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THE DESIGNED GARDEN – an unfinished canvas
MORNINGSTAR CORPORATION CHICAGO, DOUGLAS HOERR
REFLECTING POOL, JUNE BLAKE'S GARDEN
Highly regarded Landscape Architect, Bloom gold medal winner, and president of the Garden & Landscape Designers Association (GLDA), Patricia Tyrrell reports on some of the high notes and salient points from the recent seminar
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eedback from this year’s seminar makes it arguably one of the most enjoyable seminars, with a lovely community atmosphere. Our speakers contributed greatly to this with their relaxed attitudes and accessibility to the audience. Probably most in our profession have heard of mycorrhizae, unless they are living under a rock, in which case they have probably encountered them personally. According to the first speaker, Peter Korn, this is where they do their best work. Mycorrhizae are those useful symbiotic fungi that form an alliance with plants, to maximise nutrient uptake for both plant and fungus. Available to purchase in powder form, you can sprinkle them into planting holes, like magical fairy dust, to enhance the establishment of your trees, shrubs and perennials. What I did not know is that the magical fairy dust may not work if your soil is already rich. Peter Korn hails from Sweden, and his passion for his subject made a big impression on the audience. He prefers to plant into pure sand, where due to the poor nutrient availability, plants will form extensive alliances with mycorrhizae to enable them to take up nutrients. In rich soils this does not happen as the plants have little need of assistance to access the nutrients that they need. The poor sandy substrate also reduces weed competition and therefore maintenance. Dry at the surface but moist beneath, the sand draws moisture by capillary action through its open pored depths. In his garden, which he gardens with his partner Julia, he has carved out niches for plants from all over the world, that will survive in the Swedish climate. When I say carved out, he has done this physically with his own hands, showing
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us images of a gorge he created, where plants adapted to various aspects of that microclimate can grow. The second speaker James Basson, is probably best known to us as winner of best in show award at Chelsea 2017 for a spectacular quarry garden, again illustrating the small specialist niches that plants can occupy, even in poor conditions. James is from England, but now lives in the South of France where he and his wife Helen have set up Scape Design. In his designs he likes to use locally sourced young plants that are compatible with the native climate and soil, requiring little or no irrigation. This lack of irrigation reduces maintenance and creates a landscape that is more sympathetic to the local environment. To achieve this, he experiments with plant combinations and monitors them over time to see what will survive, what will thrive and what fades out. Taking this one step further, he has started to explore the use of software to try to predict how this will happen over the short and long term. This could be an exciting development, with wider uses for maintenance of public spaces. With great honesty, he took us through some of his planting successes and failures and the learning processes involved. He brought us through his progression at Chelsea, from his first garden there to his largest one last year, and the concepts behind them. Also of real interest was his sponsorship progression and the risk he took in financing his first show garden in Chelsea by himself. After lunch June Blake, the creator of one of Ireland’s most beautiful gardens, in Blessington, Co Wicklow, talked
/ www.horticultureconnected.ie / Spring 2018
