The English Garden Spring 2021

THE

english

GARDEN SPRING 2021

For everyone who loves beautiful gardens

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Finishing touches How to style your garden like a pro

Solve your lawn care problems

Small & Beautiful Clever solutions for gardens short on space Spring inspiration ●

Tools to help with WEEDING

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How to PRESERVE your flowers

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Troy Scott Smith prunes CLEMATIS

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CORYDALIS for sun or shade

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CONTRIBUTORS

Ann Treneman Ann is an awardwinning writer and columnist for The Times who writes on a wide variety of topics including gardening, which has been a life-long interest. She pays a visit to Church Cottage on page 28.

Rachel Warne Rachel was raised on her family’s flower farm, which instilled in her a love of botany and the natural world that has influenced her 13-year photography career.

Her photos of Selina Lake’s lovely garden appear on page 58.

Welcome E

ach year, we devote our spring issue to smaller gardens, celebrating the many ways in which gardeners make the most of less generously sized spaces and the huge variety of styles with which they do so. This year though, quite a few of the small gardens you’ll find on these pages have something else in common – we should perhaps think about renaming this the ‘awkward gardens’ issue. Whether it’s a plot steep enough to rival a ski slope, a garden perched on top of a garage roof, a narrow wedge between a road and a churchyard, or a tiny courtyard requiring flights of steps to navigate its levels, these spaces really do showcase some ingenious solutions to making beautiful gardens from unpromising beginnings.

Another thing has struck me: whatever their size, shape or situation, as long as there are plenty of plants all gardens are beautiful. Having masses of space is not what makes or breaks a garden: it’s how much of that space is given over to growing gorgeous things. If the plants are the stars, everything else falls into place and the result is a wonderful outside space regardless of its size, or how awkward it might have been to start with.

IMAGES STEVE MORGAN; NEIL HEPWORTH

CLARE FOGGETT, EDITOR

Holly Farrell Holly trained at RHS Wisley and is the author of books for the RHS, Kew Gardens and the Chelsea Physic Garden, most recently Do Bees Need Weeds?

She visits cut-flower seed supplier Higgledy Garden on page 89.

ON THE COVER Church Cottage in Derbyshire squeezes roses, a box parterre, and an industrious vegetable garden, into a long, narrow plot. Photographed

by Joe Wainwright.

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Over 300 of these are threatened in the wild.

For details visit kew.org/wakehurst

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Spring 2021

CONTENTS

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The English Garden subscription PAGE 73

Small Garden Special 20 Sloping Garden A staggering work of landscaping ingenuity, this near-vertical North London garden has been rendered beautiful and usable by Sara Jane Rothwell.

28 Cottage Garden The wonky garden path at this Derbyshire plot, leads the visitor on a fascinating journey past a box parterre in miniature, quirky topiary and masses of roses.

36 Courtyard Garden Sean Walter has redesigned an unsatisfying London garden from scratch, making sense of its levels and adding successful shade-loving plants.

44 Cloister Garden Adding a studio next to her Suffolk cottage has left Janey Auchincloss with a sheltered space, which she’s filled with flamboyant delights.

53 Garage Garden At a complicated London site that sits on top of the property’s garage roof, designer Sara Jane Rothwell has made a stylish and rewarding multi-level garden.

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58 Town Garden The Guildford garden of stylist Selina Lake and her husband Dave is a treasure trove of carefully curated found objects strung together with natural planting.

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Design 67 Small Garden Design Tried and tested techniques for small spaces from designers.

97 Lawn Care Spring is the time for key lawn-care jobs that keep grass growing well.

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

Plants

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75 Top 10 Plants Pat Havers, head gardener at Waterperry Gardens, chooses ten favourite plants for colourful early-summer flowers.

81 Garden Classics In the Victorian era camassias found their way to the UK, but their history takes us back to North America.

83 Plant Focus At Brian Wickenden’s National Collection, there’s a corydalis for any situation, adding charm to sun or shade.

89 Higgledy Gardens Grower Benjamin Ranyard supplies his cut-flower seed from a new home at Cheshire’s Bluebell Cottage.

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IMAGES MARIANNE MAJERUS; CLIVE NICHOLS; RICHARD BLOOM; SHUTTERSTOCK; ANNAïCK GUITTENY

9 105 Containers Rebecca Bevan offers advice on container planting in her book, The National Trust School of Gardening.

…for the botanically curious

Regulars 9 This Month Our regular guide to people, gardens, events, news, tasks and nature.

17 Shopping Equipment for spring weeding, plus sweet pea-inspired homeware.

121 The Reviewer April’s literary round-up, plus an interview with Sarah Raven.

130 Last Word The death of a pear tree has Katherine Swift considering impermanence.

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People to Meet

Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture

Marcus Chilton-Jones

RECOMMENDED

Marcus’s favourite gardens

INTERVIEW PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES RHS/MARK WAUGH; NATIONAL TRUST/JOE WAINWRIGHT; DAVID CHAPMAN

The curator of the Royal Horticultural Society’s new garden at Bridgewater explains his role and the history of the site, which is due to open in May Some people love taking something that’s run down and making it beautiful again, while others find such projects a terrible faff. Luckily I fall into the former category, and the prospect of transforming a weedy, arsenic-riddled site into an elegant RHS garden was hugely exciting. Here was a chance to paint over the framework with a new composition – a renaissance rather than a restoration.

When I began here in 2017, I knew the role would come with challenges, but I couldn’t have predicted Covid-19 or the discovery of arsenic in the soil of our proposed Kitchen Garden. The solution to the latter involved digging up the soil and reusing it to grow ornamentals elsewhere.

The Victorians used lead arsenate as a pesticide with gay abandon. While we’ve moved on from this odious practice, we do champion the golden age of walled kitchen gardens in other ways.

Our contemporary Kitchen Garden has been designed

by Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg, who based its footprint of pathways on old maps of local waterways and the historic field network in the surrounding countryside.

They’ve incorporated local, industrial and agricultural

Bodnant Garden Conwy An awe-inspiring and evocative garden with fabulous planting. I recommend walking among the Champion Trees in The Dell.

Tel: 01492 650460; nationaltrust.org.uk

Trebah Garden

history into the modern garden, which is now entirely organic.

Absolutely critical to Bridgewater’s horticultural re-awakening has been the input from staff, volunteers, local community groups, designers, contractors and partners. Our vision puts social sustainability centre stage.

There’s the Wellbeing Garden for delivering outreach work to local healthcare providers, where patients who have been prescribed gardening can get their hands dirty or relax.

We’re also planning a Learning

Garden and a Community Grow Garden with hexagonal raised beds like a honeycomb – an homage to the Mancunian bee. The jewel in the crown is the Paradise Garden by Tom Stuart-Smith, Bridgewater’s master planner. It contains three planting typologies and around 3,000 plant varieties.

We’ve got lots of planting, weeding and mulching to get on with ahead of our launch day, but we’re thrilled to be opening to the public at last.

See rhs.org.uk/gardens/ bridgewater

Cornwall I like Cornish gardens generally – the warmer climate enables such a rich mix of garden heritage.

I particularly love the huge gunnera at Trebah, which make you feel like you’re a small child again walking beneath them.

Tel: 01326 252200; trebahgarden.co.uk

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 9

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Out & About

Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month

Tulip Festival at Morton Hall 1–3 May, Worcestershire

Morton Hall is set to host its second non-virtual Tulip Festival this May, in partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Visitors can expect intricate tulip planting schemes in formal borders and pots, swathes of naturalised bulbs in meadows and woodland, and beautiful cut-flower displays from the experts at Bloms Bulbs, who will be on hand to advise. Additionally, take inspiration from a selection of original RSC costumes and enjoy a delicious treat in a spacious marquee. Adults £10; under-12s free. Pre-booking essential at rsc.org.uk

Outdoor sculpture show 1 April-16 May, Dorset See some 100 outdoor sculptures and even more gallery pieces at Form – The Sculpture Show, a spring exhibition at Sculpture by the Lakes near Dorchester. The artworks, from 30 leading UK sculptors, will be installed across the sculpture park’s 26 acres of lakes, rivers, garden, woods and gallery space and include pieces by the event’s curator Simon Gudgeon.

Tickets cost £12.50 and must be pre-booked at sculpturebythelakes.co.uk

NGS Garden 18 April, West Sussex and Kent Both Borde Hill garden in West Sussex and Great Comp garden in Kent plan to host plant fairs on 18 April this year. Visitors to Borde Hill can enjoy a fantastic display of rhododendrons, azaleas, flowering trees, bluebells and tulips while browsing the stalls of leading independent UK nurseries.

There will also be plenty of plants to snap up at Great Comp, along with a dazzling show of 52 different magnolia varieties and a mass of bright azaleas and rhododendrons. For more information and to book tickets, visit bordehill.co.uk; greatcompgarden.co.uk

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Maenan Hall, Llanrwst Conwy This lovely garden on the slopes of the Conwy Valley has dramatic views of Snowdonia. The upper part features sweeping lawns and ornamental ponds, while the bluebell-carpeted dell is filled with magnolias, rhododendrons, camellias, pieris and cherries. Maenan Hall, Maenan, Llanrwst, Conwy LL26 0UL. Sunday 25 April 10:30am-5pm.

Adults: £4; children: free.

Check the website before visiting. ngs.org.uk

WORDS PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; CAROLE DRAKE

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SPRING

Things to Do Keep up to date in the garden with our monthly guide to key gardening tasks from Troy Scott Smith, head gardener at Iford Manor

Cut back CLEMATIS The queen of all climbers is the clematis, and it stands out from the crowd in more ways than one. Clematis take up so little space in a garden, adding quick height to a

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planting scheme when trained up a support or scrambling through trees and shrubs.

They are members of the Ranunculaceae family, the same family that contains

buttercups, hellebores, and aquilegia. This gives us a helpful clue to their preference for a moist but well-drained soil. To grow clematis at their best, try to

provide a cool root run but with the opportunity for the plants to have their heads baking in the sun.

Although I already grow clematis at Iford, there are many possibilities to add even more, with walls, columns and pillars aplenty for them to climb and scramble up, through and over. Incidentally, the best time to plant clematis is in September when the soil is warm and moist, but now is as good a time as any to make your wish lists.

There are numerous types of clematis, from the early-flowering Alpina and Macropetala types through to the various Montana cultivars that are in flower now. Then there are the large-flowered clematis with flowers the size of dinner plates that bloom in early to mid-summer. Finally, there are the small-flowered hybrids of Clematis viticella that obligingly wait until midto late-summer to bloom, filling the floral famine of the ‘summer gap’ and going on to flower well into late autumn.

When it comes to pruning, clematis are divided into three groups based on their time of flowering and the age of the flowering wood (see right).

Now is the perfect time to prune those in Group 1 and I shall be pruning our large Clematis montana on the Gatehouse at Iford this week.

Iford Manor, Iford, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire BA15 2BA. Tel: 01225 863146; ifordmanor. co.uk. Follow Troy on Instagram: @troyscottsmith1

Guide to clematis pruning groups Pruning Group 1 Early-flowering clematis such as Alpina, Montana and Armandii types Lightly prune in mid- to latespring, after flowering, when the risk of frost has passed.

Pruning Group 2 Large-flowered clematis that bloom in early summer such as ‘Nelly Moser’ Prune in February and after the first flush of flowers in early summer.

Spring checklist Get plants on track for summer Pinch, prune & cut back Most perennials that flower before midsummer’s day can be cut back to ground level after blooming. New foliage will quickly return and stay fresh into late summer. Plants such as nepeta, geranium, aquilegia and Iris sibirica all benefit from this approach.

The other technique to try now is to pinch out the tips of summer perennials, such as helenium, veronicastrum and phlox. This delays flowering and makes the stems branch.

The plants won’t be as tall and may not need staking.

Feed wisteria

IMAGES ALUN CALLENDER; SHUTTERSTOCK; GAP/THOMAS ALAMY

Hopefully, we will escape any late frosts, which in just one night can cause the developing blooms of many of our early-flowering plants, including wisteria, to blacken. Wisterias are greedy plants, and their flowering will be improved if you can apply a feed high in potassium and magnesium now. A rose fertiliser would be ideal, applied at 20 grams per square metre around the root zone.

Pruning Group 3 Late-summer-flowering clematis such as Texensis and Viticella types Prune in February.

Clip evergreens Evergreens such as box and yew perform several functions in a garden: creating a division of space; providing visual full stops; used as devices to beckon you on; and for injecting solidity, clarity and mass in perennial plantings. Whatever type of evergreen you are using, or the function it is providing, it will generally require two clips a year – one now in spring and a second in September.

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SPRING

Nature to Note

The wonder of wildlife in the garden and countryside this month

Run Rabbit RUN! Stoats can be found throughout Britain, but tend to stick to covered areas for protection. In colder areas they turn completely white in winter, but by summer will all have beautiful chestnut and cream coats.

They lead a mostly solitary existence, coming together only to breed in summer. The female won’t give birth until the following spring, when she produces a litter of six to 12 kits who are born blind and deaf. Mothers stay with their young until the kits become self-sufficient at around 12 weeks old.

Stoats can be difficult to spot due to their speed and agility – their distinctive bounding gait distinguishes them from weasels. Keep watch near rabbit warrens, where you might see these voracious hunters seeking out their next meal.

CRAB APPLE (Malus sylvestris)

WILDLIFE NEWS

How to identify it Crab apple trees have an irregular, rounded shape and a wide canopy. Their grey-brown bark is often gnarled or ‘crabbed’, while their pointed, glossy, oval leaves grow to 6cm long and have rounded teeth.

Look out for the beautiful, sometimes scented white or pink blossom in spring, which turns into small applelike fruits come summer.

Where to find it These trees grow throughout Europe and tend to be found in areas where the soil is heavy and moist, or in scrubland. They are one of the few trees to host parasitic mistletoe (Viscum album).

Value to wildlife Crab apple leaves are enjoyed by many moths, including the green pug and the Chinese

Pesticide toxic to bees will not be used

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UK approval for the emergency use of neonicotinoids on sugar beet crops has been withdrawn after recent cold weather killed off virus-transmitting aphids. Campaigners have welcomed the news, since neonicotinoids are known to have a devastating effect on bee populations. However, they issue a note of caution since use of the previously banned pesticide could still be allowed in the future.

WORDS PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK

character, while their fragrant spring flowers are an important source of pollen and nectar for bees and other pollinating insects. Once the fruit develops, it is enjoyed by many birds and mammals including mice, voles, foxes and badgers.

Did you know? Native crab apples are difficult to identify, since many ‘wild’ specimens are descended from the discarded cores of eating apples.

They are often planted in commercial orchards because their long flowering period, makes them a good pollination partner for cultivated apples.

Reprieve for bees

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SHOPPING

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Pretty Peas

Sweet pea-inspired gifts for growing or simply appreciating this beautifully fragrant flower

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1. Sweet pea 100/6030 wallpaper, £100 per 10m

roll. Tel: 020 7376 4628; cole-and-son.com

2. Portmeirion botanic garden sweet pea plate,

£9. Tel: 03456 100336; johnlewis.com

3. Deadhead mini snips, £5. Tel: 0300 1232025; shop.nationaltrust.org.uk 4. Sweet pea pottery jug, from £25. greatbritishflorist.co.uk 5. Lathyrus odoratus print by Pierre Joseph Redoute, from £10. Tel: 01273 021685; rhsprints.co.uk 6. Sweet pea seed tin, £3.50. visiteaston.co.uk 7. Sussex oval trug, £80.

Tel: 01608 731670; daylesford.com 8. Sweet pea baby swaddle, £16.95. Tel: 020 7193 6444; trouva.com 9. Wooden obelisk, £149.95.

Tel: 0345 0920283; sarahraven.com 10. Bulb vase,

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£5. Tel: 01743 588820; wyldhome.com

WORDS PHOEBE JAYES. ALL PRICES ARE CORRECT AT TIME OF GOING TO PRESS.

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SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 17

SHOPPING

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Spring Clean

Tidy up those borders ready for the growing season ahead with our selection of weeding kit

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1. Kent & Stowe razor hoe, £12.99. Tel: 01480 774555; marshallsgarden.com 2. Hawkesbury hand cultivator, £12. Tel: 01993 845559; gardentrading.co.uk 3. Gardener’s digging fork, £39.95. Tel: 03332 401228; sophieconran.com 4. Garden gloves, £16. Tel: 01993 845559; gardentrading.co.uk 5. Daisy grubber, £11.99.

Tel: 01142 338262; burgonandball.com 6. Strulch organic wheat straw mulch, £14.99. Tel: 01480 774555; marshallsgarden.com 7. Kent & Stowe corkscrew weeder, £12.99. Tel: 0131 561 6406; dobbies.com 8. Sophie Conran weeder, £17.95.

Tel: 0345 5480210; annabeljames.co.uk 9. Double strength wool compost, £11.99. Tel: 01931 713281; dalefootcomposts.co.uk 10. Stainless steel dutch hoe, £29.99. Tel: 0844 7364208; suttons.co.uk

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A clever terraced design by Sara Jane Rothwell conquers the slope of this steep London garden.

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Rise & SHINE A staggering work of landscaping ingenuity, this near-vertical North London garden has been rendered beautiful and usable by Sara Jane Rothwell, thanks to multi-level terracing, immersive planting and dedicated places to sit, work and play WORDS ALEX MITCHELL PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 21

T

here aren’t many London gardens that could double up as a ski slope, but the towering Highgate plot belonging to Frida Grundberg and Peter Dahlen is one of them. When the Swedish couple called in garden designer Sara Jane Rothwell for help with the unusual space, she’d have been forgiven for taking a deep breath.

The garden rears up behind the house, rising seven metres over its 38-metre length. Mature shrubs on either side took away the light and made it feel like a claustrophobic tunnel. “A 2.5m patio just outside the back door was really the only flat place to sit in the whole garden,” Frida recalls. “Then it was just a big slippery ski slope, covered in grass all the way to the top.” Not that anyone ever went up there. The back third of the garden was a no-go area of overgrown shrubs, dead trees and rubbish.

But where some find a problem, others see an opportunity. “If anything, the slope excited me,” says Sara Jane. “Flat gardens are boring. The success and beauty of this garden is down to the steep slope, so you get this wonderful theatrical view as you walk into the house that could never have been achieved without the specific geography of this site.”

Theatrical it truly is. By terracing the slope into multiple seating areas, linked by steps and staggered platforms, pushing back the terrace outside the back doors and removing or restructuring the overgrown shrubs, Sara Jane has created not only a wow-factor view from the house, but opened up the space so every inch can be used by the couple and their two young children.

“Of course, when designing we want it to look great from the inside out,” says Sara Jane, “but I don’t feel I’ve done my job unless I’ve encouraged the client to go outside.”

From having one cramped area to sit in, the couple and their two children Tyra, 9, and Carl, 6, are now spoilt for choice. They can eat around the table or sit on the corner bench on the lower area, its permeable resin-bound gravel making it the perfect spot for lockdown PE lessons and football; they can climb up the poured concrete steps to catch some rays on the ipe hardwood deck above, continue up limestone chipping steps to a gravel area nestled among foliage, or go right to the top up wide turfed steps edged in Corten steel that lead to a serene rectangular lawn, a further deck and a

corner studio with outdoor gym and children’s play equipment set amid woodland planting.

“Sara Jane is a genius,” says Frida. “She has created all these different spaces where we can sit.

Even the concrete steps are lovely and organic to sit on – as well as the gravel steps further up the slope. You can just take a wooden chair and move it around the garden to wherever the sun is.”

The garden faces south west, so in summer Frida and Peter tend to have early coffee halfway up the garden then move a level down when the sun moves round. By the end of the day, the top deck and lawn are bathed in sunshine. “You are drawn to the top,” says Frida. The 27 or so steps that take you there don’t feel like a hard climb because of the stopping points along the way and the planting that immerses you as you wander through it.

“It’s very serene at the top of the garden and we naturally congregate up here,” she continues.

“Before lockdown I’d look out and there might be ten or so neighbouring children up there who had come in through a gap in the fence. There’s lots of birdsong and a great view of the rooftops.”

Although the slope wasn’t a problem from a design perspective, it did make the hard landscaping quite a challenge.

A structural engineer’s approval had to be signed off on all the retaining walls and drainage was key. The area, which backs onto a conservation area known as the Highgate Bowl, has several springs and an underground river beneath. Add in the London clay soil and the slope and Sara Jane soon realised that installing land drains was a necessity. These run under the garden, feeding into a main drain that runs down one side of the space.

The water-permeable bound resin on the lower level was chosen to absorb any extra standing water and plants were selected for the ability to cope with always having fairly wet feet.

A huge amount of soil had to be removed through the side return in order to push the terrace back a couple of metres to create a comfortable space. A thick retaining wall of poured concrete backed with bitumastic paint and lined with a membrane holds back the vast tonnage of earth above.

It’s a testament to Sara Jane’s skill that, despite these heavy earth works and the large-scale structure of steps and platforms, the garden now has a light, organic feel, while the sharp attention to detail in the hard landscaping adds to

“The slope excited me. Flat gardens are boring. You get a wonderful theatrical view as you walk into the house”

22 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above Persicaria bistorta ‘Superba’ and Iris sibirica ‘Perry’s Blue’ flank wooden chairs on the garden’s gravel terrace.

Above Pinus mugo subsp. mugo and Euphorbia x martini supply a textured mix of permanent greenery.

Right Shadow gaps give these concrete steps a feeling of lightness.

Below Looking back to the house from the gravel terrace.

Left The garden’s owners, Peter Dahlen and Frida Grundberg, with Tyra and Carl.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 23

Corten steel-edged steps stylishly navigate the slope up the garden, their colour echoed in the planting.

24 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

the elegance. The poured concrete steps that lead up from the lowest level are chunky yet appear to float thanks to shadow gaps created by removing the bottom front edge of each step. “I’m a real shadow gap person,” says Sara Jane. “They make such a difference.” The Ipe corner bench is cantilevered to give it a similar lightness.

The muted tones of rusty Corten steel, silver timber and pale concrete play off colours in the planting that help soften the corners and sharp edges as you climb. Dwarf pines (Pinus mugo subsp. mugo) hug the steps, their rusty cones picking up the colour of the Corten, with more russet accents coming from the flowerheads of euphorbias and the fronds of pheasant’s tail grass (Anemanthele lessoniana). Higher up, grey limestone chippings set off the pale blue stands of Iris sibirica ‘Perry’s Blue’ beautifully. At the very Top left A rescued and top, the colours are a pruned rhododendron restful combination from the original garden of green and white brightens the terrace. including 15 silver birch Top right Alchemilla mollis, Geranium trees (Betula pendula ‘Rozanne’ and ‘Mount ‘Zwitsers Glorie’) and Everest’ alliums soften four flowering cherries, the steps’ landscaping. underplanted with cool Middle The garden is now a treasured space dryopteris ferns. for all the family to enjoy.

Arguably the most Left Iris sibirica enjoys stunning plants in the the moist soil here, and garden, however, were flowers in May and June.

The poured concrete steps that lead up from the lowest level are chunky yet appear to float thanks to shadow gaps

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 25

The rhododendrons have become sculptural trees that give the garden an almost Himalayan feel

already here – albeit in a much less graceful form.

Sara Jane quickly saw potential in the overgrown rhododendrons that lined one side of the garden and, with judicious pruning, they have become sculptural trees that give the garden an almost Himalayan feel, especially impressive in spring when they drip with petals from palest rose to shocking pink. Another tree, a beautiful mature acer, was also retained at the lower level, its roots now in a raised Corten planter, its foliage providing a parasol of dappled shade.

26 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Top The inherited

rhododendrons dictated the colour scheme; Salvia ‘Caradonna’ is the perfect complement.

Above Tyra and Carl regularly have friends over to play.

As the year progresses, the garden’s colours change completely. In spring, the rhododendron blossom dictated a palette of pinks and purples.

Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’, Geranium ‘Rozanne’, the irises and pale pink Persicaria bistorta ‘Superba’ are “delicate and feminine”, says Frida. By August, fiery oranges and reds take over, when Helenium ‘Waltraut’, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Firetail’ create a summer blaze.

Sara Jane started out in TV and theatre design, working on productions such as Dennis Potter’s Lipstick on Your Collar. She credits this with her interest in exploring all three dimensions of a space: “Vertical interest is vital.” There was no shortage of vertical space here, and she has used it to turn a ski slope into an outdoor theatre set. As Frida explains: “It has brought an added dimension to our lives.” n Sara Jane Rothwell, londongardendesigner.com

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Lynette Coyne and Richard Tresidder have transformed the long, narrow plot around their Derbyshire cottage.

28 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Up the Garden Path

The wonky garden path at Church Cottage, in the heart of this Derbyshire village, leads the visitor on a fascinating journey past a box parterre in miniature, quirky topiary, classic cottage planting, an orderly vegetable plot and masses of roses WORDS ANN TRENEMAN PHOTOGRAPHS JOE WAINWRIGHT SPRING 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 29

A

t first glance, Church Cottage in the Derbyshire village of Parwich looks almost too good to be true. It really could be a film set: the old stone cottage, with its quintessentially English garden, would make the perfect backdrop for an Agatha Christie tale. Added drama comes from the fact the garden is next to the churchyard, separated only by a low stone wall.

Lynette Coyne and Richard Tresidder realised immediately on buying the cottage, which is situated on a long thin plot wedged between the churchyard and a country lane, that this was not just their garden. It was very much seen as part of this Peak District village. “We realised how open the aspect was. People would talk to us, over the walls, from the churchyard and in the lane,” says Lynette. “That was the lovely thing about the village.”

It is intriguing to discover that, while the garden is now picture perfect, with its wisteria and roses, vegetable patch and riotous flower borders, this has been achieved only through ingenious design and planting. The way to transform this skinny, weedfilled plot, 65m long and 9m at its widest, was not immediately obvious but Lynette and Richard saw potential, not problems, and have worked hard to create a unique and quirky garden that blends in beautifully with its surroundings.

“I want it to feel timeless,” says Lynette. “I wanted to keep what attracted me when I first came here.

The wonky path. The little stone planting areas. The big stone trough. Those are the things that said to me: ‘This is a lovely cottage garden, potentially.’ I wanted the postman to feel like: ‘I don’t mind going all the way up that path to put the post in a box.’”

The path is indeed a little wonky, starting at the low cottage gate and continuing alongside walls adorned with roses and underplanted with bulbs.

30 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above Passers-by often stop to chat over the garden’s low stone walls.

Right Set on an angle, the diamond-shaped box parterre makes the plot feel wider than it is.

Below, from left St Peter’s Church; Richard’s neat vegetable garden; Lynette Coyne with her topiary chicken on a nest; a pleached beech hedge adds privacy.

SPRING 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 31

“I wanted to stand in my garden and look beyond and have it appear bigger than it was”

Above The wonky stone paths and walls are what first drew Lynette and Richard to the cottage.

This image A small square of lawn is bounded by colourful borders with a mix of perennials and roses.

32 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

A stunning lollipop box ball commands attention and, carrying on, there is a further surprise: a small, diamond-shaped box garden that lies under a cloudpruned cotoneaster tree, the air perfumed by Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’ and a voluptuous wisteria. Here the mood feels playful, not least because of the central chicken-ona-nest topiary. But, just beyond it, the atmosphere turns restful with a small square lawn surrounded by colourful borders on three sides and a pleached beech hedge offering some privacy from the lane.

The path carries on, passing through an arch festooned with roses, including white ‘Claire Austin’ and pale pink ‘The Generous Gardener’, and into the vegetable patch where Richard rules supreme. Now the atmosphere becomes one of industry, the cabbages lined up as if waiting for Peter Rabbit to create a little mayhem. Finally, the path winds through beds of ferns and woodland plants, before terminating at a bench, the perfect place for contemplative rest.

The rags-to-roses story of this plot is made all the more inspiring by the fact that neither Richard nor Lynette were experienced gardeners before they arrived. They had bought the cottage in 1986 but did not embark on the garden in any serious way until 2006, after they had finished building a garden room and studio for Lynette, a retired interior architect: “I decided to make a list of all the things that I would like to achieve in the garden. I set out to draw a plan down to the last half metre. On my list I included private spaces. I also felt that the garden was too linear – I knew I needed to visually expand it.”

She did this by “pinching” views both from the churchyard and the hills beyond, with yew hedges planted to blend in with the churchyard. Richard explains how successive vicars had been given gifts of roses, so now the likes of ‘Rambling Rector’ and ‘Wedding Day’ may be planted in the churchyard but add to their garden too. The neighbouring yews embrace the garden as well. “The connection between our garden and the churchyard was always uppermost in my mind,” says Lynette. “I wanted to stand in my garden and look beyond and have it appear bigger than it was.”

The box parterre is next to the garden room and Lynette thought its relatively low-maintenance structure would be “pleasing” to see all year. Its four pentagonal beds are placed on the diagonal to make

An arch through to the vegetable plot is covered with Clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ and pink rose ‘The Generous Gardener’.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 33

borders. Richard, a retired journalist, notes that the perennials are turbocharged by the rich soil and need to be divided every year.

He is a lover of sweet peas (particularly whiteand-pink ‘Deborah Devonshire’, named for the late doyenne of Chatsworth), which are a fragrant link between the flower borders and the vegetable patch, which a few years ago gained an espaliered apple tree border that provides structure while maintaining an all-important feeling of openness.

Asked what plant they can’t do without, Richard replies: “Rose ‘Gertrude Jekyll’. Repeat flowering. Wonderful fragrance. She adds an air of joy.” Lynette does not have a top plant (though salvias are a current passion), but her favourite section is the box garden. But, as she notes, that could change as she explores shady planting for the end of the garden: “I hope that, in due course, the woodland might become my favourite.” n

Above Sweetly scented philadelphus bursts over the yew hedge that backs a border of salvia, crimson astrantia and vibrant alstroemeria.

Left Rosa ‘Ballerina’ in one of the parterre beds.

the plot look wider, and the lines of the box take your eye up and out into the wider landscape.

The beds are filled with tulips and alliums in the spring; Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ and Rosa ‘Ballerina’ later on. The central topiary chicken has become a nesting place for a wren, providing much “bird in a bird” viewing entertainment.

The different sections are linked by evergreen, seasonal planting, with the colours of the box garden leading to the boisterous herbaceous 34 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Church Cottage should open for Parwich Open Garden Day on 20 June, 1pm to 6pm, but check online at parwich.org to see if it’s going ahead.

How to make a topiary chicken on a nest Lynette had the idea of creating a chicken on a nest because she wanted the box garden to have more of a whimsical, “cottagey” feel. She found a two-stem yew tree in the reject section of a local nursery, planted it in the centre of the parterre and “fed it like Billy-o”. The stems were forced apart by pieces of wood that she kept widening. Clever pruning soon produced a proud chicken and, in 2020, ten years since its inception, the chicken gained a rather rambunctious topknot. The wren that nested in it last year seemed to approve!

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All About THE PLANTS

When Sean Walter got the chance to redesign an unsatisfying Notting Hill garden from scratch, making sense of its levels with hard landscaping was important but filling the restructured space with successful shade-loving plants was his priority WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS

This page Clematis ‘Étoile Violette’ clambers the steps to the balcony.

Opposite Charlotte’s table came from Colin Mantripp’s Lillyfee Woodcarving Studio.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 37

Well-kept box balls flank a pair of matching metal wire benches on the upper terrace.

38 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

W

hen garden designer Sean Walter was asked by his friend, the interior designer Charlotte Crosland, to remodel the garden behind her Notting Hill house after a new garden studio had been added, he couldn’t have been happier.

“I’ve worked with Charlotte for years,” Sean explains, “and over time I’d tweaked the previous garden, but it was always frustrating – I never got a good feeling from it. I felt almost resentful doing it, because nothing quite grew. It’s a tall house and the back of it faces east, so a lot of the garden is in its shadow – plus it was bone-dry at the back because of an oak tree in the neighbour’s garden.” The game-changer, he says, was when Charlotte had her new studio-office built, which prompted an entire rethink.

This time, Sean could plan the planting from scratch, and although the space left to garden was smaller, a more considered approach could be taken as to how it was used.

Small it may be, but this garden has a dynamic feel due to its different levels. The first terrace, which is where Charlotte has a

Above Two Prunus ‘Umineko’ stand either side of the steps, with pots of Hosta ‘Francee’.

Below Various lanterns are dotted about for a subtle glow after dark.

dining table and chairs, isn’t level with the doors of the house – it’s reached either by steps that come up from the basement, where her husband has an office, or via a flight of galvanised stairs that lead down from a balcony and the drawing room’s French doors. The balcony was previously a timber structure, but Charlotte commissioned a larger version made from T-washed galvanised metal, its perforated surface letting more light down into the basement below.

From the dining terrace, steps lead up to the main terrace where the studio sits. Previously the garden sloped ever so slightly here, but Charlotte was keen that the studio be on the same level as the garden in front of it, no steps in or out, so the whole terrace was raised to create spirit-level perfection, with a corresponding increase in the number of steps leading up to it from the dining terrace.

There are two sets of steps – one on the right so Charlotte can come straight down from the balcony and up to her studio, and a second flight on the left. “When clients visit the studio, they come down the side access so it made sense to have another path and another set of steps here,” Sean points out.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 39

Once these main areas of hard landscaping were set down, it meant, as Sean explains, that: “everything else could be planting. You have to create enough border space in which to make something of proper interest, otherwise you’ll just have window-box sized planters on the boundaries – and that’s never very interesting.”

A statement multi-stemmed Osmanthus x fortunei commands the upper terrace. “There needed to be a decent evergreen plant that would create a yearround visual break between the two spaces but we didn’t want a wall or a hedge – the garden is too small to divide up into spaces,” notes Sean. The large osmanthus does the trick, even though Sean admits it was “a performance” to get it down the narrow alleyway at the side of the house.

Other new additions included four Amelanchier lamarckii to bookend each corner of the upper terrace, and three upright Prunus ‘Umineko’ to flank the galvanised balcony steps. Here, a cluster of Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’ are among the few plants that remain from the previous garden, along with a handsome Vitis coignetiae that covers the boundary on one side, and an old Trachelospermum jasminoides along the other.

Almost everything else was newly planted, and this

40 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Below Astrantia poke

through the sea of Hakonechloa macra below the large, multi-stemmed Osmanthus x fortunei.

time Sean could make sure that what went in would thrive in the garden’s shady conditions.

One side of the garden is shadier than the other, so for its borders Sean chose hellebores, the woodland grasses Luzula nivea and Melica uniflora f. albida, scented sarcococca, and ferns such as Dryopteris filix-mas. On the less shady side, a similar colour palette and repeated plants ensures consistency, but with the addition of perennials including Phlox x arendsii ‘Miss Jill’ and veronicastrum.

The box hedging and balls that are dotted about the garden are still in excellent shape, despite localised problems with box blight and moth.

Sean puts this success down to gardener Alex Forster (garden-excellence.co.uk), who maintains the planting for Charlotte. “Amazingly, Alex has managed to keep the box going,” he enthuses.

One plant that Sean has used in abundance is Hakonechloa macra, which he has planted to create a sea of flowing leaves beneath the multi-stemmed osmanthus. “That space is both sunny and shaded, and I wanted a plant that would cope with both,” says Sean. “I always lean towards plants that like the shade but will take the sun, rather than those that like the sun but will take a bit of shade. I find in London gardens especially, you’re always trying to

quantify whether the space gets enough light and if a plant is reliable enough in that half day of sun to build a garden on. That’s why I’d rather have something that looks healthy and happy, than something that’s OK but not thriving.” When the hakonechloa gets cut back after winter, there’s a chance for white dwarf narcissus, tulips and other spring bulbs to emerge and put on a show, before the mounds of grass start to regrow.

Another statement touch is a strip of mind-your-ownbusiness (Soleirolia soleirolii) that fills the gap between paving and box hedging with a ribbon of tiny, emeraldgreen leaves. “That’s a bit of a signature of mine,” Sean admits. “I like to use it as a ‘shadow gap’. I just find that two hard surfaces meeting is quite tedious and ugly really, so I tried to find something that would grow in this sort of space, since it’s often very shaded in those corners.

“I just can’t live with a really crisp, hard space,” he adds. “I always like to have a loose, informal element

Top left Flights of

steps connect the two terraces on each side so Charlotte and her clients have easy access.

Top right Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’.

Above Brilliant green soleirolia between box and paving.

in gardens so they are not static. If you have strong structural elements, you need a counterpoint for it to feel like a nice space. I have a theory that the hard landscaping is the bit most garden designers can do, so it becomes all about the hard landscaping and the planting becomes the area you fill in later – an afterthought. Whereas for me, it’s always ‘where will the plants go, and what space do we need for them?’ first, and then ‘that’s as much hard landscaping as I’m prepared to hand over’! The practical side – where you sit and where you walk – is important, but I don’t want those things to be the leading feature. I want it to be all about the plants.” n Sean Walter, The Plant Specialist. Tel: 01494 866650; theplantspecialist.co.uk SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 41

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Garden designer Janey Auchincloss and her husband John have created a modern ‘cloister’ garden at their home in Suffolk.

44 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Inner SANCTUM

By adding a contemporary studio building alongside Edwardian Grove Cottage in Suffolk, designer Janey Auchincloss and her husband John have been left with a hidden, cloistered space in which they have created a sheltered garden filled with flamboyant delights WORDS BARBARA SEGALL PHOTOGRAPHS RICHARD BLOOM

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 45

T

he word ‘cloister’ conjures up a setting in which quiet meditation takes place. The high-ceilinged, light and airy, almost greenhouselike kitchen and studio that garden designer Janey Auchincloss and her husband John have added to their Edwardian cottage, forms a boundary that contributes precisely such an atmosphere to the garden within. But the plants and combinations that Janey has included in her design for this enclosed space are far from contemplative.

Rather, they are lively, showy and high-octane.

Benefitting from the heat that is reflected off the 46 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

“We borrow the landscape from a garden beyond and the enclosure creates a microclimate” extension’s 16-metre run of floor-to-roof windows, they glow and shimmer within the confines of the rectangular 17 x 7 metre garden.

Janey and John moved into Grove Cottage, in the heart of Suffolk’s picture-perfect village of Lavenham, in 2018. They had owned the cottage since 2016, but spent two years combining its Edwardian character with a modern extension – designed by architect friends at Project Orange – that replaced a 1970s prefab garage. An early sketch shows the bare bones of their modern cottage garden ‘cloister’, created along two boundaries by the glass-dominated facades of their house. The third

Above left The Corten

steel tank collects rain water, which Janey uses to water the tree ferns.

Above right Evergreens such as the rounded form of Pittosporum ‘Tom Thumb’ provide year-round structure.

Left The spiky red burrs of ground-covering Acaena microphylla.

Far left A display of succulents in pots on the traditional Suffolk black weatherboarded wall.

boundary is formed by the neighbour’s property, while the fourth is provided by trees bordering their garden. One neighbouring tree in particular, an ancient yew, serves as a superb green backdrop – its only downside is that it is the roosting place for greedy, noisy pigeons.

“We borrow the landscape from a mature garden beyond and the enclosure creates a microclimate,” Janey explains. “When we moved in the neighbour’s extension wall seemed to dominate, but now I hardly see it, because the focus is on the garden that has sprung up within these parameters.”

Janey started out as an illustrator and designer, but she’s always gardened, inheriting her green fingers from her mother. When she became a single parent with two small daughters, she decided to do a one-day-a-week course in Amenity Landscape and SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 47

Above A full run of floor-to-ceiling Crittall windows integrate the garden with the house.

Left A metal obelisk provides eye-catching punctuation at the corner of the border.

Below Breezy fennel, Foeniculum vulgare ‘Purpureum’ makes a great backdrop to purple Actaea ‘Chocoholic’.

48 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Design at Suffolk’s Otley College. From there she moved to Cambridge University’s Botanic Garden on a one-year trainee programme before studying for a degree in Garden Design and Landscape at Writtle College in Essex. She worked in a number of gardens before setting up her own garden design business, Janey Auchincloss Designs, in 2006.

Her garden can be seen from every window in the house, upstairs and downstairs. As she points out: “We wake up with it in full sight and go to bed with last looks at it. We see it all year round so the planting had to be special.” In a garden that’s so visible, every plant must earn its place. Janey has manipulated scale, too, using taller plants with bold flowers and foliage and layering them with textural underplanting to create a jungle effect. She also improved the soil, which is basically clay, through double-digging and the addition of organic matter.

Recycling and repurposing are important to the couple, and the majority of the building materials were re-used. “We used bricks left over from the build, paving from around our friends’ pool and timber from their demolished pool building,” Janey recalls. “I must also add that John did all the hard landscaping, which included removing 20 tons of rubble left behind by the builder, laying the paving and paths, building the shed, potting bench and our new ‘Sitooterie’. I merely drew the pretty picture!”

The Sitooterie, John’s lockdown project, is a new seating area, complete with rusty metal pergola.

As a hands-on gardener and designer, Janey knows the value of places to sit and relax in a garden, even though she doesn’t always find time herself. But she has found herself drawn to the Sitooterie, especially at the end of a day. “It gives me a totally different perspective of the garden and is the perfect place to stargaze in the evening,” she explains.

Apart from that new addition, Janey’s original sketch of the garden has changed little since she first began its planning. There are three beds separated from each other by paved paths, which, in the height of summer, are almost impossible to find, so luxuriant is the plant growth. “It is spectacular in summer, with all the zingy colours,” Janey notes.

“I am not a pastel person and I don’t like pinks too much either. I favour orange, blue and purple and flowing shapes, but there is structure from evergreens, including Pittosporum tobira ‘Nanum’ all year.” Even though the tree ferns are tied up and protected in winter, they still offer something visual in that season. For early spring colour at ground level there are drifts of snowdrops and tulips.

Foliage plants such as Asarum splendens, tellimas and tiarellas provide cover and low-level interest from spring onwards.

Janey says she doesn’t normally like the concept of the garden as an outdoor room, but she has had to concede that this garden is just that: another room of the house. But it is like no other room, especially at the height of summer when strong-coloured salvias such as ‘Amistad’, ‘Black and Bloom’ and Salvia confertiflora, with its arching ruddy flower stems, jostle at hip-height below the luxuriant fronds of tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica). In late summer, Tithonia rotundifolia ‘Torch’ punches through the blues and purples with its striking orange flowers.

Fiery Solenostemon scutellarioides ‘Campfire’ smoulders at ground level alongside the rusty flowers and foliage of Acaena microphylla from New Zealand (now renamed by Janey and John as the ‘corona plant’ since its flowers look just like images of the virus). For its vanilla-scented flowers and late summer drama, Actaea ‘Chocoholic’ is another one of Janey’s star plants.

This is a place where Janey can experiment – something she wouldn’t necessarily do in a client’s garden. And because of this garden’s cloistered, south-facing microclimate she can extend her planting choices, pushing plants beyond their

“We wake up with the garden in full sight and go to bed with last looks at it… so the planting had to be special”

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Bold colours are the order of the day in Janey Auchincloss’s vibrant, hard-working garden

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SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 49

hardiness limits, seeing what will and won’t survive.

“It is my playground and I can see what works and what doesn’t. It’s just wonderful to have a manageable space where I can change things up with the basic structure always remaining, A garden this size is a moveable feast where I can edit, faff around and change things as and when. In a small space plants need to earn their place. I feel that some plants literally tremble as I go by: they seem to understand that they are under scrutiny,” she jokes.

At the end of each growing season Janey assesses the overall look of the garden, sees where the gaps are and decides on changes and improvements.

“I currently think it needs more height in places so 50 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above left A loquat and

tree ferns add height to Janey’s garden, which benefits from reflected light and warmth.

Top right The new ‘Sitooterie’, built by Janey’s husband John.

Above right Phormium ‘Maori Queen’ has pink-tinged foliage.

Above middle Rust-toned Anemanthele lessoniana.

I may plant a catalpa or a paulownia, which I would stool to keep under control,” she muses. “As far as possible I keep everything in situ over winter and summer, but I do lift the dahlias and cannas because when I’ve left them in the ground in the past, they have been slow to flower. My aim is to make the garden as maintenance-free as possible. I do take cuttings of tender plants such as the coleus, but I also buy new plants for spring.” n The garden at Grove Cottage has opened in the past for Lavenham’s annual Hidden Gardens weekend, but openings for 2021 are as yet unconfirmed. Janey Auchincloss Designs, janeyauchinclossdesigns.com

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Surface Value At a complicated London site that sits on top of the property’s garage roof, designer Sara Jane Rothwell has made the most of the space to create a stylish and rewarding multi-level garden WORDS CLARE FOGGETT PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS

A zigzagging path and generous planting completely hide the fact that this garden is built on top of a garage roof.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 53

M

ost Londoners are grateful if their house or flat comes with any outdoor space at all, so it seems churlish, if you do have some, to question its size or suitability for creating a beautiful and useful garden. But it would have been easy to sympathise had the owners of this house near Hampstead felt slightly crestfallen on first surveying the outside space that came with their new home. It wasn’t very big, it skewed away from the house at an odd angle and, perhaps most challenging of all, the second half of it was built on top of a garage accessed at street level below.

A path along the right-hand side dropped down to the back gate, beyond which was a flight of steps to reach the garage below, while the garage roof itself was covered with unevenly laid, broken slabs with weeds growing in the cracks. Between the level garage roof and the sloping path along its side there was a not-insignificant drop – anyone using the garage roof part of the garden had to take great care not to plummet off the edge. Clearly something drastic needed to be done. Step forward a garden designer unafraid of a challenge: Sara Jane Rothwell.

“I can’t remember if the owners told me at the start of the project or at the end, but apparently another garden designer had walked away,” she confides.

Sara Jane didn’t hesitate to take the garden on though: “I prefer a project to have challenges like this one. It makes it more interesting and the end result is more rewarding.”

To radically rethink the space, bold decisions were required – the first of which was to move the steps leading down from garden level to the street and garage below. Shifted further back and accessed via a new, discreet gate in the garden’s far right corner, the path that had previously led to them was rendered obsolete, freeing up lots of space. Of course, the portion of the garden that sits above the garage is effectively a roof garden, so its design had to meet certain engineering criteria.

“Whenever we do a roof terrace, we always get a structural engineer to look it over,” explains Sara Jane. “The garage is built out of concrete though, so structurally it was completely fine.”

The next task was to re-waterproof the garage roof, an important job to get right from the outset since the only way to access it again would be to pull up the entire garden, and install suitable drainage.

For budget reasons, the garden’s existing fencing was kept along the left and right-hand sides, and a new section added just along the back, but once it had all been painted a harmonious grey and strung

with wires for Trachelospermum jasminoides to climb, the boundaries were much improved. With the structural fundamentals taken care of, Sara Jane could turn her attention to the space within: how to disguise its funny angles and its planting.

“The owners are enthusiastic gardeners and they were keen to have a real mix of plants,” says Sara Jane. The strip on the right that had been the old sloping path was given over entirely to planting.

Because the path sank below the level of the garage roof, this strip could be filled with a really good depth of soil, and it’s here that Sara Jane positioned trees, so they could enjoy a decent root run. On the garage roof, plants grow in raised planters made from Corten steel to fit the space.

“It was a complicated build,” she admits. Clinton Wootten of Wootten Landscaping, with whom she works regularly, was in charge on this one. “Nothing fazes him,” she says, “although he does occasionally say: ‘Can’t you just give me an easy project?’”

Bifold doors at the back of the house open onto a rectangle of ipe decking that gives way to the path, flush with the deck and laid with Vande Moortel bricks in a shade of grey that matches the fence.

The path zigzags through a chicane of parallel low yew hedges, its angles the perfect distraction from the way the garden twists to the left. A couple of neat steps up and the grey brick path segues into the terrace over the garage, paved with a stylish paler sandstone. There’s room here for a barbecue, the gate that leads to the steps, and seating.

Surrounding it all are the plants, chosen to ensure plenty of floral interest. In early summer, the colours

“I prefer a project to have challenges like this one. It makes it more interesting and the end result is more rewarding”

54 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Left A rectangle of ipe decking creates a useful area close to the house.

Above The garage roof starts where the second set of steps raises the path’s level to its height.

Right Crimson Rosa ‘Munstead Wood’.

Far right A gravel strip protects the sandstone from rusty water run-off.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 55

“The challenge was this big thing in the middle of the garden. The genius is that the garden completely hides the fact it’s there”

Top left Luscious lemon meringue blooms of Rosa ‘Teasing Georgia’.

Top right The yew-edged zigzag path acts as a bridge between the decking and the terrace, while disguising the garden’s skewed angle.

Above Corten planters on the garage roof.

are soft: green Alchemilla mollis and Euphorbia x martini provide a backdrop for ‘Sutton’s Apricot’ foxgloves, ‘Teasing Georgia’ and ‘Munstead Wood’ roses, and Erigeron karvinskianus. But clumps of crocosmia foliage hint at hotter colours to come. “It’s more colourful later in the year,” Sara Jane confirms.

Owners Laurence and Alice Tailby love the garden. “There’s enough variety in the planting to make it interesting to look at, while also making

56 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

sure that it’s easy to maintain,” says Laurence. Both he and Alice completed a course at RHS Wisley when they moved here from their central London flat – “gardening for people who don’t know what they’re doing” he jokes. “I mainly wanted space for a barbecue,” he adds, which Sara Jane supplied with the end terrace, although that’s now also home to a trampoline for the couple’s two-year-old son. “I like the fact there are two living spaces: the bit at the back, which is great for sitting out in the evening and then the decking next to the bifold doors. There’s a balance: our son has space to run around, and there’s grown-up space, so it works well,” Laurence says. “Having a garage in London is worth its weight in gold, but the challenge was this big thing in the middle of the garden. The genius is that the garden completely hides the fact it’s there. I can’t praise Sara Jane highly enough – it’s fantastic.” n Sara Jane Rothwell, londongardendesigner.com

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This page Rose ‘Albertine’ frames the entrance to the vegetable patch.

Opposite A new table and benches contrast with a salvaged rusted trolley. Festoon lights from Lights4fun.co.uk

58 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Style & SUBSTANCE

The Surrey garden of stylist Selina Lake and her husband Dave is a treasure trove of carefully curated found objects and gardenalia, strung together with delightfully natural planting to create endless charm and relaxing appeal WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS RACHEL WARNE SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 59

Above The 45m-long garden is a sequence of small rooms with plenty of surfaces for Selina to style. A sleeper sections off the top lawn.

S

elina Lake is a popular interior and garden stylist whose unseen hand conjures inspirational settings for a range of publications and corporate clients across the UK and abroad. In 2019 her bright, uplifting arrangements for conservatory firm Alitex caused a stir at the Chelsea Flower Show.

At Hampton Court later that year, she worked closely with designer Jo Thompson on the BBC Springwatch garden. She has written ten books, including Garden Style, which draws upon a project close to her heart: her own town garden, within walking distance of Guildford town centre, which she shares with her husband, Dave.

If a garden chooses its owner, then this one picked well. Selina has a great talent for seeing the potential of things, and in the unloved, unkempt space that

60 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

lay before them when they moved in seven years ago, she easily imagined the beautiful garden for which she and her husband had been yearning. “When we moved in it was a bit of a rubbish dump, but we started working on the garden straight away,” she recalls, “and we spent our first summer in the garden because we’d been living in a flat before then, so the novelty of having it was intense. But we made millions of trips to the tip.”

The overgrown garden filled with detritus wasn’t completely bereft of features, however. Someone, sometime, had poured love into this 45m by 5.5m space. Cutting back growth, the pair realised there were “quite a lot of trees” here, as well as a few good shrubs. “We have a beautiful magnolia with white flowers, an old wisteria, a plum, an apple and an acer. Quite a lot, really, for a small garden.”

This image Foxglove

spires and a gorgeous pink rose – try similar ‘Nathalie Nypels’ from David Austin Roses.

Below left The dark shed makes a great foil for a bright display on a table Selina found at Sunbury Antiques Market.

Below right Selina keeps her displays seasonal.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 61

Below A shelf unit Selina

and Dave found in the garden is now used for displays of Selina’s favourite things. “It has cubbyholes for books and pots,” she explains.

Selina had been dreaming of this garden long before they moved in and knew what she wanted from the outset. A Pinterest board was helpful, but her work as a stylist also presented her with a constant stream of ideas to sift through. Despite being so close to Guildford’s centre, Selina wanted a country feel to the garden, a sort of rus in urbe. “I thought about what flowers I wanted in the garden, what plants, but an important part for me was to create little areas that I could then style up. I wanted places to put tables and surfaces to arrange my pots.”

Selina and Dave have complementary skillsets.

While she can train her eye on colour and detail, Dave, a graphic designer, has an enviable talent for laying things out in the best possible way. The garden exemplifies their teamwork. “He took control of where things should go and I was more in charge of what flowers we should use, what plants.

He’s the chief hard landscaping-digging-moving person, which is handy.”

As they cut back and cleared, more features were revealed, and they gradually created a sequence of characterful garden rooms that begins with a decked terrace at the top of the garden close to the

62 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

house and ends with a garden shed in the bottom corner. The garden was so overgrown that Selina and Dave didn’t realise the shed was there until they had completed on the sale. Even though the roof had caved in and the door was missing, Selina was thrilled. “I was beside myself,” she recalls. “It had definitely seen better days, but Dave fixed it all up.

We inherited a bench that now sits inside it and I often use that as a backdrop for overhead photos.

There’s a shelf unit in the shed that we also found in the garden. It was discarded from the previous owners’ kitchen and it has lots of cubbyholes for displays that I try to change with the seasons. I style it whenever I get inspiration.”

Also uncovered was a middle patio, which Selina has furnished with a clean-lined contemporary table that helps to keep the garden from looking twee. It reflects a taste for Scandinavian design she has picked up through numerous working visits to gardens in Denmark and Sweden. “I wanted to add a Scandinavian vibe with more modern furniture, and the garden is a bit of a mix of old and new. We stained our deck black to match the shed. I stick to a rustic metal black colour scheme for any bits and pieces that I add in,” she notes. The terrace itself was covered in weeds and the pair thought it was merely overgrown grass until they scraped back the cover and found the patio beneath. “Behind the table I have an old rusty trolley where I keep all my pots.

Some neighbours down the road were throwing it out, so I wheeled it back home and into the garden.”

Close to an arch of rose ‘Albertine’ that leads to a small vegetable garden and the shed beyond, Selina and Dave have positioned a cast iron table and chairs inherited from Dave’s parents. This furniture rests on two circular paved spaces, one of which Dave found elsewhere in the garden and re-laid to mark the transition to the working spaces.

With Selina’s eye for colour and design, planting has been kept to bright, mainly self-seeding plants.

When they moved in there simply wasn’t a budget for the garden, so she had to start small, accepting the cuttings and divisions friends and family gave her until she worked out – and built up a budget for – exactly what she wanted in the garden.

Now there are geums, nigella, lupins, cosmos and daisies, clumps of chives and occasionally a froth of erigeron. David Austin roses are a firm favourite and Dave is growing a lavender walk to the shed from affordable plug plants. Perennials are still bought small and allowed to grow to full size. “Every year I grow sweet peas from seed and let them climb up wigwams of coppiced hazel,” says Selina. And while there is raised decking close to the house, the rest of the garden has a gently untidy mood, with space for foxgloves to pop up at will and benign weeds to flower freely. “I just love foxgloves and can’t get enough of them,” she enthuses.

This image Bright blooms

with hardy Bupleurum rotundifolium.

Right The buttercup meadow is a favourite of garden wildlife.

Below right Selina couldn’t resist buying this old street sign.

Below left Hidden away, the shed was only discovered on moving in.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 63

STYLIST’S BLACK BOOK Selina’s favourite places to shop for garden accessories Kingfisher Farm Shop Set in the Surrey hills near Dorking, this shop sells a range of good local produce and plants sourced from local and British growers. Offers a good range of ‘New Wave’ perennials. Tel: 01306 730703; kingfisherfarmshop.com Petersham Nurseries “I love Petersham Nurseries. It’s a huge inspiration,” says Selina. This smart garden centre in Richmond upon Thames has an award-winning cafe and a second branch in Covent Garden. Tel: 020 8940 5230; petershamnurseries.com Le Petit Jardin This small shop in Tunbridge Wells sells vintage pieces and modern accessories, including Fermob furniture, with a display that tumbles onto the pavement near The Pantiles. “I always enjoy visiting,” says Selina.

Tel: 01892 541152; le-petit-jardin.com Perry Hill Antiques “This is my favourite old-school houseclearance. I drive past and I need everything,” says Selina. Find Perry Hill just north of Worplesdon, between Guildford and Woking in Surrey. Tel: 01483 236081.

64 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Underpinning it all is a sensitivity to garden wildlife that strengthened after Selina worked with Jo Thompson on the Springwatch Garden at Hampton Court. “I loved that garden,” she says.

“It inspired me in terms of how you can make your garden beautiful but also great for wildlife. At the end of the show I managed to get some wildflower turf – a chunk of it – and a few other plants. There are a couple of bright orange roses I got from there.”

One of Selina’s favourite spots is a small buttercup meadow that is left to its own devices. “It was April when we moved in and this patch was full of bluebells, so we left it to be very wild and do whatever it wanted to do. In summer, after the bluebells, it’s filled with buttercups.” When the buttercups are finished, Selina and Dave leave the grasses to grow, cutting them down only at the end of summer. “That’s all we do to it. It’s difficult to keep on top of the weeding but I’m fairly happy for weeds to come up – I suppose some people might think of the buttercups as weeds.”

There is plenty of work still to do in the garden as Selina and Dave tailor the space to their needs.

“Every year we think of more things we want to do.

I should say I don’t think anyone’s garden is ever finished, but this is definitely a work in progress.” n

Top left Bluebells and buttercups in the small wildflower meadow.

Above Selina and Dave stained the brown wooden loungers black to fit the colour scheme.

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09:25

SMALL GARDEN DESIGN

Little Miracles

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY IMAGES GAP/JOANNA KOSSAK – DESIGNER: TONY WOODS/ GARDEN CLUB LONDON

Applying tried and tested design techniques for smaller gardens will help you make the most of reduced space so you won’t feel as if you’re missing out

Good planning from the outset will permit every element of a small garden to earn its keep.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 67

SMALL GARDEN DESIGN

D

esigners will agree that in small spaces every element must earn its keep, from paving and planters to perimeter treatments and the planting itself. Yet these parts of the garden, seemingly mere accessories, are intrinsic to a design.

When well-planned from the outset they can make a garden sing, no matter how restricted its parameters.

Humaira Ikram, designer and course leader at the KLC School of Garden Design advises deciding what you’d like from the garden before you begin to design it – and crucially, what you would like to feel when you’re in it. Then, as you plan the garden, consider four design principles. “Simplicity is the first thing.

Always step back and ask: ‘Is it simple enough?

Have I added too many ideas?’” It is tempting to fill smaller spaces with many different elements but this is one place where less really is more.

“Next think about unity and harmony,” she continues. “Does it all work together?” This doesn’t mean everything must match but there should be cohesion, even if the cohesion is based on eclecticism. “Balance is so important. Think about the balance between hard and soft landscaping, the

68 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

or Italian garden, but it makes small gardens feel even smaller,” he says.

Consider layout as well as the transition from house to garden. Many small gardens are overhauled during a house refurbishment. For a good flow between indoors and out, especially where groundfloor and basement extensions are concerned, Stefano suggests taking the interior paving theme outside. Best practice is to start laying paving from the threshold, to avoid design interruptions. “By using the same language, the space feels bigger; it is a continuation rather than an abrupt cut,” he notes.

It is popular in contemporary gardens to use slabs of around 1m by 1m. This isn’t always ideal, however, since the eye can easily and subconsciously count the rows of paving when slabs are this size.

“That’s why it’s important to use big pavers inside and out,” he says. Small pavers are more complex to gauge and so will mask the small size of the garden.

In small spaces, they are also easier to tilt slightly to direct run-off away from the house. Try mixing up the size of the pavers, too: Stefano has sometimes used granite planks in two sizes: 900mm by 200mm as well as 600mm by 200mm. “Mix them together so your eye won’t count the tiles,” he advises.

Plan paving around where you would like to walk, eat or sit. “Where you want people to stop, have a wider set of paving or lay paving on the horizontal.

Where you want to move people on, lay paving on the vertical,” Humaira says.

front and back gardens, the sides, the beds and the lawn,” Humaira adds. If it’s unbalanced, you’ll know by how it feels. For example, a large lawn surrounded by slim beds diminishes planting possibilities.

Scale and proportion are next on Humaira’s list. “It’s really crucial to get these right. You don’t want a mean terrace next to a house – it will look and feel wrong. There is no hard and fast rule about this and these things come with time if you look at them. You will know when a space is right because it will feel right,” she confirms.

Top left Plan a garden

IMAGES HUMAIRA IKRAM; STEFANO MARINAZ; GAP/ANNAïCK GUITTENY

around how you would like to feel in it.

Above Pleached trees can make an effective screen without blocking out too much light.

Left Stefano Marinaz suggests restraint, repeating elements across the garden.

PAVING London designer Stefano Marinaz is quick to explain the merits of asymmetry in the garden. “I always try to avoid symmetry when I’m working on a smaller garden because I feel it is really obvious: when you turn left, you’ll see the same thing as when you turn right. It does work in a large landscape, like a French

BOUNDARIES The adage ‘good fences make good neighbours’ is seldom more true than in smaller urban gardens where a little good neighbourliness will go a long way. If your wisteria extends to a neighbour’s property, offer to prune it when you prune yours.

Be mindful of the effect an extension can have on your neighbours. Will a first-floor terrace extension overlook their bedroom, for example, and what can be done to mitigate that?

Crucially, be aware of local planning regulations.

These can vary from city to city and even borough to borough. Key among these is the right to light.

If a tree is found to block incoming light, it can be removed. Similarly, keep in mind the total maximum permissible height of a boundary wall, which is commonly 1.9m. “Boundaries really are key,” says Humaira. “If you get the boundaries wrong, you can always see them. Some people like to keep their fences painted and everything in the same tone but they don’t actually need to be special.”

Trellises are an attractive way to raise wall height. “In London, horizontal slats are popular but I’m much more interested in what will grow on a trellis to provide a sense of enclosure in the city,” Stefano says. Opting for an evergreen such as popular Trachelospermum jasminoides or a clematis SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 69

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IMAGES GAP/PAUL DEBOIS – DESIGNER: KATE EYRE/JOANNA KOSSAK – DESIGNER: TONY WOODS/GARDEN CLUB LONDON

SMALL GARDEN DESIGN

will mean it is clothed year-round. By contrast, a rose growing against a trellis near a busy road for example will offer screening for only part of the year.

Before you add a trellis, be clear about whose wall it is. Inadvertent damage to a neighbour’s wall could leave you with a hefty bill. On this, Stefano advises looking at the property deeds to rule out questions of ownership. “The majority of the time it’s just a matter of talking to your neighbours – but they do have the right to ask you to fix the wall.”

One way to get around height restrictions is to use pleached deciduous trees. “A pleached hornbeam is ideal,” notes Humaira, although she cautions against using evergreens, such as yew, which count in planning regulations. Stefano agrees. “This is why there are so many pleached hornbeams in London. You can have instant screening up to 3.5m.”

Pergolas generally have a height allowance of 2.5m.

CONTAINERS & DETAILS When choosing these details, keep the broader picture in mind. Can a theme in a gate or wall be repeated in a container? If eclecticism is a theme, do it well, keeping together items of the same mood.

“In every garden we like to repeat some details across different elements in the garden,” says Stefano. The timber of a table might echo a timber fence, or be repeated in containers elsewhere, for good cohesion. “Your eye unconsciously sees it. In a small space it’s important to use different materials but to make sure there are elements with a similar texture and colour elsewhere.”

For a smooth transition between spaces, subtlety is key. It is easiest to achieve this with natural materials that will weather over time, so look to terracotta, limestone, granite and bronze for example. Corten steel is currently in vogue and good for raised beds in particular. Shiny stainless steel can be too attentionseeking and too demanding on the eye, says Stefano.

Top left Clothe a

screen or trellis with an evergreen climber for interest all year round.

Top right Leave room in the budget for lighting, which will extend the use of the garden.

Above Asymmetry is a useful technique to employ in small gardens.

You can double up on containers, too. The right vessel can become a fire pit, a water feature or even a drinks table with a board placed on top. With the details in place, add a single striking feature to weight the design and act as a focal point. This could be sculpture, a water feature or even a specimen plant.

COLOUR More important than colour is putting the right plant in the right place. Following this maxim will go a long way towards making planting and colour cohesive. A shade-loving plant will naturally have broad, deep green leaves; sun-loving plants will have smaller, often grey leaves. “A tree fern next to an olive tree looks wrong,” says Stefano, “because you would never find them growing together naturally.”

Do look at repeating colours however. “Colour makes me really happy and with gardens you can do SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 71

SMALL GARDEN DESIGN

Resources The Garden Trellis Co. Tel: 01255 688361; gardentrellis.co.uk

Architectural Heritage Tel: 01386 584414; architectural-heritage. co.uk

Jacksons Fencing Tel: 01233 750393; jacksons-fencing.co.uk

Bronzino Tel: 020 7370 4344; bronzino.co.uk

Stuart Garden Architecture Tel: 01984 667458; stuartgarden.com

Atelier Vierkant Tel: +32 50 370 056; ateliervierkant.com

Jay Davey Tel: 07983 783426; jaydavey.co.uk Majestic Trees Tel: 01582 843881; majestictrees.co.uk

Paving Mandarin Stone Tel: 01600 715444; mandarinstone.com Limestone Gallery Tel: 020 7828 6900; limestonegallery.com London Stone Tel: 07562 205171; londonstone.co.uk

what you want,” says Humaira. “My front garden has big, blowsy tree peonies in it. If you want colour and it makes you happy, you should have it.” Keep in mind pollinators though, focusing on plants with single flowers and scent.

LIGHTING Lighting is an underestimated finishing touch.

Advances in design mean it’s now easy to illuminate different parts of the garden by remote control. Be selective. Paths and seating areas are obvious choices but you could also light up a specimen tree, beds along a garden wall or even a water feature. Doing so will help extend the life of the garden from day into night and summer into autumn and winter. n Humaira Ikram. Tel: 07956 975602; studioikram. com. Stefano Marinaz. Tel: 020 3727 7264; stefanomarinaz.com 72 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above Keep in mind local planning regulations when calculating the maximum permissible height of garden walls.

Yorkshire Handmade Brick Company Tel: 01347 838881; yorkhandmade.co.uk Westminster Stone Tel: 01978 710000; westminsterstone.com Vande Moortel Tel: 020 3633 2422; vandemoortel.co.uk

Containers & Details

The Heveningham Collection Tel: 01242 838483; heveningham.co.uk Whichford Tel: 01608 684416; whichfordpottery.com Agriframes Tel: 0117 9341790; agriframes.co.uk A Place in the Garden Tel: 01403 864866; aplaceinthegarden.co.uk The Wooden Garden Obelisk Company Tel: 01728 684433; woodengardenobelisk. co.uk

Lighting John Cullen Tel: 020 7371 9000; johncullenlighting.com Hector Finch Tel: 020 7731 8886; hectorfinch.com Vaughan Tel: 020 7349 4600; vaughandesigns.com

Andrew Crace Designs Tel: 01279 842685; andrewcrace.com

The English Lamp Company Tel: 01603 460581; englishlamp company.com

Lichen Garden Antiques Tel: 01608 678890; lichengardenantiques.com

Hunza Tel: +64 9 528 9471; hunzalighting.com

Pots and Pithoi Tel: 01342 714793; potsandpithoi.com

Elstead Lighting Tel: 01420 82377; elsteadlighting.com

IMAGES GAP/PAUL DEBOIS – DESIGNER: CARO GARDEN DESIGN

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TOP 10 PLANTS

Full Spectrum

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Take inspiration from Waterperry Gardens’ brilliant Colour Borders, with a selection of early-summer flowers chosen by head gardener Pat Havers

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY IMAGE CLIVE NICHOLS

eatrix Havergal established the School of Horticulture for Ladies at Waterperry in 1932 and ran it until her retirement in 1971, having trained generations of gardeners. Pat Havers grew up at Waterperry, joined the garden as an employee in 1997 and became head gardener in 2013, having done her training “in-house, The Waterperry Way”, she explains. “My childhood

was spent around Beatrix Havergal and the amazing ladies, so I always refer to myself as a Home-Grown Head Gardener.”

Here, Pat selects her favourite plants from Waterperry’s striking 100m-long Colour Borders for the best early-summer hues.

Waterperry Gardens, Wheatley, Oxfordshire OX33 1JZ. Tel: 01844 339254; waterperrygardens.co.uk

1 Paeonia lactiflora ‘Bowl of Beauty’ “This showy pink peony has an unusual shape,” says Pat. “It needs staking but looks good in a border or as a cut flower.” Flowers reach 20cm across, while the plant grows to 90cm. Bare-root peonies take up to three years to flower, but make long-lived, rewarding plants.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 75

TOP 10 PLANTS

2 Anchusa azurea ‘Loddon Royalist’

3 Lupinus ‘Chandelier’

Brilliant blue flowers are unusual but this perennial bears them in abundance, year after year. “This is a staple of the borders here,” remarks Pat of these colourful spikes, which can reach 90cm tall. It responds well to picking, so keep cutting it for continued flowering from May to July. Grow in damp soil in sun or partial shade.

‘Chandelier’ lifts the spirits with its cheerful racemes of flowers.

It is ideal for borders where a vertical element is needed – thread it through mixed planting for good effect. “I love all lupins but ‘Chandelier’ looks amazing with purple alliums,” says Pat. All parts of lupins are toxic, so avoid them if children use the garden.

4 Tulipa ‘Maureen’

5 Wisteria floribunda ‘Burford’

“‘Maureen’ is a late, white-flowering tulip that looks good in any planting combination,” says Pat of this May-flowering bulb.

Supplier Peter Nyssen points out that it also offers some wind resistance, so it’s ideal for balconies or a spot that catches the breeze – unsurprisingly it holds an RHS Award of Garden Merit.

Also known as Valder’s wisteria, ‘Burford’ has a glorious scent and is generous with its flowers in early summer. “On a warm, sunny day, it is usually alive with the sound of bees buzzing,” remarks Pat. This variety twines clockwise and needs a sheltered southor west-facing site to receive sufficient sun to thrive.

76 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

IMAGES GARDEN WORLD IMAGES; CLIVE NICHOLS; GAP/NICOLA STOCKEN/TIM GAINEY/JERRY HARPUR

6 Geum ‘Mrs J. Bradshaw’ Geums have come to the fore in recent years and the new Cocktails series offers a range of subtle colours in peachy tones. Coral-hued ‘Mrs J. Bradshaw’ takes some beating both for its colour and lengthy flowering period, from May to September. “It’s a small perennial that will grace the front of any border,” says Pat.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 77

7 Erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’

8 Verbascum ‘Gainsborough’

“This one flowers its heart out for you for most of the season,” notes Pat. Its bold clumps of flowers and blue-green foliage are a foil for red- and orange-toned plants – in fact anything on the opposite side of the colour wheel. It’s fully hardy and its evergreen foliage will provide valuable winter interest. Grow it in full sun.

“‘Gainsborough’ is a short-lived perennial, so we treat it almost as an annual,” says Pat. “It makes a brilliant combination with Geranium ibericum and Geranium x magnificum.” This is a semi-evergreen with branching stems that are covered in lemonyellow flowers from June to August. Propagate from cuttings.

9 Stipa gigantea

10 Rosa ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’

Also known as golden oats, this statuesque grass is one of the earliest to flower at Waterperry. Its height makes it useful at the back of a border, but its transparency means it can also be planted closer to the front, where its feathery plumes can be appreciated. It is easy to care for and looks good in flower arrangements.

“In my opinion, this rose has the best-scented dainty pink flowers – and it rambles anywhere and everywhere,” notes Pat. It reaches up to 6m, so is ideal for clothing the walls of garden buildings where its blooms, which appear in May and June, can be properly appreciated. Grow it in full sun in moist but well-drained soil.

78 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; GAP/NOVA PHOTO GRAPHIK; ALAMY

TOP 10 PLANTS

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GARDEN CLASSICS

Bread & Beyond In the Victorian era camassias came to the UK, but their fascinating history takes us to North America

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; GAP/CLIVE NICHOLS/TORIE CHUGG

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shimmering meadow of indigo-hued camassias in late spring is one of the great joys of this time of year. These striking bulbs are native to North America, mainly the Pacific coast, and make an enchanting addition to relaxed planting schemes. But they have uses beyond the ornamental.

Camassia tubers have long been used as a food source by indigenous Americans, as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, commissioned by Thomas Jefferson to explore the western reaches of the continent, came to learn. During their threeyear expedition, between 1804 and 1806, Lewis and Clark made an arduous east-west journey.

By the time the expedition crossed the Bitterroot Mountains into Idaho, food supplies were low and the men were forced to eat their horses. It was the Nez Perce tribe that came to their aid in September 1805 with bread made from camassia bulbs. Later Clark wrote: “I find myself very unwell all the evening from eating the fish and roots too freely.”

Camassia bulbs have historically been widely traded by indigenous Americans and used in ceremonial rites of passage. ‘Camassia’ itself derives from the Nez Perce Indian common names ‘quamash’ or ‘camas’. By the 1850s, camassias had reached ornamental gardens in the UK, and today there are at least five cultivated species of this member of the Asparagaceae family.

Camssasias occur naturally in mountain grasslands and while their wild habitat is under

HOW TO GROW Plant these springflowering perennials in autumn or winter at around 20cm deep. If soil is sandy, enrich it with organic matter.

Grow camassia in sun or semi-shade where they will reach 90cm.

Potted camassia are available throughout winter and spring.

increasing threat, the popularity of domestic meadow planting has brought these flowers to the fore. They are now a common sight at the Chelsea Flower Show and grow abundantly in the meadows at Highgrove, two of the best species for naturalising in grass being Camassia leichtlinii and C. quamash.

Flowering begins in late April, with elegant racemes of starry-shaped blooms opening up over six weeks. Stella Exley of Hare Spring Cottage Plants (harespringcottageplants.co.uk) is an ardent fan, and holds a National Collection. She suggests pairing the plants with reds, yellows and oranges in pots, or with wisteria, dicentra and polygonatum. n

Camassia: Two blues and two whites to try

C. cusickii ‘Zwanenburg’ Mid-green

leaves with deep blue flowers.

C. leichtlinii ‘Alba’ White flowers with a hint of blue.

C. quamash ‘Orion’ A variety of the most common species.

C. leichtlinii ‘Semiplena’ Striking

semi-double white flowers.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 81

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All-Round Appeal There’s a corydalis to suit any situation, adding relaxed charm to sun or shade, as Hazel Sillver learns at Brian Wickenden’s National Collection PHOTOGRAPHS ANNAÏCK GUITTENY

C. solida ‘George Baker’ is one of the best for red flowers and thrives in sunny borders with well-drained soil.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 83

PLANT FOCUS

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t this time of year, border perennials are few and far between, which makes corydalis a must-have.

Forming a cloud of dainty, tubular flowers above fine, fern-like leaves, they inject the spring garden with lovely colour.

The name ‘corydalis’ comes from the Greek word for crested lark, since the narrow, spurred flowers resemble the quiff-headed bird. Blooms appear over delicate foliage reminiscent of bleeding heart, Welsh poppy, and other members of the poppy family (Papaveraceae), to which corydalis also belong.

The majority are woodlanders that flower in cool, light shade in spring, but some forms grow in sun, and some bloom into July. “Corydalis are great for early flowers in a range of colours and for attractive

84 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above Flowering in April

and May, C. solida and its cultivars are the best corydalis to select for sunnier spots.

leaves,” says Brian Wickenden, who holds a Plant Heritage National Collection of corydalis in Essex, “especially if you have a woodlandtype aspect in your garden, or if you have a scree or dry area that dries out in summer. There are species that are ideal for both situations. Some corydalis are very easy to keep, while others are not for the faint-hearted!”

The genus encompasses over 400 species of annuals, perennials, deciduous plants and evergreens – most of which grow in the Himalayas and China. However, at the mention of corydalis, many gardeners will instantly think of the yellow-flowered Corydalis lutea. Just like Mexican fleabane (Erigeron karvinskianus), it loves to grow out of old walls and paving, flowers for months, and seeds itself around the garden. Bursting out of a woodland wall, glowing yellow in the dappled gloom, it has irresistible charm. Another lovely option for walls is C. ochroleuca, which produces yellow-tipped ivory flowers for months in sun or shade.

When it comes to borders, corydalis can be divided into those that relish shady situations and those that grow in sun. For shade, Brian recommends C. flexuosa, C. elata, and C. cava. The latter – commonly known as holewort – gets going first, producing lilac or ivory flowers in March or April, while C. cava ‘Albiflora’ has lovely white flowers. Pair with scilla, epimedium, erythronium, hellebores, or wood anemones. By late spring, C. elata, and C. flexuosa appear, looking good alongside ferns (such as hart’s tongue and Athyrium ‘Silver Falls’), bleeding hearts (such as ‘Aurora’), and hostas (such as ‘Halcyon’). Both have gorgeous blue flowers, which are often flushed with purple.

Some of the best-known corydalis are the vividblue forms (such as C. cashmeriana or ‘Kingfisher’).

But Brian warns that these can be tricky customers, since the cool, humid conditions they love are not to be found in most British gardens. So if you’re partial to blue, it’s better to opt for C. elata or a form of C. flexuosa such as ‘China Blue’, which has wonderful pale-azure flowers. The late gardener Beth Chatto loved ‘China Blue’ and described it as being, “covered with clusters of glacier-blue flowers, looking like shoals of little fishes swimming through a sea of finely-cut blue-grey leaves.”

Another corydalis for light shade is the unusual C. ophiocarpa, Top right It’s obvious which offers up why C. flexuosa ‘Purple primrose blooms from Leaf’ got its name; blue flowers will follow.

May to July, above greyAbove C. ophiocarpa and green, fern-like foliage. its pretty yellow blooms.

Shade-loving corydalis Left Try C. elata for blue enjoy the conditions of flowers in shady areas. a woodland: relatively cool, light shade; their feet in humus-rich, welldrained, fertile earth that has a good amount of moisture. So leafmould is your best friend, and you could try mulching with composted bark.

For sunnier spots, opt for spring-flowering C. solida, which is commonly known as fumewort or bird-in-a-bush. “C. solida and its hybrids are bombproof plants for sunny borders,” says Brian.

“They look after themselves and will reward you with a variety of coloured seedlings in due course.”

Top left C. ochroleuca

will seed around into paving cracks and walls.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 85

PLANT FOCUS

GROWING ADVICE

Corydalis Care National Collection holder Brian Wickenden on how to succeed with these pretty plants

Species C. solida flowers in mauve, pink, purple, or white during Clockwise from right April and May. ‘Beth Grow C. tauricola in an Evans’ (rose-pink) and alpine bed; C. malkensis is early to flower; C. ‘George Baker’ (bricktemulifolia ‘Chocolate red) are two of the best.

Stars’ is known for its Pair with Euphorbia russet-hued foliage. epithymoides, daffodils and elephant’s ears, for a show of pink, red, and gold.

And if you have an alpine bed, you can grow the graceful C. tauricola, which has pale-pink flowers with damson-coloured noses, and the beautiful white C. malkensis. Both are spring flowering.

Good foliage always adds interest and various corydalis supply it. Most have finely cut leaves, while a few boast foxy leaf tints. The grey-green leaves of C. ophiocarpa, mature to russet-bronze. C. flexuosa ‘Purple Leaf’ has blue flowers above claret and tan-tinted fern-like leaves. And, C. temulifolia ‘Chocolate Stars’ has rust-hued evergreen foliage in autumn and winter, morphing to bronze and olive when the lavender-coloured flowers open in spring.

Given the right conditions, in woodland gardens and borders, corydalis are a joy, providing colour and charm throughout spring and early summer. n

Above C. solida ‘Beth Evans’ bears deep-pink flowers in April to May.

Brian Wickenden’s National Plant Collection of Corydalis can be viewed by appointment.

Tel: 01255 821744; briwick@aol.com 86 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Care differs for shade and sun-loving forms of corydalis.

Ensure the shade lovers are kept moist and free from other plants encroaching. Don’t allow the sunloving corydalis to be smothered by other plants when they enter dormancy over summer.

C. lutea and C. ochroleuca are thugs, so consider whether you want them before introducing them. Every seed is viable and will grow anywhere, assisted by ants who spread the seeds around, including into the pointing in brickwork.

To enhance the flowering display, divide corydalis (including C. solida and C. flexuosa) every three to four years to make new plants. Lift, pull the corms apart and replant separately.

Shade-preferring forms (such as C. flexuosa, C. elata, and C. cava) prefer a semi-shaded spot and a well-drained, moist soil that is neutral to acid. Ideally, give them a peaty soil enriched with leafmould or composted bark.

If you buy these as dry corms, plant them three inches deep and set on their side to alleviate rotting during dormancy.

Grow sun-loving corydalis in well-drained soil, with added grit if you’re in a clay area where winter wet is a problem. They will grow in acid or alkaline soil.

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NURSERIES Benjamin Ranyard, whose seed company Higgledy Garden now operates from Cheshire’s Bluebell Cottage Nursery.

The Good Life Holly Farrell meets Benjamin Ranyard, founder of Higgledy Garden, supplying cut-flower seed first from his narrowboat, and now from a more permanent home in Cheshire PHOTOGRAPHS JOE WAINWRIGHT

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 89

NURSERIES

“H

iggledy is a nice story of boy made good I guess. When I started out, people were doubtful I could succeed – the big companies have so much buying power that nobody thought I could make it profitable… but that’s what we did.” Benjamin Ranyard is a maverick seed merchant, proving that ‘simplicity is the ultimate sophistication’ with his small company Higgledy Garden. With no land of his own and operating in the main from his narrowboat home, over the past ten years he has built up a highly successful cutflower seed company that now employs four people.

Of course it hasn’t all been plain sailing for Ben, who was working in hospitality, managing bars 90 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Above Dark maroon ‘Black Ball’ cornflowers and ‘Beaujolais’ sweet peas make a pleasing contrast to sunflower Helianthus ‘Valentine’.

and restaurants, before he started growing flowers.

Initially he was a flower farmer, “but I wasn’t any good at selling them,” he admits. He was, however, good at growing the flowers and writing for his website, and the content he put on his blog and Twitter account soon attracted a following. People came to the website to find out how to grow the flowers, so it made sense to Ben to also sell the seeds – and, from there, things began to flourish.

Always relatively nomadic by nature, Ben grows on borrowed or rented land and last year struck up an arrangement with Sue Beesley of Bluebell Cottage Nursery in Cheshire. Like the rest of the country Ben needed to stay put for a while during lockdown, but a suitable site wasn’t immediately obvious since he needed plenty of space to exercise his dog, a Hungarian vizsla called Flash (who features frequently on Ben’s social media), access to a post office to run the business and space to grow flowers.

“Sue really kindly said that I could come and lock down and grow at her place for free, and it’s worked out really well – both of our businesses have grown as a result,” Ben explains. Sue has given Ben the use of a 500m2 patch at the entrance to the gardens and he believes the contrast between his ‘chaotic’ style and her ‘exquisite’ gardens shows off both to their best advantage. Sue agrees: “I think it’s a great partnership – I had some spare land and was in need of a bit of a psychological boost after running this place for 13 years. Ben needed somewhere to get his hands in the soil and a base for his expanding business. And of course he brought with him his natural joie de vivre – and Flash! It’s been great fun having them around this past year.”

The gardens are close to the canal where Ben can moor his boat, and there’s plenty of space for Flash, too. For the 2020 growing season Ben used only around a quarter of the available space and while he plans to expand this year, he has no desire to keep on multiplying the business ad infinitum. “The past ten years have been the happiest of my life,” he says.

“I’ve got a really good idea of what I want, and I want to have enough time to enjoy my life: my boat, my dog and growing flowers.” With that in mind he makes sure that the size of the growing plot is manageable so he can both work on that and run the business. This year he has also been open about his decision to put a cap on his sales for the year, to deliberately keep the business small and not expand into retail spaces or dilute the stock range. “Most businesspeople would just laugh at me and say I should go big or go home, but that’s just not how I want to operate. Higgledy works well as a small business, it’s intimate and it’s got a really lovely loyal base of customers.”

Partly that loyal customer base is there because of the magic of the images and prose that Ben shares online. They feel a personal connection with his

Top left Rudbeckia hirta

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Top right Cleome ‘Violet Queen’ stands out.

This image Sue Beesley of Bluebell Cottage.

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04/03/2021 09:36

NURSERIES

narrative, and that story is part of the business.

He jokes that everything fell into place and that “it wouldn’t work if I lived in a cul-de-sac and had my plot behind a timber yard”, but the creation of a huge Twitter following takes time, effort and honesty.

Ben is Higgledy Garden, and all the elements of the company and its social media complement each other, so that he now has a Twitter following at least three times as big as those of the major seed houses.

However, while customers might be attracted by the media, they stay only if the content and products are good, and Ben’s endless enthusiasm for growing flowers and helping others to do so is why so many people go back each year. To buy a packet of flower seeds from Higgledy is to know that Ben personally vouches for them – he has grown them himself Above Godetia provide a gorgeous froth of lilacpink flowers, along with white Cosmos ‘Purity’.

Left Ben with his dog, Flash, star of many social media posts.

Far left Some flowers are picked to sell to Bluebell Cottage’s visitors.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 93

NURSERIES

Start a cutting garden this year Ben recommends cut-flower beginners start with hardy annuals, such as Calendula officinalis ‘Indian Prince’, cornflower ‘Blue Ball’ and sweet peas. Phacelia is more usually regarded as a green manure, but Ben rates it as a cut flower: “If you grow it, your garden will be full of bees and butterflies”. He’s also a big fan of biennials, such as foxgloves, honesty and sweet rocket. “By using biennials you have a really solid patch of plants in March, long before the hardy annuals get going.”

and recommends them – and that you are supporting a small business that does everything by hand, from making and stamping the seed packets to writing the notes that go with them (all plastic-free). The joy of social media for Ben is that “I genuinely feel connected with my customers. Because of the way the digital world works I can directly help people with their growing, and celebrate with them when they have a beautiful patch of flowers.”

Ben has a clear and infectious love of life but also of flowers, which he talks about like people, and he says he finds growing flowers ‘totally inspirational’. “There’s not been a single year where I haven’t found it amazing just watching my flower patch grow – it’s the most incredible thing in the world, and I’m really lucky to have my career around that.” n Above Some of Ben’s cut flowers for sale: varieties are selected for vase life and strong stems.

Left Packets of seed waiting to be mailed out to Higgledy customers.

higgledygarden.com; bluebellcottage.co.uk 94 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

In fact, Ben cautions against over-keenness in sowing annuals.

Wait until mid-April before sowing into pots (he creates mini-greenhouses out of sturdy plastic-lidded boxes) or directly into the soil. The warmer soil temperatures and longer hours of sunshine mean that seeds sown then will grow into healthy, stocky plants that require minimal cosseting and don’t take significantly longer to flower than those sown considerably earlier.

If you have a really good-quality, weed-free patch of soil, sow direct but, if not, sow into small (9cm) pots and then plant out in May. This way the plants can get going without any competition, and you can spend the time weeding the plot without having to go carefully around the flower seedlings. By May the worst of the weeds will have been dealt with and the flowers will be a good size to outgrow any that are left.

Ben puts about nine plants to a square metre to allow enough space to get a hoe between them.

Traditional cut-flower patches are grown in rows of single varieties, but this year why not try mixing them up, and making it a bit more – well – Higgledy?

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LAWN CARE

IMAGE CLIVE NICHOLS

Keep your lawn green and healthy, whether you have a short, neat lawn like this one – or longer meadow-style planting.

A Cut Above Whether your garden features fine turf, a laid-back lawn or the grass is left to grow as a meadow, spring is the time for those key lawn-care jobs that keep grass growing well

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 97

LAWN CARE

This image Moss is more

likely to grow in shaded lawns, so prune trees to let in light if you want to weaken its grip.

Left A smart, formal lawn suits formal borders.

T

he sun is out, the days are longer, the sounds and scents of spring gladden the heart and, underfoot, the grass is beginning to grow. Which means it’s that time of year to start paying attention to your lawn, particularly given that the lawn care jobs carried out now in spring are the ones that will help get the grass in the best possible shape for the summer to come.

How much time and effort you lavish on the lawn really depends on the finish that’s desired – and how much you enjoy looking after it. A perfectly smooth, weed-free, striped baize obviously takes more effort than a laissezfaire lawn studded with daisies and clover, but both types will benefit from a little care and attention now. And even for those who treat their grass as more of a meadow, the first mow of the season is due. For many people, spring lawn care covers the whole gamut if there’s smart lawn next to formal borders and longer grass below trees or towards the garden’s woollier edges.

Whatever the style of grass you aspire to, all areas of turf tend to suffer from similar problems, but most are easily addressed with a few key spring tasks.

98 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Keep invasive moss at bay Visit a famous Japanese garden such as the Saihoji Temple in Kyoto and, after marvelling at the beautifully cultivated blanket of moss that flows across the surface of the ground in the dappled light cast by acers, you may well come away asking: ‘What’s wrong with moss?’ Moss gardens do look incredible but, as a lawn alternative, it’s not the best choice if you have children who want to play games, if it gets a lot of foot traffic, or if you’d like to spread out a picnic blanket – it can be spongy, damp and soggy. It can also turn brown during hot, dry weather, which isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing effect – but then, so can grass.

Moss is normally only a problem when lawns are perpetually shady, damp or the soil below

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IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; GAP/NICOLA STOCKEN

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them is compacted. If it’s neighbouring trees or buildings that are casting the shade, and there’s no way these fundamental issues can be addressed, embracing moss may be the best solution. It will save hours of effort, negate the need to apply chemical treatments to kill the moss, and avoid the frustration of finding that, whatever you do, the results are temporary and the moss comes back.

If permanent shade isn’t the problem and you’re still keen to go into battle, compaction and waterlogging can be relieved with time and effort.

Serious drainage issues across the garden may need addressing – a good landscaper should be able to advise on installing drains – but if the lawn just stays soggy in areas that see heavy footfall, local compaction might be the problem. Hollow-tine

aerating is the solution here, where cores of soil are removed and the holes backfilled with a sandy lawn top dressing. Done annually, this gradually improves the soil below the grass, alleviating compaction while also letting air reach the roots, thus improving the lawn’s growth so it can outcompete the moss.

At the same time, treat existing moss with a liquid moss killer (these are often more effective than granular treatments), and when it has turned black after a fortnight or so, rake it out. It helps to mow the lawn before you apply the treatment, giving it the best chance of reaching the moss.

There are also multi-action lawn-care products for spring application that combine moss treatment with fertiliser and weedkiller.

Kent & Stowe 4 Prong Lawn Aerator Removes cores of soil to aerate the lawn’s roots. £34.99; gardenhealth.com

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 99

LAWN CARE Bowling green lawns like this are made of fine fescue grasses, so patch any bare areas with a suitable lawn seed.

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Fill in unsightly bare patches Bare patches can occur for a number of reasons: scuffing and general wear and tear – particularly in areas that are walked over frequently; damage from moles or pets and their urine; treatment of weeds or moss that leaves behind a bare patch; a general thinning of the grass after a wet winter, in areas of light shade or where leaves have been left on the surface and smothered the grass below; or where the lawn has been ‘scalped’ by too close a mowing.

Spring is the perfect time to patch up any bald bits, and to thicken the lawn generally by overseeding. Use a hand fork or small rake to break up the surface of the bare patch so the grass seed can 100 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

root easily when it germinates – you could also spread compost or topsoil over the patch to create the ideal conditions. Make sure you choose a carton of grass seed that will blend into your existing lawn – bowling green lawns are usually made up of fine-leaved fescues; sow a general purpose grass seed that’s mostly ryegrass and the filled patches will stick out. For most normal lawns, a ryegrass mix is just the ticket and the latest developments in grassseed breeding guarantee vigorous growth that’s hardwearing and resistant to dog urine problems.

Once sown, remember to water it as you would any newly sown seed so it has the moisture required to germinate, and keep watering as it gets established.

Johnsons Lawn Thickener Thicken the growth of a tired lawn with this fast-germinating seed. £8.99; johnsonslawnseed.com

Strong, healthy grass resists invasion by weeds, so a feed in spring can help reduce problems later on.

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IMAGES GAP/GRAHAM STRONG; CLIVE NICHOLS

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Give the lawn a spring boost If you are leaving grass to grow long in meadowlike areas, feeding is something to be avoided since it encourages grass growth at the expense of wildflowers, most of which prefer a poorer soil.

Anyone aiming for bowling green perfection may need to feed a couple of times during the growing season, particularly if the grass undergoes an intensive mowing regime.

For everyone else, who just wants to give the grass what it needs to grow strongly and healthily so that it forms a thick sward that can withstand traffic and compete with undesirable weeds, a dose of fertiliser at this time of year is well worthwhile. It makes sense

to help the grass grow as well as it can – weeds find it harder to invade a thick sward, while vigorous, questing roots will help lawns stay green during dry weather, reducing your input later on in the season.

Use a straight lawn fertiliser or, if you have just a few weeds that need dealing with, use one of the combined feed-and-weed products. Follow the instructions carefully and measure the dose accurately, since too much fertiliser can scorch the grass. If the fertiliser or combined product you use is granular as opposed to a liquid, you’ll need to water the treatment in unless you apply it just before it rains, and remember that most fertilisers can’t be used on newly laid or sown grass.

Gardena Handspreader M Even coverage at the right rate for granular fertilisers. £22.99 gardena.com

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 101

LAWN CARE

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Start to mow regularly For long, meadow-style grass, April is the time to give it a new-season cut, down to about 7cm or so.

This helps weaken its growth, to allow meadow flowers to come through – then of course, it gets its ‘hay’ cut in late summer. Spring is also a good time to set out mown paths through the longer grass.

For regular lawns, mowing usually starts in early spring, when temperatures rise and the grass gets going. Start gradually with the mower blades set high and lower them as the season progresses and growth increases. On a standard lawn, don’t mow away more than a third of the grass’s height each time. It’s somehow easy to forget that a lawn is essentially the leaves of thousands of grass plants, and those leaves are their engines for growth.

Swipe off nearly all of their leaves every week and it will weaken the plants, which will then struggle to regrow, leaving them vulnerable to disease or invasion by weeds. Not to mention that extremely close-cut lawns will be the first ones to turn brown in hot, dry weather.

102 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Over summer, a height of 30-40mm is about right for most normal lawns – short enough to look neat but long enough to allow the grass plants plenty of leaf so they can carry on growing. This should require only once-a-week mowing, possibly a little more frequently at the very height of the growing season. Many reluctant lawn-keepers have been converted by the effortless lure of robotic lawn mowers. With their ‘little and often’ cutting regime they do a super job of lightly ‘tipping’ the grass, returning the fine clippings to the lawn to feed it and freeing up time for more enjoyable jobs to be done around the garden.

Anyone striving for smooth perfection may want to add a session of scarification to their spring lawn care regime. Using either a spring-tine rake for small areas, or a mechanical scarifier for large lawns, scarifying rakes out the debris (known as ‘thatch’) that builds up at the bottom of the lawn over time, letting air in to the base of the grass and encouraging it to ‘tiller’, which basically means spread sideways and thicken up. ■

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IMAGE GAP/JOE WAINWRIGHT, DESIGN: SUE BEESLEY

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CONTAINERS

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IMAGE NATIONAL TRUST/NICK TURNER

Rebecca Bevan distils 300 years of experience from Britain’s finest gardens in her new book, The National Trust School of Gardening, including advice on creating glorious seasonal container displays

Glossy aeoniums and scarlet pelargoniums brighten summer containers in the garden at Hidcote.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 105

CONTAINERS

Above Pots line up along

the wall in Bodnant’s poolside garden, which is known as The Bath.

H

owever nice your pots, the plants should be the stars of the show.

The general rule is to ensure that the plant mass is always as big or bigger than the container. Most small spaces look better with one large pot with a decent specimen plant, rather than small pots dotted about, which can get rather lost. Bigger pots will also dry out less quickly if you are away over a sunny weekend and can’t water them. If you have only small pots, grouping them into collections can create the sense of

106 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

mass needed to make an impact. The advantage of this is that individual pots can be moved into the display when at their best and hidden when the plants go over.

The affordability and temporariness of bedding plants makes it easy to experiment with new combinations each year. Some gardeners aim to create schemes that harmonise with nearby borders.

For others, seasonal container displays are an opportunity to introduce new colours and textures to change the look of an area. A striking effect for a terrace or balcony is to fill a number of pots with

CONTAINER IDEAS from Tintinhull Senior Gardener Helena Hewson plants pots with a nod to Tintinhull’s creator, Phyllis Reiss

Scent and sensibility A brilliant welcome

IMAGES NATIONAL TRUST/JOE WAINWRIGHT/ANDREW BUTLER

Either side of the steps leading to the front door, Helena has grouped pots of varying sizes filled with a mix of different plants. Her favourites include clear-blue, daisy-flowered Felicia amelloides, an old-fashioned but reliable plant that Phyllis Reiss would almost certainly have grown, and Salvia discolor, a more adventurous choice with silver leaves and jet-black flowers. Towering above these are two Tibouchina urvilleana.

Hot spot

The golden touch

Helena plants large stone and terracotta pots with Canna indica, Helichrysum petiolare and Pelargonium ‘Shottesham Pet’. All three are tolerant of this hot, sunny site and the luxuriant canna foliage looks great against the stone.

Copper and gold Heucherella ‘Brass Lantern’, golden-leaved Carex oshimensis ‘Evergold’ and single-flowered Dahlia ‘Bishop of Dover’ perfectly complement the honeycoloured hamstone of the house wall.

Helena recommends scented-leaved pelargoniums for growing in pots: they are tolerant of heat and drought and irresistibly tactile. She and her team of volunteers propagate all their own pelargoniums from a collection that they keep in the greenhouse.

They take cuttings in September and again in spring, if needed.

Muted brilliance In the Pool Garden – an iconic Tintinhull feature that Reiss designed as a memorial to her nephew – Helena plants four giant pots with purple-leaved cannas, Salvia cacaliifolia, pelargoniums and Helichrysum petiolare. She chooses not to use bright colours here as there is already enough drama from the famous hot and cool borders.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 107

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CONTAINERS

IMAGES GAP/ROBERT MABIC/NICOLA STOCKEN

the same selection of Left A blue-glazed pot complements these tiled bedding plants so that steps, helping to create together they form a a vivid Moroccan theme. collection. You don’t Below A collection of need exactly the same pots grouped together makes real impact on combination in each this decking. pot, but some repetition between them will draw the eye from one to another and feel harmonious.

Most of us want our pots bursting with colour, but bold flowers close together can easily clash. To overcome this, choose complementary colours such as pastels, which always go well together, and aim for a mix of different flower shapes with some plants chosen purely for their foliage – many bedding plants have fabulous silver, gold, lime-green or glossy leaves. It’s also best to choose a mix of plants of different heights and habits. Many species used for bedding – including pelargoniums, verbenas and lobelias – are available in upright, spreading, semitrailing or fully trailing forms, so check when you are buying. Plants that trail elegantly are especially important for hanging baskets and window boxes.

Many shrubs, perennials and grasses also have a place in containers. Some of the longest flowering include everlasting wallflowers, dwarf penstemons and shrubby salvias. Mix them with bedding plants in large containers or provide them with containers of their own to stand among pots of bedding.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 109

CONTAINERS Right A grouping of Most will need annual containers at The Courts repotting into fresh Garden in Wiltshire compost and regular includes pelargoniums liquid feeds. Perennials and aeoniums. suited to container growing that need less frequent repotting and feeding include lavender and rosemary (which love sun and tolerate drought), hostas (which can be kept far more slug-free in pots than in the ground) and agapanthus (which flowers best when squeezed into a container). Exotics with dramatic foliage such as cannas, aeoniums and Melianthus major are effective surrounded by floriferous bedding.

Fill your pots three-quarters full with peat-free compost. A multipurpose one is suitable for all bedding plants. Shrubs and perennials planted in a pot for a few years do better in loam-based compost that will retain its structure for longer. Don’t reuse compost for seasonal displays – it won’t have enough nutrients left and is better spread on beds as a soil improver. For spring planting, some gardeners mix in a slow- or controlled-release fertiliser, but if you don’t want to buy another product, there’s no need: compost has plenty of nutrients and you can add more from organic liquid fertiliser during the summer. n

Adapted from The National Trust School of Gardening by Rebecca Bevan, £20, National Trust Books.

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110 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

IMAGES NATIONAL TRUST/MARK BOLTON; SHUTTERSTOCK

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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 SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 113

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 widely grown today, being especially good for oil extraction. In this lies the brilliance of

114 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

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, early this year the collection moved into a brand new, state-of-the-art building, Hilltop, which is intended to open to the public later this year.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these studious spaces sequestered from throngs of visitors and crowd-pleasing herbaceous borders yet so integral 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 new RHS herbarium at Wisley.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 115

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PRESERVING FLOWERS This image Helichrysum

bracteatum lends itself to lasting displays.

Right Consider keeping a journal using favourite pressed flowers.

Below Flower-pressing equipment.

IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; JAMJAR EDIT

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.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 117

PRESERVING FLOWERS

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.

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

Further reading Carolyn Dunster explores ways to preserve and present special flowers in Cut and 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 outlet 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

118 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

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 220gsm-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.

IMAGES JAMJAR EDIT; SHUTTERSTOCK

Above Selected framed,

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.

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Strulch is made from wheat straw and the mineralisation process preserves the straw and turns it dark brown.

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BOOKS

The Reviewer

A selection of the best writing on the shelves this month

The Kew Gardener’s Guide To Growing Roses

by Tony Hall Frances Lincoln, £12.99

Like Astaire and Rogers, Simon and Garfunkel, and French and Saunders, roses and English gardens are a dream partnership and it is difficult to imagine one without the other. Yet even to the well initiated in these matters, it can at times be almost impossible to decide on the perfect rose to grow.

To assist, author Tony Hall has selected 78 good candidates, grouping them by wide-ranging functions or locations and noting their idiosyncrasies. There are roses for hips, shady spots, training as standards or growing in containers. He makes the case for ramblers and climbers and picks good roses for training against walls – ‘Reine des Violettes’ , ‘Roseraie de l’Hay’, ‘Rosy Cushion’ and Rosa roxburghii, although many will doubtless have an opinion on that.

Threaded through it all is the sort of sound advice to be expected from this established writer (his Gardening with Drought-Resistant Plants was published in 2020). He also offers definitive explanations as to the differences between roses types, clearing up any debate over floribundas, grandifloras, climbers and ramblers.

Can a garden have too many roses? Many would argue not. And although the bare-root season has passed, it’s not too late to put in a rose for later flowering. If that is on your mind, this book will help you choose just one more – and outline how and where to grow it.

Herb/A Cook’s Companion

WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY

by Mark Diacono Quadrille, £26

To the canon of works on herbs, Marc Diacono adds a fresh, contemporary take on the subject.

His writing is engaging and draws deeply from personal experience of both growing and cooking these valuable plants.

While you’ll find the usual suspects such as parsley, rosemary and so forth, Marc has slipped in a few wildcards that will make you think again. Fig leaves, for instance, make a wonderful flavouring for ice cream and, when toasted, can bring a sweet, slightly nutty flavour to rice. Some additions are less practical – it’s difficult to imagine having many avocado leaves to use – but these are the exception, rather than the rule.

There is plenty of growing advice and recipes are diverse and inspiring, among them, picada from Catalonia, adjika from Georgia and hearty French pistou. This wonderful book will enhance the shelves of gardeners and cooks alike.

Plant, House Plants: Choosing, Styling, Caring

by Gynelle Leon Mitchell Beazley, £15

The quality of our interior spaces can have an immense effect on the way we experience and view the world. Houseplants have rightly enjoyed their place in the sun in recent years, with millennials in smaller homes of course, but also among those who have had to remain indoors for the past year.

Houseplants are all too easy to kill and many is the plant that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Gynelle Leon is the founder of Prick, the Hackney shop specialising in cacti and succulents. Her first book, also called Prick, dealt with that topic. In Plant, she shares knowledge on choosing, styling and caring for leafy houseplants. There are 100 plants noted here and what stands out is their diversity.

From broad-leaved Ficus elastica, to filigree Tillandsia usneoides, a world of plants awaits the attentive grower.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 121

122 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

Q&A

BOOKS

In her new book, A Year Full of Flowers, Sarah Raven offers seasonal planting ideas and advice to would-be cut-flower growers, inspired by her own garden at Perch Hill Farm Can you outline three good hacks for growing and arranging cut flowers?

Think of your seed as gold dust and be stingy with it. For this, gutters are good for concentrating the mind – sow 1.5 inches apart and you can’t go wrong.

Galvanised water troughs make brilliant containers because they retain moisture down to the base and are excellent for an intensive cutting patch. For floristry, instead of using floral foam or chicken wire, crumple up pliable woody stems, put them in a vase and you’ve got a lovely, organic, natural equivalent.

Debunk a myth about growing cut flowers.

When I started teaching, there was a perception that our homegrown flowers wouldn’t last. This is not true. If you grow the right varieties, pick them at the right time of day and condition them correctly – that is, not pick-plonk, but pick, condition, rest and arrange – you’ll get more life from them. The things that have disappointed me over the years are things I’ve bought at vast expense but which have flopped because they’ve been grown in a polytunnel or glasshouse with massive irrigation and heat.

What is essential for a good cutting garden?

What else would you like to achieve?

Boringly, site, sun and soil – all that. Even if you just have a window box, choose the right place. I wouldn’t bother with any plant that wasn’t cut-andcome-again, to the point that I would grow narcissus over tulips because the right varieties give you a repeat crop. Develop a passion for picking. Having a bit of an eye helps: the visual life must engage you.

I’d like more people to discover the simple pleasure of gardening. That’s why I still love teaching: it’s seeing that spark in someone’s eye when this sort of lightbulb goes on. It’s an easy switch to flip and gives a person joy for the rest of their life. I’d like to do that more and I don’t want it to be elitist or exclusive.

INTERVIEW VIVIENNE HAMBLY

Which flowers should we be sowing now for long cutting and distinctiveness?

If I were to choose one it would be dahlias, which are now perennial here because of climate change. They give you the most bountiful harvest and because they’re now so fashionable, the range is ever better.

The whole cosmos clan is unbelievably giving and there’s nothing better or more reliable than cosmos ‘Purity’ or ‘Dazzler’. I adore ammi arranged on its own. Foxgloves and antirrhinums give a vertical spire and there is good breeding going on in both.

On antirrhinums, look for the ‘Chantilly’ series, which have scent and flower from June to September.

Which are your own favourite spring varieties to have in the house?

For me it’s blossom, from plants like amelanchier, Prunus ‘Tai-haku’ and Malus ‘Dartmouth’ and I always sear the stem end in boiling water for 30 seconds. A single bough is fantastic, or, if you’re having a party, a bucketful is wonderful. I use fritillaries, even the imperials, which smell of fox poo but have such an architectural shape. Snake’s heads are very short lived, but you can get two weeks out of an imperial. If you change the water the smell is minimised and adding vinegar helps because it stops the stem rotting. There are tulips of course. I grow ‘Flaming Parrot’ or ‘Estella Rijnveld’ to bring in.

A Year Full of Flowers

by Sarah Raven with photography by Jonathan Buckley, Bloomsbury, £25.

SPRING 2021 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 123

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IMAGES MIMI CONNOLLY; MARK BOLTON; REBECCA BERNSTEIN; ANNAÏCK GUITTENY

Next issue

SAON 21 A L PR E I

Spring perfection • Homeware designer Sophie Conran’s beautiful Wiltshire garden • The waterside gardens at Dipley Mill in Hampshire • A florist’s garden in West Sussex, designed with wildlife in mind • Artist Judith Glover’s iris-packed garden in rural Suffolk • The dreamy garden at Mothecombe House and its owner’s devotion to bees PLUS Behind the scenes at Special Plants Nursery; the finest alliums; a guide to garden entertaining; finding the perfect furniture; Troy Scott Smith shares his box-trimming tips

Don’t miss out. Buy single copies or subscribe now at theenglishgarden.co.uk

01858 438854

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NURSERIES & GARDENS FOR SPRING INSPIRATION TREHANE NURSERY

WEASDALE NURSERIES A small, traditional grower based in Dorset, Trehane Nursery has specialised in Camellias and blueberries for more than 60 years, introducing many new Camellias to the British gardener. Today, we grow an unsurpassed range of more than 200 different varieties, from young plants to mature specimens, all of which can be dispatched by courier throughout the UK. For friendly advice, or to order, please contact us by phone, via the website, or call in and visit our peaceful, woodland nursery.

Weasdale Nurseries have been growing hardy trees and shrubs on our site at 850ft elevation in the Howgill Fells, at the heart of beautiful Cumbria, since 1950.

Specialising in mail order from the outset, our careful packaging system has become legendary and guarantees safe arrival of the delicate contents anywhere in the UK. Contact us for your free copy of our highly readable, illustrated catalogue, listing over 900 different plants available from November to April. EGSPR/21.

OPEN: Monday to Friday (all year) 8.30am to 4.30pm; please check website for weekend opening hours.

Tel: 01202 873490 www.trehanenursery.co.uk Stapehill Road, Wimborne, Dorset BH21 7ND

Tel: 015396 23246 sales@weasdale.com | www.weasdale.com Newbiggin on Lune, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria CA17 4LX

ASHWOOD NURSERIES

TWELVE NUNNS At Twelve Nunns we are well known for our Harvington Hellebores® and have many beautiful colours and forms to choose from.

They are available to order from our website now, so why not brighten up your winter garden.

A plantsman’s paradise and an independent nursery situated in the West Midlands. We specialise in Hellebores, Hardy Cyclamen, Salvias, Hepaticas, Lewisias, Hydrangeas, Dwarf Conifers, Snowdrops, Primula auriculas and many more beautiful plants.

We also specialise in Trilliums, Erythroniums and Roscoea – all plants that enjoy dappled shade in the garden. Our plants are bred and grown by us in rural Lincolnshire and come carefully packed in our ecofriendly packaging. Visit our website to find out more.

Our mail order service sends plants, garden essentials and gifts to mainland UK destinations.

Please visit our website for up-to-date information regarding opening times and events.

© Clive Nichols

Tel: 01384 401996 mailorder@ashwoodnurseries.com | www.ashwoodnurseries.com Ashwood Lower Lane, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 0AE

Tel: 01778 590455 penny@twelvenunns.co.uk www.twelvenunns.co.uk

DAISY CLOUGH NURSERIES LTD

TENDERCARE NURSERIES

A busy nursery in rural Lancashire, Daisy Clough specialises in a carefully selected range of over 700 perennials and grasses.

Open seven days a week, the nursery also offers a good selection of shrubs, trees, container plants and fruit. Plenty of homegrown vegetable plants are available through spring and summer.

A full plant list is available to view on our website. Our garden shop sells seeds, tools and essential garden sundries. We have a beautiful homeware and clothing shop, a deli and a tearoom to round off your visit. Covid restrictions apply.

Tel: 01524 793104 info@daisyclough.com | www.daisyclough.com Station Lane, Scorton, Preston, Lancs PR3 1AN

Specialising in more mature and specimen plants, from acers to agapanthus, pleached trees and evergreen screens, Tendercare’s 12 acres are a joy to visit.

Our popular site visit and warrantied planting services can help rejuvenate a tired garden or change the focus of the garden after building works. While our award-winning design service will create a beautiful garden for you to enjoy all year through.

Book a visit with assistance from one of our horticulturists, by golf buggy, or pop into our office and we can give you a map, a route to follow, and suggestions to get you started.

Tel: 01895 837120 sales@tendercare.co.uk | www.tendercare.co.uk.

Southlands Road, Denham UB9 4HD. Next to Junction 2 on the M40.

THE BISHOP’S PALACE & GARDENS, WELLS

Don’t miss the outstanding Tulip displays this spring.

Tel: 01749 988111 www.bishopspalace.org.uk Off Market Place, Wells, Somerset BA5 2PD

OPEN: Daily 10am to 6pm.

WAKEHURST Have a day out like no other at Wakehurst, Kew’s wild botanic garden. See the landscape come alive after a long winter, as flowers turn from buds to blooms and trees transform with new life.

Wakehurst is home to the UK’s largest conservation project, the Millennium Seed Bank and more than 500 acres of beautiful gardens and woodlands. Discover Kew’s world-leading plant science — and the extraordinary gardens at its heart.

Wakehurst © Jim Holden, RBG Kew

More than 14 acres of spectacular, Covid-secure, RHS partner gardens, including picturesque, romantic, formal and Victorian styles, a wildflower arboretum, specimen trees, a contemporary Quiet Garden and Community Garden alongside waterfalls, well pools and a moat with resident swans around a stunning medieval palace.

OPEN: Daily 10am to 6pm (from 1 March)

Tel: 01444 894066 wakehurst@kew.org | Pre-booking essential kew.org/wakehurst Selsfield Rd, Haywards Heath RH17 6TN

CERNEY HOUSE GARDENS

KELMARSH HALL Cerney House garden is a romantic English garden for all seasons. There is a beautiful secluded Victorian walled garden. In March and April we feature a wonderful display of tulips which heralds the arrival of spring with a riot of colour throughout the garden.

Explore our new medicinal herb garden. Tea, coffee and homemade cake available.

Dogs welcome.

OPEN: Daily from Sat 30 Jan 2021. 10am to 7pm (dusk).

© Sarah Vivienne

New for 2021 Potting Shed shop selling plants.

The glorious grade II* listed gardens at Kelmarsh Hall are influenced by the work of three 20th century tastemakers: Nancy Lancaster, Norah Lindsey and Geoffrey Jellicoe. The garden holds exuberant flower borders, romantic rose gardens, and a walled garden full of vibrant colours.

Springtime offers swathes of daffodils and fritillaries along the driveway to the Hall, along with a colourful sea of tulips in the walled garden.

OPEN: Sunday 4 April-Thurs 30 Sept 2021. Tues, Wed, Thurs, Sun and BH Mon.

Tel: 01285 831300 janet@cerneygardens.com | www.cerneygardens.com North Cerney, Cirencester GL7 7BX

Tel: 01604 686543 enquiries@kelmarsh.com | www.kelmarsh.com Northamptonshire NN6 9LY

HEDGING UK

SPRING REACH NURSERY Hedging UK are specialist growers of quality hedging plants.

Plants are available to purchase at wholesale prices across the UK through our mail order service.

Buy direct from the grower, delivered direct to your door.

Readers of The English Garden get a 5% discount (quote TEG2021).

Tel: 01704 827224 or 07789 922457 sales@hedginguk.com | www.hedginguk.com Boundary House Farm, Holmeswood Road, Holmeswood, Lancashire L40 1UA

A plant fanatic’s paradise on the edge of the beautiful Surrey Hills, just 10 minutes from the A3/M25.

Brilliant home-grown Shrubs, Climbers, Grasses, Perennials, Roses, Ferns, Trees, Hedging and Fruit, plus these spring wonders: pink Chaenomeles ‘Moerloosei’, Exochorda ‘The Bride’, Magnolia ‘Black Tulip’, Magnolia ‘Genie’ and Ribes ‘Elkington’s White’. New season roses and yew hedging now ready.

Tel: 01483 284769 info@springreachnursery.co.uk | www.springreachnursery.co.uk Long Reach, Ockham, Surrey GU23 6PG

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LAST WORD

Coming Full Circle The death of the beloved pear tree that watched over the formal garden at Morville leads Katherine Swift to consider the beauty of imperfection and impermanence

130 THE ENGLISH GARDEN SPRING 2021

“

With its twisted trunk and shattered crown the tree became the glory of the garden”

Then, last summer, the tree, having flowered its heart out, died. We had seen it coming. Over the years it had dropped bigger and bigger branches.

Sam, who came to take it down, worked so neatly, so full of respect for the tree and the part it had played that, when he had finished and the wood had been taken away, there was not a mark on the grass where the trunk had fallen, only an absence in the air.

Before he cut it down, he climbed to the top and took a photograph of the garden from the pear tree’s point of view; as if it had been watching all those years while the garden took shape around it – a green garden with yew hedges, cloister and turf maze, topiary and temple. In the photograph, arching over the garden, was a perfect rainbow, as if to say: all is well. Everything is as it should be. ■

ILLUSTRATION JULIA RIGBY PORTRAIT RICHARD BLOOM

I

write this in January, as the sleet and snow comes skirling down sideways between the house and the heavy-boughed yew tree opposite. Snow has bookended my life: the winter-long drifts of 1946-7 at my birth and now this fitful blast, coming and going as the temperature alternately hovers and dives.

Last April I made a bargain, amid the incandescent white blossom of the pear trees, the air full of the drifting white petals of damson and plum.

There had never been such a spring. In the silence of lockdown, time stood still. It was like the silence of a perpetual Sunday morning, or a day of deep snow when the garden paths are obliterated and all traffic on the road stops; or the first day of the summer holidays when I was a child, with no people, no cars, just the countryside and the trees heavy with leaf and all the long day just to wander and look at water meadows and horses knee deep in buttercups and the dark brown river. If this was to be my last spring, I thought, I’d settle for this.

Spring for me is always, has always been, about pear blossom. There’s a photograph of the garden dating from my first April here, Spring 1990, with the yew hedges just nine inches tall, freshly planted, the newly sown grass white with hoarfrost, and the whole acre-and-a-half as flat and empty as a billiard table with the exception of a single old pear tree, tall as the house, encrusted with white flowers – frost and blossom intermingling in the cold air.

When I first approached the National Trust about making a garden here, I was offered permission to remove it: ‘You can’t leave a tree like that, off-centre, in a formal garden.’ But I made a garden plan that folded round it, incorporating it into the outlines of the new garden as a reminder of what had gone before. With its twisted trunk and shattered crown it became the glory of the garden, a living example of wabi-sabi (the deliberate flaw, the treasured imperfection that reminds us of the impermanence of everything); the question most asked by visitors became: ‘What is that wonderful old tree?’

Loved cats were buried at its foot; blackbirds annually feasted on its fallen burgundy-and-gold fruit; its leaves each autumn were the first to turn, butter-yellow, falling with the first gales of winter.

It became the calendar-marker of our years.

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