangings from homegrown dried flowers.

Secrets of Eternal Life Jacky Hobbs talks to Bex Partridge, who has developed a range of special techniques for drying her home-grown flowers to make incredible everlasting art and arrangements PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 89

CRAFTSPEOPLE

B

ex Partridge’s summer allotment billowed with pretty flowers: it was a tightly knit patchwork of colours and textures, dancing with butterflies and abuzz with bees. A gardener and floral artist, Bex is passionate about growing, mostly from seed, the flowers and seedheads that she uses to create her long-lasting floral arrangements, decorative wreaths and larger installations. She’s inspired by nature, working with the seasons to capture their ephemeral beauty and preserve and prolong precious moments in time by desiccating and drying flowers, fronds, seedheads and leaves.

90 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Above Many of Bex’s

dried flowers are annuals grown from seed and include love-in-a-mist and cosmos.

She happened across the art of preserving flowers by chance. A neglected vase of formerly fresh blooms, inadvertently left to desiccate, changed into a pleasing, seemingly immortal, gentler form. Intrigued, Bex began to experiment, growing and drying a host of different flowers and seedheads way beyond the remit of traditional dried flowers like statice.

“Initially I grew allotment annuals – anything and everything,” she recalls.

“Now I grow what I’ve learned works and add a sprinkling of newness.”

Stalwarts include love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) and cornflowers, (Centaurea cyanus), brilliant for both flowers and their seedheads; bold and colourful zinnias; the trailing chenille tassels of love-lies-bleeding (Amaranthus caudatus) in greens and pinks; sphere-headed giant garlic, Allium ampeloprasum ‘Elephant’; spires of larkspur; star-bright linen flowers, Linum grandiflorum ‘Bright Eyes’; and drums of rattling poppy seedheads.

Bex and her family have recently moved to a more spacious location in Devon, but every inch of her previous plot, a five-minute stroll from her former home in Surrey, was cultivated. And a third of the family allotment, once entirely dedicated to growing edibles, was given over to flower production – “following hard negotiations with my husband,” notes Bex with a smile.

Her husband grew squash, courgettes, beans, onions and beet leaves alongside herbs including dill and borage, with rhubarb tucked in at the foot of a productive infant pear tree. Set at right angles to the crops, five metres long and two metres wide, was a tightly packed tranche of flowers, row upon row, for cutting and drying. “Growing space was always maximised. I’d uproot the nigella as soon as I had its seedheads, making space for the second sowing of flowers. Later, rudbeckias and dahlias would creep into the gaps left when we’d picked the crops,” Bex explains.

Everything on the allotment was grown from seed.

“Many plants were sown in situ, but a few got a head start in our greenhouse,” says Bex. “I inherited a love of gardening from my mother and grandmother.

Like me, my children heaved buckets of rainwater, collected from water butts beneath the allotment’s shed roof to spill over the plantings.” The resultant plethora of summer blooms brought pollinators,

butterflies and bees to the patch, increasing the biodiversity of the pretty and productive idyll. “My boys loved to visit, picking strawberries, bug hunting and butterfly counting,” she adds.

Bex founded her dried-flower venture, Botanical Tales, five years ago, believing she could grow and supply enough annuals from her sole dedicated patch. Fuelled by early success, she then planted her garden with fuller, fatter-flowered herbaceous perennials and shrubs for drying: roses, peonies, ranunculus, echinacea, rudbeckias, astrantia, hellebores, pansies, violas and even tulips. “Summer time is bumper-harvest time,” she notes, “and you need to pick flowers in their prime, unless you’re growing for seedheads, which develop later.”

Outside the summer window, there are lots of opportunities to gather additional natural materials for drying. Foraging, especially in woodland areas, brings irresistibly rich pickings: “Think plump red rosehips, browning leaves of bracken, fir cones and twisted, gnarly branches found lying on the ground,” says Bex. These ‘wild’ materials are all always gathered considerately, legally and with sustainability in mind.

Bex works using various drying techniques, but simply suspending flowers upside-down is her go-to method for drying the majority of what she picks, since it is both effective and highly decorative. Her previous studio, a neat, tidy and organised work area in a coveted corner of the family’s living space, was a brilliant trove of upended blooms. Artfully

Top left Picking statice

and love-in-a-mist, ready to hang to dry.

Top right Bex perfects an arrangement of seedheads and flowers.

Left As its common name of strawflower suggests, Helichrysum bracteatum is a perfect bloom for drying.

strung from branches of foraged birch, drying bunches of colourful flowerheads – echinops, larkspur, achillea, amaranthus, cornflowers and helichrysum – looked more like an art installation than a drying rack. With all her materials directly to hand, Bex could simply reach up and pluck specimens to be tied into decorative floral crescents for wreaths, wall hangings and arrangements.

That bijoux nook was lined with shelves spilling with experimental desiccations, jars of deepening pink blossom, ‘antiqued’ tulips and ruffled MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 91

CRAFTSPEOPLE

peonies. “In lockdown I experimented with upright air-drying of my garden peonies, ranunculus and tulips, forgoing the more complicated traditional silica-drying method,” she says. The studio’s conditions, warm, dry and away from direct sunlight, helped to create charming dried flowers. To showcase them, Bex crafted a rudimentary flower-frog-style base from a packet of clay, to hold the preserved flowers and keep their natural character intact. “The striped, faded tulips are preciously fragile and really delicate to work with,” warns Bex. When accidents occur, fallen petals are salvaged and added to a mixed petal pot-pourri – nothing is wasted.

Exploring these techniques, Bex has found that roses and other open and heavier-headed flowers, such as echinacea, zinnias, dahlias and umbellifers, dry better facing upwards, their heads supported, slotted and held between the slats of an upturned bulb crate. The flowers dry attractively, in a more ‘open’ fashion, a method that has inspired artworks of collated flowerheads framed in garden sieves.

Pressing flowers is another age-old way of preserving smaller, flatter, more delicate blooms like pansies and violas. Small treasures are placed,

Above, from left

Beautifully preserved garden flowers; layers of petals in a dried rose flowerhead; any fallen petals are saved to make a mixed pot-pourri.

Left Heavier flowers are slotted into an upturned crate so their petals are supported as they dry.

92 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

How to dry flowers

T

he drying technique Bex selects depends on the type of plant material she is using.

“Certain blooms respond better to specific methods: some are simple, others are more complicated,” she explains. However, all material is largely prepared for drying following the same basic principles: Stems should be harvested in their absolute seasonal prime when they’re in full bloom.

l

Choose the best flowers for drying, which are free from damage, tears, insect nibblings and unsightly blemishes. Imperfections will become increasingly obvious once dried.

l

Pick when conditions are dry to minimise moisture content and drying time. Damp or dew-laden pickings are prone to mould and rot. Reduce initial moisture content by laying flowers out to dry on tissue or newspaper before ‘processing’.

l

Strip stems of all unwanted foliage, leaving a few decorative fronds around the flowerheads to “add a bit of texture and give a more natural appearance” before drying.

l

Air-drying is a simple and effective method of desiccating cut-stems. Bex has perfected her ‘giving-living, leave-everlasting’ method by creating loose arrangements of fresh flowers, with plenty of room for air to circulate. These arrangements then ‘wither’ in the vase to create an everlasting bouquet.

Flowers with larger, flatter heads and petals that fall open with downward gravity, like echinacea and rudbeckia, will benefit from an ‘upright’ drying method, as do classic dried flowers such as statice and helichrysum.

The appearance of grasses and seedheads, meanwhile, remains little altered whichever way up they are dried.

flattened and dried using a traditional flower press.

“In a few weeks you have wafer-thin, delicate flowerheads perfect for creating an everlasting floral montage behind glass,” she explains. She would also press larger, more slender material, such as foliage and ferns, placing them between sheaves of paper and pressing them flat beneath the living room rug!

Bex and her family are now getting established in a rural location in Devon, leaving her fruitful allotment and town garden behind. Her dried flower arrangements, larger bookings and workshops have

Top Bex finds that hanging loose bunches upside down to dry is the best method for most flowers.

Above right A wall hanging featuring helichrysum and the seedheads of grasses.

Above left A display of delicate dried peony and tulip flowers.

recently resumed and she’s even found time to write her first book, Everlastings: How to grow, harvest and create with dried flowers. Bex has succeeded in growing and preserving a much wider collection of natural plant material for her craft than is usual. She has mastered the art of drying decoratively, bringing the beauty of the outdoors indoors. n Sign up to Bex’s monthly newsletter and follow her on Instagram @botanical_tales. For more information, visit botanicaltales.com MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 93

Next issue Glorious early-summer gardens • Dreamy borders at Wollerton Old Hall in Shropshire • Rockcliffe, a quintessential English country garden in the Cotswolds • Roses galore in the private garden of David Austin Junior • A florist’s cutting garden in West Sussex • Cottage garden charm in a small Derbyshire village

PLUS A preview of what’s to come at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show; choosing the perfect piece of garden sculpture; and the very best achillea to grow

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IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; JOE WAINWRIGHT; ANNAÏCK GUITTENY; RICHARD BLOOM

N O LEAY SA10 M

BOOKS

The Reviewer

A selection of the best writing on the shelves this month

A Greener Life

by Jack Wallington Orion, £19.99

Jack Wallington’s easy, approachable style won him plaudits for his 2019 book, Wild About Weeds: Garden Design with Rebel Plants. He brings this same character to A Greener Life as he presents environmentally friendly approaches to gardening with an intimacy borne of personal experience.

Describing himself as an ecological gardener, Wallington has created over 70 gardens with regenerative, wildlife-friendly planting at their heart. He wasn’t always a designer, however. He discovered his vocation while looking after his own 5m x 6m patio garden, which became the springboard for his decision to retrain in horticulture with the RHS and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. His environmental concerns grew in tandem. “Coming home each time to our garden, I soon realised that the only difference between it and a wild space was me,” he writes.

This is a clearly presented work, with accessible topic headings and plenty of good advice sprinkled with engaging personal anecdotes. The message at the book’s heart is to adopt a greener way of being and to see oneself as part of nature, not removed from it. On this point it is exceptional, distinguishing itself from many of the green gardening books written in recent years. Most notable is the chapter on encouraging ecosystems, in which Jack suggests plants for weed suppression along with the showstoppers; further thoughts on plants he’s tried himself are useful.

Containers in the Garden

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY

by Claus Dalby Cool Springs Press, £22

The best potted displays are neither closely matched nor disparate but balance subtle cohesion with enough interest to hold the eye and thus earn their place in the garden. They need near-constant watering and feeding, and for these reasons only the most adept of arrangers can pull them off at scale. Popular Danish designer Claus Dalby certainly falls into this category, and Containers in the Garden provides a masterclass on growing in pots.

Dalby’s seasonal schemes are a triumph of exuberant colour and form, and this work offers pages of transporting seasonal inspiration for anyone who has wondered where to start on container growing. He draws from decades of growing experience, and consequently the book is packed with hard-won advice on such topics as using the colour green effectively, staging pots and extending the growing season.

The Vegetable Grower’s Handbook

by Huw Richards DK, £16.99

When conditions are right, crops from a vegetable garden can be abundant to the point of a gardener seldom needing to buy produce from the supermarket.

Huw Richards has optimised the process and here guides the reader through productive gardening with the efficiency of a personal trainer.

Driven by his mission ‘to escape from a busy world and relish every harvest’, Richards covers the breadth of vegetable growing, from setting goals to developing skills for efficiency and fine-tuning productivity techniques. A chapter entitled ‘Eliminating Issues’ considers year-round weed control, disease prevention and frost protection. This focus on goals points to the fact that good garden practice will bring reward.

This book is concisely written and clearly illustrated, making it easy to pick up new techniques and perfect existing ones.

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 95

BOOKS A Passion For Snowdrops: A Personal Perspective

by George G. Brownlee Whittles Publishing, £15.99

George G. Brownlee specialises in tiny things. A Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford and the Royal Society, the pathologist has made his career in researching nucleic acids in RNA and DNA. Perhaps, then, it is little surprise to learn that he is also a passionate galanthophile, training his eye on the minute differences between the many varieties and species that comprise the compelling Galanthus genus.

Here Brownlee presents his own experience of growing these beautiful winter flowers. The foreword by Dr Chris Thorogood and Professor Simon Hiscock, both of the Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, meanwhile, hints at the discipline with which Brownlee approaches his topic.

This work gathers together the knowledge Brownlee has gained over 30 or so years of growing snowdrops. In this respect, it is an excellent introduction to the topic and would make a superb handbook if you are considering starting a collection or wish to expand what you have. There are notes on growing techniques that include division and disease prevention, as well as suggestions of good bedding companions.

Galanthophiles will be interested in descriptions of his favourite snowdrops, as well as a selection of 15 snowdrops that could form the basis of a collection. Later chapters outline subspecies and notable collectors, while a useful directory of specialist snowdrop breeders around the world is also provided.

The Regenerative Grower’s Guide to Garden Amendments

by Nigel Palmer Chelsea Green, £20

As spring takes hold and hoeing, sowing and planting gather pace, it can be heartening to think that our labours will result in abundant harvests. It is also tempting to raid a garden centre for products that might assist with this: fertilisers, particular additives and even pesticides and herbicides. Author Nigel Palmer points out, however, that most of what we need is actually already in the garden, and in this book he outlines many other natural ways to boost the fertility of our outdoor space.

Some of these include familiar routes – making our own compost or comfrey tea for example – but Nigel’s focus is on viewing the garden as a complete ecosystem. Amendments are intended to influence all-round health through such aspects as mineral availability, pest-resistance and nutrient density. Some material here will be too specific for the average gardener – although capturing micro-organisms for a garden ferment is surely no different from making a sourdough starter – but as sustainable and regenerative growing gain relevance, this book is a valuable reference.

96 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

Skills For Growing

by Charles Dowding No Dig Garden, £22.50

With both the RHS and RBG Kew having adopted the no-dig method of vegetable growing in certain gardens, Charles Dowding’s success at promoting this seemingly easier, gentler way to garden is in little doubt.

Charles enjoys a large online following, particularly on YouTube, and to support his online courses, he now presents Skills For Growing, a detailed look at holistic ways to achieve more on the vegetable patch. While he does outline the principles of starting a no-dig bed, many techniques here are for more experienced growers. There are schedules for intercropping, raising half-season vegetables on the shoulders of the main growing period, as well as multi-sowing and spacing. Those who record precisely when they sow, measuring results year on year, will appreciate that Dowding does the same here: he is honest about failures and what can be improved upon. Notable chapters advise on perennial crops and seed collection. The book could be structured more rigorously, but Charles is skilled at explaining topics clearly and this is a minor issue.

Q&A

Garden designer and landscape architect Marian Boswall specialises in sustainable, regenerative gardens, and her book, Sustainable Garden, brings this expertise to the public who I find interesting. The philosopher Charles Eisenstein, who wrote The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, has fascinating ideas.

Describe some straightforward ways we can all be more sustainable in our gardens.

Recycle your own stuff and, if you can, create your own compost. That might seem like a big deal in a town garden, but you can have a wormery or a bokashi bin that will take any kitchen scraps. This works on many levels, one of which is to show you how much you throw away. Of course, peat, plastic and poison are no-brainers. Reduce the amount of machinery like leaf blowers and lawn mowers you use. Buy for the long term and choose furniture you can fix that’s not mass produced and not made of plastic. Every little action builds up to make a difference and every one of us is powerful.

What sustainable elements do you try to include in the gardens you design?

What does sustainability mean for home gardeners? What sort of thinking does it involve?

It’s important to understand what will make you happy. Think about what you enjoy and have more of that and less of what you don’t enjoy. Think about the rhythms of the year and what energy you have when, so you can make sure the garden works in that way. Work with what the land wants to be.

Look after the soil, by not poisoning it and by not poisoning yourself with petrol fumes and glyphosate.

Have things that will do you good. You could have a herb garden, or you could just have an apple tree and really inhale the tree as you pass by.

INTERVIEW VIVIENNE HAMBLY

Who have been your influences in terms of your own thinking on sustainability?

I’m very interested in regenerative farmers and I’ve been talking to William Watson of Riverford about putting in wetlands and bringing back beavers: that’s what I find exciting. There’s a lot of crossover between regenerative farming and gardening sustainably. Martin Crawford is a forest gardener

Having water changes the whole nature of the garden but it also changes the ecosystem by creating a microclimate. I try to protect the soil with layered planting and mulching, and by not using poisons.

Try not to use things that have been processed.

Ceramics are beautiful, but there is a lot of heat intensity in their manufacture so we use them sparingly. We also use a lot of wood.

In terms of buying once and buying well, which garden tools are worth investing in?

I like to visit reclamation yards and garden fairs to buy old tools that are made of wood and metals and feel fantastic in the hand. If I was buying new, I’d go for a brand like Niwaki, whose tools are beautifully made. Find companies that show you how to repair their tools and always consider materials: a steel watering can will last longer than a plastic one.

What garden products can we do without?

You can do without buying in compost because if you have leaves and kitchen waste you can make your own. If you must buy it, buy it in a dumpy bag, not plastic bags. We can also do without peat, plastic pots and garden-centre impulse buys. n

Sustainable Garden

by Marian Boswall £18, Frances Lincoln

MAY 2022 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 97

LAST WORD

Sign of the Times

F

ashions change – in gardens, as in clothes. But it’s never just about fashion. Neither is fashion. Look at safety pins and punk in the time of Mrs Thatcher; or the yards of fabric in a New Look skirt after the end of WWII. Gardens, like fashion, reflect the spirit of the age, and over the past 50 years we have seen four shifts in garden style in response to our changing view of the world.

In the 1970s when I started gardening, British gardeners were still stuck in the past, making what were essentially early 20th-century Arts & Crafts gardens with formal lines and cottage-garden planting. Our models were Sissinghurst and Hidcote by way of Rosemary Verey. Then we were jolted into the present by the likes of Christopher Bradley-Hole and his second-generation Modernist gardens – we Brits were very late to that particular feast – all sleek, precision-cut stone, gleaming water and stainless steel. Beautiful gardens, but they could have been anywhere – in a desert on the Gulf or in the middle of London – an International Style to match the concrete and glass skyscrapers of the modern city.

New intensive maintenance and irrigation techniques meant that perennials could be planted anywhere and in any combination: a purely decorative and artificial approach that was challenged by Piet Oudolf. His hugely influential New Perennial style, adopted by British gardeners in the 1990s, promoted a more sustainable way of

98 THE ENGLISH GARDEN MAY 2022

“

We have community gardens, community orchards, community composting”

planting, in free-flowing naturalistic settings with signature plantings of grasses.

Then came the financial crash and the Postmodern garden: a fusion of New Perennial planting with formal historical or post-industrial elements, as in the post-capitalist New York setting of Oudolf’s iconic High Line, a recolonising by nature of a disused, high-level railway line, a style represented in this country by the re-imagining of the 19th-century Italianate parterre at Trentham with New Perennial style planting by Tom Stuart-Smith.

Now we are seeing the fourth major shift in style.

It’s as if the WWII ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign has been re-imagined for the 21st century. Rather than digging up the lawn for potatoes, we let it grow into a wildflower meadow. Instead of building an Anderson shelter, we make bug hotels and put up bird boxes. These are sustainable gardens, but it is sustainability of the planet we worry about now, not just sustainable planting. Gardens are co-operative, collaborative and local: we have community gardens, community orchards, community composting schemes. Guerilla gardeners seize unused ground and grow flowers up lampposts.

City planners sow wildflowers on traffic islands.

We decrease our carbon footprint by buying locally and seeking out local materials and suppliers.

We cherish the textures of local stone and gravel.

We recycle bricks and re-use timber – the aesthetic is rust and old weathered wood instead of stainless steel. We conserve water: rainwater butts are a feature; water in these gardens is more likely to trickle than to gush, to nourish rather than purely to ornament. Anxieties about food and its wholesomeness lead us to grow our own vegetables and experiment with organic gardening. The need to reduce carbon emissions encourages us to eat less meat. We plant local varieties of apples because we like the feeling of distinctiveness they give.

We choose old varieties of vegetables because they maintain genetic diversity.

We don’t have a name for them yet, but no one could accuse these gardens of being all about fashion. ■

ILLUSTRATION JULIA RIGBY PORTRAIT RICHARD BLOOM

The move towards more sustainable gardening reflects our wider concerns about the sustainability of the planet in general, explains Katherine Swift

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