CHAPTER FIVE Rooting
And so to plants, the subject that makes bosoms heave and hearts swell . All the months of machinery, mud and noise melt away into soft colours and birdsong in scented evening air. Yet ornamental planting is nature at her most mercurial. Understanding her tricks and seductions is essential for a happy garden. Hard work, trial and constant error and discussions with fellow gardeners is how good plant knowledge evolves. That knowledge is then constantly tested, as making plants combine well requires patience, skill and serendipity.
I wanted this border to be exuberant. It gets taller and wilder as the season progresses, tamed by the clipped forms of the Quercus ilex and illuminated for months with Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’.
The gardener is the garden
There is no avoiding the fact. Plants are all about hard physical work. The majority of activities relating to plants and planting involve constant and sometimes back-breaking effort. If you want to be seduced by the subject, then just look at the pictures and stop reading! Gardeners, those of us who love gardening, are normally to be found face down presenting their posteriors to the world as they rummage around muttering into a border. We fall easily into intense coded conversations with others of our ilk that leave non-gardeners bewildered. One of the chicest women I know, America’s great landscape architect Andrea Cochran, says she spends days on end at home in her vegetable garden, her battered trousers held up by bailer twine and not a thought for what she looks like. There is no absorption as profound as gardening. It is a form of transcendentalism. Garden admirers, on the other hand, are to be found genteelly dressed strolling slowly and admiringly through the afore-mentioned sumptuous borders.
I work like a carthorse in the garden. Born in the Chinese year of the ox, I expect I have no choice. I remember when I started out as a garden designer the terrifying figure of Mary Keen swept down upon me at the Chelsea Flower Show. She grabbed my hands hard by the wrists and examined them wordlessly. She flung them down. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘you actually garden. You’re all right.’ We have liked each other ever since. Unless you garden it is quite difficult to make reliable gardens for others. It is essential to be able to understand the man-hours it will take to manage and maintain things. Temple Guiting, with its eighteen garden rooms, fourteen acres of garden and two sizeable vegetable gardens, is gardened part-time by Marion Jones, an impressive young Welsh woman. She has help with mowing and topiary clipping but everything else she does herself. I designed the garden to be self-managing and that doesn’t mean no work at all – it just means it is focused, intelligent and cognizant of the person who will garden it. The gardener must be considered as integral to the design. My dear, departed friend Ian Kirby always said, ‘The gardener is the garden’ and it is the truth.
This little garden bakes in south-facing heat, amplified by the enclosure, and the plants need to accommodate this. Vitis coignetiae is very much at home on the walls and blends well with the lavenders and Elaeagnus ‘Quicksilver’.
I loved making these long walk borders. The yew columns march down as far as the barn and the Quercus ilex , where the tempo changes and the planting loosens. Viburnums, roses and philadelphus bolster the Campanula lactiflora ‘Loddon Anna’ and tumbling herbaceous plants all in shades of blue and white.
This is the tumultuous conclusion to the long walk seen here , where it relaxes and spreads out, blurring with the natural surroundings. Rosa californica ‘Plena’ in the background supports waves of fennels, lavender, irises and salvias. The dry ground tempers the unruly behaviour of the valerian, with Rosa x odorata ‘Pallida’ (syn.‘Old Blush’) playing to the crowd in front.
Soil
Mulch is magic
Let’s get stuck in! This is the good bit. Finally, the building work is done and the planting can begin. Only, hold your horses, we aren’t planting anything until the soil is sorted out.
Good soil has been my Holy Grail for as many years as I can remember. I have been gardening London clay for so long I almost lost my faith. It is enough to test the commitment of any gardener, as clay is so horrible to work. It seemed it was in workable condition for only a few miraculous weeks a year when it wasn’t either baked to rock hardness with inch-wide cracks or a sullen stolid immoveable mass of damp misery. Tens of years’ worth of manure and grit were swallowed up by it and it remained unyielding. London clay is a law unto itself. Inevitably the plants I most admire enjoy chalk or lovely dry friable limy soil. Irises detest the morosely clammy clay with its legions of slugs. Persistently I grew them and persistently the slugs would chomp through the neck of the stem below the bud like Monsieur Guillotin on a good day. Off with their heads! In desperation I relandscaped the garden specifically to dig out the clay and import good soil. Et voilà ! Irises in full and glorious flower, albeit only for ten days a year.
In wilder areas, if plants can be left to become self-mulching, then leave them in peace.
Rosa Iceberg (‘Korbin’) hedges are a bold move. They slice across the garden and brighten the woodland backdrop. Such great plants – flowering without cease and obligingly good looking and healthy. Heavy mulching is necessary on thin chalk soil.
I’m lucky enough to also have a garden out of London, where the soil is miraculously good, light, sandy, warm and sweet. Things grow like magic beans, my back doesn’t ache and every day is a salad day. Generally, though, I am pragmatic about soil preparation, as replacing soil is not possible or appropriate in most cases. More often than not we set about improving it. It is easy to analyse topsoil. If it is moist and rolls into a ball in your fingers, then it is clay. Sand is self-evident, and the rest can be chalk, good loam or peat or stony schist.
All soils are improved by mulching. It holds the moisture beneath its blanket and opens up the top layer to oxygen and life. It also helps stop erosion. Spreading a thick layer over beautifully cleared soil in autumn is very satisfying. In my planting schemes there are areas where I try to persuade people not to clear up every leaf, but leave them to form a natural mat over the soil and let the worms do their work. Regular mulching reduces the need to dig and cuts down on labour. Good soil is a reward beyond words.
This low wall needs thoughtful planting, nothing too uncontrollable. I chose Stipa calamagrostis on the right of the gate and Salvia x superba to the left. Vitis coignetiae drapes nonchalantly behind.
My garden is on sand so drains like a sieve and is mulched, broadly speaking, with wild oregano. Everything else just blasts up through it and it seems uncomplaining from the first bulbs to the last asters.
Structuring and layering planting
How it works
I have a belt-and-braces method for creating a planting plan. Planting is extremely difficult to visualize, as it is a four-dimensional puzzle. Knowing your plants is important. Failure is the bedfellow of ignorance, and as gardens are judged on their planting, it is pretty essential to get it to function adequately. It can be worth writing the critical plant facts – heights, flowering times, die-back period – on bits of paper and shuffle them round your desk. This way it’s easy to see the rudiments of their performance and avoid obvious disasters. I taught myself by always following this system. Start with your shrubby backbone and build from there. Confidence grows quickly from this point, and having a structure to fall back on is helpful even now. Herbaceous plants have very varied structural natures and it is good to get to grips with friends and enemies who will help or hinder your borders. Using annuals to plug unforgiving gaps is also useful if you have access to them or can grow your own. They deserve a comeback.
I have a ‘Salome’s veils’ approach to layering planting. It is important that there is enough airiness to allow each layer to suggest the next, but without giving the game away entirely.
My first paid garden design! Running water in the mill leet on one side and an orchard on the other. This little garden was carved from a bit of farmland and had never been cultivated. I didn’t want to obscure the countryside or create a martyrdom of weeding on the bank, so I sketched the image from the top floor of the mill to help me ascertain the heights of the shrubbery. Conclusion – nothing bigger than an elder.
This was my first proper planting design made flesh. It feels like I drew it with my tongue stuck out in concentration! I like it and it amuses me how stiffly I pooled and layered the plants. But it is important to learn, and learn I did. And this photograph by Andrew Lawson launched my career. Thank you, Andrew!
Here is the Urban Glamour Wood that became an RIBA prizewinner and a shoot location for many well-known fashionistas. A few humble Betula pendula and some tousled sexy planting are all it took.
Trees
Folk heroes
Starting at the top of the planting plan pyramid are trees – it is very important to scale them to the location and think ahead twenty, thirty years and more. In smaller gardens I tend to use fruit trees, or containable trees such as Catalpa x erubescens that can be hard-pruned. Amelanchiers and the smaller maples work – Acer griseum is good and so too is Cercis siliquastrum . Try to smother each season with something good to enjoy: flowers, changing foliage colour, interesting bark and perhaps fruit or seed pods. A well-chosen tree will do all of this in a small space and earn its keep well. In parkland, of course, it’s possible to plant much larger trees and, again, I urge consideration of planting distances between trees. Avenue trees must be planted 10m (39 feet) apart. No large tree will enjoy being planted closer, and in a few years the mistake becomes obvious as the crowns collide and the trees look miserable.
A lot of trees these days are cloned in production, so it is worth knowing at the outset whether you are buying cloned or seed-grown trees. It makes a difference to the ultimate character of the plant. I prefer trees not to be uniform, but that is a personal choice.
This is an entirely constructed scene. I bought a redundant fruit research station in Belgium. These are special hazelnut varieties that had been pruned beautifully for propagation. Now retired from active service and bedded into long grass, they’ve never been happier.
Then, of course, there are the pleached and espaliered trees. Lime, pear, hornbeam, apple and liquidambar are the usual suspects for me. A Frenchman told me that all pleached and espaliered trees are unfashionable. I told the Frenchman I was unmoved by fashion. They are too good a building block to worry about what they are wearing. I use box heads or espaliers a lot – I also use espaliered screens where space is limited. I think it was probably a seminal visit to the baroque Palace of Het Loo in the Netherlands that got me started. The amazing arched hornbeam tunnel was quite an inspiration. Trees are malleable enough to be formed to create architecture.
These lovely old boys were lost among overgrown shrubs, so I hoicked them all out and restored the sward. The little bridge over the ha-ha is possible now we no longer graze this area. The grazing line on the canopies will now gradually drop without the attention of the deer.
I make no claim here other than the surprise and delight of coming across a vast grove of these now wild rhododendron, collected and planted in the Highlands by Sir John Stirling-Maxwell some 135 years ago. I wish he could see it as he must have imagined it.
I have an addiction to crack willow and plant them whenever I can near water. I think my love stems from the really ancient ones that lined the river where I grew up. I’m from Shakespeare country, and they felt old enough for him to have known them. They’re as useful as they are characterful.
Topiary
Shape shifters
Topiary is essential to many of my gardens. It is a very necessary anchor in loose herbaceous plantings, as it holds the eye as firmly as a building or a wall. I favour beech and yew and, if it’s warm enough, myrtle and bay. I’m keeping away from box until the terrible blight that afflicts it calms down – if it ever does. I love box as a wild shrub so am happy with Buxus sempervirens ‘Rotundifolia’ left to grown large and beautiful. Box is a terrible loss to the topiarist but I do think we have to accept it as a fact and move on. There are plenty of things that will take a good shaping. Westringia is pretty if you need silvery leaves. And, of course, osmanthus takes a good prune after flowering, and smells beautiful in flower. I’ve only tried Ilex crenata once and it defoliated on me, so I’ve left it in peace since then.
Staggered sizes and mixed blocks of yew and beech create a crenellated hedge or semi-maze along a problematic boundary (above). They change colour beautifully in autumn and maintain the contrast through the winter months when it is needed. By the house I used the tree Robinia pseudoacacia as a soft airy adjunct to all the structural planting (below).
Topiary is so immensely useful. Brimming with character, it can fasten the layers of a garden and balance different textures.
My garden in London benefits from the little box cubes and the dumpy cloud hedge at the back. They stop the planting flopping onto the path between the terraces.
This garden is filled with huge bulks of loosely clipped Buxus sempervirens , forming partitions between spaces. On the boundary of the garden I used Buxus sempervirens ‘Rotundifolia’, which is reaching around 2.5m (8 feet). Topiary is excellent for nesting birds as well as for its visual uses.
Texturally I wanted some evergreen bulk to balance the ephemeral Rosa laevigata and Rosa ‘New Dawn’ and the contorted mulberry.
This is the mother of all topiary: a forest of wild Buxus sempervirens at home in France. Heaven only knows how old it is. It’s like being lost in an enchanted kingdom, with the soft fairy mosses hanging from the trunks and the cool moss-covered rocks and ferns underfoot.
Shrubs
Bring back shrubberies
Below the trees come the shrubs. They haven’t been very fashionable in recent years, with gardening being in the thrall of the perennial and meadow movements. They certainly earn their keep in my world, creating the all-important middle layer. They give a backdrop to the floral border. Pragmatically they offer flowers, scent, autumn colour, nesting sites for birds, food and lodging for insects and attractive winter structure. I adore viburnums, hydrangeas, tree peonies and, to my own great surprise, rhododendrons. Rhododendrons, where the soil suits them, can be planted into the most magnificently harmonious groves like no other plant. In Scotland we discovered hundreds of them hidden away on a spruce- covered hillside and forgotten since their Victorian collector brought them back from the Himalayas and set about re-creating that landscape. The plants had grown to immense size and there, in their moistly dripping Highland haven, they flourished in peace (see here for the evidence). Happy rhododendrons don’t flower very much and this forever exorcized my horror of them that originated from the dumpy, gaudy plantations I remember as a child on visits to a distant cousin. I am fond of any shrub that drips romance and carries us through the bleaker seasons with their blurry outlines shrouded in mists.
Often the gardens I make are quite large, so I would be lost without shrubberies. It is vital to take up space, literally waste space, and give that intermediate tier to a garden, and shrubs are so very giving in this. You do need to care for both layers though. The trees need thinning to give light to the shrubbery below. ‘Neglect and die’, if I might paraphrase P.W. Botha.
Batty Langley’s account in 1728 of the ‘Manner of Disposing and Planting Flowering Shrubs’ appeared in his ground-breaking book New Principles of Gardening . His descriptions are sufficient even to this day for understanding how best to dispose shrubberies and create wildernesses.
The palette of plants for this semi-wild city garden in New York needed to be chic and gentle. I used big banks of Hydrangea quercifolia . It is well known and that doesn’t matter – it loves living here and thrives below the forest oak canopy.
Nothing but shrubs will do here. The ground is covered with the exquisite little Cornus canadensis , and then layers of hydrangea, viburnum and Magnolia virginiana build up the levels into the canopies of the oaks and pines.
Climbing plants
Agility and grace – the athletes
Once the tree and shrub layers are clarified on a plan, I move next to the climbers. Vines, roses, wisterias, clematis, jasmines and all manner of exotica can be used. Every region of the world has its party piece and it’s worth using them. Plants that are popular are popular for a reason, so don’t be too clever – just plant them and enjoy. The note of caution I’d sound is that most climbers do need someone competent to look after them. An unwieldy mess ensues without good pruning and training, and you end up needing binoculars to see the flowers at the top while being greeted with a horror of bald stems at the base. However, if this obstacle can be surmounted, then I advocate using them lavishly. Not everyone can do as Dame Miriam Rothschild did and smother the entire house, but an organized close second is worth considering. I think carefully about what I’m planting onto. Some houses either can’t take, or don’t need, a lot of climbers. Sometimes it’s nicer to plant shrubs in front of a façade if the house is decorative enough without needing more.
A pergola or frame designed expressly for climbers is invaluable. Decoratively it can unite disparate parts of a garden, and the plants benefit from plenty of air and sun, so they grow beautifully and strongly.
We found vines of a large size, and in some cases quite loaded with grapes; we also found an abundance of roses, which appeared to be like those of Castile.
—JUNIPERO SERRA
The most modest of climbers, and yet the most giving. These sweet peas were planted fairly thoughtlessly and yet scented the house all summer. I love them.
Rosa ‘Paul’s Scarlet Climber’ is a tremendous rose. It’s not scented, yet who cares as it flowers without end and is obligingly healthy and strong. Paired with a well-pruned grape-vine of indistinct parentage, it enhances rather than overpowers the house.
This is the kind of wall I dream of! It probably once had a vast glasshouse built on it, hence the lumps of oak all through it. Now it looks like a work of art. I didn’t want to swamp it, so chose the spare frame of climbing Rosa The Pilgrim from David Austin. The flowers are large enough and constant enough to register against the stunning stonework.
Rose gardens
The throbbing heart
Cy Twombly hated roses. I’m amazed to find his loathing of them so well recorded! Finding time in his all-consuming artistic life to make his feelings known means the feeling must have run deep. I love roses. Every garden I have ever made has been vastly enriched by their presence. The air is heavy with their perfume. Bees bumble lazily from flower to flower. ‘Come into the garden, Cy, you just don’t know what you are missing.’
I only love certain types of roses though. For easy opulence and lack of disease I tend to go for the Bourbons. I planted an entire flint wall with ‘Honorine de Brabant’ and, in the capable secateurs of the gardener, it flowered like the sort of wall of roses you tend to see in books. It just needed lavender at its feet, so that’s what I gave it. In my experience the Bourbons don’t need a lot of messing about with. Plant them into fantastically well-prepared soil, having first root- and top- pruned them quite hard, and leave them to it. I prune hard in the first year to stop them rocking and then not much after that. I rather like their big unwieldy shapes. For something neater I love the Portland ‘Comte de Chambord’. Having no fear of pink I find it can be the base note of some fairly exciting colour combinations, and it smells beautiful.
I’m veering back towards the frowned-upon Hybrid Teas. Much maligned in the UK due to overenthusiastic municipal planting forty-odd years ago, they are thought of pejoratively as ‘granddad’ flowers. A full load was wrongly delivered recently by an unscrupulous trader and we planted them, thinking they would fill an empty summer until the right ones turned up bare-rooted in the autumn. I was astonished by the vigorous purple shoots, the scent and the really rather nice foliage – planted in one of my looser schemes they came into their own and I decided to keep them. Gardening is all about serendipitous accidents, so there’s no point being too uptight about mistakes. My favourite Hybrid Tea is ‘Mrs Oakley Fisher’. It is very tasteful, though, with slender flame buds opening to a single apricot rose. Christopher Lloyd once chastised me, saying my choices of plants were ‘rather too tasteful’. It’s a recrimination I can live with. Perhaps one of the best climbing Hybrid Teas is ‘Lady Hillingdon’– a rather wonderful heavy apricot-yellow rose that hangs its head down shyly. Lady Hillingdon was the wife of an Indian Viceroy and is reputedly the originator of the phrase, ‘I close my eyes, open my legs, lie back and think of England’, as she heard her husband coming up the stairs. Not a bed of roses for her then!
Hybrid Tea roses are due a renaissance and I’m happy to be heading it. I used Rosa A Whiter Shade of Pale in this mix. I love the song and I love the rose.
A strong clear pink is essential in a garden and, to stop it looking too much like a girlie bedroom, I weight it down with serious magenta and navy, such as these Lychnis coronaria and deep blue Campanula ‘Kent Belle’. This is Rosa ‘Comte de Chambord’, planted in vast quantities.
Dear Lady Hillingdon. Here she is immortalized in the most beautiful climbing rose, created in 1917. I hope the eponymous rose and the wedding gift of Overstrand Hall, one of Lutyens’ best houses, diminished her horror of her husband’s feet creaking upstairs towards her!
Flowers and subshrubs
The complicated bit
The blending and weaving of herbaceous plants is possibly the trickiest part of a garden. It is the mutable element that brings both sublime joy and unutterable sorrow and is, I think, akin to making music in its subtlety and complexity. Sigmund Freud observed that flowers engender a sense of peace, as they suffer neither from conflict or feelings. That said, Sigmund, you do have to give quite a bit of thought to the party guests or it could be a very unfulfilling event. Not every truism is true.
Technical understanding of plants and their vagaries will only take you so far when designing. At some point it is important to cut loose, take risks and fly. I don’t know how much help can be given, as it is such a personal process – it is, after all, about creating a living painting.
My own approach is probably based in replicating matrices that are quite close to nature. I’m not a ‘wild’ gardener by any means, as I am far too organized for that, yet I like the plants in my schemes to get on with each other and coexist in a companionable way. I’ve developed my own style of blending herbaceous plants so that there is always something happening, even in a very restricted space and within a restricted palette. My gardens really have to work. I am giving people something with an evolutionary life and that is a responsibility and needs to be fully understood.
I work with a relatively pared-down plant palette that I know I can rely on to perform. Gardening at home for myself, I can try out all sorts of things and make it all up as I go along. That is completely permissible in a private arena, but for my work I need to be focused and more measured. Soil, orientation and space are considered well in advance. In one small London garden I think I used just six species, and the instruction was to keep them in equal balance. The garden was planted well over ten years ago and is still going strong – as plants tire, they are replaced. If one variety becomes too powerful, it can be split. Other times, as in Kenya, I wanted a much more complex solution, as the evolution of planting there is extremely rapid. The equatorial climate offers nonstop growth without discernible seasons. This planting needed to weave together and then balance into a toughed-out wilderness matrix. The intellectual process for this is more akin to creating a permaculture than a garden. The area is remote and wild and aesthetically there is a danger of it looking like a hotel if over-gardened in a traditional way. I’m not up for that! I do try to move things along a bit in my work.
Plumbago, named because ‘plumbum’ is Latin for lead. Pliny believed it cured lead poisoning, as the flowers are of a similar colour to the metal. I like it as a plant for interstices between grasses. It flowers well and is undemanding in heat.
An example of a good hardworking border exists at Temple Guiting in a very narrow bed 70m long and 1m deep (230 by 3 feet) that is filled with the espaliered hornbeams. (You can see it in its various seasonal guises on images shown here through here ). The trees are greedy for water. I keep them tightly espaliered so light gets to the border. The skill needed was to combine very tough herbaceous plants with the trees so the symbiotic competition worked. Know this – the beautiful peony Paeonia lactiflora ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ is a very tough old bird! Her looks belie her character. Combining her with cardoons, Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’ – another grande dame who can hold her own – and lavenders, the border has chugged on for a remarkably long time. There isn’t a grass in sight for reasons I will explain next. It is hard-core romantic herbaceousness and, guess what, people love it. Beauty changes how we feel, there is no doubt about it, and it is good.
Thank goodness for immigrants in horticulture, or we would have nothing to plant!
Early summer in the Peacock Garden. I enjoy the emerging rusty orange of Eremurus x isabellinus ‘Cleopatra’, knowing it will soon be in full swing with the crimson claret of Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’. When this garden gets cracking, the colours rival Christian Lacroix in his heyday.
Campanula ‘Kent Belle’ with Papaver orientale ‘Patty’s Plum’ knitted together with the still emerging Calamintha nepeta . Glistening in the background are the buds of Lilium martagon . I use these plants often, as they make comfortable bedfellows and the colours are so sumptuous.
Frequently I’m happy with very little. Plants need space in order to shine. This is Knautia macedonica but came up as a pale pink rather than the conventional magenta. Enjoyably random.
Grasses
Kissing the wind
Grasses come next. I use them sparingly. Piet Oudolf is a good friend and I greatly admire his work, though my planting is very different. He is a genuinely original thinker and very much copied. Piet and his wife Anja are amazingly knowledgeable plants people and generous to a fault with that knowledge. The percentage of grass to herbaceous in Piet’s schemes is probably a good deal less than popular perception gives us to remember. I just fact-checked that in his book and am correct. Grasses are extremely useful when used as an adjunct or a statement within a more varied collection of species. However I am cautious of inflicting too many grasses on a gardener, and here is why. In the first big garden I planted at The Menagerie, I used Miscanthus sacchariflorus to form a series of serpentine paths leading to a temple and also to the water’s edge. I’ve always loved the feeling of being out of scale to my surroundings, and moving through the shimmering grass was a beautiful experience. This grass grows cheerfully to about 3m (10 feet) tall. And it did – it was very happy indeed. And then I had to look after it and garden it and try and hoick couch grass out of its congested stems. Couch grass is the ‘dirty bomb’ of gardening. In late winter, cutting the miscanthus back to ground level engendered the need to sing songs of the chain gangs to keep myself going; hard and bloody work. And I vowed I could never inflict large swathes of biomass on anyone ever again, however fabulous its swishing tresses. It was the moment that I understood that if I wanted to be a free expressionist, it would have to be in my own time, as that level of artistic excess is suited only to the solipsist!
Grasses were vital in the courtyard in Kenya. The landscape is open grassland and so the planting combination needed a variety of plants scattered through a backbone of grasses, as occurs naturally. Otherwise it would be like jam without toast – not very nice.
The roadside nurseries of Nairobi aren’t big on labels so I don’t know which pennisetum this is. Is has the right diffuse non-colour necessary to bring together the planting.
After their rock’n’roll moment, grasses are settling into part of the rhythm of well-loved garden plants.
My grasses of choice are the gentler ones. I use the panicums a fair bit, also Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’– even though people claim it’s boring, it is very useful. I also like the smaller grasses, such as Milium effusum ‘Aureum’, which lights up shady spots and is never a pain. The stipas are also good, and I have a special place in my heart for the beautiful Ampelodesmos mauritanicus . Get to know the habit of the grass and use it accordingly. Better to have a few that really look good than cram them into the wrong spot. In my new garden I’ve just gleefully dug out all the horrible little blue festucas. I know for a fact that if I saw them in their native habitat, I’d love them, but in gardens they are static spotty runt among other free-flowing plants. So in essence I suggest investigating the natural growth pattern in the wild of the grasses you like, seeing if that look is what you are after and then mimicking it.
Ferns
A slow reveal
I definitely have Pteridomania. It’s been untreated for a while, as I haven’t really had access to a good place to build a proper fernery. I can’t survive without my tree ferns and it broke my heart to leave a well-tended and enormous Woodwardia radicans with a friend, as they had the perfect conditions and I didn’t – that was well over thirty years ago and the pain is as raw as ever. I was an odd teenager.
In our teens my best friend Ian Kirby had a flat in a vast old Victorian mansion that was semi-derelict. It was built in the faux Elizabethan style and was extremely picturesque. That saved it from being viewed as the untenable dump that it was. Ferns grew inside and out and mosses clustered on the damp maroon wool carpets. So taken were we with this colonization that we ornamented the toilet basin with collected moss and tree bark tied on with florists’ wire. The flat had a vast old fernery built onto the room we used as a kitchen. It was a conservatory of sorts, with complex tufa rustication smothering the walls and a defunct watering system of old lead pipework. It would have been a technological marvel in its day and we set about repairing it with a will. Maidenhair fern liked it best, along with blechnums and aspleniums. Had we known about it, we would have used Selaginella kraussiana too, but we made do with the ubiquitous ‘ferner’s friend’ Soleirolia soleirolii , or baby’s tears. Hours were spent misting and fogging to keep it all drippingly happy.
I use ferns wherever I can in cool spaces. They do need the right conditions to thrive, so check carefully. There is nothing worse than watching plants suffer from the indifference of bad placement.
Currently there are well over 10,000 fern species alive and well on earth. Their enigmatic antiquity and stimulating way of unfurling their fronds make them indispensable.
Everything I love about France is in my garden wall. The ferns have chosen to live here and no one has ever said they can’t. It’s a happy symbiosis.
In Scotland, happy in the unending soft rain is Dryopteris wallichiana . The black hairy ribs of the leaves catch tiny drops of water and glisten beautifully. One of my favourite ferns, as its big and semi-evergreen.
One of my tree ferns at home bathed in early morning light. I’ve got a little grove of them and although they’d much rather be in New Zealand they are making the best of it here. I water them daily with rainwater to keep them pliable.
I so enjoyed creating this garden. It’s full of things I love: Genista aetnensis, Dicksonia antarctica , the delicious honey-scented spurge Euphorbia mellifera and Astelia chathamica , all woven into a matrix of grasses. What’s not to love!
Bulbs, corms and rhizomes
Joy division
How to make a garden happy? Plant loads of bulbs, and I mean loads. In the depths of winter, up pop the snowdrops, crocuses, the sheets of aconites and the anemones. Then hot on their frosty heels come the narcissi and hyacinths, muscari and scillas, then the bluebells, fritillaries and camassias. The tulips come in great fanfares and save you from thinking spring is but a damp squib with nothing to commend it after months of winter. A spring garden without tulips is a sorry sight. I’m especially fond of them, as our family crest is three flamed yellow tulips, bestowed by a cheerful King Christian IV of Denmark for reasons we will never know. We all know about tulipomania and it was justified and still is.
After tulips, the alliums – getting bored yet? No? Alliums of all colours and sizes are great in a garden, but try to avoid the mistake I saw recently of planting in a sheltered garden far too many Nectaroscordum siculum . They reek to high heaven and it does rather spoil the effect. Then the summer flowers: irises, crinums, nerines and lilies. Lilies have been ruined for me by the invasion of the revolting scarlet lily beetle, Lilioceris lilii. We are under constant siege from invading enemies that make life so frustrating. I am going to try again though and see what can be achieved, as life without lilies is a lesser life.
In the Middle East I’ve enjoyed discovering bulbs that create such a show over there in spring. They are so well adapted to the ferocious terrain and brutal sun and yet flower with grace and delicacy, and add so much to the planting schemes. There are so many good bulbs and corms it is impossible to list them, but suffice to say they earn their keep many times over as they take up so little space and give back so much.
With careful planning , there is a bulb for every month of the year, and the pleasure of them is immeasurable.
Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ lives up to its name and I plant them in thousands every year. Despite their ubiquity I haven’t a bad word to say about them – I just plant some more.
At the other end of the spectrum is this delicate Turkish species tulip, Tulipa acuminata . It is surprisingly versatile and creates wonderful displays if it can naturalize. I’m having another go now I’ve moved to a garden with better soil for it.
This orchid is in one of the damp meadows at home in France. I’m not certain but think it’s Orchis purpurea , the lady orchid. They appear in sheets with the strange tasselled Muscari and are extremely ornamental.
Orchids require patience. Plant them and then go and concentrate on other things for a few years and let them surprise you.
One of the nameless wild Iris germanica that thrive at the base of the walls of my house in France. Their rhizomes bake in the heat of the summer.
This is part of a colony of Dactylorhiza that suddenly appeared in my flowery mead this year. Patience rewarded.
Lilium regale is such a good doer and seems to deal with the dreaded lily beetle well enough for me to keep planting it. Garden borders need incursions from the glam squad from time to time.
Plant groupings
Getting the party started
A good planting combination is a happy party of not too many guests who all allow each other time and space to express themselves. We now have the hierarchy of the plants and the layering, and then it falls to making bewitching combinations that work for a space. Drawing out planting plans is the best thing and I still draw them by plant diameter. I make my list following the hierarchy and then I plan them out. I then trawl through and see what the behaviour is like – there is nothing worse than planning something, as I once did with Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’, and then not realizing that it leaves a hole a yard across.
I like my gardens to settle into an easy compatibility of plants and give effortlessly charming results. I’m flatteringly told that my gardens are all about planting. Quite a lot has been written about me to that effect by people who don’t know me. My own view is that they are all about good planning and structure and then that is overlaid with well-thought-out planting. Temple Guiting looks incredibly plant-driven, but it has very few mixed borders in relation to its size. I just used plants that sing out lustily the joy of summer. I do that almost criminal thing of making the gardens pretty, because pretty makes us happy.
Hand-drawing planting plans helps me understand the layering and seasonal movement. I think the complexity of a planting plan is often misunderstood.
Soon the stepping stones in the courtyard will disappear in a tide of planting. (above and below) Shooting through this scheme are spots of rich reds and oranges that also appear fleetingly in the natural landscape.
The joy of good planting is intoxicating – with no awful side effects. The muted slatey grey blue of the plumbago offsets well with the subtle colour shifts in the garden.
How to grow without being eaten? Get yourself some thorns like this acacia.
The main canal garden border at Temple Guiting in June, flowering beneath slimly espaliered hornbeams.
By choosing good bedfellows a garden will semi-naturalize. Going back to my roots in France, I observed how plants in nature grow into self-moderating and companionable groups, and I can’t reiterate enough how important it is to understand the rudiments of a genus and how it adapts to its location. I had neither the means nor the method to travel much when I was younger, so I read voraciously instead. The very best gardening books for me, other than those by Graham Stuart Thomas, were those by Roger Phillips and Martyn Rix, published by Macmillan. I have worn them out several times over, thumbing through and memorizing the habitat of the plants. In more recent years I have been able to travel and see things for myself, and this information is invaluable. There is no substitute for getting to know plants personally and learning their Latin names. Latin is a practical language and holds a lot of the relevant information about the character of the plant within it – very useful shorthand for remembering who your friends are and what they like.
The planting plan tells you very specifically how many plants are needed, as they accurately show the final plant diameter.
Cardoons are controlled by the power of the trees. The same border in late April shows why tulip planting is so vital for the early months.
Even before they leaf up, the hornbeam espaliers are good architectural screens. I cut them slim for maximum light.
By late May the beds are getting going and the hornbeams are fully leafed up and doing their job beautifully.
The kitchen door
Food in the garden
There has to be food in a garden. Diocletian was right. There is no greater sense of achievement than that of collecting herbs, fruit and vegetables from your garden. I always plant something edible, however lowly, such as alpine strawberries, in my gardens – if the humans don’t get them, then the birds and mini mammals will. It is a constant battle against our proliferating pests, though. I always factor in a practical space for growing vegetables and fruit. I like raised beds that aren’t too big and stick to a tried and trusted method of making them out of green oak. However the cultivation rests with the garden owner. Very little space is required to feed a family. I was on the train once when a young guy started going crazy as we pulled into London. He ran up and down the carriage making strange anxious grunts as he looked out of the window. Looking at me, he said, in anguished tones, ‘Magpies? Why doesn’t anyone kill them? We kill them on the farm.’ He still lives with the urgent imperative of being self-sustaining, whereas most of us don’t.
If you could show the cabbage that I planted with my own hands to your emperor, he definitely wouldn’t dare suggest that I replace the peace and happiness of this place with the storms of a never satisfied greed.
—DIOCLETIAN
We dug up the lawns and put in vegetable beds while returning everything else to managed wilderness in the anti-garden. There is no solace like a freshly pulled radish!
One of two of our vegetable patches at Temple Guiting. They started off modestly and now supply a famous restaurant in central London with fresh produce and sweet peas.
Meadows
Love in the long grass
Meadows are part of a farming cycle of grazing and haymaking. Our pastoralist forebears recognized thousands of years ago that using grazing animals can be an efficient way of harnessing otherwise unusable resources like grass. The species count in a proper old meadow is intense.
A meadow in a garden is, as far as I am concerned, just an element of gardening. Being pedantic about the etymology, ‘meadow’ means land covered in grass that is mown for hay. Hay is animal fodder. A ‘meadow-y’ area of long grass, like the millefleurs of medieval tapestries, studded with other flowers and in a garden setting, is nevertheless valuable and attractive. It becomes a pretty interstice between other elements. If space permits, I will add a flowery mead, both for all the life it supports and for aesthetic purposes – a garden equivalent of a sorbet.
A year earlier this had been a pristine manicured striped lawn. It was miraculous to see how it metamorphosed into this hummocky bee-filled gentleness.
My little orchard mead at home, alive with oxeye daisy, clover and orchids. It is also hosting some very fine plums and apples. On the right is the start of the garden, and the tiny mown path is all that’s needed to separate one mood from another.
In the anti-garden we allowed the grassland to develop with very little interference other than removing tree saplings. It is poetic. Feet on a regular route to the greenhouse beat through the tiny path.
The nut trees in the nuttery slowly strip fertility from the soil and allow the grassland to become more species-rich. The rougher textures of the land help return the house to its bucolic Tudor roots.
Graziers have known for thousands of years that by rearing herbivorous animals they can utilize and improve open grassland. Grass is an otherwise unusable resource.
Plantago lanceolata , or ribbed plantain, is a very common meadow herb and has been known across northern Europe since Neolithic times. It is made immortal to me in Albrecht Dürer’s much loved painting of turf.
Hedges
Living on the hedge
Native hedgerows when well managed are filled with food and practicality. They form protective boundaries and hum with sustaining resources of food and fuel. The basic structure of a hedge is as follows. It has intermittent tall trees, such as oak, field maple, sweet chestnut and ash, then below a base of several flowering and nectar-rich shrubby plants, often including hawthorn, hazel, spindle, cherry plum, wild cherry, wild apple and pear, viburnums, rowans, holly, sloes, bullace and elder – a very great deal of fruit. Twining and scrambling plants come next: dog roses and sweet briar, blackberries, honeysuckles, hops, old man’s beard and then not often seen but entirely appropriate are wild gooseberry, blackcurrant, raspberry and redcurrant, depending on location.
Hedges were frequently planted on banks so the resulting ditch would hold water and sustain all the smaller species at the base: primroses, wild strawberries, lady’s bedstraw, hedge garlick, and chamomile and other herbs such as oregano and marjoram, with mint thriving in the damper areas. Also in the vicinity you might find wild asparagus, chicory, mallow, horseradish – the list goes on and on. I once counted up to 129 useful species in a hedge and its close neighbourhood. Hedges are so good for wildlife that 130 priority species in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan are associated with them. I chose to demonstrate hedge laying in my first foray into the Chelsea Flower Show on behalf of HRH Prince Charles. He is extremely skilled at it. We managed to lay a hawthorn hedge in full flower.
The uses derived from a hedge are diverse. Principally they protect us from invaders or contain animals with their thorny density. I plant a hedge on every project as a matter of course. The tall trees were also used for building materials, furniture, cartwheels, tools, charcoal, firewood, smoking, tanning, fruit such as acorns for animal feed, or sweet chestnuts for human consumption, as well as dyes and fuel. From the hedgerow shrubs came fruit and nuts in abundance, as well as finer hardwoods such as spindle and holly for turning and making needles, boxes, skewers, pegs and lamp oil. Without hazel there would be no wattles for wattle and daub, or baskets or walking sticks or beanpoles or kindling or water divining. Hedges prevent soil erosion and capture pollutants from fertilizers and pesticides, store carbon and also provide homes for many creatures that feed on pests.
Hedges are peculiarly British phenomena, although corrals and living vegetal structures exist across the world as defensive enclosures. All of these can be adapted and used decoratively and functionally in gardens.
While not a traditional hedge, I tried to make the divisions in this garden as safe routes for wildlife using old gnarly pears and box. Food and shelter in abundance.
Of course, with the easy availability of internet shopping and a global economy that is clearly destined to be robust and long-lasting, we no longer need any of this stuff. We can simply enjoy the very pretty succession of blossom and fruit that the hedge affords. And the pastoral idyll brought to us by the near proximity of songbirds, various tits and greater horseshoe and Natterer’s bats that use hedges as green ‘commuter routes’ for foraging and roosting.
The sheer quantity of flowering species in a hedge makes a rich resource for bees, and beekeeping was a natural part of the system. Hazel catkins are the earliest pollen source, shaking out their golden dust in February before we are even aware the year has begun. A by-product of this concentration of good things is the physical habitat for so many creatures that is produced. Apparently up to 284 species of insect live on an English oak tree, and around 324 species of lichen, not to mention all those that benefit from the rest of the hedge and all the birds, mammals and invertebrates that find comfort and safety in the dense thorny structure. Every home must have one.
This deceptively bucolic scene is actually my first ever design for the Chelsea Flower Show for HRH Prince Charles. We lifted great lumps of the organic meadow in full flower from the field’s home, Highgrove House. I used them to front the hawthorn hedge that we laid in full flower. In 2002 this wasn’t at all in vogue and I think I appeared a bit of an oddity for doing it! How times change.
The Granary Walk becomes riverine as it flows towards the countryside, and the planting becomes looser. Strict topiary gives way to fruit trees still holding the verticality yet in a softer manner.
June in the canal garden captures Iris ‘Jane Phillips’ in its soft light. Although their appearance is brief, they are one of the defining plants of these dry hungry borders.
It is important to repeat plants through a large garden so, for ease of maintenance as we only have one gardener, I use a lot of roses. Rosa x odorata ‘Pallida’ (syn.‘Old Blush’), fronted by box and backed by a venerable beech tree, is England personified.
The canal becomes both reflecting pool and a wet flower bed of Nymphaea alba , the wild white waterlily.
The framework for the gardens at Temple Guiting came together very easily. I created a network of rooms and walks flanked by high drystone walls either protected from or overlooking the ever-changing views. The landscape of the Cotswolds is intimate, so perfectly suited to classical English gardening. The context might be steeped in English history yet the gardens are liberated from it and are a contemporary interpretation. My client’s brief was simple. He doesn’t like everything dead in winter, he wanted flowers every day and he wanted a 100 foot lily pond … on a hill!
This is a very plant-rich garden. Visitors comment on the tumultuously romantic borders. If one were to study the plan though, it reveals a different story, as the borders are not large yet the spaces are. The soil is thin, stony and dries out fast. The beds have to work hard to give a good display. To stabilize these issues I used a lot of structural planting. If the eye registers green, it immediately amplifies it and I’ve harnessed this suggestibility throughout the garden. In all areas there is topiary or some form of evergreen.
One of the great natural tricks I learned from the wild French gardens I love is how well some things adapt to growing on stone. Given that this garden is so stony and dry, I thought about all the plants that self-control according to their circumstances. Given that I was making quite formal gardens, they still needed to feel relaxed, or the antiquity of the house could be challenged. I chose a tough group – flag irises, the pretty little daisy erigeron and the usually rampant white valerian – and planted them all around the base of the house. Out of this self-managing ruff grew climbing roses and vines.
The Granary Walk utilizes what was previously the main road through the village, and I altered its mood as it travels through the gardens. It begins close to the house, where it sits between high walls and is made formal by tall columns of yew rhythmically placed through sumptuous borders in pale blues and whites. At the mid-point, against the granary, I placed clipped holm oaks and these mark the change of the planting into something much looser and softer, and it then drifts out another few hundred feet towards the countryside. The central formal garden has tiny flower beds in relation to its size, and here I planted cunning successions or exceptionally strong growers below the hornbeams. So far they have done nothing but flourish.
My love affair with eryngium species continues unabated (above). The electric blue of Eryngium alpinum is a show stopper and the intricate graphics of its ruff are utterly absorbing. Combined with other blues it is a catalyst that unites all the tones of the surrounding flowers, such as Campanula lactiflora ‘Prichard’s Variety’, Salvia x superba and hazy Geranium ‘Spinners’ in a harmonic sequence (below).
