Tag Archives: garden design

Malvern magic

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by in design, shows, unusual plants

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

malvern1A happy day yesterday pottering among the plants at the RHS Spring Festival at Malvern. This is one of the most low-key of flower shows, rarely talked about yet hiding treasures at its heart. Not least of which is one of the very best floral marquees of them all: for my money, second only to the marquee at Chelsea in terms of quality, quantity and sheer wow factor. I never tire of it.

By the time I left I was three scented-leaf geraniums, three salvias, a solar-powered irrigation system and a lot of large bamboo plant labels the heavier. All of which, no doubt, more later. But since I also had a camera loaded with pics I thought I would resurrect an old Constant Gardener tradition, last seen in 2012, and dish out a few gongs for the bits of the show that I thought were worth singling out for special attention.

Best Use of a Borrowed Landscape
At One With… A Meditation Garden (Gold and Best in Show)
malvern_borrowedview
Head and shoulders above the rest, and a shoo-in for Best in Show, Peter Dowle’s garden was a study in how to transport you to another place using plants, water and very, very clever design. Not least of which was nicking the grandeur of the Malvern Hills to make your acers look like they’re at one with the landscape.

Best Use of Recycled Materials
Team AK’s Grand Day Out, Ashton Keynes CofE Primary School, Wiltshire (Highly Commended)
malvern_recycledbottles
I adore the school gardens at Malvern: they never fail to provide new ideas. I think it’s something to do with the way that kids see the world differently – and that includes gardens. Loved this painted bottle path edging – it just made me smile.

Best Wildflower Planting
The Refuge (Gold)

malvern_wildplanting
Ragged robin and corn poppies in a sublime little mini-meadow on Sue Jollan’s garden for Help Refugees UK.

Wall of the Year
Buckfast Abbey Millennium Garden (Silver)
malvern_wall
How lovely this garden was. Dominated by a delicate wire sculpture of a deer drinking, it combined gentle, airy planting with green oak arches – infilled at the base with cut logs to make a wall which combines natural beauty and elegance.
Highly Commended:
Molecular Garden (Gold)
malvern_wallart
Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best: this wooden wall art transformed a stretch of render in the winning garden in the Spa Gardens category, by visiting designers Denis Kalashnikov and Ekaterina Bolotova, on an exchange from the Moscow Flower Show.

Garden Furniture I Most Wanted To Take Home
Ocean Garden (Bronze)
malvern_furniture
Colour… and comfort. Love it.

Funkiest Sculpture of the Year 2017
Nik Burns
malvern_sculpture
Garden grunge at its best. Loved this chap right down to the bulb. Now that’s what I call garden lighting.

Plant of the Show 2017
Peonies
malvern_peonies
They were everywhere: breathtaking, blowsy, beautiful. I particularly liked that the ravishing display on Primrose Hall Nursery’s stand was staged close enough for you to be able to smell the blooms and work out which are as perfumed as they say they are. I will be filling my garden with la Duchesse de Nemours forthwith.


Most Astonishing Stem Colour
Acer palmatum “Sango-kaku” (Staddon Farm Nurseries, Gold)
malvern_acer
Extraordinary: and those lime green leaves just popped against the stems.

Plant That Most Resembled a Pillow
Scleranthus biflorus (D’Arcy & Everest, Silver Gilt)
malvern_weirdplant
Hands down the weirdest plant in the marquee. I had to look twice before I realised it even was a plant. Then all I really wanted to do was lay my head down on it and go to sleep.

The “Why? Oh Why?” Wooden Spoon Award for 2017
Bubble Drops (Spa Garden, Bronze)
malvern_rubbishgarden
It had one slightly lonely-looking plant in it. In a pot. ‘Nuff said.

A very capable man

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by in garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

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.

Dahlia dilemmas

07 Saturday Nov 2015

Posted by in cutting garden, design, garden design, Gardens of Somerset

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , ,

dahlia_tyntesfieldI do love a dahlia. They were planted en masse in a vibrant late-colour display in the little garden alongside the orangery at Tyntesfield and were really turning heads.

But that also creates my difficulty with dahlias. Each flower individually is so absolutely sensational that you quite literally can’t grow anything else alongside.

Here there were cosmos, chrysanths, a few rudbeckias… all beautiful in their own right but thrown totally into the shade by the huge cutting dahlias next door.

Dahlia 'Black Jack'

Dahlia ‘Black Jack’

It feels a little churlish to be complaining that a flower is too beautiful. But that’s basically the problem.

Dahlias were bred for show. It was a bloke thing: grown firmly in military-precision rows, their flower forms divided into groups and sub-groups so complex that it satisfied even the most geeky of anorak-wearing fanatics.

They did end up with a lot of breathtakingly beautiful flowers. But in truth, they are only really good for growing in straight lines, on their own: for they will not brook any competition from other flowers.

Dahlia 'Rycroft Delight'

Dahlia ‘Rycroft Delight’

Try planting a pompom dahlia – even the ever-popular ‘David Howard’ – in a mixed border and you’ll see what I mean. It’s trying to hog the limelight all the time: it’s like asking Kim Kardashian to blend into the crowd in your local Tesco’s.

And that, for me, is the rub. They are on the whole generous garden guests: a bit of dead-heading and they will keep flowering profusely till the first frosts. They’re pretty nearly pest free if you can get them past the slugs when they’re young (start in containers and keep potting on till they’re almost mature before you plant them out).

But how do you grow them among other, more ordinary plants?

Dahlia 'Sandia Rose'

Dahlia ‘Sandia Rose’

Of course you can opt for the ubiquitous Bishops: Llandaff, Oxford, York and Dover all have pretty open daisy-like flowers which sit better among other perennials. But the colour range is quite primary, and limited: and then there’s the purple foliage, which is lovely in the right place, but what if you don’t want purple?

I discovered species dahlias a few years ago and they’re now my dahlia-of-choice for borders. Lovely, ethereal Dahlia merckii in lavender pink; little brick red Dahlia coccinea dancing on wiry stems. And there are more to discover: D. spectabilis, in white, perhaps, or sorensenii with drooping petals.

It so often happens that the closer plants are to their wild forms, the easier they are to garden with. I wouldn’t want to lose the showier dahlias – but I don’t really want to use them either. We do make things difficult for ourselves, don’t we?

Of triumph and tribulations

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by in design, landscaping

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

The other day, very quietly and without fuss, I triumphed.

The natty blue traffic cones aren’t part of the design (honest)

This is the Bible Garden, formerly a patch of scruffy grass outside the Key Stage One area with some wonky benches plonked on top, at my kids’ school. And it is, at long last, finished.

The school is a Church of England school, so they wanted a Bible Garden in which the plants reference passages in the Bible. It’s a popular concept in the States but less so here – in fact I struggled to find any in the UK.

The whole thing was made even more complicated by the fact that the site was in part shade, and most plants mentioned in the Bible are of course Middle Eastern – so very much sun-lovers. Added to which this is Somerset, so damp (and last year, even damper than usual) and I had to be pretty inventive with what I put in there.

biblegarden4

Playing fast and loose: an olive in the raised bed (Garden of Gethsemane and all that) is a risk in part shade, but it is sheltered. And that’s Mentha longifolia underneath.

There was already a brick-built hexagonal raised bed around 1.2m high, so I based the design around that and created two connected hexagons. The teachers wanted it to feel enclosed, but still open enough that they could see in: and they wanted turf seats, and some reeds (for Moses and his basket).

biblegarden5

Bay lollipops marching around the edges (must move that rubbish bin…)

We ended up edging the whole thing with a low box hedge, but punctuated with bay ‘lollipops’. I steered everyone away from turf seats – too rustic, too scruffy, too much maintenance – and towards raised seats with the tops planted with spreading Thymus serpyllum (I was going to have chamomile but it needs sun). Once small bottoms have sat on them often enough, they should make a lovely dense, fragrant mat.

biblegarden1

Raised bed seating planted with Thymus serpyllum

I’m still not quite sure about the practicalities: after all, it rains quite a lot here so those seats will be damp a lot of the time. But I have a plan B in my back pocket, to replace some of the thyme with small 30cm square paving slabs so the children can sit down but still be surrounded by herbs.

It looks a bit bare at the moment but last week I spent a happy hour or two seeding it with the wildflowers of the field: Agrostemma (corncockle), Nigella (love-in-a-mist) and, slightly incongruously, broad beans, the closest I could get to tares. Actually, I’ve had to interpret the Bible verses fairly loosely: in the back corner, for example, I’ve taken Job’s verse:

“If I have stolen the land I farm and taken it from its rightful owners, if I have eaten the food that grew there but let the farmers that grew it starve, then instead of wheat and barley may weeds and thistles grow.”

…and replaced the thistles with purple Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ (loves damp, happy in part shade) and the wheat and barley with Hordeum jubatum, an annual grass sown pretty easily from seed and with suitably ear-like flowerheads. Should look lovely.

biblegarden3

I wasn’t too sure about the colour of those raised seats at first, but I’m warming – it sets off the daffs beautifully.

And the reeds? A pond was out of the question with small children about, so I’ve done a little bog garden in the corner lined with black plastic. In it I’ve buried a couple of ‘mini-ponds’ – basically plastic flower pots with the holes bunged up – for the real water lovers, Cyperus papyrus and Typha minima. Around them are little marsh marigolds (Caltha palustris) – no Bible mention, just a bit of spring colour.

It’s been a lot of fun, incredibly frustrating (I was building this, on and very off, through the wettest summer, autumn and winter we’ve ever had) and absorbingly interesting: in all, quite the most challenging design I’ve ever done despite its diminutive size. The willow arches, made by a local Somerset willow weaver, have absolutely been the finishing touch, and I’m so pleased with the result. It’s being Officially Opened on Friday, too – I don’t think I’ve ever had anything of mine officially opened before. I hope there will be ribbons!

This week in the garden…

07 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by in landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

stumplong

Introducing the patient: big, ivy-wrapped, and determined to stay put

…I was digging out stumps.

Big stumps: massive ones, in fact. The kind that make you have fantasies about acquiring a large John Deere tractor at short notice equipped with towbar and strong rope. The sort that halfway through, when it’s still not budging so much as an inch, you begin to wonder whether this is the one which will defeat you and stay, stubbornly, in the ground until you can come up with a more imaginative (and probably expensive) way of getting rid of it.

Midwinter is a time I find myself doing all the grunt work in the garden: the fencing, the path laying, the reconfiguring and extending and general shifting about. Not, in fact, gardening at all.

The two stumps in question are a massive Cotoneaster horizontalis on the top terrace of our stepped garden leading from the side of the house to the garage. This has been gradually getting bigger and more thuggish ever since we’ve been here: it recently acquired a topknot of brambles and this year made the decision even easier by refusing to produce more than one or two berries, which made my previous excuse that it was helping the birds entirely redundant.

The other stump – the one in the pictures – was a large hazel bole (the multistemmed bit at the bottom when you coppice it). It wasn’t unattractive, particularly: just in entirely the wrong place, being right in front of the gate that leads into my veg garden. I’ve been eyeing it with a view to obliteration for a couple of years now. But since the extension of the veg garden by another 60ft or so is now gathering pace, the compost bins had to shift up a bit: and the hazel stump was right in their way. It had to go.

Shifting stumps involves several essential pieces of kit:

  • border spade for the fiddly bits
  • fencer’s graft: a single-cast, long-handled and narrow metal spade used by fencers to dig a straight hole. Ours has been one of the most useful tools in our armoury for years now and is rarely out of commission.
  • crowbar: another essential in the toolbox
  • bowsaw and loppers: for cutting away the surface roots (and a few underneath once you’ve got that far).

The general approach is as follows.

1: Cut away all top growth so your stump looks like a stump. Mine, being hazel, was nice and straight – next year’s wigwams, I think.

2: Gingerly dig a trench right round the stump with the border spade, cutting away surface roots as you go: anything up to an inch, with the loppers, anything larger, with the bowsaw.

3: Have a cup of coffee and congratulate yourself on making a start.

4: Start work with the fencer’s graft, deepening and widening the trench and going in as close to the actual wood of the stump as you can. At this point it helps to rope in one’s spouse, if only so you can surreptitiously take a break under the guise of chopping out a few more roots.

5: As you get deeper, start sloping in your cuts so they’re going under the stump. The idea is to destabilise the whole thing by removing all soil, cutting any anchoring wood and generally working it free. This takes absolutely ages and since by now you’re completely knackered, it’s the most painful bit of all. Added to which, the stump is still refusing to move, and your language is getting worse and worse.

stumplong2

Conquered at last. Ouch.

6: Eventually, if you keep at it long enough, the stump starts to rock, imperceptibly at first, then more and more until it is undeniably loose. This is my favourite bit of the whole process: you get a whole new injection of energy and start doing embarrassing things like punching the air and shouting, ‘Gotcha, ya b*****d!’ at an inanimate lump of wood. It is best not to let anyone observe you at this point.

7: Shove the stump over as far as you can get it and cut away the remnants of any roots holding it in place one by one, until you’ve worked it free and can roll it out of the hole.

8: Fill the hole back in, go in and brew yourself a strong coffee, and sink into a nice hot bath. Do not plan to do anything at all the following day as your muscles will be in such spasm you will be unable to move. Return to view your handiwork with that warm glow of satisfaction that comes with a job well (if painfully) done.