THE COLD

            So with temperatures down to –13C (which I suppose might be regarded as a rather pleasant day in some places where this is being read), what else is there to talk about. We have had several weeks of this, which seems to add insult to injury.

            Last winter was pretty bad too. Anyone who wants to see what survived and what didn’t should have a look a the RHS report, based on a nationwide survey. Losses as interesting as survivals.

            I wonder just what impact this winter will have on the fashion that has developed over the last twenty years for growing tender stuff. During that time a whole generation of people have become gardeners without knowing what a ‘proper’ British winter is (though in fact this is worse - a central European winter) – this 20 years has co-incided with a time when the garden industry went on its great expansion.

            I’d better put my hand up. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s I was certainly one of the early pioneers of the great gardening boom’s promotion of the less-than-hardy. I was actually primarily interested in widening the range of cool conservatory plants – that great swathe of flora which just needs protection from freezing (and in many cases are ok above (round about ) –5C. Selling plants at RHS flower shows in London (remember them, before the RHS decided it could make more money renting the halls out than running flower shows – which some of us naively thought was their core mission) I remember being vaguely shocked by people saying that they have planted some of my stuff out and it had survived. We began to realise just what a warm microclimate London has – and indeed any big city is warmer than its surroundings.

            I long ago moved onto hardy perennials, which are nearly all from climates far more severe than ours, and living in the Welsh borders I am not tempted to be too experimental on the hardiness front. Maybe one day I’ll live by the sea and have one of those fabulous west coast gardens where you can mix and match from different climate zones. Maybe in my old age. But back then, I was certainly part of that zeitgeist, and I remember thinking that some of my colleagues who just got deeper and deeper into the whole hardy exotic thing were doing something which was just going to end in tears.

            Anyway, what happened in the 1990s was a coming together of several things: a long run of mild winters (assume global warming, probably on top of cyclical climate change), an increase in plant introductions from borderline frost climates all over the world which went hand-in-hand with the great consumer gardening boom. Lavandula stoechas was never seriously regarded as hardy, maybe a few folk in Cornwall grew it. Mild winters created an opening for introductions from different parts of its range – we got aware of the concept of provenance, where something came from, how (in some species) there are appreciable genetic differences  in ability to survive cold depending on between plants over an altitudinal and latitudinal range. And then of course you can hybridise, so Lavandula stoechas blossoms into , quick look at RHS Plant Finder – 55 taxa in commercial cultivation in Britain.

            By the way I do like Lavandula stoechas, but I am going to use it to illustrate my point. Wholesalers started selling it, probably run by people too young to remember a cold winter (am I sounding like a grumpy old man here?), what with those little rabbit-ear ‘flags’ on the flowers the gardening public just love it. I remember, years ago, looking at some in a garden centre, at the little plastic tag which tries to give information without actually using any language (like IKEA flat-pack furniture), and no mention of (lack of) hardiness.

            So here we are, with a whole new diversity of plant life in our gardens, being subjected to a big experiment. There will be lots of surprises when the big thaw finally happens. I just hope that the growers of ‘plants on the edge’ make notes and let the rest of us know about survivals and casualties.

"I'd give it three years"....... how perennial are perennials? and other awkward questions.

Ever bought a 'perennial' from a garden centre and then wondered why it drops dead after a number of years? You like the thing so you try it again. Ditto. Naturally you blame yourself/the soil/the fact that the dog peed on it, but then you discover that everyone else has the same problem.

Welcome to the world of the 'not-perennial'.

Annual, biennial, perennial - three words which actually represent points on a gradient - from ephemeral to Bob Brown's "bomb-proof". Between 'biennial' and 'perennial' there are a host of short-lived perennials which do generally die after a few years. Their saving grace is that often they self-seed. If they don't its a bit of a con the hort industry telling us they are perennial.

How often do the garden reference books tell you that a perennial is short-lived? Or if it runs about, and if it does, how rapidly or its mechanism of spread. Lots of questions the books don't tell you the answers to.

But go to something like a Hardy Plant Society meeting and the air is thick with anecdotal material on just these kind of questions. So, I thought, why not design a research questionnaire which aims to get experienced gardeners answering carefully targeted questions on just these issues? As it happens there was an EU project: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), European Territorial Cooperation 2007-2013.Interreg IVB North Sea Region Programme, which I was able to join and get (pretty decent) funding. Hurray for the EU! And of course to the Landscape Department of the University of Sheffield, in particular Nigel Dunnett and Mel Burton.

So, here are the results.

There is the 'lite' version, reprinted from the Hardy Plant Society journal (long-term plant performance), and for those of you who feel up to it, the full report.

Take a look at the garden

Here's the garden at Montpelier Cottage, best shots from this summer.


Come on into the garden.... but don't feed the perennials. 

Those Robinia logs, and the Dutch Wave

Lots of queries about how Monique & Thierry Dronet at Berchigranges (see last blog) use robinia logs to build up slopes. Philippe Ferret kindly sent me some pictures of the technique soon after construction:

Meanwhile back home, the Garden Museum have launched their Dutch Wave exhibition, funny to see one's life become history, The exhibition probably would not have been there if it hadn't been my plugging away telling everyone about the Dutch garden scene back in the mid 1990s. There have been a series of events featuring Piet Oudolf, "they sold out quicker than anything else we have ever organised" said museum director, Christopher Woodward. Back in the 1990s we bewailed the chauvinistic inward-looking nature of the British gardening scene. How things have changed!

See an article in The Daily Telegraph. to hear some reminiscences.

Is this the most beautiful garden ever? Travels in Mitteleuropa part5.

             Well I have been back home now for a week, and le Jardin de Berchigranges, isn’t in Mitteleuropa, but in France, on the way back home, but the Vosges mountains do feel a bit like central Europe. It is a lovely setting in which to create a garden, and this particular one blends into its landscape perfectly. It is the garden I think I would like to create if I had the time, the commitment to opening it to the public, and an endless source of robinia logs.

            I was absolutely blown away, which to be honest I am very rarely these days.

Knew the garden was going to be good when i met these box

            The planting, needless to say is very naturalistic, with some bold new departures, such as asters growing in rough grass, lots of self-seeding, and the feeling that the plants have a large say in deciding where they grow. There are lots of just the kind of additional elements I love - slightly whacky, imaginatively creative touches in the form of buildings, sculptures, odd structures, unexpected views. There is hardly a straight line in the place, so the massive hornbeam hedge ‘structure’  at one end of the garden which reads like a fortress has all the more impact. What I particularly like is how they have achieved structure without using cement, brick and the usual array of ‘hard landscaping’ materials (I have a deep loathing of hard landscaping). Much of this is by using logs rammed vertically into the ground with the gaps between them filled with soil, and needless to say plants - so dealing with elevations. Its all so inventive.  And technically, really well done. I love it! I love it! I love it!

Gärtneri Hügin

            The house, is so like our own ‘pavilion’, even down to the angle of the roof and the ornamental ‘dagging’ fascia. Clearly people after my own heart. I can’t wait to get back here.

Before leaving Germany

            I dropped in on Ewald Hügin, who is one of the most talked about  nurserymen in Germany. His nursery is reassuringly British, which is  a way of saving its idiosyncratic, rather untidy and full of really unusual plants. He has created some very good display gardens since I was last here – perennials and annuals together, wonderfully colour schemed.

And on the way back.

            France’s reputation for good summer planting is now well-known and appreciated this side of the channel. I dropped into Metz on the long drive home, which markets itself as a ‘ville de jardin’. The plantings I saw were in a way nothing special for France, but streets ahead of anything you see back home. What I like about them is the sheer inventiveness and range, and they look very well trialled, in terms of composition, getting height and spread right – that kind of thing. There is obviously a whole genre of planting design here . Why  isn’t anybody in Britain doing anything like this? I mean, why?

Spot the celery!

            To illustrate the inventiveness, in the park I looked at in Metz, there was a very glossy leaved plant which looked vaguely familiar, obviously an umbellifer – a bite proved it to celery. This lateral thinking approach to planting design is what I love about the French style – and you see it in Germany sometimes too.

            Final stop en route to the ferry was Chris Ghyselen just outside Bruges in Belgium (or perhaps I should say Flanders). I’ve wanted to meet him for years, as Belgium has not figured highly in the new perennial movement;  he combines a classically Flemish love of hedges with a passion for plants. And some very clever little secret paths through the garden, so very much a garden where there is so much more than what you see at first.

Swissinnovation - Travels in Mittleuropa part 4

Experimental 'perennial hedge'

       Lots of good things happen at Hochschule Wädenswil. The ‘integrated planting system’ for one, which aims at making randomised mixes of perennials and bulbs, and annuals for the first two years, and some other ‘mixed planting’ systems where again the emphasis is on choosing plants compatible with the site, and each other and then randomising them. Works well in slabs rather than conventional borders. And they are trialling a ‘perennial hedge’ too, with Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ as the main element, oddly flowering component not randomised, but interesting idea – more of a summer-autumn screen planting than a hedge. I’ve always thought tallish perennials work well as shallow screen type plantings.

Doris, maestra of the urban annual mix

            They have also started working with annual mixes, using them on sites left temporarily vacant in the constant rebuilding which seems to afflict Zürich. Public love them. They work here as the country gets quite high summer rainfall (which I remember only too well from childhood holidays); stress annuals with low soil moisture, and they go into seed-production mode and an early death, a trajectory difficult to stop, but keep them moist and many will flower all summer. Annual mixes don’ t work in eastern Austria or further east as the summer is too dry and they will all be dead by the end of July.

Doris Tausendpfund who designs the annual mixes (and the very promising looking perennial mixes) describes how she sees the mixes working on two levels – one colour dominates from the distance, perhaps as you drive by in your car, but then if you stop and look more closely, like whilst waiting for the tram, you see that there are many other colours.

Climbing plants in containers in Basel (Hochbergerstr.)

On the subject of building sites, it never ceases to amaze me how much the Swiss love cement, in fact the smell of wet cement always reminds me, in a really Proustian way, of Switzerland, as I spent several months here as a child and the frenetic building with cement clearly impacted the hard-wiring of the scent bit of my brain. Perhaps all this rather unsustainable use of cement is one reason for the counter-reaction, that the country is the world leader in green architecture and engineering; green roofs are everywhere, climbers are used to dramatic effect on buildings, whilst slope stabilisation using plants is increasingly seen, or actually not seen, as it is a lot less obvious than great concrete bastions or gabions.

            Whilst I’m having a moan about my recent dear hosts, it also never ceases to amaze me how much the Swiss smoke. Like the proverbial chimneys, so unless you have an alp to yourself you can forget about the pure mountain air. Although, smoking in restaurants has finally been made Verboten. Putting two things together, perhaps the country should be symbolised note by the alpenhorn, the Emmentaler cheese or the Swiss army knife but a re-inforced concrete ashtray.

           

What do you do when the Schau is over? Travels in Mitteleuropa part 3.

     What happens when the last Stein has been drunk, the last leaflet on bio-dynamic slug control handed out and the last Tagetes wilts in autumn's first frost?        
     Gardenshows are a big part of the German garden scene, lasting all summer and (key thing this) leaving behind the legacy of a regenerated urban space. Many of the best parks are former Gartenschau sites. We tried it in Britain during the Thatcherreich but no attempt was ever made to keep them as public spaces, and in the sad case of Liverpool, the show site is now quite well-known for its grafitti daubed ruined Chinese garden.

Playground - durability all right! Had to stop myself running up it.

            How you turn a one-summer event into something permanent is a challenge, one which has apparently been met pretty well here. Of course I tend to visit the successful ones, but I have seen places with  artworks that look like beached whales, avenues which go nowhere, and perennial borders run amok. A couple of days ago I dropped in on a 2004 Bavaria State show at Burghausen. On the whole a successful transformation, 8 out of 10, I think Herr  (or Frau) Burgermeister. One series of perennial borders pretty well abandoned – why not just replace with ground cover? and some strange objects which could only be artworks, but a fantastic children’s playground – the kind of really inventive place which can be one of the best features of these events, overall a good urban green space, and a whole series of little gardens between beech hedges – nice intimate spaces (assuming the good folk of Burghausen don’t go in for too much spliff-rolling or needle-based activities, which is always a problem if you create too much quiet space in urban parks). These were all designed by design practices, a bit like Chelsea Flower Show gardens, but permanent. Some looked really good, the others … well, I am sure the designers would be horrified if they could see their names attached. There is always a real problem with these individual gardens in places where they become permanent and get maintained by the same staff – they all sink to a common level. On the whole though they make for garden vignettes you would never get normally in a public park.

Panicum virgatum grass with Aster dumosus at Weihenstephan

            Quick visit to Weihenstephan, home to the world’s leading collection of perennials, meet the new prof. of planting design, Swantje Duthweiler, whose interest in early 20^th century planting styles heralds the prospect of some interesting new takes on plant use (watch this space?).

            Now in Switzerland where I have spent a fascinating day at Hochschule Wädenswil, a teaching and research centre in canton Zürich. They have done a lot of work on perennial mixtures – randomized combinations of plants for particular visual effects or management techniques, sometimes just perennials, but sometimes including bulbs and annuals too. Some very high tech means of teaching plant ID too – you use an iPhone app. to zap a code on a pillar and your phone downloads a plant list, plant information and other stuff about the planting; meanwhile some nicely designed little leaflets give you plants lists too.

Most stunning of all though are the vertical gardens they are working on for indoor environments, including some wonderful ‘plant pictures’, exploiting the fact that a lot of tropicals perform well when growing vertically.

            A lot of fruit growing happens at Wädenswil too – it has a mild climate, being on Lake Zürich; some fascinating unusual fruit here too. Actinidia arguta makes tiny sweet little Kiwi fruit – much nicer than the normal kind, and I never realised you can eat Schisandra chinensis berries – although to be honest the flavour made me think of what it would be like if you bit into a chunk of incense – a challenge for the truly innovative cook perhaps.

            Odd how in the German- speaking world, it is public horticulture  which is where innovation happens, and private gardens are relatively unsophisticated - mirror image of back home. Our nearly all having private gardens (in the UK) has meant, sadly, a lack of political pressure for quality public space. But given the very different agendas of private and public gardening, there is so much scope for cross-fertilisation of ideas.