Powis Castle garden revisited

A lot of people in the garden world list Powis Castle as their favourite garden. I have at times. I went several times many years ago (like - a long time ago!) but then although it isn't that far I haven't been for ages. Having hugely enjoyed it, I know I shall be going back more. It really is very special. It's that location for one thing, that huge drop down, the view, the horticultural extravagance on one level after another. It's also one of those gardens that makes you feel like you are in a separate, self-contained world where everything is a little more perfect than reality.

What always made Powis special was always the half-hardy stuff, always pushing the boat out as to what would work. Jimmy Hancock started all this playing with hardiness zones. He was the previous head gardener, retiring in 1996  And he got a obit in the Times too. He was one of the National Trust's great head gardeners, always fun to talk to, as he was so full of ideas and knowledge. He obviously had a rather combative relationship with Graham Stuart Thomas, the Trust's Gardens Advisor for many crucial years (1955-75) and by all accounts, rather full of himself. I remember Jimmy telling me some stories of Thomas turning up and telling him what he could do and not do. Jimmy had no time for his advice, which he dismissed as irrelevant, pointing out the climatic differences between the south-east of England (Thomas's natural habitat) and the Welsh borders.

Although Powis is a great garden, full stop, it is the half-hardy planting which has always been the high point. Jimmy's work had been continued and built on superbly by the current team, headed by Gardens Operations Manager David Swanton. The top slope is now a towering border of half-hardies, almost hardies and hardies which look like not-hardies. It is a triumph.

Reproductions of old photographs are dotted around showing you what the garden was like at various points in the twentieth century. Emptier of plants for the most part.

 

The pots here are fantastic, some of the best filled containers I've seen, exuberant, exotic and using a huge range of plant material.

One of the things which gives Powis its really special atmosphere is the sense of antiquity which oozes out of the stone walls, the statues and these extraordinary overgrown yew topiaries. We were slightly of the attitude that they looked a bit too much like obese flesh, and perhaps in need of a little restorative pruning.

The 'ordinary' i.e. not full of half-hardies, borders are pretty spectacular too, but very old-fashioned. There is a great deal of traditional support given with canes and twine which must take up a lot of time, and for some plants, like Knautia macedonica just does not work, which led to much thinking on my part as to how I might do things differently, as the frame of a traditional border is very tight.  I'd forgotten just how wide a range of plants there are here, very much with a late summer focus.

Some of the border plantings are contained within box low box hedges, which is a traditional way, and looks distinctly odd now, makes it look like all those dangerous perennials have to be kept in a cage. Mostly however they spill out over the paths - that was probably quite daring back in the day.

This is one of those places that combines innovation (primarily the half-hardies) with traditional skills. Unlike in Graham Stuart Thomas's day, the garden staff here have plenty of autonomy. It always used to be said that the NT used to make every garden look the same. I was never sure about this, but it certainly is not true now, as there is apparently very little central direction. For new ideas it can only be good, and it was new ideas that put Powis Castle on the map and made it such a favourite.

James van Sweden - a memoir

James van Sweden, who has died at 78, after a long illness, will be remembered as one of the great revolutionaries in the landscapeworld. With his long-time business partner, the late Wolfgang Oehme he turned the tide (or perhaps I should say began to turn the tide) of one of the worst aspects of the American landscape - the tyranny of the lawn. He was one of the most creative minds in the landscape business, incredibly influential, a true visionary. He was also great fun, and a lovely guy.
Jim was not a gardener though, but an architect by training. His plant knowledge was not great, and he never really grew anything himself. But he had realised early on in his career that he was, as he told me once "more interested in the spaces between buildings and around them than the buildings themselves". What changed everything was his meeting Wolfgang Oehme, the nerdy, awkward, brilliant, maddening plantsman and garden designer. Together they formed an extraordinarily successful partnership. Neither could have achieved anything much without the other, and yet they could not have been more different. Wolfgang was simply the worst lecturer anyone had ever heard, while Jim was the consummate people person, to our European eyes, the classic American - confident, expansive, charming. His professional genius was to see the potential of Wolfgang's plant knowledge (gained in Germany from where had emigrated in the 1950s) and how that would fit into American suburban and urban landscapes.
Jim was a good businessman, he invested in property, he bought good art, and sold them both when necessary. Without his business skills he and "Wolfie" would have still be humping plants and paving slabs out of the back of a VW station wagon like in a wonderful old picture of them both in their hippy gear taken way back in the early days. Wolfgang's complete lack of business acumen eroded their relationship in the later years, but Jim always kept it in perspective, and managed to laugh off Wolfgang's increasingly eccentric behaviour.
 The two men got their big break with the garden of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1978. It is one of the great stories of landscape planting and deserves retelling in some detail. Chairman David Lilly knew their work from a colleagues' garden Wolfgang had designed. Staff however were horrified - they were expecting the usual crap that passed for landscaping and civilisation in 1970s USA - mown grass and evergreen shrubs. What they got were lots of big grasses and drifts of flowering perennials. The Indians or the hippies or something were clearly on the war path. Jim always said to me that he had learnt to love grasses because he had been brought up in Grand Rapids on the edge of the prairies and remembered as a kid the remnants of the wild landscape running along the edge of the railroad.
Never afraid of facing his public, Jim (probably with Wolfgang in tow rather than in the lead) made a presentation to the staff, explaining about the plants and why they had used them. Grudgingly they were accepted, and as they grew, they became acclaimed and loved, with FRB staff realising that their office looked distinctively different and therefore distinctively better than all the other boring mown to death grassscapes of DC. So, the New American Romantic Garden was born! Soon, everyone in the DC area started to see the beauty of grasses and perennials and realise the potential of these plants to create something new and distinctive, alive and seasonal in the American urban landscape.
Over the next decade Jim and Wolfgang began to make big changes around DC. Wolfgang tested plants to destruction in his chaotic garden. Only the boldest and the bravest and the deer-proofest made out onto the street. It was a limited range, but in 1970s and 19802 Washington, Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm' and Sedum spectabile were revolutionary material. It was a good way to start using plants in a plant-cautious place. Wolfgang had that wonderful German ability to make things work technically. Jim had, he liked to say from his Dutch ancestry, an artistic vision. He made everything work aesthetically. Although he helped the birth of a new consciousness in planting, he coudn't take untidy plantsman gardens - I remember on the Horticulture magazine tour when we first met, we visited Sean Hogan's garden in Portland, and mid-visit, noticing he was not there, I went to find him; he was standing alone in the rain on the other side of the road - "I can't stand this mess" he hissed.
While it was the public plantings that got the limelight, it was the private garden clients who enabled the two to really refine their style. Initially they got a lot of the liberal art collector crowd; the tribe of people who are the heart of the forward-looking and globally-aware community who are behind so much of what is good and progressive in the country. I got to visit several of them in the late 1990s researching stories for garden magazines - without them there would have been no landscape revolution. Jim got quality landscape and garden design out there - his hardscaping and landforming a foil for Wolfgang's planting. The Oehme and van Sweden look began to make waves. Just last week Roy Diblik, a pioneer of containerised native plant production in Wisconsin, was telling me that it was their work which began to change attitudes to perennials in the Midwest. Almost the whole perennial-growing world owe these men an immense debt.

Jim was a fantastic guy, with a great sense of humour and joie de vivre. I met up with him around a dozen times and stayed at his house on Chesapeake Bay or in Georgetown. We had first met in somewhat trying circumstances - and as so often when people meet at a time when things are less than ideal, every time we met conversation would return to that awful evening and we would laugh ourselves hoarse. It concerns the late Rosemary Verey. I had been invited by Horticulture magazine to be part of a lecture tour across the US, with a number of colleagues, four of us in all, one of them Jim. I had heard he was visiting England about a month before the tour, so I contacted him, and he suggested that I join him at Rosemary's Barnsley House. "Typical" I thought, "invite a near stranger to someone else's house, no Brit would do that". I phoned Rosemary to check this was ok, and yes it was. Arriving, I realised that all was not well, as she was clearly very drunk. Rosemary then proceeded to be as rude, as patronising as offensive to me as possible; quite honestly it was simply one of the worst experiences of my professional life. This was normal for Rosemary; in the garden at Barnsley she was very generous with her time with visitors; but she was also a notorious drunk and noted for her abusive behaviour to staff and colleagues. "Rosemary" I can still hear Jim admonishing her; I can also remember the acute embarrassment he was feeling - it was so palpable. He and his companion had clearly decided to take control of the evening, finishing off cooking and serving, Rosemary being completely incapable of anything other than rambling more or less incoherently, letting slip incidentally that she was spending Christmas with Ross Perot (yes really). So, when we met, Jim and I would laugh about many things, but that dreadful evening in particular, we had to relive it every time.
 Jim loved to talk about Japan, which had clearly made a huge impact on him. Not that his work was in any sense Japanese in style, but he had got something deeper from the experience, a sense of proportion, honesty to materials and the feeling that Oehme van Sweden designs were, to use that ungainly German word, Gesamstkunstwerk - holistic and consistent and thought through all of a piece (you see the English is even more ungainly). Not that I wish to lower the tone, but there was a story about a sexual encounter with a monk in a Zen monastery which he liked to tell as well. For him, there was nothing sordid about the encounter, it was all part of the same rich authentic experience. Japanese food was a great love too - we always seemed to eat Japanese when I came to town.
I count myself lucky to have seen the site of Jim's house on Chesapeake Bay before it was built, when it was just a patch of overgrown soyabean field on the flat shores of the flat water of one of the most minimalist landscapes I have seen. Native plant expert Darrel Morrison helped him integrate Wolfgang's plant selections into the wild flora, and his friend the architect Suman Sorg designed a house, in a style he liked to describe as 'unresolved' - unfinished, raw, open to suggestion. Later, when it was built, complemented by its almost wild but not quite garden I remember visiting and watching ospreys feed their chicks on a nest in a tree down by the water.
Jim was not an Anglophile (thank god, and do not mention Downton Abbey in my presence) but the idea of an Englishman driving him unsettled him, as if I might suddenly, somehow atavistically swerve his Mercedes onto the wrong side of the road. Several times I drove him out to the country, and he would always at some stage start singing "drive on the right, drive on the right, pray to Jeeesus". He always wanted to get a commission in England though, somehow it would set the seal on his career as garden maker not just as an architect in the landscape – now it turns out the practice have got a commission – the American Museum in Bath. I am sorry to say I have not seen him for several years, as my travels in the US seem to have been less frequent, so I did not get a chance to tell him how 'prairie' has recently become a buzzword in British gardening circles. He would have enjoyed the irony.

Its all in the mix..... resources for understanding Mixed Planting.

Intermingling is the new buzz word in planting design.

Thomas Rainer's recent blog post on the subject which has sparked off a lot of discussion. We're going to continue the discussion on ThinkingGardens later on, but in the meantime, as the person who has probably done more over the years to push this concept in the English speaking world, I'd like to deal with some of the background here.

Intermingling is what happens in most natural plant communities. You don't get a solid mass of plant one here and another one there. Plants naturally mix and mingle. For me, for designers to accept intermingling in planting design is the final step in creating plantings which are genuinely naturalistic, and getting away from that awful blocky look that the boring evergreens have down at the supermarket car park.

The people who actually led on this were in Germany. Planting design there began to look at what they called 'sociability' from the 1970s onwards, people such as Richard Hansen at Weihenstephan. This was a way of trying to look at the aesthetic dimension of how many plants you put together to make an impact. This was followed by the development of Mixed Planting schemes in the early 2000s, where a formula is created, with plant varieties set out intermingled, at random, to create long-lasting communities. The concept is modular, so that a hundred or 10,000 square metres can be bought and set out. It is this idea, of creating an artificial ecosystem, which so many in the design community find so interesting. 

 

So, following a lot of enquiries whilst teaching in Poland and Russia here is a summary of resources to find out more.

The book Piet Oudolf and I wrote earlier this year, briefly discusses German mixed planting systems, and others. 

I go into a bit more detail about the German work here, in a piece in the Garden Design Journal.

There is now an English language version about the German mixed plantings available here . My colleague Prof. Kircher says "Only if the printed out pages are arranged and tacked in the correct order the opposite pages fit together. So mind the page numbers (bottom of pages left and right corner) not to get wrong connections!" He goes on to say that "The German version can be ordered by Ilka: i.ballerstein@loel.hs-anhalt.de for € 5,-- plus postage".

Now, auf Deutsch, Prof. Kircher recommends:

The webpage of the Perennial Nursery Association (BdS) offers much information about mixtures. Click onto “hier” on the right side of the entrance page to find Info about Mischpflanzungen. Here left side click Mischpflanzungen Mischungen  Alphabetisch to find an overview over all (or most) mixes. If you choose one mixture you find a description, then click at the right side the button “Artenliste mit Charakteristik…” to the list of species as pdf file.

and:

An interesting webpage is www.durchgeblueht.de from a landscape architect from Dresden. He offers in cooperation with a perennial nursery pre-mixed combinations of perennials. The lists in the website are a little changed and simplified compared with the original recipes.

Wenn Sie Deutsch lesen können...

Staudenmischpflanzungen: Praxis, Beispiele, Tendenzen is a new book out by Uwe Messer and Axel Heinrich.

Hope this helps!

 

Russian dacha gardens, a threatened species?

Dachas, second homes or just simple little weekend hideaways are a crucial part of Russian life. Similar in concept to German or Dutch leisure gardens, they are organised in colonies, a place for people to garden, and stay at the weekend. During the Soviet era they were a crucial part of the economy as they allowed people to grow their own fruit and vegetables, either for their own consumption or barter; the family Lada or Moscowitch car might be fixed in exchange for a box of produce.

Anna Benn, a garden designer near Bath, who has lived in Russia suggested we take a train out of St. Petersburg to have a look. I don't know whether our colony, near Darskoe Selo station, is typical, but it did rather look as if the traditional dacha garden might be an endangered species.

Traditionally, they have looked very much like our idea of a cottage garden: fruit, flowers and veg all in together. During the brief, but warm, Russian summer a lot of growing can happen. Phlox, rudbeckia, helenium and other American-origin perennials do particularly well. Indeed these gardens have proved a useful hunting ground for old pre-WW2 perennial varieties.

Unconventional fruit is quite common, such as Hippophae rhamnoides (above) grown for its Vitamine C rich berries, and black Aronia berries for jam making

Many dacha gardens are falling into disrepair as the older generation dies or retreats from working these plots. The arrival of shops with things in them to sell (a major innovation in the Russian economy) has meant their usefulness has declined too. More Russians can afford to travel too.

Some people are buying multiple plots and then constructing large houses on them. Eventually a lot will probably go this way. We met a young woman in a smart car, who spoke good English, who was mystified we were there, and not doing the sights in St.Petersburg - her family were building here too. I don't think she'll take up gardening yet.

Sado-naturalism? A hard look at the Japanese garden - Part Two

Clipped bushes, classic little bobbles.... we'd disparagingly call meatballs if they were lined up in front of a burger outlet in North Carolina. Does the fact that they were in a historic monastery garden in Kyoto make them any different? A bobble is a bobble is a bobble, isn't it? Here of course I could appreciate their being parts of a whole , but still felt each one was an example of something I personally do not care for.

The Abbot's private garden at Kiyomizu Temple (above) was an opportunity to see a small garden, like many designed to be viewed from a building, with a backdrop which cut it off from the city. A lantern on the hillside opposite was an excellent example of shakei – borrowed landscape. The garden itself was centred on a pool, a classic example of a miniaturised landscape, with a bridge which you had to imagine yourself using, rather than ever using in actuality. Stones and clipped bushes (mostly azaleas, I think) made up the composition. Everything was harmoniously balanced.

Genkyuen garden, Hikone Castle

 

Tree clipping is also something here which evokes mixed reactions. There are those people who get very emotional about how much they hate bonsai (I have heard of bonsai enthusiasts being thrown out of nurseries). I am not one of those; indeed I rather like bonsai, although I would never bother with them myself. They are however only one end of a whole spectrum of tree management in Japan. A great many trees in private gardens and public spaces are clipped; much of the work of gardeners is concerned with tree management - Niwaki as it is called. In a crowded environment, in a culture where seeing the macrocosm in the microcosm is important, I can see that this is a very useful skill. In the case of pines in particular I think it lengthens the useful lifespan of the tree, and the results can be very pleasing. Sometimes though, in larger spaces, it just seems so unnecessary, a tradition applied too readily. 

 

Where tree clipping passes from useful skill to absurdity is in where trees are trained to resemble the windswept trees of the coast (as at Jogasaki above), which are seen to exemplify a virtuous tenacity, as much as being beautiful in their own right. Clipping and training can be so extreme that permanent and highly obtrusive bamboo structures are needed to support branches to extended that they can no longer support themselves. Which seems to me to be an absurdity, as the trees no longer resemble anything natural. An example of the means overcoming the end. And a reminder that bondage and sado-masochism is an important part of the pornography industry here (see Ian Buruma's excellent book on popular Japanese culture A Japanese Mirror).

For heaven's sake - put it out of its misery and cut it down!

Cut and trained to look like a windswept pine - except that it needs a bamboo framework to support it.

 

A conservative tradition of heavy-handed pruning, a contrived idea of what nature is, and an over-reliance on clichéd stock forms? All of these criticisms could be levelled at the European tradition of classical formality; indeed I have often done so. And here too, perhaps even more so.

But the basic design principles, techniques and philosophy can inspire continued development.

Here was one which was occupying a few square metres of a wedding venue in Kyoto. Very nice use of a few perennials (rarely seen here in traditional gardens).

 

And here is a garden on a very steep slope at Jogasaki, only five years old, a reminder of how a hot humid summer makes things grow. Made by a lady potter who scatters her various creations around the garden. A wonderful naturalistic creation with a dense ground flora, mostly native. And - its open too, the idea of public open gardens is beginning to take off in Japan. Private and contemporary gardens - that's what I'd like to do next time I come.

 

A hard look at the Japanese garden - Part One

Garden at Tenryu-ji monastery, Kyoto. Classic sand garden, pool and borrowed scenery.

I have a clear memory of a favourite book in the library at school – it was about traditional Japanese architecture and included quite an extensive section on gardens. I remember taking it out again and again – I was utterly fascinated by those gardens. Like many other western teenagers (including to some extent my son) I developed something of a passion for Japanese art and design. Finally, after many years, arriving here and seeing them for the first time feels like meeting someone you have corresponded with for a long time but never actually met – certain things are just as you imagined, but much remains unexpected – and certain things you do not feel comfortable with. Anyone who knows me knows I am interested in naturalistic plant-focused design - so I was interested to see what my reactions would be. I feel a bit sensitive about critiquing someone else's garden heritage, but there has been so much unthinking adoration of traditional Japanese gardens in the west, I think it's fair enough to be a bit more critical.

Some of the greatest beauty is in the detail and finishing. Paving at the Katsura Palace.

In many ways I am sorry I have not visited Japan before, to begin to explore this extraordinarily creative and complex civilisation at an earlier stage in my life. As far as gardens are concerned though, I do feel it has been good to see them 'in the green' after having seen and experienced so much else in the world of making gardens, growing plants and designing landscapes. I can look at them as an experienced adult rather than a naïve youth, too ready to be smitten by the exotic. I was interested to feel my reactions to the gardens and see them not only for what they were themselves but what they offered us as garden practitioners and garden users today. To sum it up, I felt distinctly underwhelmed by much of what I saw; maybe I just knew these gardens too well before I saw them; there is plenty to admire and learn from, but also a lot that I did not respond to. I can imagine that if I were Japanese I might have been very critical of the garden tradition here.

Like many traditional garden styles, plentiful labour is essential.

Moss when it works, is wonderful.

But very often it doesn't.

Good examples of tree pruning at the Katsura Palace.

I recently spent five days in Kyoto with Juliet Roberts, editor of Gardens Illustrated magazine. We started out looking at Tenryu-Ji, like many gardens, created around a monastary on the hillier outer edges of the city (14^th Century). As we came in, a work crew were bent hands and knees over areas of moss beside and extensive areas of immaculately raked sand, a reminder that these gardens are immensely high maintenance. Most of the garden was however composed of heavily pruned trees growing out of what was for the most part bare earth. The overall effect reminded me of roses sprouting out of bare earth in a British municipal rosebed. 

Many gardens are built for viewing from a particular point. If however you get up and walk into the view, what you see is actually rather uninteresting. The analogy is with a stage set - effective and dramatic when see from the seats but wander amongst it and all you see is MDF and support struts. Planting is only relevant if it can be seen from the privileged viewpoint. We (and interestingly, the Chinese), expect to be able to wander around our gardens and see them from lots of different angles.

The bare earth effect we saw in many other places, so it is worth looking at in a bit more detail. Moss appeared to be growing, and I can imagine that a moss surface was probably what was desired, or originally intended. Moss only works as a ground cover if the soil is consistently moist, and preferably shaded. In sunlight, with regular summer temperatures of over 30C, it simply does not do, and either bare earth or algae-stained dried mud is the result. I found myself wondering how come a garden tradition with access to an incredibly rich woodland flora had not come up with an alternative ground cover to moss. Even the moss surrounding the stones in the great Ryoanji was burnt-up and patchy.

View from the sublimely beautiful Katsura Palace.

 

A hot and sweaty traipse through some rather featureless suburbs brought us to the Katsura Palace, where the garden was laid out in the 17^th century. There was almost no signage and several people who we asked had never heard of it. It turns out that whereas foreigners can get in by applying to the Imperial Household Agency a week in advance, Japanese citizens have to apply for tickets in a lottery. The palace is a characteristic piece of Japanese understatement with several acres of grounds dotted with tea houses and small water bodies. It is how many of us imagine a Japanese garden, as presented to us from over a century and a half of imagery, from Gilbert and Sullivans Mikado on. It has the hump-backed bridges, the pines with layered foliage, rocks and little thatched pavilions we expect. A set of images which have become so cliched with endless repetition that it is actually very difficult to see beyond them to get a genuine reaction.

 

Ryoanji - and its worshippers. Quite rightly. I think this is a masterpiece of understatement.

An early morning taxi ride gets us to the most famous of Japanese gardens, Ryoanji, shortly after opening at 8.00. We have a precious ten minutes in the company of the famous fifteen stones before the first tour party. It is really rather special, very condensed, a garden in the abstract. The nearest thing I have ever seen to it were 'dry tray landscapes' in China. It is so designed that you can never see all fifteen stones at once and it is impossible to see the whole thing at once, although it is not that big. It is the ultimate Zen koan, or puzzle. All this seemingly modern abstraction is all the more impressive when you realise this is similar in age to our European Renaissance.

Context is all important. Japan often feels a claustrophobic country, its population squeezed into a narrow coastal plain between the mountains (thickly forested) and the sea. Rice paddies jostle factories and apartment blocks. Most people can only garden in tiny backyards, on balconies or at the front of their houses. One of the joys of walking around residential districts is seeing how gardeners create incredible assemblages of pots and other containers in front of their houses: bonsai, shrubs, perennials, annuals, barrels of water with waterlilies. When you have as strip only half a metre wide, the only way to go is up, so plants get stacked onto shelves and climbers reach up to the second storey. Landscape designers do similar tricks – with three-layered shrub plantings against walls which can stretch for long distances along walkways, but fit into the narrowest of strips. Courtyard gardens are created in the tiniest of spaces, wherever a shaft of sunlight reaches the ground. This use of minimal space is the real miracle of Japanese gardens.

 

A tiny courtyard garden in an old Kyoto house. The simple planning of such tiny spaces is perhaps the Japanese garden tradition's greatest contribution to the world.

The only other garden that made a similar impact on me was one of the sand gardens in the Daitokuji temple complex. A not dissimilar size to Ryoanji it was simple and stark, with a healthy aura of Polytrichum moss around a group of two stones and neat little tuft of Selaginella, ferns and sedges around some others. Interesting that it dates to the 1980s when a venerable tree finally fell down, and something had to replace it. Elsewhere at Daitokuji there is an extensive tea garden which had good ground cover planting, and a balance between the clipped elements and naturally-free growing plants. It felt lush, quite naturalistic, calm and cool, the most relaxed planting we had seen. 'Cool' is important – Kyoto in summer is very hot and humid – we looked like beetroots for much of the time. It was almost the only garden where I felt at home with the planting.

Sand garden at Daitokuji