A finger in the ocean - Cornwall

A classic Cornish garden view of rhododendron with bluebells and wild garlic - Antony House.

Vast rhododendrons, vaster than you ever imagined you’d see, magnolias with their impossibly large flowers on as yet leafless branches, camellias forming virtual forests, Gunnera manicata spreading like an ambitious triffid along a valley floor, sheets of bluebells and other wildflowers, bamboos with stems as thick as drainpipe, cordylines spiking the sky, banks of azaleas beckoning with that scent you could almost drink, and oddities, things you have never seen before and send you scurrying into the leafage to try to find a label, and failing that starting off earnest discussions with your gardening companions.
Read on............

Daffodiliphilia

Daffodils are somehow the quintessential spring flower. The appearance of their distinctive yellow flowers is a sure sign that winter has either ended or is about to soon. Unlike the tulip, which appears to be dependent on us for its continued re-emergence in the garden, daffodils re-appear faithfully every year; and not just in the garden but in places such as roadsides, churchyards and parks where they have been planted, often decades ago – in some cases over a century ago. These plants are clearly great survivors, as witnessed by the number of flowers which appear in places where they have clearly been accidentally dropped or discarded – the flowers frequently mark where someone emptied the boot of their car of garden waste into a ditch or hedge, little thinking that the event and scene of their crime would be annually and flamboyantly marked for so many years to come. Read on.........

A weekend in Hummelo

Piet Oudolf laying bricks to mark out a new perennial planting bed. Dragon back hedge in the background.

                  A weekend with Piet and Anja Oudolf. We need to discuss collaborating on another book, reflecting Piet’s increasingly sophisticated planting design. He has to a considerable extent broken away from the blocks of planting which has always so dominated the thinking of garden designers. So we spend a lot of time looking through plans groping for words to describe the different ways he mixes plants to get them sparking off each other, which is not easy as he is a very visual person and words and concepts don’t always match up. And photographs – by the end of Sunday we've looked at hundreds, and then on Monday morning I go through a big pile of his slides, looking for good (but unpublished) shots of plant combinations, and am rapidly reminded of how  it used to be looking at slides through a loupe on a lightbox, and now even harder now as my eyesight isn’t what it was. Hurray for digital technology. Piet takes vast numbers of pictures of his projects, at every stage, talking to the funders and politicians, earth-moving, laying out, planting.

New book out - Monacelli Press, a monograph of 25 of Oudolf projects, public and private, see my online bookshop.

Looks a bit of a desert, but it won't be for long. Anja watering a newly planted Calamagrostis in what was the old nursery area

                  An interesting weekend to be chez Oudolf, both the boys are there: Pieter who runs a business selling repro Delft tiles (Dutch made) and Hugo who lives in Ecuador, in his wife’s village running an eco-tourism and community ranching business. And to see the first planting in a big new space; Anja has decided to retire from the nursery business, so the old nursery area is a vast expanse of sandy soil. The next day saw some Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ going in and some young trees – Sorbus sargentii. Piet told me that the plan was to sow perennials in between some planted material, and develop a big prairie look. I look forward to it.

Mertensia virginica runs in my garden and the Oudolf's. In Hummelo it has spread amongst perennials in conditions of great competition pressure, even in the middle of a Panicum clump. Like a bulb this exquisite flower is summer dormant.

Ranunculus ficaria (Lesser Celendine) is also summer-dormant. I've never seen the point of weeding it out, I'm glad Piet agrees.

Viola canina has sown itself into some of the perennial borders.

A clipped Pyrus salicifolia outside the new office building.

Garden or Museum - what’s the big deal with heirloom veg?

 
Heirloom vegetables and flowers (or as well call them over here in the UK – heritage) have been big for some time now. Much more so in North American than home. In fact I am always really surprised about how enthusiastic American gardeners are about ‘vegetables our grandmothers grew’. The love of heirloom veg however goes along with a certain hostility to modern varieties, and modern breeding methods such as F₁ hybridisation, particularly claims that heirlooms taste better; there is also an undercurrent that heirlooms are somehow better for the world, more ethical. Here I’d like to challenge this and stand up for modern scientific plant breeding. There is also a political point I’d like to make. Read on..........

Singapore - Garden City State

How to describe the city state of Singapore? Downtown is like an American downtown (with even more malls – yes really!), the suburbs like….well a kind of tropical multiracial version of Sweden with a rather bossy government – the same well-designed but rather bland housing estates of modestly tall tower blocks, all separated by amazing amounts of greenery. Which is why I’m here of course. The place really does live up to its reputation as the Garden City of Asia, or indeed the world. I really think they are the global leaders in integrating planting into urban spaces and in making almost seamless connections between wild spaces/nature reserves and conventional urban parks.

Read on.......

Life before Hellebores?

  There was once a time before hellebores. Well there was only Helleborus niger, the Christmas Rose, and a few other oddities, mostly green and murky. There were some pink and spotty creations courtesy of Helen Ballard, a rather grand nurserywoman of the English midlands, available for what seemed like exceptionally large sums of money for a perennial. Ballard had actually done rather a good job, with what turned out to be limited genetic material, giving her creations cultivar names, and of course propagating them as one does with cultivars – dividing them. This was the 1980s.

            Hellebores do not form large clumps, and depend on seed to distribute themselves through the rocky woods of their (mostly) Balkan homeland. So there wasn’t very much to divide, which explains the price tags. Today’s hellebore passions are based on two things: one is new genes from the wild, hugely extending the range of colour and the other is the realisation that you can get very good plants from seed. So, forget the sharp knife, and the trauma to a plant which does put up with being dug and up and split like most other perennials. Forget the cultivar names too. “Do not propagate your cultivars from seed” is a mantra in the garden and nursery world. Turning the hellebore from an elite possession into an item of mass production required that this mantra be resisted, and so too that ego-driven urge of every nurseryman to name plants.

            I remember a report in (I think) the Hardy Plant Society journal in the very early 1990s reporting someone bringing back seed (or maybe plants) of a near-red hellebore from Slovenia, maybe newly independent, or maybe awaiting its short war of freedom against Milosovic. The place was not exactly off the beaten track, indeed it (as Yugoslavia – some countries change names more than plants do) was part of package-holiday land, yet my memory of the article had a tone of deering-do  plant intrepid hunterdom about it. Others followed. Piet and Anja Oudolf went further south, to Bosnia, remember people discussing imminent war, and came back with some plants with black flowers. Will McLewin, retired mathematics professor turned botanist/nurseryman, carried on travelling in the region, whenever peace and wherever landmines allowed. He took his van to places which were never part of package-holiday land, like Kosovo, usually basing himself in the increasingly prosperous Euro-spending Slovenia, with Stane Susnik, a television producer with a passion for gardening and his country’s rich, varied and beautiful flora.

            The results of all this travelling was a huge range of genetic diversity. Hellebores are easy to breed, if slow to germinate and grow. John Massey of Ashwood Nurseries and Roger Harvey have been particularly good breeders. The plants now come in a huge range of colours, with spotted and striped and picoteed variants. Devotees attend hellebore days and compete to buy the best-looking plants. Being seed-raised you cannot just buy a plant with a good name, you have to buy it in flower in order to know what you are getting. Or you can be patient and buy seed, and hope that your investment produces some good returns.

            In my current garden it seems that every hellebore seed which hits the ground grows. We have to weed them out. Which seems terrible. Three years ago I transplanted a load, and lined them out. The breeding is not very sophisticated (one nurseryman breeder once said to me – “who’s Mendel?”) so I had high hopes that there would not be too much genetic backsliding. Which indeed has turned out to be the case. Most are dark red (no blacks though – L ), which are the most vigorous, some lovely spotties (I LOVE spotty flowers), a decent number of picotees, some big whites and the occasional pale pink. So I either give them to friends or distribute them around the garden.

            Growing on your own hellebores from seed (if you have the space) is actually vital. The plants do not go on for ever. Rember these are not ever-marching-forward in steadily-spreading clumps, chop up and put bits in yogurt cartons for the church fête type perennials. Plants I bought from Ashwood 12 years ago are now very much declining, to some extent their seedlings replacing them, but some replanting is now necessary.

            From the Balkans to the World. I have always wondered whether we would grow them if they flowered in June. Probably not… or well no-one would have bothered sleeping in vans by roadsides in Bosnia in order to gather their seed. But for the end of winter their dusky, sometimes rather mournful, sophisticated shades are perfect.

Second career guidance

For a couple of years now we've had trainees from the WRAG scheme,

Read on.....