Northwind

A little while ago I had my second visit to Northwind Perennials in a year, they are just outside Lake Geneva in Wisconsin. Run by three people who all take different roles in the company, it is Roy Diblik who is known as the plantsman - he was a real pioneer in the containerised production of native perennials.

Colleen Garrigan does some wonderfully artistic or even wacky assemblages of old tools, architectural salvage etc. 
  
Roy has developed a sophisticated take on the art of putting together native and non-native perennials - all explained in a neat little book - 'Small Perennial Gardens: The Know Maintenance Approach'.                                                                                                                                                                        The pun is based on the fact that what so many (American) gardeners seem to want is NO maintenance, but Roy is keen to stress that if you KNOW your plants then you can reduce maintenance - and this is key, without smothering the ground with wood chip mulch.               

The plant combinations are very much about creating a complete canopy so grasses shoehorn in between flowering forbs like liatris and echinacea and sprawly (but not actualy spreading) low things like calaminthas can fill in the gaps. The display gardens around the nursery are very accomplished with a good 'field' type effect, and nicely integrated with shrubs and small trees.

Now - the wood chip. A good example of how a 'good thing' becomes a 'bad thing'. Not so long ago mulch was seen as solving  a lot problems - like reducing moisture loss and smothering weeds, but of course like all good things (chocolate cake, beer etc.) can be overdone. Wood chip has become one of Roy's pet hates, and I can see why - a lot of folk around Chicago seem to think that wood chip is an end in itself, any plants standing out looking rather lonesome. The stuff is dumped on every year, so not surprisingly plants underneath can be completly buried, and in the hot humid summers, all sort of diseases get going. What's more, a lot of the wood chip gets shipped up from Georgia, so the transport miles are pretty crazy.

Jim Archibald

Jim Archibald, who died last week, was one of the 'last of the great plant hunters'. This is what I wrote about him for an obituary to be published in The Daily Telegraph.

    For those of us in the gardening world who enjoy the challenge of growing unusual and rare plants, the annual arrival of a seedlist from Jim and Jenny Archibald was keenly awaited. Unillustrated, and consisting of A4 sheets stapled together, it would inevitably list scores of intriguing plants, mostly offered as seed collected in the wild. Some would be new forms of familiar species, some species of groups we know and are familiar with, but many would be completely unknown. However it was the introduction that many of us would read most keenly. Who would be Jim Archibald’s target this year: a botanist whose opinions on plant naming he disagreed with, the Royal Horticultural Society, Kew Gardens, or someone being holier-than-thou about the ethics of collecting seed in the wild? The introduction was always erudite, well-informed, witty and often very hard-hitting; in the world of gardening, where there is little openly-expressed disagreement they were a true tonic.
    Archibald’s career as a freelance plant hunter and seedsman extraordinaire began, appropriately, with another plant catalogue. That of Jack Drake, a famous grower of perennials and alpines in Aviemore. As a teenager Archibald was a keen gardener, and it was the listing of some plants grown from an expedition to Nepal in 1954 which fired his enthusiasm. His holidays were spent working at Drake’s nursery, and even at university (Edinburgh), where he read English Language and Literature, he continued to grow, and even sell, unusual plants. Early trips to look at plants growing wild and collect seed followed, to Corsica and Morocco.
    Travelling, often in out of the way places, looking for plants was soon established as a lifestyle. He would make light of the process, I remember him telling me once that “seed collecting in the past might have involved intrepid hikes or perilous adventures on donkeys but these days the road system makes it a lot easier, we rarely need to go anywhere more than a few hours from at least a track”. But soon he would talking casually about collecting alpine plants from the “mountains of the Iran/Iraq border region”. Then there is the story, legendary amongst alpine plant enthusiasts, of ‘the van to Van’, when he and Jenny towed a caravan to eastern Turkey, to use as a base for seed collecting.
    The only period Archibald was not spending at least part of the year travelling, it was running a nursery – The Plantsman, near Sherborne in Dorset, from 1967 to 1983. Working in conjunction with Eric Smith, it was the forerunner of the great many small specialist nurseries which make the British gardening scene so vibrant. The Plantsman was famous for its hellebores and hostas, many varieties bred by Smith. Unable to make a success of the nursery as a business, Jim turned to his first love, of travelling.
    Usually accompanied by Jenny, who he had met in the early 1970s, Archibald established an annual cycle of summer and autumn seed collecting, selling the seed in the winter and spring. With a clear focus on alpines and small bulbs, JJA Seeds sold primarily to enthusiastic amateurs, but also to botanic gardens (at least until the restrictions of the Convention on Bio-Diversity made this difficult) and nurseries. Some of his bulb introductions were used by Dutch breeders to produce new varieties for the general public, but it was commercial growers of alpine and rock plants who relied on him for a constant supply of interesting plants; it is reckoned that almost anyone growing such plants today will have some which originated as JJA seed.
    Famed for his memory, Archibald seemed to have an almost photographic memory for the plants he collected, even able to take fellow travellers back to the exact rock where he found a particular plant, many years after he first visited the spot. His favourite hunting grounds for the plants he loved were the mountains of Iran and Turkey; occasional run-ins with military check-points or secret police did little to dent his enthusiasm. In later years he spent more time in the mountains of the western USA, often working alongside the growing number of local botanist-gardeners who were passionate about both seeing their native flora in the wild and growing it.
    Archibald was resolutely not commercial. Many times I tried to persuade him to pay more attention to collecting seed from larger herbaceous plants – apart from anything else they could have been more remunerative, but he stuck to what he loved.
     Many of us also wished that Archibald had taken up journalism. Those seedlist introductions were always worth re-reading – barbs flung (but always politely) at the pomposity of botanists who concealed data (supposedly in the name of conservation), at the effects of political-correctness on horticulture, at the dogmatic application of ill-thought out quasi-legal concepts like the Convention on Bio-diversity or Plant Breeders Rights.
    Archibald’s knowledge and ability to communicate it was recognised by the Alpine Garden Society, who in 2003 gave him their highest award – the Lyttel Trophy, given annually in recognition of a lifetime of achievement in contributions to the growing of alpine plants, their culture and botany. His incredibly wide circle of friends and colleagues in the garden and botanical worlds will remember a man of great intellectual integrity, enormous and infectious enthusiasm, who combined real erudition and learning with an ability to communicate it, and great personal warmth. Eloquent too, one seedlist introduction ended -  “we sell dreams to ourselves and hope to pay for their reality by work and knowledge…what are seeds but dreams in packets?”

Great prairies.............but stick to the smoothies

All pictures are of Shoe Factory Road prairie, near Elgin, IL. A dry to mesic site.

When Europeans go to the USA 99.99% of them do the same three things: go to NYC and go "ohmygodohmygod, look at those buildings" or the Grand Canyon and go "ohmygodohmygod, isn't it big, you could fit the whole of London/Paris/canton of Zurich in there" or they drive from San Francisco to NYC and all you ever hear is "ohmygodohmygod it is so boring driving across Nebraska". But we all complain about the coffee.

The other 0.01% tend to have a nerdy interest in something American like those people who know every single Indian tribe or every single Civil War battle. But there is a growing number who get obsessive about prairie. Personally I love it. This is the most fantastic habitat. It sums up what I love about being in the Midwest. It and the wooded surrounding landscapes are familiar enough to make you feel at home, but foreign and exotic enough to be give you a real thrill of excitement and novelty.

Silphium terebinthinaceum leaves

A dry habitat form of Phystostegia virginiana

Prairies are like Euro-wildflower-meadows but more diverse, with richer flora and an incredible level of difference between them. They are very beautiful but over a surprisingly long time, with flushes of different wildflowers from May to September. There are wet prairies, big and lush, right across to dry prairies, often on sand or gravel moraines - where the vegetation is short and sparse. Exploring any of them is an extraordinarily rich aesthetic/ecological experience, as it seems like every single bit is actually different to every other single bit, with different species or combinations of species.

Spotting mighty bright yellow silphiums with their sandpaper-textured leaves or deep purple/violet Dalea purpurea is like meeting old friends, and they always look so much better in nature than in the confines of a border. Bit like having a proper cup of coffee instead of the stuff that comes out of the tub the size of an oil barrel which says 'makes 240 cups'.

I only had a  day and a bit to look around this time but you can pack a lot in. Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennials in southern Wisconsin took me round to look at some of the local wildflower sites. Hot and humid, so a bit like walking around in mosquito soup, but who cares. At Kettle Moraine you can see how the Wisconsin Dept. of Natural Resources is trying to buy up parcels of land to create a 30mile long prairie corridor. Its places like these that make give you a feeling about what this country looked like before fields of soybeans, highways, malls and as-far-as-the-eye-can-see suburbia took over. And on the way to the airport we scrambled through a fence to look at a fantastic site at Shoe Factory Road.


Its just a shame about  the coffee. But then if it got better I might be tempted to emigrate.

Check out Shoe Factory Road Prairie, at:
http://chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/spring2004/weekendexplorer.html

Visionaries and ground elder

A visit to Waltham Place in Berkshire is a good opportunity to confront some of the dilemmas of the nature-inspired garden. Owner Strilli Oppenheimer employed the late Henk Gerritsen to help her ‘naturalise’ parts of the 1920s Percy Cane layout, all pergolas and walled and hedges and walled off garden rooms. Henk’s own ‘Priona Garden’ in eastern Holland had been her inspiration to get him over, as he was obviously good at gardening without making war on nature (although I don’t recall much food growing at Priona, I think it grew in the local supermarket where there was no nature to go to war with). Priona was wonderful for the balance between wildness and hedged and trimmed and mown order – a very Dutch balance, so it was right he should be involved at Waltham.

Ground-elder is a problem at Waltham, and since the garden staff cannot rid the garden of it using the bio-dynamic methods they are instructed to use (chemical warfare is actually little better either in my experience) the pragmatic decision has been taken to accept it. In one big courtyard area it is allowed in part (but heavily suppressed by lots of seriously big perennials) but kept from spreading by a cordon sanitaire of box, ingeniously Henk-clipped into a caterpillar shape – so much more fun than self-consciously trendy cloud pruning. In another garden it is allowed free-rein, but has to face vigorous perennials and so is too kept in check; earlier in June I think this is a very effective naturalistic perennial blend but by July it has gone over. A gravel garden is a riot of self-seeding, whilst the most successful part of the garden as far as I was concerned was an allee edged by walls, where shrubs and climbers had been allowed to spread just so, perennials to spread and intermingle and self-sow – the whole looks just so perfectly on the edge of tumbling into wildness. Head gardener Beatrice Krehl and her staff have managed to create a perfect embrace of the wild and the formal here.


Not all works, or has achieved such balance yet. A perfectly good terrace has been almost entirely lost to cistus and lavender and much other shrubbery in the final stages of the rangy senile decay to which many Mediterranean species seem to suffer, while a long border seems a long way from having a successful mix of species (nothing in flower in early July!). All in all, though, an immensely brave experiment in letting formality go to seed skillfully and gracefully.

Radical idea..... plant out some wildflowers in turf, maintain by "grazing like a cow" (Henk Gerritsen) - pulling up tufts of what you don't want and the add definition by deep edging between the wildy bits and the mown lawn.

A brief hop across the ditch

    I haven’t been to France for 7 or 8 years (I’m rather embarrassed to admit), but am on the way back from a visit to the Chaumont garden festival, where I took part in a conference on naturalistic planting design. Back in the mid-1990s there was a flurry of such events with a loose group called ‘Perennial Perspectives’ – with an event organised at Kew by Brita von Schoenaich in 1994 a notable watershed, as it introduced British gardeners to the astonishing virtuosity and technical skill of planting designers in Germany. The half-dozen or so PP get-togethers involved Brits, Scandinavians, German-speakers and Dutch. No-one from Latin Europe ever showed up, which on one level was a puzzle, as we all new that there were some individuals in France who were very keen on wild-style gardening, including of course the incredibly gifted Giles Clement; but on another level confirmed our prejudices about Gallic landscape dirigisme, and the very different garden traditions of Latin Europe …. yes it does involve a lot of straight lines, and a strangely obsessive desire to separate the garden from nature.

    So, an invitation to speak in France, alongside James Hitchmough from Sheffield University and Cassian Schmidt from Heremannshof in Germany was very welcome. But to us it felt like we were in a timewarp, with speaker number  one (president of the French landscape association) pompously describing a park project which supposedly involved nature – nature being confined to an inaccessible wilderness area and a few bits of unmown grass. What is it about French landscape culture which seems unhappy with any public space which looks empty with less than 5,000 people in it? Tired by endless slides of vast mown grass spaces and thrusting walkways, speaker number two (a garden journalist) addressed us with the kind of “love your weeds” hippy ramble which we last heard about 20 years ago. He did however end up with a spirited critique of ‘natives-only’ planting, reminding us of its fascistic history. Then it was over to me, and then James and Cassian.
      We all agreed that the Chaumont garden show this year was more planty than in previous years, although only one garden made us go “wow”. In previous years the boundary between ‘garden’ and ‘installation art’ was a pretty fluid one, with many of the gardens combining art-school abstruseness with a use of materials which bore little relationship to what anyone could achieve in a permanent garden. One of the show mottoes is ‘ideas to steal’, but whilst there was some good planting to inspire visitors, so much of the non-planted elements simply don’t have permanence : willow, willow, willow, and plastic, and while Corten steel is pretty damn permanent it is beyond most people’s pockets and (yawn) we have just seen so much of the stuff in show gardens of late.
   The Chaumont site however is fantastic, kicking any British garden show into the compost heap, as the show gardens are shoehorned into the landscape by hedges, and blocks of permanent perennial planting. The whole event is a delightful experience, and surprisingly intimate. All terribly tasteful and stylish and so very French.

       The whole thing though does reinforce my feeling  of many years that French garden style is very good at the cosmetic - the stylish but not necessarily durable, whereas what Dutch and German garden style is more about combining style with technical proficiency and practical longevity. I suppose we are in the latter camp, but scoring lower on all counts. The bedding schemes which French munipalities invest in may belong to the cosmetic camp, but oh, they are so good, very high quality, and there is clearly no problem with funding them; that any British town council would stump up such funds is sadly unthinkable.

This was jolly clever, on the edge of the parkland to the south east of the Chateau de Chaumont,  bedded out plants in ribbons so that when you see them sideways or diagonally on, there appears to be a field of planting.

       On to a night at a grotty hotel in Paris, and a meal in a pavement café with James in which we go into raptures about French food culture, and vengefully remind myself that escargots are merely a cover for butter and garlic. Dutifully set off for Parc la Villette, one of the most important parks made in the latter years of the 20th century. Trudged around, admiring the red steel ‘folies’ but cursing the grey gigantism of everything else, more spaces which needed 5,000+. Yes, there are some wonderful little corners too, and a fantastic variety of spaces, but not a perennial or a flower to be seen anywhere. The whole place feels oddly sterile. Came back to grumbling, I hope not too xenophobically, about French landscape culture: form over all else, a fixation with hard materials and straight lines, a general lack of softness. Lets hope the little signs of interest in wilder styles take root. I’d love to see a real French take on naturalistic planting.

The Wild Garden - June 2010

Here are some pics of our wild garden, early June. Click below:


photos

Cow Parsley gardening

    

        This year’s Chelsea Flower Show seemed to mark a return to horticulture, rather a relief after the show becoming increasingly dominated by sculptural assemblages (I’m trying to be polite here) or flocks of statuary. A lot of the gardens were just well planted, with a refreshing lack of pretentiousness. Andy Sturgeon’s winning Mediterranean Garden (for The Daily Telegraph) was a model of all that is best about British garden design – the classic balance between strong structures and exuberant planting – but all in a very contemporary style.

            No cow parsley though. I’d like to put in a bid to do a cow parsley garden. Queen Anne’s Lace to American readers (I think). This cream-white flowered umbelliferous plant dominates a vast proportion of British roadsides, seemingly able to compete with the grasses which, fed on nitrogen pollution, more or less suffocate the rest of our limited wildflower flora. In my last garden, I conducted an experiment in letting it seed one year, and then controlling by pulling up after flowering. It worked, in that I got a respectable amount of cow parsley but without it competing with anything else. So, now I’m repeating the experiment here.

            What I like about cow-parsley is the delicate flowers and, because it is such a common element of the British countryside, brings the landscape into the garden. The colour is also a buffer, toning down and blending the brighter colours of border plants. In theory I’d be quite happy for the stuff to distribute itself  around the garden, but only if it isn’t going to become a weed and out-compete my border plants.

            Cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) is a biennial which survives year to year by seeding and apparently (though I have not verified this myself) by the production of bulbils at the base of the plant. It has a very narrow profile, doesn’t spread sideways or sprawl about, and dies from July onwards. Not something which could become a major problem then, and its reproduction can be controlled by pulling out before it seeds. Welcome to the naturalistic border!