CHAPTER TWO Understanding
Taking the pulse of the land is vital to my approach to designing. Before starting any drawings a good chunk of information needs gathering together . Get out there and sniff the air. Bury your nose in books and maps and uncover the local history. Consider the weather patterns and microclimates. Prowl around the fields and lanes or streets and see what’s growing, what other people are growing and what the views are like. Understand what drew you to the place – it must have been something special that you fell for. And what are your aspirations? Let’s gather the raw ingredients required for creating the new Elysian fields.
We inherited a few magnificent old field trees here and I wanted to blend the gardens out towards the fields and create a solid visual relationship between new and old. We have planted an ornamental ‘mead’ filled with tulips and alliums, their seed heads just visible in the sheets of poppies and cornflowers.
Respecting what you unearth
I’m a natural enthusiast and get incredibly excited about new projects. From the initial meeting I become a sponge for all the information that is about to come to light.
The exploration of the subject starts long before you actually arrive on site. I enjoy deciphering a landscape. I love geography and geology, and it does help to give thought to the nature of the land you are about to alter. How did it come to be the way it is, what actually happened, prehistorically, to the earth? What have been the ancient and traditional movements of people across the land? The better the understanding of it at the start, the more likely the end result is to turn out well. I live in England, one of the most diverse landscapes on earth in relation to its size. As an old country it has seen many levels of conditioning by its past through architecture and human activity and these are still visible if you are able to tune your eyes. I can decipher quite a lot just by looking, common sense combining with a degree of knowledge.
It is very easy to make assumptions about land and I’m frequently surprised, when I dig a little deeper, that the character and historic usage were radically different from the vestiges we see today. One project I had was set on the edge of what I assumed were naturally occurring beech forests. Reading up on the history of the area unearthed the surprising discovery that these forests were largely man-made. The original forests had been an appealing mixture of oak, cherry, holly and ash. The beech had been planted in huge quantity to support the local chair-making industry – now long defunct. Back in the 1700s the beech would have been managed on coppice rotations and the indigenous oak forest strategically felled and sold for shipbuilding or construction. This intense yet natural use of the land slowly altered the character of the landscape as the forest species changed. The area is nowadays justly famed for its beautiful beech and bluebell woods, and we take them completely for granted as ‘natural’.
Landscapes last a long time if they are done well, so honouring them with a bit of thought at the start stabilizes the design process.
Slowing back down to walking pace is also really useful when considering the scale of relationship between a new garden and an existing landscape. I have a near-medieval inclination towards manual labour, and land-workers deal with the details of the natural world at a human pace. This pace dictates comfortable spacing between trees, heights of walls and distances between buildings. It is why we love old villages and settlements: they have a proportion born of humanity and kindred relationships. I like to delve deeply into the landscape and the architecture, draw out its beauty and compliance and then integrate it back into the design work. This way it is easy to create places that suit their location, rather than rubberstamping a sole identity onto everything one touches.
This is a created view. I cleared lots of Victorian tree planting that blocked the view to the water and included a wellingtonia over 36m (120 feet) tall. I stripped away mature Leyland cypress on the right-hand side, replaced them with a native hedge and created a ha-ha from where this image is taken. The view to the tiny Windrush River flowing through the wild irises and the medieval mill pond is now restored.
For me it is about respecting the place I find myself in, and trying not to be too cocky about my big ideas before I’ve really had time to submerge myself in the area. For example, the profundity of things I’ve discovered about one of my new garden projects has stopped me dead in my tracks. I learned it is built over the long-lost ruins of an historic palace of national significance. We are now undertaking serious research into the recent past as well as the local geology and archaeology, and are discovering things that are making the design work so much richer. With the discoveries also come enriching stories that will help to make the new gardens captivating long into the future.
Wild roses abound in local field hedges and in autumn their magnificent hips gradually turn a rich scarlet, creating sparks of colour. I’ve always found them beautiful and plant them freely on wild margins. Their hips contain a lot of vitamin C and were extensively used during World War II to create syrup for children.
As the garden bleeds out towards nature I wanted to create a visual relationship with the wild roses in the outlying hedgerows. This is a great cascading bank of Rosa californica ‘Plena’. A trouble-free, single-flowering semi-double and exquisitely scented rose, it is redolent of summer and massed with orange hips in autumn. Quite a sight.
Geology
The structure of the countryside
What is the structure of the countryside? What is the underlying physical nature of the land? These questions set up an investigation that will allow the resulting garden to be properly and pleasingly related to its environment.
In the recent past, houses were built using stone from small localized quarries. Sufficient stone for building would be blasted and the resulting crater left to naturalize. These are easy to find if you look for them.
A glaciated landscape, for example, moulded and scoured by slow-moving ice floes into distinctive U-shaped valleys, is very obvious to see once your eye acclimatizes to it. In tandem with past glacial movement come readily understandable paths of water in the valley bottoms and down the steep hillsides. This water runs in fast spating streams, pitching down the steep valley sides into rivers flowing over the remnant glacial moraine of rolled rock and gravel with its distinctive rounded shape.
The shape of the land implicates its function. Valleys tend to be fertile, but this fertile land is limited, so there might be grazing cattle here where grass can grow. But the associated high rainfall and cool conditions indicate short seasons for crops, so arable farming is generally less viable. The steep rocky valley sides might be useful for grazing sheep but the inevitable high rainfall leeches nutrients and leaves soil that is thin, acidic and relatively infertile. Grass growth is weaker, yet in turn this allows more wildflower activity. So, historically, how else could people sustain themselves here other than keeping a low population density? Quarrying, of course. How are the houses built? Stone: slate for roofing, granite for building and limestone for steelmaking. By assessing the local architecture one immediately has the locally appropriate lexicon for building a new landscape.
My experience working on the volcanic east coast of Scotland, and my French experience in the Auvergne, helped me work in Kenya in the Rift Valley. I could tell that the Kenyan landscape was volcanic simply by its shape and colour and by the rock debris that is typical of expulsive volcanic activity. To be fair, it’s a pretty obvious call as Mount Kenya looks like a volcano as it rises to its conical peak. The land is dry red and dusty and covered in rough low grasses that bind it. All around are gobbets of black rock shaded with the orange rusting of iron ore and with the peculiarly smooth finish of something once malleable that hurtled through the air and cooled as it flew. There are also smaller bits of aerated pumice that would have been flung from the volcano over two million years ago and still litter the ground today. The structural stone for the house we were building was mined from one of these pumice seams – it can be sawn by hand and is very light and is, effectively, blockwork. I also used it crushed up into gravel on the green roofs to create a base reservoir, as it has the capacity to hold a lot of water and release it slowly.
The mountainous limestone outcrops at home in France allow tiny gardens of box and helianthemum to manifest in the crevices. The plants are bonsai’d by their location and take on forms that suit the circumstances. Lower down in the fertile valley the same box grows to a forest.
From the unmade road on the approach to a project in Scotland it is clear to see this is a classic U-shaped glacial valley, scoured and shaped by creaking ice floes. The absence of trees is man-made. They will grow even at this altitude, and occasionally a downy birch is visible in the crags.
I’m always amazed at the complementary qualities of natural materials – here in such a dry place, with only two episodes of annual rainfall, to have a material that acts like an oasis is a perfect symbiosis. This same ‘tufo’ is found in Italy and is used extensively in the decorative rustication of gardens such as the Villa d’Este. I love it, as when it is constantly saturated by cool fresh dripping water, it creates a micro world of mosses and ferns and is a beautiful adjunct in a blisteringly hot country.
The plant matrix
Demeanour of the countryside
I have found that once I understand the physical structure of the ground it doesn’t really matter which country I am in as, functionally, it behaves in a way I can recognize and work with. It is then quick and enjoyable work to get to grips with the plant species that will thrive and to create a palette of ingredients for that place. Wherever it is on earth I am now confident in my approach to unravelling the story of the place and with it the nature of the project. I like plants to live out long happy lives. A diet of native plants alone makes a dull garden, and I would not advocate it. However, I might thread native species through ornamentals if it adds authenticity to a place. It really depends on how much space there is and the desired result.
Choosing the plants for this New York City garden was easy, as they needed to replicate the shrubby woodland floor. In this part of the city the villas were built into the indigenous woodland, and the forest glade feel is very chic and relaxing.
In a project in New York State I needed to find a way to fuse the new gardens into an exceedingly rugged wild environment. In the recent past the substantial houses of the area had simply set up strict boundaries around their gardens and kept nature out and ornamental planting in. These gardens are very much of their time, and the ornamental plants are cosseted and coaxed to live in an environment they fundamentally detest. I went for more warp and weft of the natural and the ornamental, and stitched a very carefully curated list of plants in and out of the garden and native surroundings. The result can naturalize easily and still has a designed integrity that is discernible. This sort of planting is not without its perils, and it is extremely important to ensure that ornamentals are not going to escape into the wild and cause havoc.
In a city garden the choice of planting is much more to do with microclimate and the effects of surrounding buildings than with geology. Generally the evolution of a city will have denaturized a garden to an extreme degree – in some cases even the soil isn’t original. One garden I made in town started with the need to block out everything on its boundaries. I was asked if I could re-create the ‘limitless veldt’ of my client’s South African childhood. We both laughed out loud, as the garden was only 12m (40 feet) deep, but it did give a very good basis for the planting matrix. I chose lots of compatible South African and antipodean species and wove them into a pleasingly rugged scheme. We altered the soil appropriately, adding grit and pumice to keep it free draining. We craned in some vast contorted cryptomeria and pine, and voilà ! Suddenly we had an evocation of a purely imaginary landscape.
I often sketch accurate scaled sections in order to think through the proportions of trees I’m proposing. It is a waste of life to plant the wrong thing only to have to take it away in a few years. The Sitka spruce in the background was an introduced species from the forestry commission and is almost a pernicious weed. In the foreground is a stretch of lochside that we cleared and returned to the softer deciduous indigenous species, and the ‘hairy’ sauna lodge blends in.
Studying old maps
Links and relationships
The masterplan design of several of my larger projects in the UK has come about directly as the result of historic research. I’m a bit of a map enthusiast, which is a helpful trait in this line of work. It is fascinating to be able to look back in time on an old map and see how the roads used to run and where buildings once stood.
The new structural layout of Temple Guiting Manor in the Cotswolds was determined almost exclusively by the discoveries made by historic research, intuition and serendipity. The house was noted in the Domesday Book in the 11th century, making it one of England’s most valuable buildings. I felt very conscious of the responsibility to the past and for making the gardens appropriate to the place.
I know the Cotswolds area very well. From the Middle Ages onwards it was a very wealthy region, with its wealth based on the production of sheep wool. The villages were connected by myriad sheep droving tracks, and discovering these lost track ways on old maps of Temple Guiting and the ghosts of old farm buildings now vanished allowed me to re-create the medieval structure of the ancient farmstead, with all its old walls and enclosures for animals. These eighteen ‘rooms’ now host the different gardens, and the proportion and flow feel right for the place. The actual garden designs that I created within the rooms owe nothing to the past, yet they feel comfortable set around this historic skeleton.
A great deal of statutory permission is needed for buildings as important as Temple Guiting. In part it was the proof found in old maps that allowed the extensive redevelopment to go ahead. After many years of work we were lucky to win a Drystone Walling Association Pinnacle Achievement Award for the extensive new garden walls. None other than HRH The Prince of Wales, the patron of the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain, presented the Award amid bunting and tea in the marquee. Maps led us there.
The maps indicate clearly the cluster of houses and farms and their trackways, fields, rivers and orchards. This is how I solved the riddle of Temple Guiting.
The largest part of the house in the foreground is two dovecotes. Stomachs were more important than bedrooms! The garden is built in what was a vast kitchen garden that would have fed the household in the 1400s.
This is an ancient sheep-droving track (above) that passed between the various walled enclosures and led out into the ‘wolds’. I love the structure the old tracks give to the garden, passing by the barn and the granary through orchards to the fields. We didn’t restore the cow byre (below) – I love its simplicity and fringed the old cobbled floor with achillea, thyme and Stipa tenuissima . The worn oak timbers and old mossy roof are enough.
Happily, the house and terrace are gradually being subsumed by planting (above). I chose self-seeders, such as the Erigeron karvinskianus, thymes and catmint with ‘blow-ins’ of oxeye daisy to populate the terrace, while the climbers cascade down from the walls. Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’ covers two sides of the clapboard house and has currants and raspberries at her feet (below).
The garden had no mature trees so I went to Belgium and found a redundant fruit and nut research station that was closing down and bought everything they had. Knackered sixty-year-old trees gave instant aging to our plan (above). Years of hard pruning had rendered them gnarled and strangely shaped, with dying branches here and there, but still sufficiently full of vigour to add to the garden. I planted nutteries because hazel slowly strips the strength from the fertile soil, weakening the grass and allowing wild plants to develop a toehold. I’ve let this process happen in real time (below).
Lorryloads of colossal unclipped Buxus sempervirens ‘Rotundifolia’ gave depth to the empty spaces. The lawns in full untrammelled splendour have become very rich in species, despite the deadly clay. Bounded by great baulks of lightly clipped box, they are given a structured context (above). Achingly beautiful, the little Rosa ‘Stanwell Perpetual’ toughs it out in the long grass (below). She chugs on all through the summer, emitting a delicious scent.
I have made a wild garden so I feel able to discuss this point from a position of experience. The owner, a free-thinking academic, wanted to subvert a perfectly logical garden that surrounded her Tudor farmhouse in the country into something altogether wilder. She wanted her children to enjoy the experience of boundless nature rather than acres of manicured lawn.
This act of subversion required thought. How far were we prepared to go in ‘letting go’ the land? I cautioned that it would be very hard to wrest it back from nature – visions of Thomas Hardy’s furze cutters, coarsened by the relentless hacking back at the unremitting tide of gorse in The Return of the Native , have never left me!
The area was a recently decommissioned dairy farm. All the farm buildings had been removed and grassed over by the time I arrived. What lurked beneath the grass was anyone’s guess. The land surrounding ours was beautiful, heavy iron-rich clay cloaked in sweet chestnut coppice, studded with sheets of bluebells in spring and wild stands of Dryopteris filix-mas and Asplenium scolopendrium . Coppicing creates a wild garden that is hard to better.
Both of us had independently known the splendidly learned entomologist and champion of research into schizophrenia Dame Miriam Rothschild and her remarkable house, Ashton Wold in Northamptonshire. Miriam had allowed her house to become subsumed by climbers until it became a vast green hairy mound with, at night, yellow flickering light emitting from the occasional window deeply recessed within the mountainous climbers. Her lawns had gone to long grass dotted with wildflowers and orchids, and there were birds everywhere. We came up with the idea of an ‘anti-garden’.
Inspired, we would let the lawns grow unchecked, plant an ‘Orwellian’ vegetable patch, on the front lawn outside the drawing room in order that radishes were easily accessible, submerge the house in roses and vines and creepers and turn the rest over to masses of orchards and nutteries. The gardener went pale.
The layout required a strong underlying design to hold the whole rationale together. I planted wild nutteries, managed nutteries, orchards, coppices and a herbaceous border (a border of herbs!). And I smothered the house, the cottage and the oast house completely in Rosa ‘Madame Alfred Carrière’, R . ‘Rambling Rector’, R. banksiae ‘Lutea’, Virginia creeper, Vitis ‘Fragola’, V. vinifera ‘Purpurea’, with oxeye daisy everywhere. It was so exciting. There was such an abundance – of bees, butterflies, birds, slow worms, you name it.
The anti-garden has stabilized nicely into a simple system of management. Perhaps the greatest successes were the reverted lawns and the submerged house, and the vast quantity of relaxed wildlife they support.
The only vestige of gardening, other than the vegetable plot, is a very simple cutting garden for the house that is planted with near relatives of native species.