The awfully nice people at Burgon & Ball have sent me some of their marvellous garden tools in exchange for a review here on the blog. Read on for my first impressions of these shiny wonders.
Read moreDecember light
Light is in short supply this month, and so it makes sense to make the most of the little we have. For reasons of sanity, not to mention Vitamin D. It’s as good a time as any for garden photography, and the more familiar you are with the behaviour of the light, the better your images will be.
Read moreThe bonfire of deplorables
Autumn turns to winter, the leaves are all but tamed, and a short window of opportunity opens. While it’s still warm enough feel your fingers, there’s just time to clear the beds in preparation for a good, thick mulch. But what to do with all the stuff this produces – compost, or burn? It helps to have a plan.
Read moreThe quick & the dead
There’s a lot of rot in the garden at this time of year, and that’s no bad thing. I visited Waterperry Gardens at the weekend, where the ghosts of this year’s herbaceous perennials are taking their final bow.
Read moreNovember chill
The garden might be closing down for the year, but there’s so much to see in autumn. Far fewer hours in which to see it, though, so best to be up and out with the first rays of light.
Read moreGetting on with it
Not long now till many of our trees, shrubs and perennials divest themselves of their foliage before swooning into a hibernal slumber. Meanwhile, less glamourous things – semi-evergreen, hardy biennial and annual things – are quietly going about their business, apparently unfazed by the drama, while we pass them by..
Read more#WordlessWednesday in the garden
Can a garden blog be all words, only photography, or a mixture of both? The answer might seem obvious, but considering the question can be a useful exercise when working out the optimum balance between words and pictures.
Read moreThe seedier side of gardening
There’s nothing I like better than a spot of horticultural retail therapy, which often involves ordering from the seed catalogues far more than I could reasonably hope to raise in a year. Autumn brings the chance to gather seed for ourselves, an activity for which our gardening lives are all the richer.
Read moreRakes Progress
The awfully nice people at Rakes Progress have sent me the first issue of their magazine to review (I had to shamelessly hustle for a copy on Twitter. It wasn’t pretty). The magazine is certainly a thing of beauty. But is it all style over substance? Or is there a pair of hard working gardener’s boots beneath the designer exterior? I brewed a pot of tea and resolved to find out.
Read moreHeat stress
Taking a summer holiday can be a traumatic prospect for the gardener. But with a bit of preparation, there’s no cause to worry that your plants will die of thirst in your absence. What’s more, a decision to step aside momentarily from the perpetual onward march of the gardening year creates the thinking space in which to reflect on the current season, and plan for the year to come.
Read moreBurgon & Ball Sophie Conran Precision Secateurs
It’s a matter of record how much I love my secateurs. The only slight drawback to them is that the blades often prove a little on the large side for selectively pruning in tight spaces. Having considered a few different models, these precision secateurs from Burgon & Ball’s Sophie Conran range caught my eye, and I’ve been putting them through their paces over the past fortnight.
Read moreWandering through Wisley
Only forty minutes away from me – traffic allowing – it borders on the criminal that I don’t find myself at Wisley more often, particularly when there’s always so much to see. This morning I was there for a meeting, following which I took the opportunity to take a stroll through some of the gardens before hurling the car back into the melee on the M25.
Read moreOrange is the happiest colour
According to Frank Sinatra, orange is the happiest of colours, but while Ol’ Blue Eyes may have loved to be surrounded by it in his garden, orange is a something of a departure for me. This summer I've found myself embracing orange with an ardour suggestive of a wish to make up for lost time.
Read moreCool in the shade
A July heatwave, following a June washout. Having been caught dragging its feet, the year seems now to be charging full tilt towards high summer; baking heat, parched lawns and rock hard, bone juddering soil. We’re not quite there yet, though, and before the hot colours arrive en masse to dominate in the latter part of the month, I’m allowing myself a week or so to wallow in cool pastel shades.
Read moreHighlights from Hampton Court
I was fortunate to be allowed back by Fibrex Nurseries to help set up their displays of ferns and ivies, and pelargoniums on Sunday. A whole day in the Floral Marquee surrounded by plants in tip-top condition. But Monday was press day, and a chance to have a look around the rest of the site and see what the show gardens have to offer the visitor to Hampton Court this year.
Read moreHaemmerlin Pick-Up Wheelbarrow
The lovely people at Haemmerlin UK were kind enough to send me a 110 litre Pick-Up barrow in exchange for a review on the blog. But, even in the unlikely scenario that the prospect of a grown man geeking out over wheelbarrows is something you’d ordinarily eschew, I’d urge you to read on, as this is a particularly well thought out piece of kit for the garden.
Read moreBirdsfoot trefoil
While most people will stroll along the borders marvelling at fabulous specimens, I spend half my time peering at the lawn or at cracks in the paving to see what's taken root of its own accord. It’s in exactly this kind of situation where I’m likely to encounter birdsfoot trefoil, a plant which the Victorians, for reasons best known to themselves, associated with dark feelings of revenge.
Read moreThe Weeds of May
Depending upon your perspective, May is a great month either for wildflowers, or for weeds. However you choose to view the often statuesque plants that appear fully grown almost overnight in our hedgerows and gardens, their presence is hard to ignore, and their fresh, frothy and voluminous presence provides a welcome space filler after the drabness of winter.
Read moreRHS Chelsea Flower Show 2016
The Chelsea Flower show opened its gates to RHS members today, before welcoming in the general public on Thursday. It’s a great opportunity to see the work of some of the most talented garden designers, immerse yourself in a fabulous variety of plants, and pick the brains of the most expert nursery folk in the country, if not the world. Naturally, I left it too late to buy a ticket. Fortunately for me, this year I’ve been in the extraordinarily privileged position of being involved with with the preparations for not one, but two multi award-winning nurseries, Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants (and Rosemary Hardy’s first show garden) and Fibrex Nurseries, which allowed me access to the site during the build. Having spent another wonderful day surrounded by pelargoniums, laughter and more tea than my bladder could reasonably be expected to contain, I left the Fibrex stand in the Great Pavillion at around six on Sunday evening and headed off to make a round of the show gardens.
While you can expect me to be a little biased about the garden I worked on (a post on the background to Rosy’s Forever Freefolk garden here, and, likely as not, more to come), I’ll whisk you through some of my favourite sights, as captured on camera in the failing evening light of the final hours before press day.
The Chelsea Barracks Garden by Jo Thompson. A streamlined curving rill runs through grey stone, representing the lost river Westbourne that flows beneath the site of the Chelsea Barracks. This is a modern rose garden, referencing the rose window of the listed Garrison chapel that will be preserved as a focal point in the new development now owned by the Qatari royal family.
The garden blends roses with perennials and biennials, offset by the bronze hued metal of the sleek, sweeping bench seats and the upright pillars which intersect the tall yew hedging. It’s a masterly blend of sleek, contemporary lines and finishes with a very traditional, cottage-garden style planting.
Controversially, this garden features a lawn – a wonderful, circular bowling green-flat stretch of turf*. There’s a lot of rot talked about lawns, and although I don’t hold with chucking chemicals and valuable water at them, while our climate will sustain such useful, restful patches of green space, I’m happy to allow them room in the garden, and pleased to see the odd example at Chelsea. This won a gold medal for Jo and sponsors Qatari Diar, and deservedly so. Well done, judges.
Cleve West has worked his magic again, this time with a garden inspired by Exmoor National Park where he spent his youth. Sunlight filters through the oak woodland canopy onto The M&G Garden, the dappled shade creating the perfect environment for epimediums, ferns and other perennials and grasses that work well on the woodland edge.
The themes are memory, strength and longevity, but while Dan Pearson’s wonderful homage to Chatsworth at last year’s Chelsea almost conjured you into the Derbyshire countryside, this garden feels much more like a contemporary space inspired by memories of aspects of a specific place.
There’s a central sunken terrace, outward from which radiate stone and gravel paths that wind their way through the woodland glades, past substantial sandstone borders, some with rain-weathered hollows making a de facto bird bath here, a miniature reflecting pool there. It’s a tranquil, energising space, another worthy gold medal winner.
Andy Sturgeon’s garden for The Telegraph also uses monolithic structures, although here the slabs are of bronze-coated steel and arranged in a stylised manner which manages to suggest at once both the bony back plates of a stegosaurus, and a jagged mountain range thrust from the earth in some tumultuous seismic event. Both are intentional, the theme of the garden being the changes wrought upon our planet over geological time and scale.
It’s an awe-inspiring garden, which contrasts the drama of the sculptural elements and the purbeck limestone boulders (some containing fossils) strewn over the site, with a delicacy of touch evident in the semi-arid planting. This latter uses a restricted colour palette – mainly greens and blues with splashes of hotter orange (Digitalis canariensis) and red (the Australian kangaroo paw, Anigozanthus).
The upper story is dominated by a holm oak Quercus ilex, a strawberry tree Arbutus unedo, and the frothy foliage of Schinus molle, the Peruvian pepper tree.
A bridge of smooth limestone crosses the gorge filled with “meltwater”, going some way to inject a touch of domestication to the wildness, but this is still a very dramatic place. I loved the planting, the theatre, and the execution. This year’s Best in Show.
Charlie Albone’s garden for Husqvarna garnered silver gilt for its marriage of lush, European formality with Antipodean colour. Clipped yew hedges, squared pleached hornbeams and stepped box surround a sunken square lawn, through which a path of grey stones travells up and down the levels to a suspended seating area at the rear. A rill rounds the path and lawn, contained within the same bronze/corten steel coloured material that is a feature in so many of the gardens this year. It’s lush, and disciplined, but the perennials in the border in shades of cream, purple and mauve inject an element of chaotic fun, without getting too unruly. More digitalis, also eremurus giving the tall vertical accents in the beds, while alliums and poppies gently jostle with leucadendron and grevillea in a kind of floral equivalent of the Ashes.
The Winton Beauty of Mathematics Garden by Nick Bailey of Chelsea Physic Garden is a celebration of the laws of logic and maths that underpin life, and are seen to be at work in the natural world. A copper band winds through the garden, etched with mathematical equations. At one point it's a bench, then it becomes a stair rail, then a balustrade atop the roof of the garden structure, overhung with trailing plants. Architctural forms of Aloe polyphylla, Aeonium tabuliforme and yuccas feature prominently, while Pinus sylvestris ‘Watereri’ and Banksia integrifolia lend height to the planting. It's an inspiring, immersive space, with layer upon layer of detail, which importantly (to me, at least) works well as a beautiful garden.
James Basson is back with another masterful evocation of the Provencal landscape for L’Occitane. More lavender, rocky terroir and stunted almond trees. You can almost feel the heat baking the stones underfoot – another gold medal for this skillful recreation of a unique landscape.
I spent several moments during the build admiring the pear stepovers on Jekka McVicar’s Modern Apothecary Garden for St John's Hospice. This is a healing space, with a circular path of pebbles surrounding a thyme and chamomile lawn, in the centre of which stands a water feature. Two benches nestle among the outer beds, packed with medicinal herbs and aromatics, the whole garden bordered by a herbal ley, which is how I shall from this point on be referring to my weed-ridden lawn.
It’s the kind of intensive, herb-stuffed space I’ve always wanted to grow myself, and not yet managed – most of my herbs living in pots out of reach of the more antisocial activities of Bill the border terrier. I often wonder what kind of havoc he’d cause if let loose at Chelsea.
The light began to fade, and my camera’s meter started to behave oddly, notwithstanding the fact I’d had rather a long day. Just time for a shot of Matthew Wilson’s Garden for Yorkshire, inspired by the East Window of York Minster, in which the perennial planting cleverly echoes the panes of the stained glass.
Something of a whirlwind trip around the show gardens, but a fantastic opportunity to see them without the crowds, as well as having been on site to witness their progress from soggy patches of muddy ground to fully realised designs. Chelsea 2016 is certainly not one RHS show I’ll be forgetting in a hurry.
* I saw this being cut to shape by a friendly chap, Roger Moore, of Lindum Turf in Yorkshire. I was laughing at him edging the turf with a battery operated angle grinder with cutting wheel attached, when he pointed out that the grass seed sown into and grown on a felt, rather than soil-based substrate. Perfect for show gardens and exhibition stands. Lindum also provide wildflower turf for meadows and green roofs.
Forever Freefolk
Rosy didn’t have to look far when it came to deciding upon a concept for Forever Freefolk, her show garden for Brewin Dolphin at this year’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show. Inspiration lies all around the award winning nursery which she and husband Rob have been running since first setting it up in their back garden 25 years ago. Located in the heart of the Hampshire countryside and within walking distance of the River Test, today Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants occupies a 13-acre portion of that chalk landscape that stretches from Dorset, across South East England, beneath the Channel to France, and northward into Norfolk.
The inspiration
This is Watership Down country – the local pub in the village of Freefolk has been renamed in honour of the much-loved book by local author Richard Adams – renowned for its rolling green hills, close cropped pastures and crystal clear streams. These chalk streams provide a unique environment, home to iconic species such as otters, water voles, salmon and brown trout, and it's this biodiversity, coupled with the vulnerability of fragile habitats in the most populous region of the country, that has led WWF to a declare that Britain's chalk streams “are our rainforests”, with all the incumbent responsibility that confers upon us for their conservation.
The design
Rosy’s design for the show garden on main avenue references one of the starkest possible outcomes: dried up stream as a result of excessive water extraction represented by an area of gravel planting traversed by stepping stones constructed from flint-filled gabions. There’s certainly an element of cautionary tale, but the garden overall is more a celebration of both the natural landscape and the manner in which we interact with it.
“While the main concept informing the design is the chalk stream, the garden also draws upon the flora of the chalk downlands, our local industrial heritage and its effects on the area,” says Rosy, pointing out how the silver path that meanders through the space represents the metal security thread to be found in the banknotes made from locally milled paper. From one local industry, set up by Huguenot refugee workers in the eighteenth century, to another, and a photograph of a fishermen’s hut from which a raised walkway over the river leads to a series of eel traps.
“This image gave rise not only to the floating aspect of the pathway, but also to the structure that I wanted hovering above the space.” Seeing as this is Chelsea, something a little more high concept than a shed on stilts is called for, so for the design of the structure, Rosy turned again to the chalk bedrock of Hampshire, only this time at a microscopic level. The chalk itself, laid down in the warm, shallow seas over millions of years during the Cretaceous period, is made up of elaborate structures formed from the skeletal remains of microscopic marine plankton, or coccolithophores .
The garden building
The characteristic geometric shape of these tiny fossilised creatures has been used as the basic building block for the frame of the garden building – the ‘Coccosphere’ – an elegant sculpture constructed from cast aluminium.
The plants
There are four planting zones in all: shade, dry, damp with part shade and lush damp. Rather than slavishly recreating the planting communities of the calcerous grasslands, Rosy has drawn inspiration from the flora of her local chalk downland landscape, using a palette of soft pastel colours in the dry gravel bed, with deeper, more saturated hues in the wetter zones. Yellow tones will also run through the garden, with plants such as the marsh marigold Caltha palustris and Achillea 'Moonshine' bouncing golden light about.
Of course, this is a perfect opportunity to introduce new hardy perennial cultivars, and four new plants will be making their debut: a compact catmint, Nepeta x faassenii ‘Crystal Cloud’, the white thistle Cirsium rivulare ‘Frosted Magic’, pale blue Veronica ‘Mountain Breeze’ and the appropriately named pink gaura with red foliage, Gaura ‘Rosy Shimmers'.
With such a wealth of information and expertise packed into every element of this garden, it’s hard not to see this project as yet another out working of an impulse to share knowledge and enthusiasm, for both plants the environments in which they thrive. “I love trying to educate people in plants and how they can be used in the garden”, admits Rosy, when I quiz her about this aspect. It’s that passion and generosity of spirit that shines through, and is sure to make this garden one of the highlights of Chelsea 2016.