Garden words: Gardens as Art #2

28 Thursday Jan 2010

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I must confess I find portraits a bit boring. Those po-faced people you see lining the oak-panelled walls of stately homes were probably delightful people who would have made deliciously witty dinner guests, but as portraits they’ve never done much for me.

Well – now I know better. Now I know to look over their shoulders.

Roy Strong’s ‘The Artist and the Garden’ is proving a revelation, and I suspect I may never see old paintings in quite the same way again.

This is probably the most famous painting where the background has caused more of a stir than the foreground:

You may well recognise the big fat king in the middle, but don’t look at him – take a peek through those arches on either side. This painting hangs in Hampton Court (holiday home, of course, to Henry VIII) and the glimpse of a garden in the background is just about all that is known of Tudor gardens of the time. A Tudor garden has in fact been entirely recreated, at Hampton Court, complete with snazzy green-and-white raised beds and heraldic beasts on poles, on evidence taken pretty much solely from this painting.

This is Thomas More and family, painted in 1593-4 and currently in the V&A. Yes we all know he was executed for daring to stand up to Henry VIII but never mind that – just look at that garden. That’s a hortus conclusus – an enclosed, mediaeval garden and rare evidence that even then they were doing garden rooms, fenced off with clipped hedges of whitebeam or privet.

And how about this, from 1641? Never mind Arthur 1st Baron Capel and his family – that’s a heck of a garden back there. It is in fact Hadham Hall in Hertfordshire in all its glory, as it was laid out in the late 1630s. The people in the portrait mostly came to a sticky end (particularly Arthur who was executed shortly after Charles I for his loyalty to the king – spectacular example of backing the wrong horse) and so did the Elizabethan house – it was partially destroyed by fire and is now a secondary school. But at the time it boasted the most extravagant garden of its age, and this is one of the best – and only – depictions of its former grandeur. You can see it at the National Portrait Gallery.

This young lady, to be found at the National Maritime Museum, is my favourite though. She’s Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, painted in 1603, but never mind that. See that structure behind her right shoulder? That’s worth a closer look.

It’s an arbour, and it’s made entirely of pleached trees. Apparently you plant a ring of trees, then pleach the tops into a ‘roof’. You can incorporate extra carpentry – as here – and then plant another tree in the centre and pleach it like an umbrella to make a secondary tier. According to Sir Roy, this is the only representation we have of tree pleaching on this scale in England, although it was quite common in Italy (the Medicis, of course) and the Netherlands.

If there’s one garden design feature which deserves to be resurrected, this has to be it. Anyone short of ideas for next year’s Chelsea?

Wordless Wednesday

27 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in wordless wednesday

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cyclamen

Cyclamen hederifolium leaf

Discovering new plants: A is for….

26 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in new plants

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abelia, shrubs

Abelia

Welcome to another project of mine for this year. Now I grow a lot of plants, in my own and others’ gardens: but for some years now, they’ve all been pretty much the same plants. I’ve added a few to my repertoire, but they’ve usually been plants I know a lot about already, so they’re a pretty safe bet (and I’ve usually wanted to grow them for ages, finally got my hands on them… you know the drill).

It occurred to me some time about the end of last year that this might not be a very good thing. There are definite and really quite gaping gaps in my plant knowledge: I have never in my life, for example, grown a Deutzia of any description, even though they’re common as muck.

So I figured this year I’d change all that. I’ve picked up my well-thumbed bible, aka the Readers Digest New Encyclopaedia of Garden Plants and Flowers, and I’m going to work my way through the alphabet picking a new (for me) genus for each letter to get to know in my garden. It’s a bit random, as plant studies go, but it’ll have to do.

So this month I’ve been off shopping for Abelias. A relative of the honeysuckle according to the late great Fred Whitsey, it’s late-summer flowering, some borderline hardy, but relishing conditions just such as I have in my garden – i.e. well-drained and sunny.

There are lots of them but I’ve gone for A. x grandiflora – a hybrid between A. chinensis and A. uniflora. Mr Whitsey says all abelias are named for a Dr Clarke-Abel who worked as a surgeon to a Chinese mission in the early 1800s (now that must have been a heck of a job). For light relief he went off plant collecting, and came back with A. chinensis – borderline hardy, very pale pink, and a bit pretty for my liking. Actually he didn’t quite come back with them as he was shipwrecked on the way home and lost his seeds, which seems a bit unfair, but luckily he’d already given some to a friend so they made it back to the UK without him.

Anyway: A. x grandiflora has an AGM which makes me well-disposed towards it right from the start. It’s semi-evergreen, only dropping its leaves in very cold winters, and looks a bit like a slightly chunky evergreen spiraea, if you can imagine such a thing.

Browsing around the garden centre I could only see variegated abelias with leaves in bilious shades of mottled pink and cream which rather put me off. But luckily in a corner there was a little shrub with vibrant non-variegated yellow leaves: promising, except abelias are known to be pink, and yellow leaves with pink flowers is the combination from hell (hide your head in shame, Spiraea japonica ‘Goldflame’). On closer inspection, though, the label says the flowers on this one are white: and what’s more it has “bronze-gold” leaves in autumn. Mmmmm…. sounds lovely.

Clutching my purchase I made a bee-line as soon as I got home for my online RHS Plantfinder only to find that the cultivar, ‘Brockhill Allgold’, isn’t listed anywhere. I appear to have chosen a fictitious plant.

Well, it’s not the most promising start to my voyage of discovery. But it’ll have to do. I shall keep you updated with how I’m getting on with all my new kids on the block later in the year.

Bargain hunting

25 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in container growing

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bargains, shopping, spring bulbs

Off down the garden centre on a hot tip this weekend to find spring bulbs slashed to just 50p a packet!

I bought the lot, or at least one packet of every variety – that was 11 packets of bulbs for £5.50. For the first time in my life I think I understand the feral look in the eyes of those ladies you see elbowing each other out of the way in the January sales.

Got home and had a happy hour divvying them up into likely combinations according to predicted size and blooming times to go into containers on my patio.

I’m in good company planting them this late in the season, and in fact it seems I’m a bit slow on the uptake – it seems everyone else is well clued up on this bit of late-winter bargain hunting. The general consensus seems to be that since they’re a month or two late in the planting they’ll also be a month or two late flowering – but they will flower eventually. So I made a note of the dates they were meant to flower too so I can do a little experiment and find out just how late it makes them to plant at this time of year.

Now I have the following to look forward to, whenever they decide to show up:

Chionodoxa luciliae followed by Oxalis adenophylla

Puschkinia scilloides libanotica and Narcissus lobularis

Chionodoxa again, mixed colours this time, followed by Anemone blanda

Crocus chrysanthus var. fuscotinctus followed by Scilla siberica with a final flourish from mixed Ixia

Anemone coronaria ‘St Brigid’ possibly but not probably overlapping with Tulipa ‘Rococo’

The relative timings are, of course, a lottery, and who knows what will come up when. But that’s half the fun of it. Come to think of it, a lot more fun than doing it when you’re supposed to.

Garden words: Gardens as art

22 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in garden words

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art, Sir Roy Strong

I seem to have been spending an awful lot of time in the 16th century lately.

First it was Adam Nicolson in Arcadia – highly intelligent and full of insights into life in Tudor, Elizabethan and Restoration England, but basically not about gardens. Something of a surprise, since it’s based on Wilton which is, or rather was, one of England’s great iconic gardens. He seemed inexplicably preoccupied with the house and its sundry Earls: just ‘cos they hung out with Henry VIII doesn’t mean they’re more interesting than the garden, you know.

Anyway: now I’m wading into the history of the garden in art, in the company of the erudite and it must be said, himself rather iconic (or should that be iconoclastic?) Sir Roy Strong. Former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, and designer of bits of HRH Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove as well as author of a lot of weighty books and trustee of various charitable trusts. When you read CVs like that it just makes you want to go and curl up under the carpet.

Gardens started appearing in art for the first time in – you guessed it – the 16th century. But before I plunged into Tudor England again, I had Sir Roy’s introduction to read, and that really made me think.

When you seek to picture a garden, do you set out to record an accurate representation of what the garden actually looks like? Or do you seek to capture a mood, a transient atmosphere, the feeling the garden evokes in you when you look at it?

Does it matter if you don’t – ever – record pictures of exactly how the garden looks in its entirety? Does it matter if you get the layout wrong?

The thing is, in the 16th century it really did matter, although they didn’t know it at the time. Gardens depicted in paintings – sometimes merely glimpsed behind the shoulder of a portrait’s subject – are often our only source of historical record on the existence of entire garden styles. Garden historians have pieced together more or less the entire history of the knot garden from throwaway sketches of them in the corners of Elizabethan paintings. And we’re guilty of much the same thing even today, with our ‘plant porn’ photos of pouting paeonies and our moody shots of good-looking corners here or well-planted pathways there.

But perhaps that’s the point. Gardens are art: and if you don’t record it as such, you miss an essential part of their soul. As Sir Roy writes:

“Whether on paper, panel or canvas the garden picture bestows an immortality comparable to the portrait, enabling the viewer to walk through an existing, lost or imagined garden. The artist’s role was essentially to capture this transient and fragile art, one which was subject to the mutation of the seasons and the vicissitudes of time in a way unknown, for example, to a building.“

Moving matters #2: Seeing things through others’ eyes

21 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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garden, moving house

Well, things are progressing rapidly on the house-moving front: we’ve had our HIPs report done (what are they for, exactly?) and now we’ve had the details drawn up, so on my desk I have a leaflet all about our house as seen by others.

This has been something of an eye-opener. You get so used to complaining about this or that little niggle, and carping on about the stuff that you know needs doing but you haven’t got around to, that you forget that overall it’s not actually that bad. In fact, it’s quite nice, really.

This is particularly so with the garden. I know just how dreadful my garden is: after all, I’ve seen all those perfect gardens you go visit during summer, and I know what a good garden looks like. Not like my garden, that’s for sure.

Whenever I look at my garden, I see the borders near the house which don’t have as much winter structure as they should and are an odd shape which I’ve been meaning to change for years. Then the middle section is what can only be politely described as a “work in progress”: we’ve had an ongoing bonfire there for a while and that’s where all the piles of compost or sand or bricks have been dumped while we’ve been doing our bits of landscaping. The kids’ area, where the fishpond is, needs a bit of a weed-through and there’s a path to be put in.

The wildlife pond and exotic-ish garden are another work in progress: the intended boardwalk is still just planks on the ground. And the muddy chicken run with its half-pruned apple trees (a current project but temporarily kiboshed by the foul weather) is hardly a model fruit garden.

But get this. Someone comes round our house to see what we’ve got, and although admittedly they’re trying to sell the place, they can’t actually lie. And this is what they wrote about my garden.

The front is “landscaped with deep semi-circular well-stocked border” and “pretty beech hedging”. And as for the back: it’s “very substantial”, apparently, and those odd-shaped beds near the house are transformed into “formal gardens” with “well-stocked shrub and flower borders”. Our chicken-run apple trees are a “mini-orchard” and we have a “large timber shed”, “triple compost heap” and “mature trees”.

Blimey, I’d go and look at it myself if I read that lot. I don’t know whether to laugh at the triumph of estate-agent speak over reality, or wonder if my garden is, really, a bit nicer than I thought it was. For now I think I shall just allow myself to be very flattered.

Wordless Wednesday

20 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in wordless wednesday

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Colutea arborescens

Colutea arborescens seedpod

Gardening on air #2: Not a lot of people know this but…

19 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in Uncategorized

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Desert Island Discs, gardening on air, Michael Caine

Quotes from the priceless interview with Michael Caine for the Christmas edition of Desert Island Discs, which I’ve only just got around to listening to (we recorded it, so apologies to those of you for whom this is old news):

“I bought a mill house at Windsor which had a private gate on to Windsor racetrack. It was funny because I had about five or six acres there right on the edge of the Thames, and the Queen had the right to go through a gate and the path at the back of my garden. And so it was quite extraordinary, one day I’d be gardening and I’d look up and the Queen would go by in a Range Rover. She just waved.“

“I took [my mother] to Beverley Hills for the first time. It was in the middle of winter here, like January, and of course in Beverley Hills all the flowers were out. We were driving through it talking and I said, looking out of the window, ‘What do you think of it, Mum?’ And she said, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, all that hysteria growing up the walls.'”

I shall never think of climbing wisteria in quite the same way again. Unfortunately you can’t listen to the programme again (copyright restrictions or some such) but you can take a look at his esoteric music choices – most of them, I’m convinced, chosen by his teenagers as a wind-up for Kirsty Lang – here.

Plant of the month: January

18 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in plant of the month

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box hedges

Box
Buxus sempervirens

Sometimes there are moments when you’re really, really grateful for the boring plants in your garden.

If the garden is a stage, box is the understudy. For most of the year, all but un-noticed, it does its job quietly and uncomplainingly, taking a back seat, never seeking attention, supporting the star cast and for all I know making them regular cups of tea.

But in winter, it’s different. In winter, box steps shyly out into centre stage. All around her are tiring, fading, looking definitely jaded. A coat of frost turns them to brown and unlovely mush. But not box.

A crisply clipped box hedge frosted with silver is one of the most beautiful sights of the winter garden. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that no garden is entirely complete without one. They look fantastic in modern gardens and elegant in traditional ones. They can be whimsical, magical, artistic or geometric; box balls may be verging dangerously close to the clichéd these days, but what of box cubes, box columns, box spirals or box pyramids?

And it’s so well-behaved. It doesn’t grow too quickly – or too slowly. It doesn’t have any fussy requirements about soil, and it’s obligingly happiest in shade. It isn’t damaged by frost, or hail, or snow, and doesn’t demand primping or preening or much attention at all beyond a haircut a couple of times a year.

My little box hedge in the front garden is still in its fluffy and slightly wayward infancy: it hasn’t quite knitted together yet and still carries more than a whiff of its wild cousins growing near us on Box Hill. But even so when I look down on the half-circles it draws so effortlessly and cleanly in the gravel of my drive, I marvel that this is the one thing in my garden I’m properly pleased with. All year round – whether you’re looking at it or not. And that, if you ask me, is true star quality.

January ex-flowers, non-flowers and would-be flowers

15 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by sallynex in Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

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winter flowers

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day? In this weather? To quote the effusive Mr Gervais, are you ‘aving a larf?

Regular readers may remember I rarely have flowers around in winter even in the best of years, so it’s even more unlikely in my spring- and summer-flowering garden. I’ve planted a winter-flowering clematis (C. cirrhosa ‘Freckles’) and a Viburnum davidii this year to up the quota, but they’re still establishing themselves and resolutely refusing to flower. And one of the little tragedies of my year has been that the Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’ I planted last spring – one of my desert island plants – really, really hates my acid soil and is languishing sorrily in my front garden at the moment with only a few miserable-looking leaves left. Must dig it up again and put it in a pot before it turns up its toes altogether.

However – a little walk around my garden with my camera, more in hope than expectation, and look what turned up: