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we've looked at hundreds, and then on Monday morning I go through a big pile of his slides, looking for good (but unpublished) shots of plant combinations, and am rapidly reminded of how  it used to be looking at slides through a loupe on a lightbox, and now even harder now as my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.....

Indian trails.......

A visit to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad region of Kerala in south-

west India is a real inspiration and a very special place. Its basically a private trust who own a slab of virgin forest (in the Western Ghats bio-region, where only 3% of the original forest is left) and who are involved in habitat restoration on former tea and coffee plantations. They do also have a very good display garden of tropical flora (local, Indian and global) for educational purposes. Their conservation and research work is clearly rooted in a lot of good horticulture. I have a fantasy of coming here and spending time learning about the very different ways that have to be used to manage tropical species; there is clearly a lot to learn. Read on........

Planting up is a nerve-wracking job.

 

Most of this went in 3 years ago, some 2. Mostly filled out nicely. Its actually a north-facing slope but gets sun for most of the day. Grass is Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’

Planting up a client's garden the day before yesterday. The third winter I have done this particular one. Good design jobs go like this – it’s an illusion, partly fostered by TV design and 'make-over' programmes that you can go in and plant up, and before you can say "Bob's yer uncle" the garden is "done". No garden in ever "done". And ideally, you and the client build up a relationship, you come back and see how it all turned out, you make suggestions, they ask your advice, you come back with more plants, and so it goes on, hopefully with an annual visit. 

       In this instance, a friend and colleague had done the levels and basic spatial stuff, and I came in to do the planting - three years ago. Quite a big site, so we all agree it would have been very foolish to plant up all at once. We agreed a section and I returned a few months later with the plants. The house has a spectacular view, as it is on the top of a hill with a steep drop below, and you can see the house when you drive into their property below. It needed to make an impact at first sight - so lots of big grasses for a long season of impact.

    Most of my initial planting was a series of perennial combinations, each one designed to have a particular colour scheme but to have some interest at all seasons, along with willows and dogwoods for winter stem colour. Doing a planting scheme like this, where the beds have very rounded, flowing shapes is quite a challenge for working out quantities. In any case it is actually very difficult to match a plan with reality on the ground, unless you lay out a grid and relate that to a grid on the plan. The reality of soils and clients is that the ground never really matches the plan - slopes can create distortions, some patches of soil turn out to be unusable, setting out plants can often accumulates errors over large areas, clients shove in their own plants (annoying, but there is nothing you can do about this - I know Wolfgang Oehme would rip such plants out with his own hands while lecturing the client (following to be read in a heavy Saxon accent) "this is not your garden, this is my garden" but most of us are too nice to do this.

     In this case I did not use a plan, in fact I very rarely do these days, I work out lists of plants, work out what proportions of one to another there should be, and then calculate on the basis of how much space they take up. All on an Excel spreadsheet.  Its about a planting combinations, the overall effect, not a precise, 'this looks nice next to this' kind of approach. It saves a lot of time, and therefore the client's money; in particular it makes a lot of sense for big jobs.

    The big stress on site is worrying about whether you have brought enough plants, whether I have got the decimal place right in the calculations etc. But its usually ok. Surprisingly  usually ok. But this first time we had far too many plants - so we just carried on planting another area.

    Next year, you are back, because the client likes it, and the maintenance has worked out ok, so they want more. Hurray! So you do another area. But this is more difficult as there are young trees, and its even more difficult to work out quantities. This time around there aren't enough plants, so the best thing to do is to leave some large gaps - thin planting looks awful so you might as well make the gaps look deliberate. Next summer I came to have a look and to estimate the size of the gaps so as to order more of the same to fill in, plus some others. This is serious guestimating but to my astonishment the other day when I came back with the plants, the quantity was all but perfect. None of this very unprofessional squeezing things in too tightly, or working out how to pad out big spaces between plants. Come on, admit it, every designer has been here.

    This being the west of England the main issue long-term issue has turned out to be geranium management - Geranium x oxonianum management to be precise. This plant, parents from southern Europe (long mild wet winters) is tailor-made to cover gardens in the English south-west, and it seeds. Few complain - it flowers pinkly for a month in June and then again September to November. There are so many hybrids/varieties produced by nurserymen who obviously think "I can name this after my pretty niece and put it in the catalogue and boost my own ego into the bargain rather than throw it onto the compost heap", everything from not-quite-white to the well-known 'Claridge Druce' screaming magenta-pink. The bottom line is this, the worst thing that can happen is that the garden just becomes geranium city. There are far worse fates.