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THE
english
GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
For everyone who loves beautiful gardens
www.theenglishgarden.co.uk
Gravetye Manor’s planting secrets
Your guide to successful autumn planting
A Colour Crescendo
Glyndebourne’s garden reaches its autumnal peak
Flowers meet exotics at Ulting Wick
Celebrate October ●
SEDUM for seasonal flowers
●
Flora Arbuthnott’s PLANT DYES
●
TOP 10 plants for wellbeing
●
Plant hunter REGINALD FARRER
£4.95
CONTRIBUTORS
Naomi Slade Naomi is a journalist and author specialising in gardening and the environment. Her newest book, Hydrangeas (Pavilion) is available now at naomislade.com. She visits Castle End House on page 38.
Francois Gordon A retired diplomat and lifelong student of gardening history, Francois lives and gardens in Kent. His book about plant hunter Will Purdom will be out in February. He writes about Reginald Farrer on page 95.
Welcome A
m I unusual in finding myself longing for autumn? In summer’s heat when unrelenting sun turns gardening into sticky toil, surrounded by browning lawn and dusty, droughtstricken plants, I look forward to autumn’s arrival almost as much as I do spring’s after a long, dark winter. Everything in the garden seems to breathe a sigh of relief: the demands of the summer performance are over; there’s a chance to reset the clock and start again. Especially because it’s the best time of year to take stock of your garden and its plants: dividing, moving and planting new ones – from tiny bulbs to huge trees. It’s also a season when many gardens – if they’re well planned and planted – get a second wind, when all those later flowering perennials come to the fore and turning foliage brings new layers of rich colour to the mix. Like in the inventive borders in the gardens at Glyndebourne, where salvias, dahlias and asters mingle with berry-covered pyracantha while Vitis coignetiae turns crimson on the walls of the house. Or at Ulting Wick in Essex, where bananas and other big-leaved foliage plants jostle with dahlias, cosmos and nicotiana, all cheerfully in flower until the first frosts strike. Yes, autumn’s definitely a season to celebrate – I hope the gardens and plants in this issue have you longing for its scents and colours too.
CLARE FOGGETT, EDITOR
IMAGES NEIL HEPWORTH
Barbara Segall Barbara writes articles, books (most recently Secret Gardens of East Anglia) and blogs about gardens and herbs. She’s also Assistant County Organiser for the NGS in Suffolk. She visits Ulting Wick on p20.
ON THE COVER A veritable symphony of Salvia ‘Amistad’ and persicaria in the brightly abundant borders of Glyndebourne on p28. Photographed by Mimi Connolly.
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October 2020
CONTENTS
Gardens 20 Ulting Wick Philippa Burrough’s Essex garden is known for its spring displays of tulips, but is just as colourful in autumn, when dahlias and exotic foliage peak. 28 Glyndebourne These gardens must look good for the famous opera programme all year round, but inventive planting means autumn here hits a particularly high note. 38 Castle End House In Oxfordshire, Petra Hoyer Millar combines the best of autumn’s flowers with swishy grasses for a gloriously extended season of texture and colour. 46 Crathes Castle A joyous array of plants thrive here in Aberdeenshire, thanks to the warm microclimate of a walled garden. 55 Mitton Manor A Staffordshire garden of different parts, each bursting with colourful planting and sculpture or water features that make the most of autumn’s soft sunlight.
20
Design 63 Iconic Gardens Mark Lane explores the gardens of Gravetye Manor, former home of William Robinson, who pioneered both ‘wild’ and cottage gardening.
77
101 Craftspeople From a remote Devon valley, Flora Arbuthnott teaches the ancient technique of botanical dyeing, obtaining rich hues from foraged and home-grown plants.
Plants 71 Top 10 Plants Imogen Jackson of Horatio’s Garden Oswestry explains how to plant a garden that supports wellbeing. 77 Plant Focus With their unassuming beauty and long season of interest, border stonecrops fill gaps effortlessly.
17 46 6 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
83 Babington House Sophie Martin and her team are busy tidying up the walled garden and looking ahead to a new season. 87 Autumn Planting This is the time to plant not only spring-flowering bulbs but also new trees, shrubs, hedging and perennials so they can establish successfully in still-warm soil. 95 Reginald Farrer Plant hunter Reginald Farrer, who died 100 years ago this month, had a yearning for travel that gave us a lasting legacy, says Francois Gordon.
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Regulars 9 This Month Our regular guide to people, gardens, events, garden jobs and nature.
IMAGES MARIANNE MAJERUS; RAY COX; CLIVE NICHOLS; SHUTTERSTOCK
17 Shopping Cosy autumn clothes and homeware, plus lighting for your garden. 107 The Reviewer This month’s literary digest, plus a chat with author Dan Pearson. 114 Last Word Katherine Swift ponders the link between gardens and letter forms.
Offers 19 Subscribe & Save Subscribe to The English Garden and save money.
Create your perfect garden with fine quality designs, hand crafted by Haddonstone Call 01604 770711 Visit haddonstone.com
76 Home Insurance Specialist insurance quotes for readers of The English Garden. 93 Sarah Raven Readers will get 20% off bulbs, plants and seeds in the autumn range. OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 7
OCTOBER
People to Meet
Introducing the gardeners and public figures we most admire in British horticulture
George Plumptre
RECOMMENDED
George’s favourite gardens
INTERVIEW PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES JULIE SKELTON; LEIGH CLAPP; SHUTTERSTOCK
The author and chief executive of the National Garden Scheme explains why being able to access outdoor spaces is more important than ever The huge importance of gardens to everybody has really come to light this year. Gardens are a place of refuge, and this is something the National Garden Scheme supports and promotes. In 2017, we launched our Gardens and Health programme to raise awareness of the positive effects of gardens and gardening on our health. It links health service users with free garden visits and funds garden and health projects, such as Horatio’s Garden, which creates gardens in NHS spinal care units. We will focus more on this side of the charity over the coming months. I love my role as chief executive because it lets me put my gardening experience to good use raising money for nursing and caring charities across the UK. We’ve been donating to our beneficiaries for a long time – in the case of Macmillan, for over 35 years. My relationship with the National Garden Scheme goes way back. As a boy, I remember cycling down lanes close to my family home in Kent, a yellow NGS sign tucked under my arm, on the hunt for the optimal spot to place it. Later, I was garden correspondent for The Times, and I’ve written various
Hidcote Gloucestershire Any enthusiastic gardener should pay Hidcote a visit as part of their education. It retains such a strong balance of good design and expert plantsmanship. Tel: 01386 438333; nationaltrust.org.uk
Goodnestone Park Gardens
books, including Collins Book of British Gardens, for which I visited 220 gardens. The process of writing it introduced me to how generous garden people are with their knowledge. It’s this human side of gardens that makes the National Garden Scheme so special: participants love to share their gardens with visitors. There’s nothing nearly as large scale as this charity outside Britain, and the idea behind it is quintessentially British. Anybody and
everybody can visit a garden, and these include community allotments, hospice gardens and small urban plots. The global crisis has proved that the garden-opening community is incredibly supported. People have made physical visits to reopened gardens or virtual visits through our library of video tours. I recommend a virtual trip to The Old Rectory in Farnborough: it encapsulates what is so lovely about the people involved in the charity. ngs.org.uk
Kent I have to go for the garden I was lucky enough to grow up in! It has a very special atmosphere and a truly outstanding selection of special trees. Tel: 01304 840107; goodnestone parkgardens.co.uk
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 9
OCTOBER
Out & About
Unmissable events, news and the very best gardens to visit this month
The Story of Gardening Permanent exhibition at The Newt, Somerset
This immersive exhibition explores the history of gardening and its impact on people and culture. Visitors must weave along a treetop walkway suspended above the forest floor to approach the experience, and families are encouraged to get hands-on with soil, scents, botany and design through a series of interactive exhibits. Virtual reality, light projection, scent displays and audio narration guides visitors through interlinking rooms that explore international garden design. thenewtinsomerset.com
Walls That Unite
Plant Heritage reveals missing collections This year’s ‘Missing Genera’ campaign by horticultural charity Plant Heritage highlights ten threatened plants that are not currently represented by one of the charity’s 650 National Plant Collections, and are therefore at risk of being lost. The charity is calling on people across the UK to consider starting a collection of one of the plants on the list. Many existent collections are held in houses and conservatories, so a large garden isn’t needed to get involved. For more information and to find the full plant list, which includes berberis, papaver and daphne, visit plantheritage.org.uk
10 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
NGS Garden for October Ramster, Chiddingfold 2 October, Surrey One of the original gardens that opened for the first year of the National Garden Scheme in 1927, this stunning woodland garden is set over 20 acres and is famous for its autumn colour. Enjoy a peaceful stroll along the grass paths and woodland walk, explore the bog garden with its stepping stones, or relax in the tranquil, enclosed tennis court garden. Booking is essential. 10am to 4pm. Adults £8; children free. ngs.org.uk
WORDS PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES PLANT HERITAGE; NGS
15 October, Château de Chambord, France The UK and France have come together to organise the first ever European symposium on the conservation of historic walled kitchen gardens. At this one-day gathering, around 200 experts from across Europe will meet to share their knowledge and skills for the future preservation of these important gardens. There will be simultaneous translations in French and English for all presentations and discussions throughout the day. The event is free to attend. walledgardens.net
HERITAGE WORKWEAR FROM NORFOLK, ENGLAND. carriercompany.co.uk +44 ( 0 ) 1328 820699
OCTOBER
Things to Do Keep up to date in the garden with our monthly guide to key gardening tasks
Checklist ● Move tender plants
indoors to protect them from the colder temperatures of autumn and winter. Cover the crowns of half-hardy plants with mulch if they’re to stay outdoors over winter. ● Plant spring bulbs
in your lawn for bright drifts early next year. ● Take hardwood
cuttings from shrubs and trees once their leaves have fallen. ● Collect seeds from
Autumn is a super time to plant lily bulbs – they root and establish best in cooler soil temperatures to give the best possible flowering display Early autumn is the perfect time to plant lily bulbs. Most lilies fare well in containers, although bigger ones need the right support to flourish. Plant up pots now so you can enjoy a beautiful display of these striking blooms next summer.
Asiatic hybrids root from the base only and should be planted at a depth equal to the height of the bulb. Others, such as Lilium longiflorum, root from both the stem and the base and should be planted at a depth of two-and-a-half-times the height of the bulb.*
Method 1 Choose an assortment of containers with drainage holes. Large, single bulbs should be planted in 20cm-wide pots, while smaller bulbs can be planted four per 25cm-wide pot. Add crocks or gravel to provide good drainage. 2 Different varieties need to be planted at different depths.
12 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
3 Plant bulbs with the roots facing downwards in a good multi-purpose compost, such as John Innes No 3, and add controlled-release fertiliser granules to the mix. Be aware that some lilies don’t like lime; these varieties should always be potted in pure ericaceous compost.* 4 Keep the soil moist, but not wet, at all times. Feed with liquid fertiliser once a fortnight during summer. *If you’re unsure about the conditions your bulbs require, search the specific variety on the RHS website for more information. rhs.org.uk
● Prune your climbing
roses and tie in new growth to avoid damage over winter. ● Now’s the time to
pick apples and pears. It’s also the month to harvest nuts, grapes and pumpkins. WORDS PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES GAP/JONATHAN BUCKLEY; SHUTTERSTOCK
Plant lilies in CONTAINERS
your favourite plants to sow next year. Alternatively, you could sow the seeds of hardy annuals now.
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OCTOBER
Nature to Note
The wonder of wildlife in the garden and countryside this month
HARVEST festival Now autumn is here, many migrant birds will already have left for a warmer climate. Those that remain in the UK over winter won’t hibernate and will be gorging on the season’s berries and seeds to keep them going through the colder months when vegetation is at its most scarce. If you have plants running to seed in your garden, or trees or shrubs producing autumn berries, you may enjoy the sight of birds such as goldfinches and linnets feasting on them. Make sure you don’t deadhead plants too soon – as well as being a great source of fuel for birds, seedheads’ architectural forms add stark beauty to the winter garden. Hedgerows are another good food source at this time of year. Cotoneaster and rowan berries are loved by thrushes, blackbirds and waxwings, while hawthorn and holly are preferred by blackbirds, redwings (left) and fieldfares.
How to identify it Horse chestnuts are one of autumn’s highlights, towering above us at a height of up to 40m with branches adorned in russet foliage and spiky conker husks. A mature tree has dark, scaly bark and its palmate leaves comprise five to seven toothed leaflets spreading from a central stem. In autumn, its leaves turn golden and each pollinated flower becomes a conker. Where to find it This tree was introduced from the Balkan Peninsula in the late 16th century and widely planted. You are
14 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
more likely to spot it in a garden, park or street than in the wild. Value to wildlife The flowers provide nectar and pollen, while conkers are eaten by deer in autumn. Caterpillars of the horse chestnut leaf-miner moth feed on its leaves and can often cause extensive damage, but are also eaten by blue tits in some areas. Did you know? Conkers are used in medicines and shampoo, and are thought to repel spiders. When leaf stalks fall from the twigs of this tree, they leave a scar that resembles a horse shoe with nail holes – hence the tree’s name.
Bee kind Pollinator-friendly plant logo launches A campaign by the National Botanic Garden of Wales aims to protect pollinators from decline by marking up plants that are truly pollinator-friendly with a ‘Saving Pollinators’ logo. Plants are often billed as ‘bee-friendly’, but some contain potentially toxic pesticides. The new logo will be the first of its kind backed by years of scientific research, and will guarantee benefits to garden wildlife.
WORDS PHOEBE JAYES IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK
HORSE CHESTNUT (Aesculus hippocastanum)
WILDLIFE NEWS
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OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 15
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Plant now for beautiful blooms next summer
Peter Beales Roses have been helping to enhance gardens since 1968 and with over 1100 varieties to choose from we are sure you’ll find the ideal rose for your garden. Now is the perfect time to plan ahead as traditionally roses are planted during the autumn/winter months, giving you a superb display of beautiful blooms in your garden the following summer. Our inspirational catalogue ‘A Treasury of Roses’ is the most comprehensive catalogue you could wish for. To receive your free copy please visit our website or telephone the nursery quoting EG20. • MAIL ORDER • F R E E C ATA L O G U E
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Enjoy the rich shades of autumn, with this selection of gorgeous homeware and clothes 1. Assorted plates, bowls & platter, from £17.95.
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2. Acne Studios Kerna sweater, £320. Tel: 020 3893 3062; libertylondon.com 3. Durham scarf, £30. brontebymoon.co.uk 4. Puddin’ Head hare coaster, £7. Tel: 020 3893 3062; libertylondon.com 5. Pinya mug, £6. Tel: 03444 994686; habitat. co.uk 6. Black Toast wooden chopping board, from
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WORDS PHOEBE JAYES. ALL PRICES ARE CORRECT AT TIME OF GOING TO PRESS.
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OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 17
SHOPPING
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Let there be light Extend the season with our selection of attractive lighting solutions for your garden
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1. Golf ball festoon lights, £35. Tel: 01993 845559; gardentrading.co.uk 2. Astro Homefield outdoor ceiling light, £160. Tel: 03456 049049; johnlewis. com 3. Davey Lighting exterior bracket light with swan neck, from £163. Tel: 01992 252900; inspyerlighting.co.uk 4. Metal hanging lamp with plant pot, £95. Tel: 020 8185 6960; cultfurniture. com 5. Pols Potten pear striped lantern, £95. Tel: 0800 5877645; amara.com 6. Bird cage tea light lantern, £6. Tel: 0300 1232025; shop.nationaltrust. org.uk 7. Mesh wall light, £277.43. Tel: 020 7371 9000; johncullenlighting.com 8. Hampton 40 exterior spike floodlight, £288. Tel: 020 7371 9000; johncullenlighting.com 9. Outdoor flower ceiling light, £45. Tel: 0800 5877645; amara.com 10. St Ives Strand outdoor post lamp, £57.
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18 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
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Box-edged borders brim with exotics such as Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’ alongside orange Dahlia ‘Happy Halloween’ and tagetes.
The Show GOES ON
Ulting Wick in Essex is known for its spring displays of tulips, but Philippa Burrough’s garden is just as colourful in autumn, when dahlias and exotic foliage reach their peak WORDS BARBARA SEGALL PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 21
A
twisty journey through winding Essex lanes, brings you to Ulting Wick – the garden equivalent of an outdoor stage, where owner Philippa Burrough enjoys staging a palette of colourful plants to create dramatic theatrical impact. Her many plant enthusiasms are the starting point for this garden, but it is what she creates with those plants and how she weaves them together, that has made Ulting Wick a magnet for both dyed-in-thewool plant lovers and first-time garden visitors alike. “I am drawn to flower colour and the shape and texture of foliage. I think exotic gardens are often the preserve of male gardeners, leaning more towards foliage. I like to think my style is a riff on this with softer colours offered by my ‘pretties’, such as cosmos and Verbena hastata, Nicotiana ‘Lime Green’ and heliotrope or ‘cherry pie’,” she explains. 22 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above The maroonflushed leaves of Ensete ventricosum emerge tall from beds of exotics, mixed with grasses and colourful late flowers.
Regular visitors will know that Ulting Wick usually opens for the National Garden Scheme, with two major displays in the area known as the Old Farm Yard. One opening is in spring, with massed ranks of tulips; the other is in late summer/early autumn, with a high-octane, heat-seeking annual and perennial display. In 2020 this changed when garden visiting was restricted due to Covid-19. Nevertheless, Philippa and her garden team (one full-time head gardener and a part-time, one-daya-week gardener) continued to keep the garden on form ready for the day when restrictions were lifted. “What makes the garden special in autumn is the soft gentle light, especially when it falls on the backs of large-leaved foliage plants such as the Abyssinian bananas (Ensete ventricosum) and filters through the delicate flowers of grasses,” she muses. “I find that by combining colourful plantings of foliage
and flowers from leading to Ulting Wick’s annuals, perennials striking black barns is and climbers, I can edged with drifts of prolong the summer Gaura lindheimeri and Verbena bonariensis. scene, sometimes taking Left Spiders’ webs on us right through to Verbena bonariensis. November.” Below A softly pretty For some gardeners combination of rose pink Cosmos bipinnatus with a planting plan is Boltonia decurrens – an essential. Philippa has aster relative with daisy no such thing and so flowers in pale pink. year on year there is no exact replica. “While there are no rules, there are some givens such as the plants that have to go at the centre, and the plants whose place on the cast list is assured,” she explains. The remainers include miscanthus, Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, tree dahlias (Dahlia imperialis), paulownias, Arundo donax and ensetes. The castor oil plant (Ricinus communis) and the climber, Cobaea scandens, also known as the cupand-saucer vine, plus Salvia confertiflora are more or less guaranteed a place as well. Early in the season, lower-growing plants such as Persicaria runcinata ‘Purple Fantasy’, P. microcephala ‘Red Dragon’ and plectranthus dominate at ground level, their role being to hide the stems and hazel supports of those plants that will eventually rise to great heights. “Timing is important and staging starts in mid-May when the tulips are lifted and larger plants such as the ensetes are brought out from their winter stay in the greenhouse or conservatory,” explains Philippa. Each year there are new recruits, and Philippa has grown enough of her new favourite, cerise-flowered Salvia oxyphora, to include it in the plantings. She Above A brick path
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 23
Above The circular bed
in the centre is always planted up first, here with ensete, mahogany aeonium and Tagetes ‘Burning Embers’. Left Dahlia ‘Spikey Symbol’ and Miscanthus nepalensis tassels with the near-metallic leaves of Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’.
is also showcasing the so-called A-Z plant, Amicia zygomeris and has fallen for a number of ginger lilies or hedychiums. Then there are those favourites that don’t make the cut, due to lack of space. This year one of them was Canna ‘Bird of Paradise’. Plants like this just have to wait it out in the wings, hoping that next time they will get their chance to shine. Philippa and her husband Bryan moved to Ulting Wick in 1995. Then, the main flower displays in their 24 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
ten acres came from three island beds that were filled with shrubs, rhododendrons and some roses. “One day, when I was edging one of the island beds, I said to myself ‘why am I doing this? I don’t like these plants!’” Philippa recalls. Out went the beds, and by moving the swimming pool a new vista was created, taking the eye away from the area in front of the house. “We also began to restore the wonderful listed black barns that I think are more interesting than the house,” Philippa explains. “The barns are essentially the backdrop for my planting. They work in all weathers and seasons to lift the colours and shapes of the plants.” “Despite saying that I make it up as I go along, I always start with the central round bed, which has an old copper at its heart,” she adds. “I think of this area differently to how I view the other four beds, two of which hold the hot colours and two a range of purple to pink colours. Here I plant shorter dahlias such as ‘Moonshine’, aeoniums and Euphorbia hypericifolia ‘Diamond Frost’. The planting is more intimate and people can get up closer to the plants – these plants would get lost in the other beds.” Once the central roundel is planted, the next phase is the four colour and foliage beds. At first dahlias and cosmos were the tallest plants here, but after a few years height became one of the drivers of the
Ulting Wick’s STAR CAST These flowers put on a vivid performance in late summer, with an encore well into autumn
DAHLIA ‘INGLEBROOK JILL’
LEPECHINIA BELLA
DAHLIA ‘JESCOT JULIE’
A distinguished collarette variety in rich red that is stocked by the National Dahlia Collection in Cornwall.
This seldom-seen perennial is a salvia relative, with vivid blue, tubular flowers on sturdy, well-branched plants.
Coral and orange-toned petals combine with the elegant flower shape of orchid dahlias on this superb cultivar.
NICOTIANA GLAUCA
DAHLIA ‘PONTIAC’
Blue-green leaves and tubular golden yellow flowers distinguish ‘tree tobacco’. The RHS Plant Finder lists suppliers.
A striking cactus dahlia in purple-pink. Philippa likes to team it with a dark salvia such as ‘Amistad’.
COSMOS BIPINNATUS ‘XANTHOS’
DAHLIA ‘POOH’
COSMOS ‘SENSATION PICOTEE’
TAGETES ‘BURNING EMBERS’
Sow in late spring for ferny foliage and delightfully patterned pink flowers.
Easily grown from seed each spring, and perfect for filling gaps with colour.
The gold petals at the centre of these collarette-type, orangey-red flowers make this an eye-catching dahlia.
This low-growing, pale-yellow cosmos blooms from June to September.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 25
design. “It was probably the ensetes that were the game-changers, giving us both height and added drama at the centre of each bed,” says Philippa. “I can’t stand plants flopping over, so staking is essential. I use stout hazel poles and early on it looks a bit like a fortress. All through the season as the plants grow taller, I wind in string to tie plants in to the stakes.” There is one exception – the grey-leaved Nicotiana glauca, which is allowed to gracefully arch over, so visitors can admire its tubular yellow flowers. Deadheading is one thing that Philippa is most certainly not relaxed about. “I cannot stand seeing a garden where there are spent flowers on a plant. I go out on a daily basis with secateurs and a bucket, snipping them off. It means that the flowers keep going for a longer period.” Once the late summer show is over, everything is lifted and the plants either go into storage if they are tender, or into pots around the greenhouse if they’re hardy. The dahlias are laid out on racks in the barn to dry until there is time to deal with them. Sometimes when the ensetes come out of winter storage there may be one or two casualties where 26 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Top More pink boltonia,
asters, ‘Park Princess’ dahlias and Pennisetum orientale surge around the greenhouse. Above Squash ‘Uchiki Kuri’ ripens on the vine.
the central stem has rotted. Philippa has learned never to accept what looks like a loss. “I take a bread knife and slice away the rotted sections, so that I am left with a cross section that is completely clear of rot. I scoop out the centre, which, in effect, damages it. Eventually the plant produces little ‘pups’ that can be cut off and potted up. I’ve had 15 from one plant in the past. Of course, they do need to be grown on until they are large enough to return to the summer show.” Philippa describes this part of Essex as being “dry as Jerusalem” and suggests that she has learned “to play to our strengths”. “Although we might occasionally have a bad winter, it is generally a mild area. The combination of the black barns and the gravel means that everything heats up quickly in spring. And the light is so good that plants get going swiftly,” she enthuses. Ulting Wick, Crouchman’s Farm Road, Maldon, Essex CM9 6QX. Usually opens for the National Garden Scheme, check ngs.org.uk for latest. For updates on openings next year, visit the Ulting Wick website. Tel: 01245 380216; ultingwickgarden.co.uk
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This page Flamboyant
planting in the terrace borders, with persicaria and Salvia ‘Amistad’.
Opposite The Urn Garden, its central feature filled with bacopa.
28 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Performance PIECE
The gardens at Glyndebourne have to look good for the famous opera programme all year round, but thanks to inventive planting and plenty of colour, autumn here hits a particularly high note WORDS JAMES ALEXANDER-SINCLAIR PHOTOGRAPHS MIMI CONNOLLY
G
lyndebourne is known across the globe for its world-class opera and fabulous music. The idea came from John Christie and his wife, the noted soprano Audrey Mildmay. They built their first theatre in the house itself, a small 300-seat number that hosted the first festival in 1934. This building was enlarged piecemeal over the years and gave both Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti their big breaks. However, it eventually became so popular that it outgrew the space so, in 1994, an exquisitely designed new theatre was built to hold an audience of 1,200. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, welcoming around 150,000 people a year with more than 120 live performances. I have been to Glyndebourne but, embarrassingly, I cannot remember which opera I saw – although I do remember ending the evening in a bathing-suitoptional hot tub somewhere in Sussex accompanied by a large plate of oysters. This was all many, many years ago, I hasten to add – but I think it is probably sensible to draw a heavy red velvet curtain over that and move on to the gardens. Performances at the festival have an extended 90-minute interval, which allows the audience (all dressed in full black tie and taffeta) to picnic on the sweeping lawns and beside the lake, looking out onto parkland. The idea of a softly setting sun, a crustless sandwich, the last chords of La Nozze de Figaro (other operas are available) bouncing around your brain, a glass of something chilled and sparkly and the company of friends is pretty much irresistible, whether you are an opera buff or not. Around the lawns and lake are a series of gardens planted so that they are in peak condition whenever there is a performance. The audience are given free rein before, during and after the performance, so the gardens have to look pretty darn good. The man responsible is head gardener Kevin Martin who arrived at Glyndebourne in 1993 – just before the new theatre opened – and has had his hand on the horticultural tiller ever since. “We have had help,” he explains. “The late Christopher Lloyd (of Great Dixter) assisted with some of the older gardens, then we had help from Lady Mary Keen. Fergus Garrett helped in the Urn Garden and John Hoyland has done great work in the Rose Garden.” He welcomes fresh pairs of eyes but the everyday work is mostly up to him and a team of five other gardeners. The gardening crescendos are designed to coincide with the big Glyndebourne dates. The main festival programme is every day for about a month from the end of July and then the touring opera returns in October for more performances. In the interim there is a busy schedule of rehearsals and education programmes, not to mention dedicated garden tours. It is a late season, so all those classic English garden 30 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
The audience are given free rein before, during and after the performance, so the gardens have to look pretty darn good Above The large leaves of vigorous climber Vitis coignetiae develop rich crimson and rust tones as autumn progresses.
staples – bulbs in spring and the soft blowsiness of June – are long gone. The borders rely heavily for colour on reliable annuals and tender perennials. Kevin and the other gardeners have an admirably democratic arrangement where they all contribute new planting ideas. “We are all pretty good plantspeople so it is a group effort: everything is grown, to organic principles, in the greenhouses here, either from cuttings or seed.” The carefully
Far left Arching flower
stems of hardy annual, Persicaria orientalis. Left Ever-popular Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ with its vivid scarlet blooms. Below Rusted metal pillars support thorny pyracantha and their heavy load of berries. Bottom right A clustered sedum flowerhead. Bottom left Nicotiana mutabilis ‘Marshmallow’.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 31
Glyndebourne’s PRIMA DONNAS There’s room for more than one star turn in these annual- and perennial-packed borders
GOMPHRENA HAAGEANA ‘STRAWBERRY FIELDS’
TITHONIA ROTUNDIFOLIA ‘TORCH’
CLEOME ‘SEÑORITA ROSALITA’
Sow this unusual annual in late spring for easy, bright flowers in borders or vases.
One of Kevin favourites, ‘Torch’ is superb, with vibrant orange flowers.
Unlike other seed-raised cleome, this excellent variety is thornless.
VERBENA BONARIENSIS
GERANIUM ‘ROZANNE’
KNAUTIA MACEDONICA
The classic choice for adding height without bulk, thanks to its tall, slender stems topped with mauve flowers.
With its Award of Garden Merit from the RHS, this hardy geranium comes well qualified to fill gaps with blue flowers.
Plant this perennial in sun and welldrained soil for a succession of crimsonred blooms from midsummer onwards.
COSMOS ATROSANGUINEUS
COSMOS BIPINNATUS ‘VERSAILLES TETRA’
COMMELINA TUBEROSA
This dark and dusky cosmos species is known for its flowers’ chocolatey scent.
Easily grown from spring-sown seed for pink blooms with a darker central ring.
32 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Simple, three-petalled flowers in striking sky-blue on this clump-forming hardy perennial that flowers in autumn.
planned scheme is then planted out in the various borders. This usually works well except for this year, when Bacchus Christie (fiveyear-old son of the Executive Chairman, Gus Christie, and his wife the soprano, Danielle de Niese) rearranged the plant labels in the nursery when no one was looking, which has led to some unexpected, although not unpleasing, combinations! The main areas of the garden are laid out between the opera house and the view of the Sussex Downs. There is the Wild Garden and then the Mary Christie Rose Garden, named after the wife of Sir George, who was responsible for the construction of the new theatre. From here you pass through the Urn Garden, the Mildmay Garden and the Bourne Garden, all of which are stuffed with plants and
contrast beautifully with the Figaro Garden, which is a very quiet and simple confection of yew hedges and still water surrounding a Henry Moore sculpture. The gardens are all made for promenading, with wide paths and deep borders brimming with mounds of tobacco plants (especially Nicotiana mutabilis, one of my absolute favourites), salvias, dahlias, bright tangerine tithonias and tall and spindly, bobbly-flowered Persicaria orientalis – also known as kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate, which has to be one of the best common names ever coined. Lots of late-season loveliness that carries on flowering until the autumn frosts. One garden path is adorned with rusted steel lights shaped like shepherd’s crooks – these do not just illuminate the garden but serve as emergency
The gardens are all made for promenading, with wide paths and deep borders brimming with plants Above left Shepherd’s
crook-shaped lighting made of rusted steel. Top right A wine-red flowered salvia. Seek out Salvia ‘Nachtvlinder’ for similar coloured blooms. Above right Asters can always be relied upon for late flowers. Try ‘Mönch’ for lilac daisies like these.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 33
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Operas are very like gardens. Both give us moments of peace, and powerful whack-it-out-of-the-park crescendos Above Dahlia ‘Blue Bayou’ emerges from the silvery leaves of Plectranthus argentatus. Left Fluffy-flowered ageratum is a superb tender bedding plant for the front of borders. Below Salvia elegans ‘Scarlet Pineapple’.
lighting as well. Picking up the rusty steel theme are six round steel columns that were designed for roses, but have been repurposed by Kevin as supports for orange-berried pyracanthas. “They are positioned close to the wild garden and I wanted to plant something that was not only spectacular but good for birds and other wildlife,” he explains. Operas are very like gardens. That is a rather sweeping statement, but allow me to try to explain. Both have adagios, arpeggios, andantes, cadenzas and glissandos. Both are a collaboration between composers (the designers) and performers (the gardeners). Both give us moments of peace, and powerful, whack-it-out-of-the-park, full-bodied crescendos. Operas can bring you to the edge of tears, raise you back up with a thigh-jangling punch of emotion and then swiftly reduce you to a quivering jelly of relief. Gardens do this too – we have all wandered through borders of breathless beauty, beneath the comfort of trees and been jolted into awe by a sudden vista or juxtaposition of plants. OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 35
“My prescription for stress is always a walk down to the lake or a few moments sitting on a bench”
In a garden that is so wrapped up in performance, one wonders what happens when all the singers, musicians and, indeed, the audience, has gone home. The answer is that it is quite a community: the gardens open for local people and there is an in-house horticultural show where staff enter cakes, prize vegetables, children’s artwork and all the things that you would expect to find at a village show. The main difference is that the entries are judged by internationally famous singers rather than the chairman of the parish council. “A lot of people work here and putting on six operas each season, dealing with performers and making 36 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Top left A late flush of flowers on Rosa ‘Bonica’
is always welcome. Above left Spikes of tiny, felty flowers on Salvia confertiflora. Above right Whitethemed beds on the north end of the lawns feature cosmos, dahlias and alstroemerias.
everything perfect can be hard work,” says Kevin. “My prescription for stress is a walk down to the lake or a few moments sitting on a bench.” Like music, gardens are an excellent way to unwind and at Glyndebourne you can enjoy the best of both in one place. And you get to dress up and drink champagne. What’s not to love?
Glyndebourne, Lewes, East Sussex BN8 5UU. The gardens are accessible to those attending performances and are also open for tours on specific dates throughout the year. Tel: 01273 812321; glyndebourne.com
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This page Echinaceas,
tall eupatorium and agastache contribute to the immersive planting.
Opposite Prairie-inspired:
Sedum ‘Matrona’ with soft Stipa tenuissima.
38 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
THE ART OF Autumn Borders
At Castle End House in Oxfordshire, Petra Hoyer Millar combines the best of autumn’s flowers with swishy grasses for a gloriously extended season of texture and colour WORDS NAOMI SLADE PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS
O
ld houses and their gardens tend to come with a history. On the one hand you might inherit delightful parterres, clipped topiary and elegant, mature planting; more chequered possibilities exist, however, and when Petra Hoyer Millar and her husband Luke moved into their Oxfordshire home nearly five years ago, they found themselves faced with almost an acre of unfortunate and untended space, and soil that was the pinnacle of mediocrity. “It was rather sad,” she recalls. “When our predecessors were here, it was the wife who was the gardener, but she died shortly after they moved in and he didn’t really venture out after that. We had to go in with machetes: there were masses of Clematis montana tangled up in a seriously overgrown shrubbery. And it was only once we’d got that under control that we realised how bad the walls were.” Having initiated an extensive programme of scrub clearance, their next challenge was the soil: alkaline clay, filled with building rubble. “I think that, several owners previously, part of the garden was a bowling green, and they had raised the level of it using stone, hardcore, and whatever else they could get their hands on,” says Petra. While she sorted that out, she worked with what she had, and the once-conventional yew hedge to the front of the house underwent quite a transformation. “It was square and terribly boring, so I let it go to see what it would do,” she explains. “It is quite hard to cloud-prune to a design, so I left it for a year. By then I could see where it really wanted to grow into great loopy bumps and blimps, and where it was being shy, I cut back hard.” The result is a curvaceous and energetic confection, filled with interest and personality; a dramatic opening gambit, in an otherwise pared-back scheme with clipped lavender and a lawn, bordered by a charming ha-ha.
Practical gardens are more beautiful. You don’t want to mess around with silly paths just to get to the shed! Top After its flowers
fade, the seedheads of Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ are just as impressive. Above A reliable choice for colourful flowers, Echinacea purpurea. Right Tall and robust,
Eupatorium maculatum Atropurpureum Group with Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’.
To the rear of the house, the living space is visually connected to the garden, which can be seen from every window. The lawn and borders are slightly elevated in relation to house and terrace, so one is immersed in a rising tide of planting. There is now a young orchard and a substantial herb garden, with a wild and free planting scheme within a formal arrangement of triangles, designed to create effective paths and a usable space, a matter about which Petra is extremely decisive. “I think practical gardens are more beautiful,” she declares. “You don’t want to
40 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
mess around with silly paths that go around here and go around there just to get to the shed!” The main part of the garden, meanwhile, comprises what Petra and Luke hope, will one day be a croquet lawn flanked by the existing borders. A chunky four metres deep at the outset, these expand to a magnificent six metres by the time they get to the far end of the garden. “They are fat, which is how I like them!” says Petra, laughing. “It is a lot of work, but it is a good effect.” Petra’s love of a larger-than-life scale is evident in her planting. The colour scheme is loosely pink and purple and these colours are iterated in both flowers
and foliage, which includes black elder as well as monarda, with lashings of eupatorium, grasses and mauve hylotelephium (formerly known as sedum). “It is kind of ‘prairie’ style with calamagrostis, molinia, phlox and asters, but there are a lot of roses too,” explains Petra. “It is a difficult style to describe. It was inspired by prairie planting but I have altered it: there are lots of trees that prairie gardens don’t usually have. But trees give it such richness, so there are crab apples and lots of elder – Sambucus nigra ‘Black Lace’ as well as ordinary S. nigra – and there are a number of hazels, including dark-leaved ones, which I coppice annually.”
Above Petra’s borders are six metres wide at their deepest point, with ample room for masses of plants that create a truly impressive display.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 41
PROMOTION
ROSE OF THE YEAR ANNOUNCED Following its outstanding performance in rigorous trials, the chic, new, yellow-flowered floribunda rose ‘Belle de Jour’ has won the prestigious title of Rose of the Year 2021
Clockwise from left ‘Belle de Jour’ puts on a lovely
display when grown in a container; it works equally well when suffusing borders with its warm glow; a profusion of blooms is produced all summer long.
B
red by Delbard of France, rose ‘Belle de Jour’ has densely petalled flowers with deep yellow centres blending to soft orange on the outer petals. The plentiful blooms are sweetly fragrant with a vanilla and apricot scent and are held on sturdy stems, complemented by mid-green foliage that has superb disease resistance. Delbard, a member of the British Association of Rose Breeders (BARB), is the first French breeder to receive the
42 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
award. Roses UK introduces Rose of the Year 2021 on behalf of the rose trade. Plants of ‘Belle de Jour’ will be available to buy this autumn, from rose nurseries and garden centres. For more information visit rosesuk.com
UK promoting interna tiona l rose breede rs & british growers
About Rose of the Year Roses UK manages the Rose of the Year competition, which has been running since 1982, on behalf of BARB. British rose breeders and UK agents of international breeders enter promising new varieties into the trial. Each trial lasts two years and begins six years before the commercial introduction of a winning rose. Form, colour, scent, floriferousness, health and ease of maintenance are all essential characteristics of a Rose of the Year.
Effortless STYLE Choose easy-going, low-maintenance perennials to make large borders less work
With robust planting sedum and elder sets and a backdrop of high off the largely pink-andwalls and trees, this is purple colour scheme, a garden that is now and the paler biscuit private, immersive and colours of the grasses’ flowerheads. plant-led. And since it is visible from every angle, it is essential that the interest runs for as long as possible. “I like my plants to be happy and to grow fat and chubby – but they have to be tough,” says Petra. “I stake when I have to, but I hate it.” Early in the season, the garden’s good looks are assured by liberal deployment of alliums and Stipa tenuissima but Petra likes to create structure with plants that flower later, too. “Asters are such undervalued plants,” she enthuses. “They get up early and produce lots of voluminous, green, spring foliage, and then the flowers provide an amazing show of brilliant autumn colour.” And plant selection is just one aspect of the garden’s staying power. Petra has worked hard on the unprepossessing soil, clearing out the stones and mulching with as much compost as she can get her hands on, while making her own from a handy local supply of nettles and comfrey. “I focus on specific areas each year,” she says. “I’d much rather mulch a few areas really well than just sprinkle it around,
ANEMONE ‘SEPTEMBER CHARM’
ECHINACEA ‘WHITE SWAN’
Soft pink flowers wave in the breeze above vigorous plants that never need staking.
One of the best echinaceas for white blooms, forming bushy clumps at 90cm tall.
SELINUM WALLICHIANUM
ASTER ‘KYLIE’
Above Dark foliage of
Looking like a beefier version of cow parsley, selinum wins high praise for its late flowers.
ACTAEA SIMPLEX ATROPURPUREA GROUP Wand-like spires of scented white flowers in autumn.
This 1m tall aster bears sprays of small, soft-pink flowers in autumn, on bushy plants that stay upright without staking.
ASTER ‘BEECHWOOD CHARM’ Bright pink, double flowers on a sturdy 1m tall plant, best grown in a spot in full sun.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 43
so I have a rota system. No one ever has enough compost, but if you want plants like asters to remain vigorous and vibrant, then good soil quality is key.” The other technique, rather surprisingly, involves leaving the garden to get on with doing what it wants. Weeding is kept to a minimum, so as not to damage the plants and, when necessary, watering takes place at soil level, rather than from above. “Borders are planted densely and look after themselves during the season. After that it is all down to the soil,” says Petra. “I keep the seedheads and cut out stuff that is getting tired and lazy, but basically I aim to interfere as little as possible.” The mellow 500-year-old house is now enveloped in a magnificent and delightfully modern planting scheme; bold and decisive, yet soft and with the sort of a relaxed quality that comes with having confidence in making – and breaking – one’s own rules at will. In this relatively short time the garden has come together beautifully, but Petra is not quite done with it yet. “What I’d really like is a hardwood greenhouse. With these old walls nothing is straight, so it will have to be bespoke, but it would really finish it off,” she says. “I also plan to tweak the drive, as it is still boring and square, and I want to fatten up that cloud-pruned hedge some more!” Right Fennel and Verbena bonariensis in large beds navigated by gravel paths. Below The yew hedge in the front garden was given its head; once its natural shape was revealed, it was cloudpruned to suit its form.
Castle End House, Deddington, Oxfordshire, opens occasionally for the National Garden Scheme. See ngs.org.uk for details and updates.
Prairie PLUS Mix favourite roses with hard-working perennials A combination of bold flowers, strong foliage and an innate airiness holds this planting scheme together, and Petra is a fan of a structural seedhead too. “I use loads of Eupatorium maculatum Atropurpureum Group, which is stonking from beginning to end, and sedums (hylotelephium), which are fantastic all year round. Asters are just priceless – they have good early foliage, pretty flowers and fabulous seedheads. I especially like the tiny-flowered ones that merge into the surrounding planting in a haze.”
44 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Grasses are a repeating feature, particularly Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’, while Thalictrum ‘Elin’ has both fantastic foliage and delicate seedheads. Petra favours roses such as moss rose ‘Chapeau de Napoléon’, and ‘Charles de Mills’, together with ‘Jacques Cartier’, ‘Comte de Chambord’ and ‘De Rescht’. “I like roses with nice hips and attractive foliage,” explains Petra. “I don’t mind roses that flower once and go a bit loopy. I also like them later, when they are thinner and just the odd rose shows through.”
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OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 45
In the Upper Pool Garden, yew blocks emphasise the pool’s corners, while dark red cotinus and berberis mix with rudbeckia.
46 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Trooping THE COLOUR
At Crathes Castle in Aberdeenshire, a joyous array of plants thrive thanks to the walled garden’s warm microclimate. Developed over centuries, but finessed from the 1920s by Sir James and Lady Sybil Burnett, it is now cared for by head gardener James Hannaford WORDS JULIA WATSON PHOTOGRAPHS RAY COX
A
lthough the walled garden at Crathes Castle is almost four acres in extent, it is far from intimidating in scale. Hedges, shrubs and paths divide the space into eight smaller garden areas full of character and colour, and at every turn there are vistas to please the eye. Built in the 16th century by Alexander Burnett, the castle was home to the Burnett family for more than 350 years, and the garden evolved over time as needs and fashions changed. There are some remnants of its earlier incarnations – the hedges and topiary mostly date from the 18th and 19th centuries, and there is a handsome range of Victorian glasshouses – but today’s garden was very much the work of Sir James Burnett, and his wife Sybil, after he inherited Crathes in 1926. Together, they created what would come to be regarded as one of the world’s great gardens. Both were passionate gardeners. Lady Burnett, inspired by design luminaries such as Gertrude Jekyll and Norah Lindsay, and by gardens like Hidcote and Nymans, was the one who took charge of the herbaceous planting. Sir James, fascinated by the work of contemporary plant hunters, began amassing a superb collection of shrubs and trees from around the world, planting them both inside the walled garden and in the grounds beyond. He exchanged seeds and cuttings with the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and with fellow enthusiasts, and continually pushed the envelope to see what might survive in his ancestral corner of Aberdeenshire. Today, Crathes is cared for by the National Trust for Scotland, and the gardens and wider grounds are in the hands of head gardener James Hannaford. He is still amazed by what will grow in the microclimate of the walled garden. “It sits on a south-facing sunny slope, and both the walls and the surrounding woodland give shelter, and all of that benefits the more tender shrubs, like Grevillea rosmarinifolia from Australia, or Fremontodendron californicum.” 48 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Clockwise from above
The ‘doocot’, moved by Lady Sybil Burnett to the end of her new June border; rich colour in the upper pool garden; a splash of deep, dusky pink in the form of Cosmos ‘Rubenza’; golden cercidiphyllum joins domed topiary shapes to the side of the pristine croquet lawn.
The long rectangle of the walled garden consists of an upper garden, under the walls of the castle, and the lower garden, leading away towards the valley of the Dee. When James and Sybil took over, the upper walled garden was the decorative part and the lower garden was largely given over to kitchen gardening, although there was a double border down the centre. Sybil first turned her attention to the Upper Pool Garden, which in those days formed the view from the Victorian wing of the house, which burned down in a fire in 1966 and was not rebuilt. She bracketed the simple, square pool with corner blocks of yew, and created a planting mix of yellows, reds and hot pinks, complemented by foliage of deep red and purple, which is at its best in late summer. Garden writer and plantsman Graham Stuart Thomas would later pay tribute to it as ‘the most OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 49
skilful piece of colour work I ever saw’. Head gardener James is also an admirer, saying: “It’s one of my favourite parts of the garden. Lady Sybil had a real touch for colour, always vibrant and strong.” Next to the upper pool garden lies the croquet lawn, still regularly used by Aberdeen clubs and featuring what are reputedly the garden’s oldest topiaries, planted in 1702. Once a crisp pair of egg and eggcup shapes, they have spread and tilted eccentrically over time and are among the garden’s best loved features. The upper walled garden is also home to a rose garden and a fountain garden to which the Burnetts added their own gloss, including a multitude of shrubs that enhanced the sense of seclusion and enclosure. For James, the plethora of interesting shrubs and trees – there are 75 viburnums alone in the walled garden – pose their own problems. “Some of them are exceedingly rare, some are reaching the end of their lives or are getting too big, so we are in the process of propagating them to get replacements ready if we have to take one out.” As time went by, the Burnetts began colonising the lower walled garden, edging out fruit and vegetables in favour of new features. One of Sybil’s triumphs is the White Border, which, at this time of year is a symphony of hydrangea, phlox and anaphalis. And she had a romantic-looking 19th century ‘doocot’, or dovecote, moved from elsewhere in the grounds to provide a focus for a new June border. The main axes of the lower walled garden meet at a venerable Portuguese laurel, clipped into a dome. Reckoned to be 200 years old, it is a source of anxiety for James, who would hate to see it go: “It’s a worry because it’s hollow; although I have got cuttings of it growing up, I just hope it can hang on. It’s an iconic plant.” After the vicissitudes of World War II, Sir James and Lady Burnett handed over Crathes to the National Trust for Scotland in 1951, although they continued to live there – as do the modern day Burnetts, though elsewhere on the estate rather than in the castle. Sir James died in 1953, and Sybil in 1960. The gardener who had worked with them, Douglas MacDonald, stayed on under the NTS and in the 1970s assisted with the last two garden areas that were created in the lower walled garden: the golden garden and the red garden. These replaced a final remnant of kitchen garden and are a source of vibrant colour all year round. In normal times, James Hannaford looks after Crathes and its wider landscape as part of a team of 50 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
This image Perovskia
‘Blue Spire’ surrounds a charming fountain of a putto with a dolphin. Below Statuesque perennial Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’. Bottom Exotic bananas, ricinus and cannas in the Glasshouse Border.
The focal point of the double herbaceous border is the 200-yearold Portuguese laurel. Helenium, rudbeckia and helianthus all add colour.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 51
five, plus three seasonal the lower walled garden helpers and some 15 where Nepeta ‘Walker’s volunteers. But under Low’ lines the fence. lockdown, there were Above A stalwart for autumn, Helenium just two of them on ‘Moerheim Beauty’. duty for several weeks, and the number only went up to five once the garden reopened in July. For this reason, some of the year’s grander plans have understandably had to be postponed. Even pruning the hedges may have to wait until next year, but James is sanguine about that: “I’m not sure if that’ll be the worst thing for them. When I first came here, we used to cut the holly topiaries at a set time, but they ended up looking sparse. We skipped them entirely for a couple of years, and now they are producing enough growth to thicken out. With some of those older things, it’s not always routine that governs it; I like to look at the plant and see when it actually needs pruning.” In the end, in a history spanning many hundreds of years, one difficult year may not make too much difference. Top Looking down into
Crathes Castle, Crathes, Banchory, Aberdeenshire AB31 5QJ. Open daily until 31 October, 10.30am to 4pm, and from 1 November to 31 December, daily, 11am to 4pm. Tel: 01330 844525; nts.org.uk 52 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Extend THE SEASON Gardening advice from Crathes’ James Hannaford To extend herbaceous displays into autumn, cut back nepeta, geraniums and alchemilla midsummer. This will tidy up the border and promote a second flush of flowers and lush growth. When clipping box hedging, avoid doing so in the wet or in strong sunlight so as not to encourage the spread of box blight. Also consider sterilising your cutters or hand shears between sections. When cutting topiaries, particularly older ones, consider if there is enough health and vigour in the plant. Delay cutting to later in the year or the following year to ensure the best finish and plant health. Summer prune deutzias and philadelphus after flowering. This will allow strong, healthy, new
flowering growth the following year and an opportunity to shape the shrubs as desired. If growing half-hardies such as salvia, argyranthemum and osteospermum, consider growing them in larger pots from the start. This will allow for a much healthier plant and gives instant height and structure for your summer displays. With a wide and efficient range of electric hedge cutters now available, make the switch from petrol. It’s better for both the environment and the operator. If possible keep one set for one purpose, particularly for box hedging. Oil the blades regularly when in use, and take the time to get the blades sharpened before the cutting season.
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Vistas are key at Mitton Manor, where views of focal points draw the visitor irresistibly through the garden.
Changing ROOMS
Mitton Manor in Staffordshire is a garden of very different parts, each bursting with colourful planting and sculpture or water features that make the most of autumn’s soft sunlight WORDS JIM CABLE PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 55
Above Dahlias ‘Karma
Choc’ and ‘David Howard’ burgeon in a box-hedged bed below a smart avenue of Prunus ‘Kanzan’ trees. Left Massed box balls are a simple foreground for the white timber pavilion.
P
erhaps more than most people, gardeners understand our reliance on the sun and its life-giving light. The seven-acre gardens surrounding Mitton Manor in Staffordshire are a perfect celebration of this. Visit on a crisp autumn day to be greeted by a veteran beech tree, its russet leaves filtering and reflecting the soft seasonal rays. That’s the starting point for a journey through garden rooms furnished with sumptuous planting that invite you to pause and be still, before enticing you on to the next stage of the unfolding drama. En route, it is the way the garden’s planting and structures play with the light that is so entrancing. One is teased by light and shade and dazzled by beams reflected from steel, water or glass before seeing the intricacies of shadow on the Staffordshire stone. It all began in the late 1840s, in the hamlet of Mitton, when a modest hunting lodge to the
neighbouring Whiston Hall was built. Colonel George Jones received it as part of a dowry when he married Alice Northey and he undertook the job of extending the lodge into a dwelling in line with the couple’s status. In 1881 the upgrade was complete. George changed the name of the property from Whiston Lodge to Mitton Manor and expanded his own name to George Jones Mitton. He enjoyed the country sports that life there offered, but the army was his real love and it increasingly took him away from home. In the end, the couple went their separate ways, but they are remembered in the Alice & George teas served at Mitton Manor today. It was essentially the same house with its curly gables and red-brick walls that current owner, Elizabeth Gooch MBE, fell in love with. She first saw it surrounded by a snow-covered lawn and in the muffled silence of that winter day a spark ignited that led to the creation of the glorious gardens
Top left The well-
appointed path in the Roundhouse Garden is fringed by more box, cannas and grasses. Above right The view to the pavilion takes in the glistening Aqualens water feature by Allison Armour. Above left A formal fountain in Mitton Manor’s Front Garden.
we see today. Elizabeth, an A-class technology entrepreneur, uses her hard-won expertise to help others set up technology companies. Gardening provides her with some much-needed down-time. “I spend a lot of my time talking and it is really lovely to do something solitary and physical,” she enthuses. “I can sort my head out for the week ahead!” The same drive and determination fuelled the four years she spent clearing the site at Mitton and countless hours of research before the garden build could even begin. “It was a big scary space, in a way and, inspired by the vistas and views of gardens like Hidcote, I thought: ‘let’s break it up into rooms and make it more manageable’.” The first of those rooms to be built is also the first area to greet visitors. Work started in 2000 on what could only become the Millennium Garden. It is centred on a beautiful David Harber mirrorpolished steel obelisk representing the sun. This was OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 57
A small shepherd’s hut summerhouse is perfectly in keeping with the more rural, relaxed feel in this area of the garden.
58 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
soon paired with a moon obelisk on the horizon just before the land drops away into a flood plain. With these in place, “it was a case of joining the dots and filling it in with gardens”, Elizabeth explains. The Millennium Garden sets the tone in an understated way with a formal layout of evergreen Portuguese laurels, Osmanthus heterophyllus and low box hedging punctuated with cones, enclosing a late display of David Austin roses, including coral-pink ‘Jubilee Celebration’. A potentially awkward spare corner created by a boundary hedge on the diagonal next to the rectangular room is comfortably occupied by a monkey puzzle tree – a lovely nod to the Victorian heritage of the house. The orange autumn foliage of an avenue of cherry trees, Prunus ‘Kanzan’, lures you into the next long and narrow space, flanked by tall yew hedges, which links the terrace at the back of the house with the sight of water splashing from a wall fountain surrounded by pots of hostas, ferns and grasses. The path is edged with low box again, behind which spill the last burnt-orange blooms of Dahlia ‘David Howard’, echoing the colour of the trees above and contrasting with those of Dahlia ‘Karma Choc’, an opulent, velvet-red, chocolatescented beauty. Rich pink ‘Princess Anne’ roses, paler Anemone hupehensis ‘Hadspen Abundance’ and Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’ fill the gaps. Plants at the end of their seasonal cycle play an important part here too; the sputnik seedheads of Allium cristophii and sunset leaf hues of Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ add drama. After the Cherry Tree Walk the paved area around the swimming pool feels expansive. The warmth of the October sun hints at past summers and the fun of the pool parties that Mitton Manor hosts. Hydrangeas in large pots still proudly display their flowers, now faded to antique shades and comfortably matched to the lime-green petunia and purple verbena underplanting. And then, in another sharp shift of mood, the visitor finds themselves in a cool, narrow glade, enclosed by pleached lime trees under which are a verdant mix of slim-leaved aucuba, ferns, euonymus and hostas. The bronze and coral tints of oak-leaved hydrangeas, the huge white ‘frosted’ leaves of Fatsia ‘Spider’s Web’ and silver-leaved brunnera stop it all becoming too sombre. The eye is drawn to the Staffordshire stone moon obelisk at the end against
The warm October sun hints at past summers and the fun of the pool parties that Mitton Manor hosts
Above Terracotta pots mark the steps that cross the garden on the way back to the house. Left A late flush of flowers on Rosa ‘Crown Princess Margareta’. Below Neil Wilkin’s glass sculptures form an elegant focal point among the box hedges.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 59
a foil of more pleached lime and surrounded by box balls and spirals. Turn right before reaching it and you emerge blinking back in the land of the sun. The Roundhouse Garden is home to a gloriously hot-coloured plant palette. The huge paddle leaves of Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’, back-lit by the low sun, glow orange and burgundy against a haze of the feather grass Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’. The hues of the banana are cleverly picked out in the blooms of burgundy Cosmos atrosanguineus ‘Chocamocha’, more Dahlia ‘Karma Choc’ and orange Canna ‘Durban’. Seedheads of Stipa gigantea dance in the breeze above faded plates of Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’ and the structural remains of Phlomis russeliana and crocosmia flowers. The saturated orange daisies of Tithonia rotundifolia contrast wonderfully with the glaucous foliage of Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii and the whole luxuriant scheme is anchored by great mounds of box and Hebe rakaiensis. It is a glorious
The Roundhouse Garden is home to a gloriously hot-coloured palette. The huge paddle leaves of Ensete ‘Maurelii’, back-lit by the low sun, glow burgundy Above left A bubble
swing seat by Myburgh Designs catches the light. Above right Cretan amphorae add structure to borders featuring cannas and grasses in the Roundhouse Garden.
JOBS TO DO in autumn Seasonal advice for October from Elizabeth Gooch Plant spring bulbs for forcing. Paperwhite narcissi will flower in time for Christmas if planted now. Keep deadheading dahlias so they bloom until the first frosts. Lift the tubers to store in a cool place over winter, replacing them with tulips and wallflowers for spring colour. 60 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
This is a good time to move shrubs and plant new ones, as well as lifting and dividing perennials that have outgrown their space. Apply a mulch to some of the more tender salvias and bring other tender plants, such as the bananas, into the greenhouse for protection.
sight on a sunny October day and one that’s hard to leave behind – but there is much more to see. The Pergola Walk is entered through an arch clothed in Rosa ‘Crown Princess Margareta’, the last of its apricot petals submitting to the autumn breeze. This leads on to the Pavilion Garden where more David Austin roses – salmon-orange ‘Lady of Shalott’ and tangerine ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’ – contrast with the purple flowers of Salvia ‘Amistad’. Towering over the beds on steel stems and refracting the light are some glass suncatchers by Neil Wilkin. Nearer the house is an Aqualens by Allison Armour, a clear acrylic sphere filled and overflowing with water into a stainless-steel bowl. It is these elements and their sparkling reflections that help keep the garden so alive as winter beckons. From the pavilion, the land drops to a stream bordered by acers in their autumn glory and the farmland beyond. It looks as if Elizabeth’s formal garden is set to grow. A stone amphitheatre is out on a limb pushing into the edge of the flood plain and will be surrounded with moisture-loving perennials in a few years’ time, extending this magical garden of light and shade further into the landscape. Mitton Manor, Mitton, Penkridge, Staffordshire ST19 5QW. Usually opens for tours and events throughout the year and on selected dates for the National Garden Scheme. mittonmanor.co.uk
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ONE YEAR GOOD GARDENING DIPLOMA BOOKING NOW
September 2020 – end June 2021
Covers the best in planting design while training in the more serious aspects of horticultural techniques. Practical sessions held at Arundel Castle under the guidance of head gardener Martin Duncan and at Sandhill Farm House, Rogate. Lectures by many leading gardening personalities and regular visits to outstanding private gardens. Students also learn to draw up planting plans. (1 day a week (Tues), 10.30am–3.15pm, over three terms)
THE ESSENTIAL GARDEN DESIGN DIPLOMA BOOKING NOW January-March 2021
Based at the Chelsea Physic Garden and led by Rosemary Alexander and architect Catriona Rowbotham, the course is an overview of Garden Design, covering all the elements needed to rethink an average garden.Taking students step by step through site surveying, using the grid, horizontal and vertical features, garden layouts and planting plans, costing and specification, plus drawing tuition and homework on design and plant portfolios.Tutors are well respected in the industry and will guide students on how to succeed in this diverse profession. (2 days a week (Wed & Thur) 10.30am-3.15pm, plus 2 days homework)
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One of our most popular courses, led by master horticulturalist Ben Pope, which aims to take each student through all the practical elements of caring for a garden from soil, tools, maintenance, seed sowing and propagating, weed control and pests and diseases.The first 3 days will be spent at the Chelsea Physic Garden and the final day will be spent gaining practical experience in Rosemary Alexander’s much praised garden near Petersfield and the garden nearby, where Ben is in charge. Participants will be given a chance to prune, plant, sow seeds and regular maintenance tasks will be discussed. A light lunch and refreshments will be provided daily.
GARDEN DESIGN & CARING FOR YOUR GARDEN Distance Learning Courses study anytime, anywhere in the world
A stepping stone to a new career.These two correspondence courses are a step by step guide to either designing your own garden or learning how to plant and maintain an existing garden: drawing up plans, hard landscaping, site analysis, planting, month by month tasks etc.Taught through a comprehensive course book, with projects submitted to us. 1-3 years to complete and individual assessment.
Garden of Medicinal Plants – Chelsea Physic Garden
Photo: R Alexander
Not sure which Diploma course is for you? We prefer potential students to attend an Information Session when Rosemary explains the whole course content and you can see our facilities at the historic Chelsea Physic Garden. JUST CONTACT US TO SET UP A DATE/TIME www.englishgardeningschool.co.uk Email: info@englishgardeningschool.co.uk Tel: 020 7352 4347 Long established as the leader in all design and gardening tuition and based at the unique and historic Chelsea Physic Garden
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ICONIC GARDENS
Freedom of Expression Mark Lane explores the gardens of Gravetye Manor, former home of William Robinson, the visionary Victorian gardener who pioneered both ‘wild’ and cottage gardening
IMAGE MIMI CONNOLLY
G
Gravetye’s borders brim with planting in a glorious ‘grand cottage garden’ style, now cared for by head gardener Tom Coward.
ravetye Manor, set in a 1,000-acre estate in the small hamlet of West Hoathly, Sussex, was built in 1598 and became the home of plantsman and author William Robinson in 1885. Over 50 years, Robinson developed a garden of incredible natural beauty around it. He is renowned for his wild garden, and at Gravetye encouraged naturalistic plantings, both native and exotic, that merge together to reflect the wildness of Ashdown Forest and the countryside of the Sussex Weald. OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 63
ICONIC GARDENS
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ravetye’s 35-acre garden was William Robinson’s laboratory, where he experimented with plants and plant combinations, leaving not a patch of bare soil to be seen. In recent years, head gardener Tom Coward has lovingly cared for the gardens, with an emphasis on the feel of the garden rather than a static interpretation. Tom uses some plants that William Robinson would not have known, yet still creates a sense of atmosphere and place. As Coward explains: “It’s about progressive conservation rather than preservation.” Robinson felt traditional gardening, where plants increase in size towards the back of the border, was ‘unimaginative’, so he varied heights and put some taller plants at the front. This naturalistic style is found everywhere today, and it’s an approach we owe to him. He created the ideal English garden with mixed borders, wild meadows, orchards, a lake and a walled kitchen garden. These are spaces that look good for most of the year, with seedheads left over the winter months for atmospheric effect. 64 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above No tiers: plants are arranged in natural groups, their heights mixed up rather than decreasing to the front. Below A jumble of ‘Pam’s Choice’ foxgloves and Aquilegia chrysantha ‘Yellow Queen’.
The Flower Garden, where the former lawn once was, is close to the house and comprises four quadrants of lawn surrounded by mixed borders, divided by Yorkstone flag pathways. Unlike Hidcote, which is inward-looking, Gravetye sits within its landscape, enjoying vistas out across wildflower meadows from spring to midsummer, and the view of the landscape is as important as the garden itself. The wilder parts of the garden sit comfortably with the informal planting of the mixed borders, and are testament to Robinson’s understanding of plants, how to use them and how to create a thing of beauty from a pulsating mix of bulbs, herbaceous perennials, wildflowers, shrubs and trees. His style rejected formal bedding displays in blocks of colour that would be removed every autumn with the earth left bare until the following spring. Robinson’s books The Wild Garden and The English Flower Garden, are just two of many published works, but offer the perfect insight into a most fascinating man and one of the most beautiful gardens in the country.
Gravetye Manor’s KEY PLANTS
IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; GAP/SUZIE GIBBONS – DESIGN BY TOM COWARD/ROBERT MABIC; GARDEN WORLD IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK; ALAMY
Robinson blurred the line between garden plant and wildflower, mixing the two with aplomb
CENTRANTHUS RUBER
AMMI VISNAGA
ECHIUM RUSSICUM
Red valerian is a pretty perennial wildflower, perfect for mixed borders and naturalising, with flowers from late spring.
Dense yet delicate umbels of myriad tiny white flowers. Perfect as a subtle architectural plant, it reaches 90cm tall.
Red-flowered viper’s grass has burgundy flowers all the way up its spikes. It’s 60cm tall and perfect for pollinators.
CAMASSIA LEICHTLINII
RANUNCULUS ACRIS SUBSP. ACRIS ‘STEVENII’
SCILLA SIBERICA
Ideal for wildflower meadows and pollinators, with tall stems clothed in starry blue flowers in April and May.
PERSICARIA ‘PINK ELEPHANT’ This perennial produces arching spikes of soft-pink flowers throughout summer.
A stunning semi-double version of the meadow buttercup in vivid yellow.
DAVIDIA INVOLUCRATA The beautiful dove or handkerchief tree is known for the large white bracts that surround its insignificant green flowers.
Nodding, star-shaped, Prussian-blue bells, invaluable for early spring colour are produced by this resilient bulb.
CLEMATIS ‘GRAVETYE BEAUTY’ An eye-catching clematis with rich-red trumpet flowers, blooming in late summer.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 65
ICONIC GARDENS
The Flower Garden A key feature at Gravetye Manor is the intensive, successionally planted mixed borders found in the Flower Garden. These borders, used by the hotel (which now owns the Manor) and its restaurant for outside dining, contribute to the perfect setting, but, more importantly, they are perfect examples of William Robinson’s and Tom Coward’s planting. The borders are full to the brim with gorgeous plants ranging in height, shape and form, all arranged in a naturalistic way, which, in Robinson’s time, was a new concept: a rebellion against neatly planted bedding displays. Although this style of planting is very popular today, and may not turn 66 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
so many heads for being new, it remains a stunning example of a moment in garden design history. And with new planting and groupings introduced yearon-year, Tom keeps it fresh, exciting, relaxed and quintessentially British. Early in the year tulips fill the borders along with other spring-flowering plants. Of note are Tulipa ‘Menton’ with coral, egg-shaped blooms on tall, sturdy stems; Tulipa ‘Dordogne’ with rose petals and satsuma orange edges, which gently twist as the flower ages; and Tulipa ‘Blue Aimable’, which is a complete contrast with its lavender-mauve shades and hints of purple-blue. Lit up by a low spring sun, these tulips sparkle within the borders.
4 1 2
5
6 7
3
1 With its arching stems of pink flowers Persicaria orientalis always brings an informal feel. 2 Dahlia
IMAGE MIMI CONNOLLY
‘Magenta Star’ adds real vibrancy, its flowers and foliage as bold as each other. 3 Slender wands of coral flowers on Salvia confertiflora. 4 Vivid orange Dahlia ‘David Howard’. 5 Bronze fennel gently seeds around to create a natural look; its yellow flowers are adored by pollinators. 6 The blue-green foliage and dainty hips of Rosa glauca. 7 Fill gaps with sowings of Rudbeckia hirta ‘Autumn Colours’.
A favourite plant of Tom’s is the eastern bluestar or Amsonia tabernaemontana var. salicifolia, which has an open, airy habit of willowy stems topped with clusters of piercing-blue, star-shaped flowers. For additional height in early summer, there are spires of Digitalis ‘Pam’s Choice’, its flowers speckled with a rich maroon that often becomes a solid fingerprint of colour inside their throats. Reaching 1.5m in height, it grows alongside Digitalis purpurea ‘Sutton’s Apricot’, whose apricot-pink flower spikes reach 1m. This continuation of colour through tulips and foxgloves unites the borders as one cohesive garden, while at the same time it feels as if they have selfseeded themselves in a wild and natural way.
Above Around its quadrants of lawn, the Flower Garden’s borders jostle with a wide-ranging mix of perennials and shrubs.
In summer the borders are a riot of colour with taller plants swaying in the wind, while mixers and groundcover plants link everything together. Geraniums such as G. psilostemon, with its black-centred, vivid magenta flowers, form loose hummocks at 1.2m. Later in the season, Dahlia ‘Magenta Star’ continues the theme, with its magenta-pink blooms and a central, dark-red disc ringed by golden anthers atop tall dark stems and foliage. Ornamental grasses with their green leaves and oat-coloured flowers catch both wind and sun and include Stipa tenuissima and Stipa gigantea. From July to October, long, fat spikes of rich red flowers are carried on slender stems above Persicaria ‘Fat Domino’, which covers the soil and sends up nodding inflorescences. Annuals such as cosmos, tagetes and cornflower Centaurea cyanus fill gaps, while late colour comes from Helenium ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’ with yellow petals splashed with burnt orange. The short-lived perennial Rudbeckia hirta ‘Autumn Colours’ has large, daisy-like flowers in shades of orange, ochre, red and yellow. After William Robinson’s death in 1935 and until the lease was taken over from the Forestry Commission and it was transformed into a countryhouse hotel, Gravetye was a forgotten and derelict site. Now, thanks to the continued efforts of Tom and his team, plants are centre stage once again, and the garden has been turned into a space like no other. Somewhere halfway between a wildflower meadow and a flower garden, it never seems to age. Gravetye Manor, Vowels Lane, West Hoathly, Sussex RH19 4LJ. The garden is open to hotel and restaurant guests and you can usually book onto a garden tour in season – visit the website for updates. Tel: 01342 810567; gravetyemanor.co.uk OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 67
ICONIC GARDENS
Recreating an ENGLISH GARDEN Choose star plants, or create a Gravetye-inspired planting scheme for a small space
VA-VA-VOOM VERBENA Pennisetum macrourum, the African feather grass, is a beautiful ornamental grass, with mounds of linear leaves and long, narrow, bottlebrush-like flowerheads. Like many of the plants at Gravetye, this grass increases by the use of runners, adding to the wild, naturalistic feel. Team it with dahlias, eupatorium, echinacea and other late flowerers.
HOME PRODUCE
GOLDEN ACCENT
Geranium himalayense ‘Gravetye’ is a compact variety with large purpleblue flowers boasting a reddish aura towards the centre. It will cover bare soil and looks particularly good planted under roses.
Patrinia scabiosifolia is an absolute jewel in the border and should be grown more in our gardens. Otherwise known as golden lace, it forms sprays of sulphuryellow flowers above long stems and ovate leaves.
68 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
WEAVE A BORDER TAPESTRY Try combining Lupinus ‘Noble Maiden’ (above) with: Foeniculum vulgare; Valeriana officinalis and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Blackfield’. Plant Hylotelephium ‘Matrona’ with Persicaria bistorta at the front and underplant with tulips ‘Attila’ and ‘Negrita’ for spring. These will create a tapestry of colour and texture for months on end.
IMAGES SHUTTERSTOCK; GAP/MARK BOLTON/JAN SMITH; ALAMY
TEXTURE AND MOVEMENT
Verbena macdougalii ‘Lavender Spires’ is a great alternative to Verbena bonariensis, while also working brilliantly alongside it, with tall, branching spikes of deep-lavender flowers reaching a height of 1.6m. It makes the perfect vertical accent and it’s a firm favourite with butterflies.
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70 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
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TOP 10 PLANTS
The Soul Garden
H
Imogen Jackson of Horatio’s Garden Oswestry on how to plant a garden that supports both body and mind to give long-term therapeutic effects
WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY IMAGE GAP PHOTOS
oratio’s Garden is a charity that provides support for the rehabilitation of patients through the creation and maintenance of beautiful gardens at NHS spinal injury centres. When Horatio’s Garden Oswestry opened in 2019, Imogen Jackson, a specialist in therapeutic horticulture, was brought in as head gardener. “A therapeutic garden must have planting that
is aesthetic and multi-sensory,” she explains. “The aim is to calm, so greens, purples and pinks work well, while a changing palette helps mark the passage of time so that there is always something to look forward to.” Her garden is immersive, fascinating and transporting, and here she selects ten plants that create this effect. For more information, visit horatiosgarden.org.uk
1 Tropaeolum majus ‘Blue Pepe’ Nasturtiums are cheerful, quick-growing, low maintenance and make good companion plants. “I like nasturtium ‘Blue Pepe’,” says Imogen. “It’s bred for culinary use and has bright red flowers and lovely blue-green leaves with a purplish underside.”
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 71
TOP 10 PLANTS
2 Allium schubertii
3 Galanthus ‘S. Arnott’
A beautiful garden works wonders at relieving stress and anxiety, and structural plants like alliums are particularly diverting when they are threaded through a border. “We grow A. aflatunense, A. sphaerocephalon, and also A. schubertii, which resembles fireworks – each day it explodes with tiny flowers,” says Imogen.
Snowdrops bring a real sense of hope, according to Imogen. “In the depths of winter they poke out their heads like a tiny promise of spring. I particularly love ‘S. Arnott’ with its beautiful, sweet scent.” Snowdrops are perennials and spread over time. ‘S. Arnott’ reaches 15cm in height and prefers moist, well-drained soil.
4 Tomato ‘Black Cherry’ Needing plenty of care, tomatoes provide an ongoing therapeutic process. “My favourites are ‘Sungold’ and ‘Black Cherry’,” says Imogen. “For some people or situations, a dwarf or determinate tomato may be more suitable, and very satisfying to grow in a hanging basket. For this I like ‘Tumbling Tom’ or ‘Red Robin’.” 72 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
5 Lavandula x intermedia ‘Gros Bleu’ This lavender has large flowerheads on tall, upright stems and a sweet scent. It is excellent for attracting pollinators and ideal for bouquets, lavender bags or teas. Its calming scent is useful for encouraging mindfulness, which Imogen finds therapeutic.
IMAGES ALAMY; GAP/JONATHAN BUCKLEY/TORIE CHUGG
6 Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ Roses are always popular and at Horatio’s Garden Oswestry ‘Darcey Bussell’ is Imogen’s favourite. “The scent is heavenly, and the deep red petals open out into perfect rosettes. I have them interplanted with Phacelia tanacetifolia and the two plants attract so many pollinators. In combination they are a sight to behold.”
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 73
7 Erigeron karvinskianus
8 Betula nigra
Plants for active-therapy groups need to be easy and quick to grow, as well as being rewarding or useful in some way. Erigeron, a clump-forming perennial is ideal. It has a long flowering season and self-seeds to great effect down steps or in containers. Bees and butterflies flock to its blooms and it tolerates drought well.
Water features are essential in therapeutic gardens, and this tree looks good all year round, hanging delicately over running water in the garden. Its shaggy, flaking bark and graceful form are eyecatching and it looks good alongside Luzula sylvatica. “It is really pretty in autumn when the leaves turn yellow,” notes Imogen.
9 Salvia argentea
10 Calendula officinalis
This drought-tolerant plant is soft, tactile, easy to grow and biennial. Erect stems bear white, hooded flowers, which are a useful food source for bees. As the weather cools, the furry leaves, which can be up to 20cm long, become less green and more silver, offering something to look forward to over a long period.
Pot marigolds are very easy to grow and offer bright flowers over a long period if the winter isn’t harsh. “Deadheading offers hours of therapy and is an excellent escape from the stresses of the ward environment,” says Imogen. “I particularly like ‘Indian Prince’ for its bright orange, crimson-backed petals and crimson centre.”
74 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
IMAGES GAP/RON EVANS; SHUTTERSTOCK
TOP 10 PLANTS
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PLANT FOCUS
IMAGE GAP/JASON INGRAM
Pewter foliage and delicate creamy blooms on a Beth Chatto favourite, H. telephium subsp. ruprechtii.
Perfect Partners
With their unassuming beauty and long season of interest, border stonecrops fill gaps effortlessly and pair well with much showier plants, providing a vital source of nectar for pollinators while they’re going about it, says Hazel Sillver OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 77
PLANT FOCUS
I
f we were thinking of plants in terms of potential partners, border stonecrops are marriage material. While some perennials provide a knock-out show of colour for a few weeks, stonecrops provide subtle interest almost all year round: attractive foliage in spring, pretty flowers in late summer and early autumn, followed by seedheads that will endure the big freeze. They are not the showiest of plants, but few perennials work harder to earn their place. Confusingly, border stonecrops used to be classed as Sedum, but underwent a name change and now belong to their own genus, Hylotelephium. The low-growing, creeping, small-leaved stonecrops
78 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above ‘José Aubergine’ is one of the stand-out dark stonecrops, with its beautifully rich, chocolate tones.
suited to green roofs and path edging, meanwhile, are still classed as Sedum. However, many gardeners continue to refer to their bigger cousins as ‘border sedums’ and some know them as ice plants. Whatever you call them, these stalwarts are invaluable in the garden. “Modest plants can mean as much to me as their flamboyant neighbours,” wrote the late Beth Chatto, who loved stonecrops. “Too many star performers lumped together can become quarrelsome; neutral areas between them keep the peace. Sedums make very good peacemakers and are so dependable on hungry soils, providing interest for almost every month of the year; few herbaceous plants can do that.” Being succulents, border stonecrops have lovely thick foliage that provides interest long before they flower. These fleshy leaves retain a lot of water, allowing the plants to tolerate prolonged periods of drought. For this reason, Beth Chatto grew a lot of them in her Gravel Garden, which is famously never watered, despite being located in a part of Essex that receives just 20 inches of rain a year. Formerly a car park, the earth of the Gravel Garden is stony and poor, but Chatto planted a garden here to find out what would survive. Border stonecrops were one of the victors – so much so that she wrote an entire chapter on them in her book, Drought-Resistant Planting. “Those succulent-like leaves indicate the plants are ideal for dry, sunny gardens – and that’s where they excel,” explains David Ward, garden and nursery director at the Beth Chatto Gardens. “In sunny, well-drained conditions, they are trouble-free, with a long season of interest.” In early summer, they form sturdy, architectural heads of buds. Then, in July or August, these open into dense clumps of star-shaped flowers that bloom until September or October, merging into sculptural, fluffy mounds of mellow colour that suit the season: dusky pink, plum, raspberry and cream-gold. Garden designers love ‘Red Cauli’, which has claret stems and reddish flowers, and ‘Matrona’, which was one of Beth Chatto’s favourites. She brought this stellar variety back from a nursery in Germany and it has large, grey-green, purple-
IMAGES GAP/ANNETTE LEPPLE/PERNILLA BERGDAHL/RICHARD BLOOM; CLIVE NICHOLS; GARDEN WORLD IMAGES
stained leaves with upright port-wine stems bearing blush flowerheads. The Beth Chatto Nursery now sells a new form of ‘Matrona’ (as yet unnamed) that has darker pink flowers, alongside the original gem. ‘Matrona’ arose as a seedling of H. spectabile (the original ice plant) and H. telephium Atropurpureum Group. The latter is one of the dark stonecrops that boast chocolate-purple foliage. Other smouldering stars include ‘Karfunkelstein’ and ‘José Aubergine’. Their rich wine tones look wonderful in the border, especially alongside the soft blues of perovskia and nepeta, while Beth Chatto liked to partner them with grey plants, such as Stachys byzantina ‘Silver Carpet’. Also elegant are white and cream stonecrops, such as H. spectabile ‘Iceberg’, which has pale green leaves and a mass of snowy blooms. Beth Chatto was a fan of H. telephium subsp. ruprechtii for its pewter foliage and cream flowers from pink buds. Grow these ice queens with silvery artemisia, grasses such as Stipa tenuissima, and Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’.
Top left Tight, pink-and-
white flower clusters on purple-leaved ‘Karfunkelstein’. Top right Jade leaves and mauve-pink blooms on the vivid ‘Brilliant’. Above right Beth Chatto brought ‘Matrona’ back from a trip to Germany. Above Classic ‘Red Cauli’ is tinged claret all over.
The architectural shape, texture and unimposing subtlety of stonecrop flowers allows them to work visually in most border designs. But they also bring wildlife into the garden. Bees and butterflies flock to drink the nectar, which is easily accessible since they can rest on the wide, flat flowerheads. These nectar platforms are vital for wildlife at a time of year when few other food sources are available. For example, comma and peacock butterflies must gather as much nectar as possible before they hibernate, in order to survive the winter. Butterflies love the ice plant (H. spectabile), whereas bees prefer ‘Herbstfreude’, and both are partial to ‘Brilliant’. All three plants have pink flowers and jade leaves and combine well with fiery foliage, such as Imperata cylindrica ‘Rubra’ and Libertia peregrinans ‘Gold Leaf’. The two-tone hylotelephiums are arguably the best for growing in (very well-drained) pots, so that their wonderful hues can be appreciated. For instance, OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 79
PLANT FOCUS
fleshy rosettes of new spring foliage on ice plant H. spectabile.
The Beth Chatto Gardens, Elmstead Market, Clacton Road, Elmstead, Colchester CO7 7DB. Online booking is required for garden entry but not for the nursery. Tel: 01206 822 007; bethchatto.co.uk 80 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
GROWING ADVICE
Border Patrol David Ward of the Beth Chatto Gardens offers tips on how to succeed with border stonecrops In poor, well-drained soil in a sunny spot, hylotelephiums are virtually trouble-free. Feeding is not necessary beyond initial soil preparation, since this genus is better suited to poorer, well-drained soils than it is to well-fed, fertile ones. So long as rich soil is well drained and not prone to waterlogging, hylotelephiums should grow well, but might get a bit floppy and collapse from the middle out. Reduce flopping by root pruning and carrying out the Chelsea chop. To root prune, cut through the roots in early spring, about six inches away from the clump, all the way around. This prevents
the plant achieving its full height, therefore reducing the chances of stems flopping outwards. The Chelsea chop involves individual stems being reduced by half, traditionally around the time of the Chelsea Flower Show in May. The plant will become more compact and stems will branch out and develop numerous heads instead of one top-heavy flower cluster on each tall stem, thus preventing flopping. To provide nectar for bees, grow the cultivar ‘Herbstfreude’ in particular, and to provide a home for overwintering insects, leave the stems of hylotelephium standing during the winter.
IMAGES CLIVE NICHOLS; GAP/PERNILLA BERGDAHL
‘Stewed Rhubarb Mountain’, which has green-white and pink flowers on burgundy Above right ‘Herbstfreude’ is loved stems, and H. telephium by bees and its pink subsp. ruprechtii ‘Pink flowers morph through Dome’, a form that was tones of pink and brown. discovered at the Beth Chatto Gardens and is a favourite of David Ward, producing clusters of pale apricot-pink blooms above grey and pink foliage. Once the flowers are spent, the show goes on. “Their seedheads add impressive deep tones among all the muted shades of winter,” wrote Beth Chatto, “furnishing the area until we cut them down in February to make way for the new shoots.” They change colour as they mature and die: ‘Herbstfreude’, which David Ward loves for its winter seedheads, morphs through pink and brickred to rich brown, while ‘Matrona’ matures from wine-purple through to nut brown in deepest winter. Then, in spring, these hard-working perennials do it all again, completing a year-round performance that earns them a place in every garden. Above left Gorgeous
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GROW YOUR OWN
October at Babington The autumn harvests have pretty much come to an end at Babington House in Somerset, but Sophie Martin and her team are still busy tidying up the walled garden and looking ahead to an abundant new season to come WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS EVA NEMETH
Autumn and winter are a time to reflect, to clear beds and to prepare the garden for a new season.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 83
GROW YOUR OWN
Last Orders With most of the harvest now gathered, the growing year slows down this month in the Walled Garden at Babington House in Somerset. Yet as much as this time is about winding down, it is also about looking ahead: the approaching winter brings with it an opportunity to ready the garden for spring. And there are still winter squash to be harvested, which head gardener Sophie Martin and her team pick when the leaves have died down and there is no longer enough sun to ripen them further. When you pick winter squash, leave about 7cm of stalk attached and place them in a cool, dry place for a few weeks to cure. Curing happens when sugars move from the flesh of the fruit to the skin, causing it to harden. If stored well, pumpkins and squash will last well into the following year and in winter will offer a bright reminder of summer sun. Carrots are also brought in to be stored, but Sophie leaves hardier roots such as celeriac and 84 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
JUST PEACHY This is the time to treat peach trees especially against peach leaf curl, a fungus that deforms spring leaves. As the leaves begin to drop, Sophie sprays trees with Vitax Copper Mixture, and does the same again in February. “If you get the timing right, you’ll get rid of it,” she insists. Above left From autumn,
pull up parsnips as and when they’re needed. Top right Pick pumpkins when the foliage dies or the stem hardens. Above right Keep kale and celeriac in situ.
parsnips in the ground over winter and these are pulled up as they are needed. “We also leave kale in place for picking, which we do leaf by leaf from the bottom of the plant up,” she explains. The flower beds are not forgotten, either, and autumn sees an en masse planting of spring bulbs. “I like to have them ready to bring in pollinators early in the year,” says Sophie. “We have tulips where the wildflowers are in summer, as well as narcissus and hyacinths, which are used in arrangements in the house.” This is also a good time to start planting onion sets and garlic, too.
Tidying Up As October gales blast leaves from trees and the first frosts arrive, Sophie focuses on hunkering down for winter, and clearing up the walled garden begins in earnest. “I pick up every rotten apple, even from under the hedges,” she admits. “We do a real tidy up and clear every single bed completely. We take down all the frames and wash and put away all the netting and fleeces. Everything is prepared from October to February, and by February the garden is bare.” Once the raised beds are clean of spent plants and weeds, she covers them with weed-suppressing membrane, fixed to a frame the size of the bed. This keeps down weeds but lets in winter rain, which, with a mulch applied only in spring, means beds stay damper for longer. In February, Sophie applies mulches on a three-year rotation, using horse manure, municipal compost and a mixture of horse manure and mushroom compost depending on need, with hungrier areas receiving the manure. “I never dig the beds over but I do give them a good weed to get them completely clear. Then we just put mulch on top of the beds and rake it out,” she explains. This is also the time for maintenance. Compost heaps can be turned, loose raised beds tightened and watering systems put in place. If you are thinking of a water butt, put one in now so it has time to fill.
Right Tidy up fallen apples and gather the last ones from the trees. If they’re no good for chutney, add them to the compost heap. Below right Clear beds of vegetables and weeds before covering with mulch in spring. Below left Herbs like sage and rosemary enhance winter dishes.
SOPHIE MARTIN Sophie and her team manage the gardens at Babington House in Somerset, but they also work with a variety of clients in the West Country. “I try to help clients get the most enjoyment from their gardens from our base near Mells,” she says. For more information call 07971 989996.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 85
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AUTUMN PLANTING
WORDS CLARE FOGGETT IMAGE GAP/FRIEDRICH STRAUSS
Autumn-planted bare-root roses are treated to a thorough soaking before they are put in the ground.
Head START
Autumn is the prime time to plant not only spring-flowering bulbs but also new trees, shrubs, hedging and perennials so they can establish successfully in still-warm soil and perform with panache, year after year
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 87
AUTUMN PLANTING
In association with
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ow do you know you’ve become a ‘serious’ gardener? Arguably it’s when pottering about in the garden in spring and summer is no longer enough and you find yourself gardening in autumn and winter, too. That’s when you know the gardening bug has truly bitten. As if to prove the point, it’s the gardening done in autumn that has the biggest impact, since it’s the best time of year to successfully introduce new plants. The garden looks effortlessly better in spring and the perfect circle is complete. “There’s so much pleasure in buying bulbs and plants in autumn,” says Guy Barter, chief 88 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above Planting bulbs now brings with it a delightful sense of anticipation for the colourful spring show that will follow.
horticulturist at the Royal Horticultural Society. “You get that nice sense of anticipation, whether it’s bulbs or cheaper plants such as pansies and wallflowers that aren’t too much fuss. Not forgetting the vegetable garden, where you could pop in some shallots or garlic. There are so many nice things you can do in autumn and some autumn days can be very pleasant. They’re not all damp, dank drizzle!” Autumn is the best time to put in new plants because the soil still retains summer’s warmth, which will help new roots establish, and there’s usually an increasing amount of rain to help plants settle in. “If you plant in early October, plants will root before the onset of wintry weather in December and they’ll be ready to resist drought next summer,” says Guy. Evergreen plants, which continue to grow slowly over winter, will benefit the most from this. As well as buying new plants, it’s a good time to divide your own and, as Guy points out, after spending summer on a garden centre bench, shopbought perennials will often be quite pot-bound by now and will benefit from being split up. From November, you also have the option of buying bare-root plants, those roses, trees, hedging plants or fruit that are sold during their dormant season. Autumn is a far less pressured time of year – unlike spring when jobs come thick and fast, all needing to be done at once. So why don’t more gardeners take advantage of autumn’s planting window? “I think it’s down to knowledge and expertise,” says Guy. “So many plants are bought on impulse, when they look nice in summer.” Twiggy bare-roots can be a hard-sell for garden centres and they’re no longer stocked as widely as they were before containerised plants became the norm. Mail order is where most of them can be found these days. “There has been such a shift to online trade this year, it will be interesting to see whether trade in plants such as bare-roots will increase as a result,” says Guy. There are a few exceptions to the plant-in-autumn maxim: grasses, bamboos and bearded iris are all
IMAGES GAP PHOTOS; GARDEN WORLD IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK
better left until spring since they don’t grow new roots at this time of year. Those gardening on heavy clay that retains water over winter may also want to delay until spring, or raise beds for better drainage – new plants hate sitting in soggy soil. “At Wisley we have lovely free-draining sand, whereas on Rosemoor’s clay, with Devon rain, by November you just can’t get anything in the ground,” says Guy.
PLANTING PERENNIALS Andrew and Helen Ward run Norwell Nurseries near Newark, which has many choice perennials in stock. “If you’re on reasonable soil, autumn planting is a good idea, and especially if you have
Top left Bought-in plants or divisions from your own perennials will thrive after autumn planting. Top right Shady areas are best planted in autumn. Above right Robust perennials such as rudbeckia are perfect to get in the ground now. Above left Save planting grasses until spring time.
really dry shade, under deciduous trees. Then, always plant in autumn because it means plants have an opportunity to get moisture during winter and early spring,” Andrew advises. Wait until later in spring when the soil under trees is already drying out, and expect to fight a battle to get plants happily established. Andrew clarifies: “If you’re on heavy soil, you have to be a bit more circumspect about what you’re putting in. I wouldn’t plant things that are borderline hardy, things that really hate sitting in wet soil, or you’ll get root dieback. On really heavy soil I would steer towards spring planting and I never fiddle around with grasses in autumn – most grasses are spring-planting plants.” The added bonus of autumn planting is that with plentiful rain, you shouldn’t need to water new plants too often. “Typically, I wouldn’t water at all in a normal autumn,” Andrew confirms, although OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 89
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AUTUMN PLANTING
IMAGES GAP/ELKE BORKOWSKI; CLIVE NICHOLS; SHUTTERSTOCK; ALAMY
if the weather is dry, extra watering will be needed. “After winter, give them a thick mulch to retain the moisture that has built up,” he concludes. norwellnurseries.co.uk
TREAT YOURSELF TO A TREE “If you are planting bare-root or root-balled trees, autumn and winter is the time to do it,” says Steve McCurdy, managing director of Majestic Trees. These days, many trees are supplied all year round in containers – Majestic’s own method of growing trees in air-pots means they can be planted in any season – but autumn and winter is still the optimum time. Moving and planting trees in their dormant season subjects them to less stress, meaning better success rates and happier plants. The key, says Steve, is to wait until the tree has lost all its leaves. “Something like Pyrus ‘Chanticleer’ can still be in leaf in November, so wait until the end of November, and then plant it properly,” he advises. For Steve, getting the depth right is crucial. However your tree has been grown, pay careful
Top left Evergreen trees, such as Arbutus unedo, suit autumn planting. Top right If you’re buying bare-root trees, shrubs or hedging ask how long ago plants were lifted. Above right Check the planting depth carefully. Above centre Plant when trees are dormant and all leaves have fallen. Above left Planting while trees are dormant helps minimise stress to them.
attention to the ‘collar’ mark that shows you how deep it should sit in the soil. “On well-drained sandy soil you can get away with planting too deeply, but in most cases if you plant a tree in the ground too deeply you get collar rot,” Steve explains. “Tony Kirkham, Kew’s tree expert, says that if in doubt, it’s better to plant a tree a bit too high.” When buying bare-root trees, ask suppliers when they were lifted from the ground. By the end of bare-root season some trees may have been lifted several months previously, their roots bagged or temporarily heeled into compost. “Once the fibrous roots are exposed, they’ll soon dry out,” says Steve. “You’ll have higher failure rates with bare-roots that weren’t lifted recently. It should ideally be the day before they’re shipped, so ask questions. Saving those fibrous roots is critical to the trees’ success.” majestictrees.co.uk OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 91
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BUYING BULBS According to Paul Blom of Bloms Bulbs, if you only plan to plant small groups of tulips, treat them as annuals. “Then, shallow planting at 7-10cm is perfectly adequate, and the job of lifting the bulbs after flowering is easy,” he explains. If you want to leave the bulbs in the ground to flower again in subsequent years, the advice is to go deeper, to around 12-15cm. “The big advantage of deeper planting is to minimise the number of offset bulbs produced. More energy is devoted to feeding next year’s flower bulb,” he points out. In pots and containers, always plant new tulip bulbs into fresh compost to get maximum impact from these colourful focal points. “The most important thing is to keep pots evenly moist during autumn and spring, without soaking them. If they’re too dry in autumn they won’t sufficiently develop their roots, and in spring they’ll start to grow normally but the flower bud will shrivel from lack of moisture,” Paul advises. Another Bloms tip is to plant the tulip bulb with its flat side outwards, especially those around the perimeter of the pot. The largest leaf always grows from this side, so doing this will produce a more balanced-looking container. 92 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Top left Tulips needn’t be planted deeply if they’re being grown as annuals. Top right Daffodils thrive in sun or partial shade, but those with pink cups will colour best in sun. Right Use soil-based compost for containers. Above Choose the biggest bulbs for the best flowering display. Above left Deep planting encourages flowers in subsequent years.
The correct planting depth is important for daffodils too. “The biggest cause of daffodils going blind (not producing flowers), is shallow planting,” Paul says. It also causes smaller flowers in future years. Daffodil bulbs need 12-15cm of soil above them, but are happy in sunny spots or dappled shade, making them a versatile choice. As for compost choice, it should be moisture-retentive, yet free-draining and friable. Paul recommends a compost that contains soil, so either mix garden soil into multipurpose compost, along with a little leafmould and horticultural grit, or buy a soil-based mix such as John Innes No. 2. blomsbulbs.com
IMAGES GAP PHOTOS; SHUTTERSTOCK; ALAMY; CLIVE NICHOLS
AUTUMN PLANTING
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REGINALD FARRER
IMAGE ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS EDINBURGH/THE REGINALD FARRER COLLECTION
Reginald Farrer, the Victorian-Edwardian plant hunter who introduced many classic plants we enjoy today.
THE GREAT ESCAPE A tortured soul who struggled to fit into society, plant hunter Reginald Farrer, who died 100 years ago this month, had a yearning for travel that gave us a lasting legacy, says Francois Gordon OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 95
REGINALD FARRER Right Viburnum farreri is just one of the plants familiar to us today that was introduced to the UK by Reginald Farrer. Below On an expedition, plant collecting in Asia.
I
n October 1920, shortly before he was due to begin his long journey home, Reginald Farrer, plant hunter and author, died of fever in his camp on a rain-sodden Burmese mountain. During his final days, Farrer was aware how his illness would end. Tragically, it’s likely he didn’t much care because he believed that he had little to live for. Yet he was one of the best and most successful gardening writers of his day and a plant hunter and travel writer of repute. He was sincerely mourned by the British gardening community, many of whose descendants to this day enjoy his writings, notably his two-volume work, The English Rock Garden (1919), which was continuously in print for four decades. How could there be such a contrast between public success – acclaim, even – and private despair?
96 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Farrer was born in 1880 into a family of lawyers and clergymen, who were every bit as socially conservative as that might imply. As an infant he endured painful surgery on the hare lip and cleft palate with which he had been born, to allow him to eat normally, but the operation that enabled him to talk intelligibly had to wait until his late teens. Even then his voice was described by his cousin Osbert Sitwell as “[being] as startling as the discordant cry of a jay or woodpecker… like one of those early gramophones fitted with a tin trumpet”. Farrer was schooled at home by tutors and from childhood he was a passionate botanist, a solitary boy who spent his time roaming the moors around the family home at Ingleborough, North Yorkshire, searching for rare plants. He was also a skilled watercolourist, specialising in botanical specimens.
IMAGES ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENS EDINBURGH/THE REGINALD FARRER COLLECTION; GAP/HOWARD RICE; ALAMY; RHS
REGINALD FARRER At 18, Farrer went to Balliol College, Oxford, quitting a village of 67 houses, all but one of which (the vicarage) were owned by the Farrer estate and where his parents knew his every move, for a free-thinking community where his private life was private. He attached himself to and was, to a point, accepted by, a brilliant cohort of socially well-connected Balliol undergraduates. His efforts to be accepted as a member of that ‘set’ were, however, hampered by an allowance from his father that wouldn’t stretch to accompanying them on trips to Greece or Italy and also because, at a time when the link between height and social status was taken for granted, he stood a little under five foot three: this made him the butt of occasional cruel jokes and, far worse, covert sympathy. One of very few external manifestations of a streak of insecurity is that throughout his life Farrer avoided being photographed next to anything that might reveal his height – or lack of it. At Oxford, Farrer discovered that he was exclusively attracted to men. In Britain 120 years ago, a few liberally minded intellectuals were privately tolerant of this orientation, but the overwhelming majority saw it as distasteful and aberrant. Farrer’s sexuality added another layer of complication to his efforts to integrate into upper-class British society, within which he was at all times forced to conceal this key element of his life. After graduating, Farrer persuaded his parents to fund a trip to Japan with a Balliol friend. They broke the journey in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) where Farrer found himself drawn to Buddhism. In Tokyo he rented a house and spent eight months happily visiting temples and gardens, with brief sidetrips to China and Korea, all the while indulging his passion for collecting works of art. On his return to Ingleborough in 1903, his parents registered their horror both at their eldest son’s extravagance on his travels and his announcement that he had converted to Buddhism: despite trenchant conflict within the
Top The countryside
near Ingleborough, where Farrer searched for rare plants as a child. Above right Farrer as a boy, taken around 1890. Above left Dressed in Chinese robes.
family, his allowance was capped at a level that forced him to live at home. Partly in reaction to parental parsimony, Farrer took up his pen and for the rest of his life he published two or three books or plays a year. An account of his time in Japan was followed by My Rock Garden (1907), Alpines and Bog Plants (1908), and In a Yorkshire Garden (1909), all ground-breaking and influential works that remained in print for years and are still enjoyed today, not least for their lyrical descriptions. To his chagrin, however, the novels and verse-plays that he considered his real forté met with far less success than his gardening books or the book he wrote about plant-hunting in Italy, Among the Hills (1910). OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 97
REGINALD FARRER
98 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above Part of the Min Mountains in what is now China’s Jiuzhaigou National Park, where Purdom and Farrer went plant hunting in 1914. Right The lovely, long, lilac flower tassels of Farrer’s fine discovery, Buddleja alternifolia.
The expedition was under-resourced and Farrer made the bitter discovery that there were few plants in northern Burma that might be hardy in Britain. His travelling companion, Ewan Cox, left after a year, leaving Farrer alone with his Gurkha staff. His letters to his friends were resigned, although in his final summer he seemed more optimistic, planning to return home and perhaps even marry, recording that despite his dislike for “the method of procuring them”, he would like children. It was not to be: in early October he fell ill and despite heroic efforts by his staff to obtain medical assistance he died on the morning of the 17th and was buried near the former fort at Nyitadi. His mother had the last word, ordering – in defiance of his wishes – a stone cross to be placed on his grave. Francois Gordon’s book about Will Purdom will be published on 11 February 2021 by the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, £19.99.
For further reading about Reginald Farrer, try Nicola Shulman’s A Rage for Rock Gardening (Short Books) or Michael Charlesworth’s The Modern Culture of Reginald Farrer (Legenda).
IMAGES GAP/JONATHAN BUCKLEY; ALAMY
In April 1913, Farrer attended the RHS Primula Conference, which included a display of plants collected in north-west China by William Purdom, commissioned by British nurseryman Sir Harry Veitch and the Arnold Arboretum in Boston. This crystallised Farrer’s dream of returning to Asia and he persuaded Purdom to join him on a similar mission for his expenses only. Farrer financed the expedition by selling shares in the future harvest of plants and seeds and hoped to turn a profit by selling plants though the nursery he ran from the Ingleborough greenhouses. Farrer and Purdom collected successfully in western China in 1914, and in December sent their sponsors an impressive quantity of plant material, including Viburnum farreri, Buddleja alternifolia, and several primulas, poppies and rhododendrons. In normal times these would have made a very satisfactory impact on gardeners and horticulturists, but the August outbreak of the Great War had devastated gardening and the nursery trade. Farrer was able only to balance the books for 1915 by selling the coming year’s harvest at sacrifice prices to Liverpool nurseryman A K Bulley. As a Buddhist, Farrer would not fight and would have failed the army medical in any case. On his return to Britain in 1916 he worked for John Buchan at the Foreign Office, writing anti-German propaganda. In 1918 he fell seriously ill: after surgery, he was so anxious to leave Britain that he began organising an expedition to Burma from his hospital bed, sailing from Glasgow in January 1919.
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CRAFTSPEOPLE
True Colours From a remote Devon valley, Flora Arbuthnott has combined creativity with a love of nature, to teach the technique of botanical dyeing, obtaining rich hues from foraged and home-grown plants WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY PHOTOGRAPHS MIMI CONNOLLY
Flora Arbuthnott, preparing cosmos flowers to extract their dye, at her studio in rural Devon.
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 101
CRAFTSPEOPLE
“M
ost crafts are about the coming together of art with science, and rationality with mystery, and there’s a certain point where it’s nice to let go and see what happens.” So says botanical dyer Flora Arbuthnott, who lives and works in a quiet, rural valley near Totnes in Devon. It took Flora some time to settle into this dualism, but now she has come to see how it permeates almost everything in her life. Art and craft are in Flora’s blood. Her mother, Vanessa, is the popular textile designer whose eponymous line of fabrics reflects the joys of rural life. Her father is an architect and stone carver, and her sister is a painter. Two brothers “are in more conventional jobs” she adds. Growing up in the
102 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Above Botanical dyeing
combines Flora’s creativity with a desire to be immersed in nature. Above right Colours have almost infinite variety, depending on the qualities of the dye.
Cotswolds meant nature was integral to Flora’s life, but with her talents it seemed an obvious enough decision to study at the Glasgow College of Art. But there was a snag: something that should have been so right in fact wasn’t right. “I struggled at Glasgow but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Then I realised what I’d been missing: I’d lost my connection with nature,” Flora recalls. “I grew up in the countryside surrounded by plants. I had always had a relationship with them. Then I did a two-week permaculture course that blew my mind. I chose to find meaning in the natural world.” So began a path of personal discovery. She finished her course at Glasgow and then did a stint in service design. “It was never going to work for me,” she says matter-of-factly. Returning to the familiar surrounds of her mother’s studio in the Cotswolds provided her with space for reflection. “I did lots of textile design, print-making and teaching print-making, things I was very confident with, but in the end I stumbled across natural dyeing. I’d never heard of it, but I realised it brought together my design background and my interest in plants. It really made sense.” Humans have been colouring materials for thousands of years, and the path of the dye indigo, in particular, spans continents and millennia. In this country, botanical dyes are keenly associated with wool in a reflection of past economies. Scottish tweeds and tartans were dyed with lichen, leaves, berries, roots and bark, allowing families a form of self-expression, as Jean Fraser points out in Traditional Scottish Dyes (Canongate). Influenced by the mineral content of the water, colours would vary even from glen to glen. In the age of the bright,
stable, cost-effective but ultimately flat synthetic dyes that emerged in the 1800s, botanical dyeing is an anomaly. Yet a contemporary yearning to reconnect with nature – itself a response to climate change and technology – has given botanical dyeing fresh popularity among a band of young artists, growers and foragers. In summer, Flora gathers cosmos and coreopsis from her studio garden near Ashprington on the banks of the River Dart, to simmer in a pot on the stove. Most dyes are water-soluble and can be extracted from plants in a tea. Flora soaks them – flowers, or stems and leaves or both – in a small amount of water, then strains them and repeats the process with the same material to take out all the colour. “Coreopsis is an old favourite that I grow every year,” she says. “Dahlias aren’t particularly stable, but they give such interesting colours. I use dyer’s chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria), which has completely yellow flowers; tagetes marigolds give greens and mustard colours. Then there’s madder for red, woad, which is so prolific here, for blue, weld, which is a reliable source of yellow…” Some plants she grows herself, others she gathers from her surroundings. There is a certain pressure to harvest flowers at their peak, which may last only a week or two, and to obtain enough material to last for a year to come. Some flowers she’ll dry; others work best fresh and will be extracted right away. “I have in my head a calendar of what plants I like to work with and when they are in season for harvest. Meadowsweet is only out for a short time in July, so I dry it out and jar it. Drying is a preservation
Above Cosmos is one of
Flora’s favourite plants for dye-extraction. Below left Many of the plants Flora harvests are dried ready to be used in future years. Below middle Bright yellow dyer’s chamomile, Anthemis tinctoria. Below right Flora keeps a record of the shades that dye and mordant combinations produce so she can repeat them easily in future.
process: 100g dried is much more than 100g fresh,” she notes, adding that it is easier to be more precise with quantities of dried material than fresh, since the water content of fresh plants is so variable. In all this, there is endless opportunity for experimentation and exploration. Each plant offers varying depth of colour depending on the strength of the dye, obviously, but botanical dyes don’t work well on their own. They also need a mordant to fix them to the material at hand, and mordants combined with dyes offer realms of possibility. Mordants are elemental substances that strengthen the bond between the dye and the fabric, making it
CRAFTSPEOPLE
colour-fast. They include aluminium sulphate, iron, chrome, zinc and copper. Fabric must be soaked in these before it can be dyed; the mordant attaches to the fabric, and the dye attaches to the mordant. But dyes themselves also react to the mordant, and so different mordants bring different colours. Add light-fastness to this and the material that is to be coloured, and the near-infinite number of hues and shades that can be achieved becomes apparent. “It can be a bit overwhelming because there are so many different elements,” Flora explains. “Everything is interconnected and there is a chain reaction between all the different elements in the process.” 104 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Top For colour-fastness, fabric must be soaked in a mordant before it is dyed. Flora continues to evaluate light fastness. Above left The magic of dyeing fabric is seeing what the result will be. Above right Different techniques achieve different patterns.
While Flora appreciates the value of the skills she learned at Glasgow, she has sought out individuals to guide her on specific topics. Michel Garcia has been influential in dyeing practice, while Ffyona Campbell has helped with foraging skills and plant knowledge. For a time, Flora sold dyed products – drawings, prints and patterns – but this meant she was always focused on an end result, when she far prefers the process. Workshops and classes were the answer. Then came 2020 and the opportunity to gather in groups fell away. Her solution has been to start teaching online and this has been very successful. From her remote valley, where mobile signal is limited, she now teaches dyers around the world. “It makes so much sense, mainly because it’s easier for them to get on with it at home. I reach people in the Hebrides, Ireland, Canada – places where going to a workshop is not really possible,” she explains. “There’s so much narrative around online tech disconnecting us from nature, but it also brings us together. It’s been really inspiring to be part of that.” Along with this, and the opportunity to tidy her studio and catalogue endless colour palettes, there has been time for reflection. “I have a lot of ideas and outward energy but I’m really learning that this needs to be balanced with a more inward process. This year has been fantastic for that,” she notes. For details of Flora’s online courses, as well as wild plant walks and practical workshops, visit her website at floraarbuthnott.com.
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BOOKS
The Reviewer
A selection of the best writing on the shelves this month
Palace of Palms by Kate Teltscher Picador, £25
To walk into the Palm House at RBG Kew on a winter day is to be instantly transported to warmer, tropical climes. The smell of plants so different from our own and the humidity and the warmth are as much a pleasure as seeing the palms themselves. Described in 1853 by the Illustrated London Almanack as ‘without question the most elegant building of its kind in extant’, the Palm House was built between 1844 and 1848 by William Turner to designs by Decimus Burton. On completion, filled with plants sent to Kew by plant hunterexplorers, it represented the acme of British colonial power and industrial development. Today, with climate change and conservation foremost in horticulturists’ minds, it points to threatened rainforests and critical conservation work around the globe. Ironically, as Kate Teltscher points out, much of the latter is a response to the trajectory started by the former. For example, palm oil production, once a lucrative alternative to the slave trade, is now directly responsible for the destruction of rainforests. In Palace of Palms, Kate Teltscher skilfully distils the historical facts of the creation of the Palm House into a piece of storytelling that is difficult to put down. Here appear the monarchs and maverick men awakened by lands unknown to them, and driven by money, ego and passion for new science. Through it all is the absolute focus of Kew’s first director, William Hooker, on establishing a centre of horticultural excellence. His legacy enriches us all.
Botanical Art Techniques
WORDS VIVIENNE HAMBLY
Edited by Carol Woodin and Robin A. Jess Timber Press, £30
Botanical art is so often a source of marvel: the detail, the exacting scale, and just the right colour and texture, whether it’s a persimmon’s bloom or an oak leaf’s decay. We may not all be dedicated enough to join a florilegium society, but there is nothing to stop us dabbling with what grows in our gardens. For aspiring botanical artists, this comprehensive work covers the gamut of techniques, from introductory notes on holding a pencil and shading a sphere, to a step-by-step guide to sketching a chrysanthemum or tulip, and working with egg tempura or painting on vellum. Clear, numbered illustrations make projects easy to follow and thoughts on composition, scale and using colour will take students from beginner to expert.
American Gardens by Monty Don and Derry Moore Prestel, £35
Two veterans with a passion for gardens take three journeys through the United States to visit their favourite properties. Monty Don and consummate photographer Derry Moore present their findings in this sumptuous coffee-table book. The Special Relationship between the UK and the US may wax and wane, but there has always been a sharing of ideas between British and American gardeners and designers, from Beatrix Farrand and Gertrude Jekyll, to Erin Benzakein and Sarah Raven. This work reflects the exchange of such ideas, featuring properties like Dumbarton Oaks and Monticello. It also highlights contemporary US designs offering inspiration on a grand American scale, as with the Lurie Garden in Illinois, and the Desert Botanical Garden in Arizona. OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 107
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Q&A
BOOKS
In his new book, Tokachi Millennium Forest, written with Midori Shintani, Dan Pearson considers the scope of this sustainable project and the philosophies it encompasses There are European plants here, not least David Austin roses, in an array that has been edited over the years. What are some of the successes?
The species roses such as R. spinosissima, R. glauca and R. gallica have been robust in the Hokkaido climate and do not need protection. Cephalaria gigantea has been a great success, growing to around twice the usual height we are used to in Europe. It is an example of one of the many non-native perennials that do well here given the cool nights, the damp summers and a certain period of winter under a protective eiderdown of snow. You sought to bring a European naturalism to the planting, but what Japanese traditions did you find yourself being sensitive to?
Can you briefly describe the Tokachi Millennium Forest and its purpose?
The Millennium Forest was established as a reserve for wildlife and landscape, with the intention that it would be sustainable for 1,000 years. It is an ecological park of 400 acres, with naturalistic gardens and landscape at its core, and its land is gently managed for biodiversity, giving way to protected wild forest.
PHOTO HUW MORGAN INTERVIEW VIVIENNE HAMBLY
Where do you start when you’re presented with a landscape on such a grand scale, knowing it is intended to be around for such a long time?
It was important to see the landscape in all seasons and to learn how the impact of man has influenced the existing woodland so that we could offer a measured response in addressing the balance. The big idea to make the park sustainable for 1,000 years has been underpinned by the integration of intimate places that help people to engage with the experience. The plans must work with both the big and the more intimate scale, so the borrowed view was very important but the detail of the immediate foreground was always there to ‘ground’ the visitor.
There are many ways of seeing in Japan that have influenced my work, such as wabi-sabi, the appreciation of imperfection, but the discipline of satoyama is particularly relevant at The Millennium Forest. The practice involves working closely with your environment to take only what you need from it, tending more intensively near the homestead and progressively less so as domestic places give way to the wilder land. It is a way of being in the landscape that is reverential to natural cycles and orders and includes foraging for food and building materials and living with nature rather than dominating it. You return to the garden each year. Which are your favourite times to visit?
The spring for its fast and joyful awakening after six months of winter, and autumn for the reverse: snow high in the mountain and chill winds that remind you that the growing season is one that has to be savoured for its bounty and brevity. What books would you recommend to enthusiasts of Japanese gardens and design?
How to Rake Leaves (Stone Bridge Press); How to Take a Japanese Bath (Stone Bridge Press); Undesigning the Bath (Stone Bridge Press); WabiSabi: For Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers (Imperfect Publishing); Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts (Imperfect Publishing); and In Praise of Shadows (Vintage Classics).
Tokachi Millennium Forest by Dan Pearson and Midori Shintani Filbert Press, £40
OCTOBER 2020 THE ENGLISH GARDEN 109
NURSERIES & GARDENS TO INSPIRE THIS AUTUMN WEASDALE NURSERIES
WATERPERRY GARDENS 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. EG10/20.
Eight acres of inspirational ornamental gardens steeped in horticultural history, quality Plant Centre, Garden Shop, Gift Barn, Gallery and Tea Shop. Close to Oxford in the heart of the countryside. Waterperry Gardens - a place to explore, relax and shop in beautiful surroundings all year round.
Tel: 015396 23246 sales@weasdale.com | www.weasdale.com Newbiggin on Lune, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria CA17 4LX
Tel: 01844 339226 www.waterperrygardens.co.uk Near Wheatley, Oxfordshire OX33 1LA
THE GARDEN AT MISERDEN
BLUEBELL ARBORETUM & NURSERY Specialists in hardy trees, shrubs and climbers including a huge selection of unusual and rare species and varieties.
Winner of Historic Houses Garden of the Year 2018, this timeless garden, with spectacular views over parkland and the rolling Cotswold hills beyond, was created in the 17th century and retains a sense of peace and tranquility. There are extensive yew hedges, including a notable topiary yew walk designed by Lutyens as well as carefully planted mixed borders, containing a wide range of roses, clematis and herbaceous plants. The garden is a preserved, hidden gem in the heart of the Cotswolds.
Expert advice is available from our helpful staff. The nursery is surrounded by a nine-acre woodland garden (RHS Partner Garden), and visitors are welcome all year round. Informative website and reliable mail order service if you would like plants delivered.
OPEN: Please visit www.miserden.org for details.
Photo: Chris Lacey
OPEN: 10am to 5.30pm April to October, 10am to 5pm November to March. Please visit our website for more information.
Tel: 01285 821303 gardens@miserden.org | www.miserden.org Miserden, Near Stroud, Gloucestershire GL6 7JA
Tel: 01530 413700 sales@bluebellnursery.com | www.bluebellnursery.com Annwell Lane, Smisby, Ashby de la Zouch, Leicestershire LE65 2TA
HESTERCOMBE GARDENS
HEVER CASTLE & GARDENS
While Jekyll’s ‘vibrating’ summer colours continue well into October, notes of autumn arrive in earnest now, including stunning crimson vines on the Pergola. Myriad trees transform into warm browns and oranges outside Lutyens’ charming Orangery, and sweep across the large Georgian Landscape Garden designed by prolific artist Coplestone Warre Bampfylde. Certainly worth an early autumn trip, and easily accessible from the M5 (J25).
Autumn is the season when Hever’s striking trees come to the fore. Colour abounds with vivid maples and brilliant beech. Boston ivy scrambles up the Castle walls whilst Vitis coignetiae clothes bridges and pergolas with crimson. Visit on a still day for the very best views of reflections in the moats and lake. OPEN: See website for opening times and prices.
OPEN: Weds to Sun, 10am to 6pm (last entry 3.30pm). Essential to pre-book admission online by 5pm the day before your visit. Tel: 01823 413923 info@hestercombe.com | www.hestercombe.com Cheddon Fitzpaine, Taunton, Somerset TA2 8LQ
Tel: 01732 865224 www.hevercastle.co.uk Hever, Edenbridge, Kent TN8 7NG
SPRING REACH NURSERY
WOOTTENS OF WENHASTON Spring Reach Nursery grows a fantastic range of clematis, trees, hedging, ferns, shrubs, fruit, perennials, roses, climbers and grasses. Enjoy the delights of the Autumn with these stars that light up borders: Acer ‘Osakazuki’, Berberis ‘Admiration’, Callicarpa ‘Profusion’, Euonymus alatus, the grasses Muhlenbergia capillaris, Miscanthus ‘Ferner Osten’ and Panicum ‘Hot Rod’, and, brand new for 2020, Pittosporum ‘Bannow Bay’.
Established for 25 years, Woottens is a traditional plant nursery selling hardy perennials, which are grown and propagated on their site in rural Suffolk. Woottens also specialises in Irises, Auriculas, Pelargoniums and Hemerocallis. The nursery runs an efficient mail order service all year round. Open again on Saturdays from 29 August. See the website for full details.
Tel: 01483 284769 info@springreachnursery.co.uk | www.springreachnursery.co.uk Spring Reach Nursery, Long Reach, Ockham, Surrey GU23 6PG
Tel: 01502 478258 info@woottensplants.co.uk | www.woottensplants.com Woottens of Wenhaston, Wenhaston, Suffolk IP19 9HF
ASHWOOD NURSERIES
DAISY CLOUGH NURSERIES LTD 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. 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. Free colour brochure quote ENGGAR20
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.
Tel: 01384 401996 mailorder@ashwoodnurseries.com | www.ashwoodnurseries.com Ashwood Lower Lane, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 0AE
Tel: 01524 793104 info@daisyclough.com | www.daisyclough.com Daisy Clough Nurseries Ltd, Station Lane, Scorton, Preston, Lancs PR3 1AN
HEDGING UK
LEONARDSLEE LAKES & GARDENS 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 TEG2020).
Tel: 01704 827224 or 07789 922457 sales@hedginguk.com | www.hedginguk.com Boundary House Farm, Holmeswood Road, Holmeswood, Lancashire L40 1UA
Visit the famous Grade I Listed gardens and enjoy the outstanding autumn displays at “The finest woodland gardens in England”. Lovely scenic walks around the seven tree-lined lakes with dazzling reflections of autumn colour. See wallabies and peacocks wandering the estate, as well as deer, rare birds and other wildlife. So much to see and do: Dolls’ House Museum, cafés and gift shop, Michelin-starred restaurant and year-round programme of events. Tel: 08718 733389 info@leonardsleegardens.co.uk | www.leonardsleegardens.co.uk. Brighton Road, Lower Beeding, Horsham RH13 6PP
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Many more varieties on our website. All bulbs are flowering size including free gift Delivery is £3.95 UK mainland only Payment with order please, tel number or email for delivery essential. Eurobulbs 314,Smeeth Rd, Marshland St James, Wisbech.Cambs PE14 8EP Tel: 01945 430009 Email: info@eurobulbs.co.uk ALL MAJOR DEBIT AND CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED
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LAST WORD
The Word Garden Gardens and letter forms are not so far apart, muses Katherine Swift as she considers Ian Hamilton Finlay’s inscription garden at Little Sparta near Edinburgh
114 THE ENGLISH GARDEN OCTOBER 2020
Inscriptions make us see more clearly and open our eyes to more than what is just around us”
is sited at precisely the point where one pool of water overflows into another, the pause between the first and second letter signalling both the slight resistance of the water as it tips over, and the hidden presence of the word Ave, the ancient Latin word of greeting – whispered, as it were, by the trickling of the water. It was Shenstone who coined the phrase ‘landscape gardening’ (as distinct from kitchen gardening or flower gardening), to describe the sort of garden that ‘consists in pleasing the imagination’. Inscriptions do just that: they make us see things more clearly and open our eyes to more than what is just around us. To commission an inscription for your own garden, a good place to start is The Lettering Arts Trust (01728 688393; letteringartstrust.org.uk) where you can see examples and find a letter-carver to carry out the work.
ILLUSTRATION JULIA RIGBY PORTRAIT BEVERLEY FRY
‘F
rom this place WORDS may fly abroad. Not to perish on waves of sound, Not to vary with the writer’s hand, But fixed in time, Having been verified by proof.’ Words from a type specimen hanging above the printing press in my hall. ‘Friend, you stand on sacred ground. This is a printing office.’ My house is full of printing paraphernalia: in the cellar, alphabets of wooden poster type, founts of lead foundry type, pages of type locked in their formes ready for printing or distributed into their upper and lower cases (the wooden cases in which type is housed), share floorspace with overwintering dahlias. Cases of books about printing and printing presses line the walls of the rooms at the front of the house where my nine orange trees spend the winter. I fell in love with type faces after coming across Daniel Berkeley Updike’s vast, two-volume Printing Types in a library in Canada one snowy winter. I went on to start a thesis on the 18th-century Birmingham printer and type designer John Baskerville. Baskerville’s friend and neighbour was the gardener William Shenstone who filled his garden with inscriptions carved upon urns and garden seats; Baskerville himself was a writing master and engraver of slate grave stones before he turned to printing. Gardens and letter forms are not so far apart. In my own garden I have one of Shenstone’s sayings inscribed on an urn, made by the potter Robin Welch: ‘The works of a person that builds, begin immediately to decay; while those of him who plants begin directly to improve’. The sculpture garden, as a site to display a collection of sculpture, was an ancient idea that became fashionable in the second half of the 20th century. But the garden of inscriptions, as exemplified by Shenstone’s garden in Halesowen, and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh, is yet to find its moment. At Little Sparta, inscriptions drawn from Ovid, the metaphysical poetry of Henry Vaughan and the sayings of the French Revolutionary leader Saint-Just are carved on paths, stepping stones, seats, fences and stiles. In each case words, design, and garden setting are all integral to the meaning. For example, the sublimely simple W AVE
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