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Sally Nex

Category Archives: garden history

Learning from the master

18 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by sallynex in design, garden design, garden history, landscaping

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Denmans, design, john brookes

IMG_4052

Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ catching the sunlight: note the silver-variegated shrub echoing the effect behind

This week I made something of a pilgrimage, to the garden of John Brookes OBE at Denmans in Sussex.

I have a personal debt of gratitude to pay to John Brookes as it was the 1970s edition of his classic book, The Small Garden, that formed my first ideas about garden design. In fact I shamelessly nicked (slightly adapted) one of the designs in that book for my first-ever garden in London, at a time when I was still feverishly taking notes while watching Gardeners’ World (I know, I know).

He has broken new ground in so many areas of garden design we now take for granted that his legacy can’t really be overstated. He was the first to come up with the idea of the ‘inside outside’, making garden rooms – as advocated by Lawrence Johnstone et al – an extension of the living room in the house they surround.

He was – astonishingly – the first British designer to take his inspiration from modern art, specifically Mondrian via his revolutionary geometric garden of interlocking squares for Penguin Books at Heathrow. And he was the first to create a design-focussed garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, at a time when everyone else was just creating showcases for plant nurseries.

Denmans is still his home, and where he runs his garden school. It’s looking a little tired these days, mainly I suspect because there’s just one heroic gardener looking after four acres of intensively-garden landscape and do lone battle with an encroaching army of ground elder. A garden of this stature deserves a few more staff.

But the mark of good design is that it holds up even a slightly woolly garden and gives it bones and structure. And so it is with Denman’s: it’s a softer garden than John Brookes’s usual designs in any case, and the fluid, sinuous curves and gentle naturalism are deceptive as underneath it all lies the solid, well thought out geometry and subtle design touches which are a John Brookes hallmark. Here are a few tips from my notebook I’ll be trying out once I get home.
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1: Don’t ignore the buildings. Reflect the materials used in the buildings in hard landscaping; and echo architectural features in the planting. Here a tall fastigiate yew emphasises the strong verticals in the Clock Tower.

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2. Don’t get too hung up about giving beds clear edges. At Denmans plants flow over the edges of curving gravel paths, sometimes spilling over into the hard landscaping and self-seeding into the edges, giving a soft, organic, very natural look that also, incidentally, evokes the Sussex coastline of the wider environment.

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3. Always be aware of the picture you are creating, and use sculpture to complete the scene. This sitting boy was delightful and added a focal point and a little vignette to an otherwise nice-but-ordinary wildlife pond.

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4. Create a sense of mystery and intrigue by cutting curving (not straight) paths through the planting, giving a glimpse of another part of the garden beyond but not revealing it all at once. It makes it all but impossible to resist following the path to explore further.

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5. Lawns are intrinsically boring. So make them more interesting (and save yourself some hours behind the mower) by only cutting the middle bits once a month. The outer paths you mow once a week – creating a contrast in texture and keeping the sensuous curves of the design at the fore.

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6. Remember your backgrounds – in every direction. This Achillea ‘Moonshine’ shone out in contrast with the dark purple smokebush (Cotinus coggygria) against the wall behind it: what a combination. But turn around, put the smoke bush behind you, and the brooding effect is completely gone to be replaced by airy woodland:

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Same plant, completely different effect. So as you compose your perfect combination looking one way, don’t forget to turn around and look at it the other way, too – and seize the chance to create a wholly new scene.

 

Guernsey, Garden Isle #4: Of Victoriana

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by sallynex in garden history, greenhouse, kitchen garden, overseas gardens

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community gardens, guernsey, Heritage Seed Library, heritage varieties, heritage vegetables, Saumarez, Victorian vegetables, Victorians, volunteers, walled gardens

guernsey_walledgarden_wideview

View down the main path, with espaliered fruit trees to right and left

You knew it wouldn’t be long before I got back to the food. My visit to Guernsey wouldn’t be complete without a look at its fine walled kitchen garden at Saumarez Park: a classic piece of Victoriana currently being lovingly restored by a team of 40 dedicated volunteers.

The Victorians knew what they were about when they enclosed great swathes of their gardens with high brick walls and created the classic kitchen garden. It creates an instant microclimate: the walls act like storage heaters for trained peaches, apples and pears, and the soil, enclosed neatly with paths, is easily tended. The whole becomes a workmanlike, industrious place of abundance, where veg production is the pinnacle of achievement: enclosing an area of the garden for one purpose and one purpose only does seem to focus the mind.

guernsey_walledgarden_thyme

I loved the way carpets of thyme covered the ground at the feet of the espaliers in soft hummocks

Of course in the days of the then Baron de Saumarez (there is still a Baron de Saumarez but the States of Guernsey own the manor nowadays) there was enough money washing around to have a huge staff of proud gardeners, deputy head gardener, head gardener, the lot – most of them working just in the kitchen gardens. De Saumarez fought with Nelson, won the Battle of Algeciras for him (nope, me neither) and made a fortune from naval spoils. He returned home and married another fortune in heiress Martha le Merchant whose family owned what’s now Saumarez Park. They were, to cut a long story short, rolling in it.

Anyway, those were the days: now the States of Guernsey own the park and its walled kitchen garden, and the ‘staff’ is down to a few dozen volunteers led by the redoubtable (and great fun) Ivan le Tissier and head gardener Jill Tetlaw.

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The 170ft span of beautifully restored Victorian greenhouses

Between them, since 2006, they have restored three magnificent but tumbledown glasshouses spanning 170ft, once used to produce Guernsey’s commercial crop of grapes. They’ve also cleared a mountain of propagation equipment left behind by the council’s parks department, and set out metre after metre of hoggin path edged with cobbles set in cement. And in between all that they had to set up a whole organisation to do it, the Guernsey Botanical Trust; Raymond Evison, of clematis fame, was a founder member and a driving force behind the project.

And they’re still going: they’ve just uncovered an old underground boiler set 15ft below ground level into the greenhouse wall. They’re still trying to figure out why it was put there, and solve mysteries like why it’s so clean it obviously hasn’t ever been used.

guernsey_walledgarden_ventilation

These are ventilation shutters, a feature I’ve never seen before in a Victorian greenhouse like this one: they go through the wall to the outside and you winch them open to let the air out and cool the greenhouse on hot days.

The whole place is spick and span: perfectly trimmed espaliers and soft fruit, and a greenhouse bursting with new seedlings on my visit. Inside the greenhouse is all the equipment needed for raising grapes – including a kind of lie-on ladder which hung just below the glass on runners, parallel with the vines, where a gardener would lie facing upwards to do the pruning and training. Hot work, I’d imagine. They grew ‘Cannon Hall’ here, a Muscat grape grown widely in Guernsey in the days of commercial grape production, that is by all accounts as sweet as a lychee. The volunteers plan to re-plant six vines this year, as well as reinstating the ladder.

Out in the garden they are sticking to Victorian cultivars, as far as possible those grown on Guernsey and all painstakingly researched. Among the pears are Chaumontels, a Guernsey variety described in Mawe and Abercrombie’s ‘Universal Gardener’ as having a ‘melting… very rich, delicious flavour’ which sounds promising.

Other detective hunts haven’t been quite so rewarding: a search for ‘Golden Queen’ raspberries that volunteers finally tracked down to a Swedish seed bank has proved spindly, weak and rather unsatisfactory to grow. You can’t win them all: and sometimes there’s a reason why heritage varieties went out of cultivation.

guernsey_walledgarden_seedtrays

This year’s crops on their way and growing fast

They now have some 300 varieties of vegetable, herb and cutting flower, as well as an oriental veg garden (a nod to the 4th Baron de Saumarez who spent some time in Japan). Some, like the parsnip ‘Guernsey Demi-Longue’ are thought to grow nowhere else – one for the Heritage Seed Library, perhaps. All the produce is sold at the gate and in the cafe at the manor house.

It’s a model example of how this kind of project should be: driven by knowledgeable, skilled people whose enthusiasm, genuine interest – bordering on obsession – and deep devotion to the project seems to know no end. I came away filled with admiration. If ever there was a garden which captures the spirit of the people which created it, this is it.

A very capable man

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

18th century, capability brown, garden design, landscaping, tercentenary

capabilitybrown

© Portrait of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c.1770-75, Cosway, Richard (1742-1821)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Think of the English countryside, and it’s my guess it’ll be pretty green. There will be fields, and hedgerows, and picturesque little villages nestled in valleys: perhaps a steeple peeping up above a copse of trees.

All very artistic. And not, one shred of it, natural.

Our countryside has been shaped, sculpted, created by people. Whether you live, as I do, in an ancient landscape where the fields still show the lines of old pre-enclosure strips and the hedgerows go back centuries; or whether you’re in rolling acres of emerald green, there is little left of how England was before people arrived.

So all the fuss about what Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown did to the English countryside seems a little unfair to me. He was only, after all, doing what the monks and farmers and squires had done before him, only prettier.

More of a crime to be laid at his door in my opinion is his cavalier way of erasing hundreds of years of garden history, not to mention some spectacularly beautiful formal gardens, in a supremely arrogant gesture that simply assumed people wouldn’t want that. Ever again.

The only English renaissance gardens to escape Capability’s shovels and picks were those whose owners had no truck with this modern claptrap of serpentine paths and copses and ha-has and focal points: the owners of Westbury Court, Powis Castle and Hanbury Court, we salute you.

So few have survived the Brown tsunami, and so much has been lost: I’d have loved to have seen the 17th century water gardens by de Caus (complete with joke fountains in the Italian style) and parterres which were once the glory of Wilton House in Wiltshire. But Capability saw to it that such vulgar spectacles never survived beyond the 18th century and they only exist, sketchily, on paper now.

I think part of my problem with him is that I don’t trust ‘gardeners’ who don’t do plants. Landscapers tend to talk in broad sweeps: I’m a detail person, the turn of a petal, the contrast of purple against lilac, the simple glory of an opening daisy. I don’t think Lancelot had much time for all that. And that’s why I instinctively don’t respond well to his style of doing things.

Of course, there’s no escaping Mr Brown at the moment, and it’ll get worse next year when the tercentenary starts: the 300th anniversary of his birth is as good an excuse as any to reassess his life and legacy. Carved into the hillsides of England as it is, you can’t ignore it.

Fortunately it’s to be neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job: just an honest reappraisal of the man who left us Stowe, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Alnwick, Hampton Court, Badminton… the list goes on (there are more than 250 of them).

There are to be learned conferences at Bath and Sheffield Universities, and at Hampton Court Palace (where Capability had his office) looking at everything from his management of historic gardens to his impact on the British landscape.

Lots of gardens are restoring Brown-designed chapels (Compton Verney, Warwickshire), re-envisioning Brown’s landscapes (Moccas Park, Herefordshire), or rolling back later growth to reveal Brown’s landscapes as he would have wanted them seen (Trentham Park, Staffordshire).

And already there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff out there about Brown, his legacy, his genius.

This Channel 4 programme was a real eye-opener: there’s a brilliant bit where John Phipps, who knows more about Brown than pretty much anyone, walks Alan Titchmarsh through Belvoir Castle explaining how to ‘read’ a Capability landscape.

Mr Phipps also pens a fantastic blog, The Brown Advisor: you can write in and put any question you like to him. Recent gems include ‘Where are Brown’s conkers?’ and ‘Did Brown sing in the bath?’

It all amounts to a lot of work and a lot of thinking about the man who had a longer-lasting and more profound effect on the English landscape than anyone before or since. It’s no more than he deserves: you can see his influence in everything from Prince Charles’s views on architecture to Dan Pearson’s advocacy of a sense of place in design. Like him or loathe him, there aren’t many people you can say are still making an impact 300 years after they came into the world and changed it forever.

A Tynte of Victoriana

05 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in design, garden history, Gardens of Somerset, greenhouse, kitchen garden

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

national trust, public gardens, Tyntesfield, Victorians, William Gibbs

tyntesfieldI’ve been wanting to visit Tyntesfield in Wraxall, near Bristol, for years. So on the slightly shaky pretext of tracking down a grapevine to photograph for the book (in all good bookshops from next Easter, assuming I can find a blimmin’ grapevine – Ed), and a passing mention of there being a grapevine somewhere in the grounds, I set off up the M5 on what passed for work but was actually a garden visiting jolly.

The house is a spectacularly beautiful Gothic revivalist confection, bought by the Gibbs family in 1843 and owned by them for four generations until the National Trust took it over.

The Gibbs family wealth was built on Peruvian bird poo: apparently guano was a hot commodity in Victorian times. They made fertiliser out of it. What the difference was that made it necessary to ship poo all the way from Peru when there was plenty to be had on the coasts of England is a mystery.

tyntesfield2

William Gibbs – who bought the house – was made a rich man by his lack of squeamishness about trading in the sort of stuff most buttoned-up Victorians wouldn’t even admit existed (and by not caring all that much about the thousands of African and Chinese slaves who died in his Peruvian guano pits, some 40 years after Britain abolished slavery).

He was known as the richest non-nobleman in England, though Victorian music-hall singers, in that wonderfully arch snobbery that was a feature of the period, were less kind: the song went

‘William Gibbs made his dibs,
Selling the turds of foreign birds.’tyntesfield3
Anyway, I digress.

Of course I was there mostly to see the vegetable gardens: and a fine walled kitchen garden it is too, though it’s tucked a bit out of the way like an afterthought at the bottom of the hill that slopes away from the house.

The grapevine, along with some excellent peaches, was in a fine row of lean-to glasshouses (not your average off-the-shelf from the garden centre: think scalloped glass and metal frames). Unfortunately you couldn’t go inside, rather annoyingly, so that was it for my book photography excuse. I just about managed to squeeze the camera in through a side window to take the above photo of an exceptionally well-trained fig tree round the corner, though: must attempt this on a couple of figs I look after for clients.

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It’s a modest sort of garden, run largely by volunteers with an honesty box outside for the veg. I did like their careful use of traditional materials: here old clay pipes used for forcing chicory and the like. There were some lovely rhubarb forcers too: and I do like a well-written slate plant label.

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All very shipshape and lovely: even if I wasn’t a bit biased, the veg garden would actually be the best bit of the whole garden for me. There was a rather fetching spot just outside, full of dahlias (of which more later); alongside that was a newly-restored Grade I orangery, but the plants were a half-hearted afterthought – just a few slightly diffident-looking pot plants inside looking as if they’d rather be somewhere else. It was crying out for some majestic lemon trees dripping golden fruit and blossoms.

There’s also a not-bad rose garden, but all on its own, separated from the house by a rather unnecessarily long path (and unfortunately suffering badly from box blight so part-cordoned off when I was there). And there’s a formal terrace in front of the house itself.

But that’s pretty much it – in a 500-acre estate. I came away a little disappointed.

The garden didn’t hang together, somehow: to me, it felt like a series of slightly inconsequential interruptions to the otherwise expansive (and presumably easier to maintain) lawns-and-trees combo the National Trust is so fond of. As if someone had gone along thinking, hmm, we’d better have a bit of garden here – without really thinking about how it all links up.

An interesting lesson, perhaps, in how not to design a garden: it would have been better to group the disparate areas together, leading one into the other and relating to each other in some way. Like the gardens around the house at another local National Trust house, Knightshayes, perhaps – a similar era and style of house, yet the gardens so very much more successful (though for some reason there the kitchen garden is miles away too).

Just goes to show: bird poo can buy you a grand house but it can’t buy you discernment.

By royal appointment #2

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by sallynex in garden history

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14th century gardening, garden history, Henry VIII, old gardening manuals, Pietro de Crescenzi, ruralia commoda

Illustration from Henry VIII's copy of the gardening manual, c. 1490-95.  Royal Collection Trust / copyright Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015.

Illustration from Henry VIII’s copy of Ruralia Commoda, c. 1490-95.
Royal Collection Trust / copyright Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015.

I am inordinately fond of very old gardening manuals. Most of the ones I’ve collected from second-hand bookshops and garage sales have lost their covers but not the fascination of their contents: I find there’s much wisdom in their yellowing pages, from the finer details of potato clamping to rather impressive photographs of earthing up celery (to thigh height with some dauntingly deep ditches all around. They really liked digging back then).

Plus they have really good adverts: ‘You Must Sow the best to Grow the Best’ from Unwins of Histon, Seeds of Quality; and a slightly scary advert for Corry’s Slug Death: the Magic Slug Killer which states with admirable certainty that 6,572 have been caught with one two-shilling tin. Official.

Anyway – they’re all beacons of modernity by comparison with the manual on display at the Painting Paradise exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery in London at the moment. Ruralia Commoda (literally ‘Countryside Benefits’) was written by Pietro de Crescenzi, an Italian lawyer and country landowner in 1304 and was the first printed treatise on anything to do with growing. There was no other gardening manual available at the time.

Unsurprisingly, it became a bible for 14th century gardeners. Henry VIII himself (or, I suppose, his gardeners) consulted it to create the gardens at Whitehall Palace (now lost). It’s a wonderful insight into growing techniques in an era we can only imagine; and it may have been single-handedly responsible for gardening one-upmanship by recommending that the size of a garden (20 acres, ideally) and the perfection of the plants within it were a reflection of a king’s status.

Pietro Crescenzi, Ruralium commodorum (Augsburg, 1471)

Copies of Crescenzi’s Ruralia Commoda were used by gardeners across the world (reproduced with thanks from the University of Oklahoma Libraries page)

There’s been a lot of sniggering about the contents of the book: reports have concentrated on the exhortation to plant squash seeds in the ashes of human bones, and a warning that cucumbers will tremble with fear in a thunderstorm. But there are also a few tips that are food for thought even in our knowing and worldly-wise 21st century gardens.

It recommends making a turf seat between fragrant herbs, for example: eminently sensible, and advice we follow to this day when we plant perfumed roses over an arbour.

It also goes into detail about how to grow giant leeks; how to graft different coloured figs on to the same rootstock; and how to manage your soil. And there are detailed accounts of how to grow plants such as oregano, Nigella and grapevines.

Unfortunately the details are scanty – apparently the text has never been translated into English. Anyone know a good Latin speaker?

 

 

 

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