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Abbie’s newspaper columns

From meadows to motorway sidings with the classic border inbetween (part 4 English summer gardens)

Nobody does steps quite as well as Lutyens did

Nobody does steps quite as well as Lutyens did

Note: this follows on from the earlier column: English Summer Gardens – part 3.

I wrote two weeks ago about the English summer garden being a continuum stretching from natural meadows through to plantings on the sides of motorways or NZ traffic islands. I was gently drifting my way along this journey until I reached my word limit around the classic English country garden as exemplified by Penelope Hobhouse and the late Rosemary Verey. I had to stop there because suddenly there is a great big punctuation point with the late Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter.

Great Dixter can be controversial. Mark stood in the garden and commented that it was a bit like an ongoing negotiation with nature. At its best, it is gifted and has clearly had an enormous influence on the direction taken in many New Zealand gardens. In the middle it can be somewhat serendipitous, but there are parts where there is a suspicion of the emperor’s new clothes. As a garden it sits between the meadow gardening–wildflower end of the spectrum which relies on a great deal of self seeding (and good chance) and the controlled Edwardian arts and crafts style synonymous with Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jekyll. Christopher Lloyd experimented all his life but his legacy to modern gardening is arguably the mixed border (using shrubs and clumping perennials in tandem and brave colour combinations) and the managed meadow. In New Zealand, we seized on the mixed border as if it was our own but alas it is not often carried out with the panache of Christo Lloyd and is frequently rather dull.

Historically Lutyens and Jekyll pre-dated Christo Lloyd and in fact Lutyens redesigned Great Dixter for the Lloyd parents. But on my continuum, they are more to the ordered and managed side. We travelled in part to see their legacy. Famous examples are Sissinghurst and Hestercomb but we also visited lesser known gardens. The spirit of the Lutyens-Jekyll style was formal landscaping by Lutyens in the Arts and Crafts mode (confined and defined spaces of the garden room type), softened by sweeping plantings designed by Jekyll. If you imagine beautiful stone work, clipped hedging, masses of blue delphiniums, extravagant fluffy pink peonies, pink and white roses and drifts of underplanting such as lambs’ ears (stachys), you will be on the right wavelength. It is very pretty although the borders and beds could be a bit on the narrow and busy side and it can get a little formulaic when you see a number of such gardens in a row. I suspect that it may be a little dated now. Certainly the very narrow borders worried me and I would want to rip them out. Keep the trademark Lutyens rounded stone steps, though. Nobody does steps like Lutyens.

Fortunately it was towards the end of our trip that we ended up at Wisley because there we saw a range of garden styles which gave us the framework to make sense of what we had seen.

Gifted and unusual colour combinations at Hyde Hall

Gifted and unusual colour combinations at Hyde Hall

Cue in the classic long border. Yes Great Dixter has one but Wisley sets the standard. Hyde Hall has a shorter long border divided into colour segments. Lots of gardens have the long border. At its Wisley splendour, it is two parallel borders with a wide grassy path between and we are talking a hundred and thirty metres long, each, and (here is the rub for many home gardeners) six metres wide. Beth Chatto’s garden is a whole series of freeform borders which curve and flow but are still following the principles of the long border. Such borders are often planted on terrain contoured to give extra height at the back. Because they froth out at the front (alchemilla mollis is a great favourite to achieve this effect and seems to be regarded as colour neutral), there is often a boundary of wide pavers defining the edge. This stops the frothing from killing the grass. Generally plants are layered from tallest at the back to lowest at the front and the crux of this type of planting is combinations of plant foliage and flower throughout the season. There is no mass planting. Many plants will need staking and deadheading and it is all extremely labour intensive. You need plenty of space for this type of voluptuous display.

For us, this is the zenith of summer gardening. On the days we visited, we ranked Beth Chatto top of the list for plant combinations and quality management of this intensive style of gardening, Hyde Hall top in genuinely original colour and flower combinations and Wisley all round top in the total package of scale, design, plant combinations and management.

But, Wisley does not stop at the long borders. Dutch designer Piet Oudolf has moved herbaceous planting on a few steps and, in front of the spectacular new glasshouse, Tom Stuart-Smith has taken it further. There is an element of modern pragmatism and indeed we were told that the new borders only require a third of the input of the traditional long borders and that is a huge difference. The Oudolf borders have attracted both praise and criticism. They are a great deal more controlled. The plant palette is restricted and most of the plants chosen do not require staking (or, I think, regular dead heading) and they are pretty much of a standard height. But it is not mass planting and the skill of striking plant combinations remains to the fore. Oudolf has worked with parallel borders again but used different plant combos in rivers flowing across, more or less in diagonal lines when viewed from above. Each river is comprised of three or four different types of plants.

Tom Stuart Smith has further refined the Oudolf technique, bringing it together with the sweeps of colour first espoused by Gertrude Jekyll and the prairie meadow concept currently in vogue to give grand sweeps of herbaceous plantings for the larger canvas. Much of the detail and complexity of the long borders has now gone, as has the need for intensive maintenance. But plantsmanship and design lifts it well above utility mass planting and while it may not appeal for smaller scale domestic gardens, it is a modern and more practical approach for public plantings.

So how do we end up at the traffic islands filled with tussock or the motorway sidings of utility clumpy plants? Take the simpler blocks of colour planting done by Tom Stuart-Smith. Eliminate any plants that are pink flowered (not fashionable), anything that is deciduous (need foliage 12 months of the year), anything that is grown more for its flowers than its foliage, anything that requires more than a very occasional clean up. You are left with reliable, utility, evergreen clumping perennials which in recent years have become the repertoire of many landscapers for mass plantings – the liriopes, mondo grass, ligularia type of plant. Now reduce the range further. Take out any plants which are less than 30cm high, any plants which require good soil conditions or shelter, any plants which look sufficiently desirable to be stolen, and any plants which are not available dirt cheap and preferably from a native plant supplier or prison nursery. You are left with mostly tough grassy type plants which on their own are as dull as ditchwater. It is the end of the road.

English Summer Gardens – Part 3

We went to England to look at summer gardens which are all about flowers, particularly perennials and annuals. We didn’t expect to see so many meadow gardens and nor did we have the perspective of the summer garden as a continuum.

At one end, we saw natural wildflower fields, grazed by sheep and not managed as gardens at all. There are two key aspects to understanding British meadows. One is that many of our weeds in this country are in fact wildflowers in their home environment. So what might be seen as a rank, unloved and weedy infestation of dandelions, stinging nettle, daisies, convolvulus and blackberry is an entirely appropriate and acceptable meadow garden in its natural setting. Add in other elements such as cowslips and wild orchids (dactylorhizas and anacamptis pyramidalus) and you have something altogether delightful. The second aspect is that wild flowers thrive in a climate that is cold enough to stop all growth in winter and dry enough to stunt most growth in summer. These are hardly typical Taranaki conditions.

Inch along the continuum and you discover managed meadow gardens which were integral to most of the large gardens we visited. The late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter was an influential figure in popularising and enriching the meadow garden genre by encouraging a wider range of wild flowers to naturalise. The general rule of thumb for managing meadow gardens is to cut the meadow down in August (the equivalent of February or March in our hemisphere) and to leave it lying for about three weeks. This allows the seed to distribute. The hay is then raked off the meadow in order to keep the fertility low. If the soil is too rich, the growth becomes rampant and grasses will dominate. The existence of a parasitic annual referred to as Yellow Rattle (Rhinanthus major) helps to keep the grasses weakened.

Meadow gardens appeal to the romantic and naturalistic instinct cherished by the English. It is not seen at all as scruffy or unkempt and it is fine to have a designated meadow area as your main point of entry to the garden. The naturalism is often combined effectively with that most prim and proper of all gardening techniques – topiary. Great Dixter does it – the large clipped yew shapes created by Lloyd Senior now stand in the midst of an informal meadow. At Helmingham Hall in East Anglia, an undulating wave of pathway is cut through meadow grasses which surround large clipped yew domes.

I don’t see many New Zealand gardeners managing this meadow genre. Our soil fertility is too high, our grasses grow too strongly and will choke out most competition, our torrential rains will flatten meadows even in summer and if the rain doesn’t do it first, then winds will. Our nitrogen levels are too high. And we tend to be a bit anally retentive and suburban, dedicated to manicured lawns and edges, let alone to glyphosate, to tolerate the casual live and let live philosophy of the meadow.

Take another step along the continuum and there is the completely contrived and totally enchanting field of flowers (without grasses). We saw this done at East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden where the field of yellow daisies had hints of blue cornflowers and red soldier poppies and it was so perfect that it took our breath away. If you start with bare earth, in the first season there are no competing grasses or weeds so all that is seen are the desired annuals. By the second season, competing plants mean that you are closer to the managed meadow situation.

Contrived but charming field of flowers at East Ruston Old Vicarage

Contrived but charming field of flowers at East Ruston Old Vicarage

We are now moving into a style of gardening which has a debt to the North American prairies and the prairie meadow style reaches a pinnacle at Wisley Gardens where Professor James Hitchmough from the University of Sheffield is responsible for one of the most delightful meadow gardens of perennial flowers that you will ever see. Apparently the inspiration was Missouri meadows but the execution of the vision was achieved with gardening skills. The brief included a requirement that this garden be easily managed by Wisley staff so it went in to an area which had been cleared of weeds and grasses and probably also cleared of much of its topsoil. A rope mesh mat was laid, allowing the plants to stay anchored and a carefully chosen palette of about ten plants from seed mixed with sawdust was sown to create a sea of perennial flowers. There wasn’t a lot of foliage evident and the plants were tough performers which thrived in hard, dry conditions. It was magic. It was also in its second season already and there was no evidence of weed or grass contamination although it must be said this is managed with some ongoing minor intervention.

The Missouri meadow garden at Wisley

The Missouri meadow garden at Wisley

Move along the continuum further and you get to the classic cottage garden style which the English made their own. Cottage gardening is an indulgence of self seeded annuals and perennials, usually combined with roses, along with other shrubs and climbers such as clematis. The effect is a riot of colour and flowers with nothing so contrived as colour toned borders or stage managed plant combinations. Plants should look as if they are growing naturally where the seed falls and hard landscaping takes a back seat in this informal, romantic look. Readers who know the Armstrong’s garden in Waitara will have seen a rare local example of this gardening genre. If you have yet to visit, go and see it this Rhododendron Festival. Alathea Armstrong has it peaking to perfection for that week and it is very pretty, albeit labour intensive.

But take another step along and you come to what I call the managed cottage garden look which I associate with English gardeners such as Rosemary Verey and Penelope Hobhouse. The romantic naturalism is now combined with hard landscaping, form and formality. It is much more controlled, as can be seen in the Hobhouse Country Garden at Wisley. Colour toning becomes a major factor. Deadheading becomes intensive in order to prolong the display. Planning for successional flowering from spring to autumn is important. Constant management means spent plants are cut back and holes are plugged by bringing in fresh potted colour from out the back somewhere. Weed management becomes more critical. Many of the plants need staking. We talked to Lady Xa Tollemarche at Helmingham Hall about her borders and she manages to keep them at a peak for several months. The English do this classic garden style so well but it is not for the home gardener who sees spending every spare minute in the garden as a form of slavery. Easy care and low maintenance, I think not.

The classic Hobhouse country garden at Wisley

The classic Hobhouse country garden at Wisley

We are, dear Reader, only half way along the continuum. How silly of me to think I could summarise all we saw and talked about in 1200 words. We need to pause in the middle before moving on next instalment through the mixed border a la Christopher Lloyd, the sweeps of herbaceous colour softening formal landscaping in the style made famous by the Lutyens-Jekyll partnership, moving through the classic and intensive long borders to the recent work of Piet Oudolf and Tom Stuart Smith and onwards to the modern minimalism of mass planting. There is still quite some distance to go and any number of points where thinking gardeners can hop off the continuum, comfortable that they have found the point that best suits their situation.

English summer gardens – part 2

The delphinium trials at Wisley - yes these are creamy yellow

The delphinium trials at Wisley - yes these are creamy yellow

When I packed for our English trip, I packed for an early English summer. That is to say that I anticipated a temperature range in the vicinity of 12⁰ to 22⁰. Not 32⁰ which is what we ended up in – soaring even higher as we crawled the M25 in a car which was not air conditioned.

England is generally regarded as a moderate maritime climate, lacking extremes experienced by inland continental areas. But as we looked at extensive snow damage to large conifers at Hidcote Garden in Gloucestershire, bone dry conditions in East Anglia and Surrey where the annual rainfall is a mere third of what we get here and thin, poor soils on top of chalk in many areas, it made our conditions look easy. And bunny rabbits may be native to England, but it does not make them any easier to cope with. We have been complaining about a minor population explosion at home but believe me, it is nothing to what we saw over there. Super bunny is fearless and everywhere, grazing at will. Pretty well all plantings outside urban areas need rabbit protection. Even hedgerow plants all went inside individual plastic sleeves. Add in voracious grey squirrels, invisible but destructive moles, badgers who insist on excavating their own version of the Clyde dam, marauding foxes and various birds of prey. At times, nature seemed rather more savage in that well tamed country than we expected.

Over a period of a couple of weeks, we visited about 30 gardens. By the end of that, we felt we had a reasonable grip on a range of gardening practices particularly with regard to herbaceous plantings but you will have to wait for my next column for any analysis. While I blithely deny jet lag, the brain is still a little woolly. So this week is edited highlights, Hidcote, Beth Chatto Gardens and Wisley.

“Go to Hidcote,” urged our Oakura friend and colleague, Glyn Church, “it is my all time favourite garden.” Having been ever so slightly disappointed in most of the Cornish private gardens we had seen, we headed up to Gloucestershire and hoped Glyn was right. He was. Hidcote was quite simply everything to which we aspire.

I have gone on record before saying that there are measurable and definable standards for gardens. That whether you or I like a garden is a matter of personal taste but whether it is a very good garden is not just opinion. Hidcote excelled across the board. It was very well planted, it was managed with sensitivity, it showed excellent design and structure, the maintenance was top quality. But more than that, for us Hidcote was on a scale we can relate to (it is a defined 10 acre garden) and quite simply, it set the standard for the genre that we like. It was the complete, all round domestic garden. To visit it was gardening nirvana.

Apparently Hidcote has not always attained this standard in recent years and it is nearing the end of a £3 million makeover (yes, that is three million UK pounds) so it should be looking good. And with about 10 qualified gardeners on the staff, the skilled labour component is well beyond what we can ever hope to reach. It is owned by the National Trust and it must be a flagship for quality management of what was a private garden created on a domestic scale (narrow paths and entranceways) now coping with very large visitor numbers. But the garden has not lost the intimacy or detail that defines a private vision. It was one of the early Arts and Crafts gardens, using rooms or defined spaces to mark changes of atmosphere and plant types. Photos are all very well, but to actually visit was to experience the gifted use of vistas, borrowed views, green rest areas between busy plantings, different types of plantings and all the other layers that go together to make a brilliant garden. The red mixed border was terrific. We walked out after several hours like stunned mullets.

The famed Beth Chatto gardens in Essex on the same site where she has gardened for many decades. We were privileged to have close to half an hour with her personally taking us around part of the garden and although she is now elderly, she has lost none of her mental sharpness and still appears to be very active managing what is now a pretty massive machine in terms of large, intensive garden, nursery, tea rooms and a constant flow of visitors. Beth Chatto is synonymous with perennials, both as a writer and a gardener. Her reputation is such that even my late mother (who died several years ago at an advanced age herself) always regarded Mrs Chatto as The Expert. And her gardens were so good that we had to go around twice, once going one way and then in reverse. Decades of intensive skilled gardening show in plant composition, plant health and management. Putting together combinations which are eyecatching and effective even without any flowers is not easy with perennials. Avoiding the scruffiness which can come with herbaceous material past its peak, keeping very tight weed management and restricting the movement of invasive wanderers, stopping it all looking the same – there was so much to learn from these gardens. It is not as if there was much hard landscaping and I can’t recall garden ornaments or sculptures – this was a brilliant garden that was all about plants and plant combinations.

Wisley was our third garden that provided a completely satisfying experience. It is the flagship for the Royal Horticulture Society – over two hundred acres of property encompassing pretty well every aspect of gardening that you are ever likely to encounter. Its scale is astounding and so is its quality. It must surely rank up amongst the very top public gardens in the world.

We were in the extraordinary position of having access to Wisley out of hours, after the thousands of visitors had gone home. Wisley is not just about plant collections and public gardens. It has a strong educative and comparative research function and to this end they have display frames of all fruit trees that they can grow, including different cultivars. We were worried that nobody appeared to be sufficiently rigorous with the assessment trials of the ripe cherries in particular, as well as the berry fruits. Left alone in the gardens, we spent some time working out how to gain entry to various netted cages but decided it would be all too embarrassing to be caught stealing fruit so we had to settle for the pieces we could wheedle out through the protective layers which reduced the efficacy of our assessments.

What Wisley showed us (besides the fact that stolen fruit does not always taste the best – Mark encountered the sour Morello cherries) was a whole range of different approaches to herbaceous gardening with examples by a number of different designers over a period of years, including very modern plantings around the new glasshouse. It gave us a series of reference points for what we now think is a continuum stretching from wild flower meadows through a range of styles and eras to an end point of herbaceous plantings best characterised by the massed utility grasses on motorway embankments. And for our thoughts on that, you will need to wait another fortnight.

Mark takes responsibility for the after hours cherry trials

Mark takes responsibility for the after hours cherry trials

Letter from England

Greetings from a Cornwall fishing village where we are currently in residence in an oh-so-cutsie-pie antique fisherman’s cottage, suitably renovated to bring it up to the level of comfort expected in 2009. The thatched roof has been replaced with slate tiles and actually I think thatching may be a great deal better in photographs than in reality. Not only does thatching have a limited lifespan and require a trained thatcher to replace (probably elderly, meticulous, speaking in a thick regional dialect but charging for the new millenium), it provides a cosy habitat for all manner of insect, rodent and bird life. Mark has even spotted a duck nesting on a thatched roof.

But I digress. We made this trip specifically to look and learn from English summer gardens and we placed a strong emphasis on private gardens of high quality, rather than the better known historic gardens. You will have to wait for another fortnight to get a more detailed analysis of what we have seen but suffice to say that we are abandoning that earlier plan and returning instead to an itinerary heavier on the known historic and estate gardens. We have been a little underwhelmed by the calibre of many of the private gardens that had been recommended to us. That is fine – it allows us to establish benchmarks and comparators – but now we want to see the best of English garden tradition and it appears we will find that in the trust and public gardens.

We have been particularly impressed by the country lanes where, thank goodness, glyphosate is clearly never used and hedgerows are valued. Of course many of our weeds in New Zealand are native to England (think of the Flower Fairy books) so completely at home in the natural environment here. And the lanes are natural wildflower environments. This is not territory for large cars or urban tractors and oft times, even very small cars such as we are driving have to reverse up to allow an equally small car travelling in the opposite direction to gain passage. Once away from the motorways and main arterial routes, the English summer countryside is simply charming. It makes our farming practices at home look very industrial and the green desert we inhabit is not environmentally rich in any way at all. We only get away with a clean green image because of a very small population and areas of considerable natural beauty, not because of any great sensitivity to environmental matters. Mark has long been railing against the District Council and Transit practices of spraying out wide areas of natural growth with weedkiller. It looks really bad and it is really bad practice.

Road verges along a Cornwall lane

Road verges along a Cornwall lane

So we are delighting in the hedgerows which team with insect and bird life and Mark is fast becoming very competent at identifying native birds and butterflies. And we also admire a society which has rediscovered the importance of allowing some of the natural environment to regenerate and where not everything in the countryside is sacrificed to the speedy passage of the internal combustion engine.

The current vegetable garden craze is by no means limited to New Zealand but in a society where dense population means that most people live cheek by jowl with minimal space, the allotment has taken on new importance and status. Allotments are areas of public land which are allocated on request. It appears that the right to allotment space is enshrined somewhere in law here, although the wait time in high demand areas can be up to 40 years. The line up of allotments down the road from our London hosts near High Barnet used to look very tatty and unloved when I first looked at them 18 years ago. Not so today. Now they are high producing areas much loved and tended by their leasees, in this case mostly Italian. It is a sign of the times, alas, that they are also surrounded by high security fencing. We spent a pleasant half hour chatting to Bruno, who was indeed Italian and in memory of his homeland, he had a fairly large number of fig trees, 18 as I recall. He also had every other fruit bush and tree (on dwarfing stock) that he could grow there, along with extensive crops of vegetables. I think he had managed to get down on a double allotment. It was from Bruno that we learned about the difficulty of gardening in competition with the squirrels. He had come down one morning to pick his pear crop, only to be disappointed. From being laden the previous day, there was not a single fruit left. He ferreted around the base of the tree and found a neat stack of pears, each one with tooth marks and damage, stored by the squirrel against winter famine.

Bruno in his London allotment

Bruno in his London allotment

Here in Cornwall, we tracked down the allotments in nearby Gerrans where we chatted to a young German woman who now lives locally and tends her allotment. She told me that Germany also has an allotment system but, being German, they were subject to tight controls prescribing what proportion of land must be devoted to food production, rather than ornamentals, and the standard to which your allotment must be maintained. She much preferred the more relaxed English model. She was watering in her leeks as we chatted. This being the UK, the allotments in Gerrans had what was probably a million pound view – literally. It is part of the wonderful contradiction that is England – an overheated property market with extremes of wealth and historic country cottages that are under-used holiday homes way out of the financial reach of local residents. The local council responds by allocating allotment land and building subsidised affordable housing, as it is called here, on a prime spot of coastal land with an astounding view out to sea. In rural Cornwall, none of these allotments were fenced but clearly a code of courtesy prevails. While being extremely impressed by a crop of peas which eclipsed anything we have ever managed to grow at home, we were sufficiently well mannered to resist the temptation to pick one to eat.

the impressive pea crop in a Cornish allotment at Gerrans

the impressive pea crop in a Cornish allotment at Gerrans

Allotments are different to community gardens. The former are individually rented (about $50 per annum in Gerrans, $100 in London) whereas the latter are managed collectively, also on public land. Keen gardeners tend to like individual allotments, community minded people and do-gooders lean to the latter option. In our very own Waitara, as I recall, the residents in Battiscomb Terrace wanted allotment rights whereas Mayor Pete preferred the more PC community garden approach. But part of the identity of allotments (or indeed community gardens) is that aesthetics do not enter the equation at all. While there may be increasing pressure to keep a tidy, productive allotment and to go organic, it is fine to cobble together a scruffy old shed, plastic water butt, rough paths and piles of accoutrements which may at some point possibly be useful, or not, as the case may be. Frankly it would not appeal at all to the conformist types who wanted Battiscomb Terrace residents to have tidy and preferably matched front fences.

Allotments are not usually aesthetically pleasing.

Allotments are not usually aesthetically pleasing.

Apparently being allocated an allotment is now a triumph worth boasting at dinner parties in Mayfair and even Ma’am is supervising the installation of an organic allotment plot at Buckingham Palace. Admittedly it is facing the wrong way for the sun, part shaded by a mulberry tree, hard up against a hedge and in less than ideal conditions, but it is the thought that counts and garden space is at a premium at The Palace.

In search of summer gardens

Plenty of detailed planning

Plenty of detailed planning

Readers of this blog may not have worked out that most pieces are published first in our regional newspaper, the Taranaki Daily News. After being a garden columnist for over a decade, last Saturday the editor published the equivalent of an abbreviated school report. Extensive readership surveys had given this column the thumbs up and in fact ranked it second only to the TV review. This was attributed to my writing “informed and often devilishly waspish garden pieces” . Try saying that after a glass or two of wine. But I was enchanted. True, the TV reviewer was described as witty and wry, but devilishly waspish has such a wonderfully archaic feel to it. I read on in the hope that other contributors would be described in such terms as, say, fiendishly roguish. Maybe graciously rubenesque or coquettishly impish. But no, I alone have the sting in the tail and a persona fitting of a Regency romance by Georgette Heyer.

But it will not be the editor sitting beside this devilishly waspish woman high above the world somewhere in transit between Tikorangi and London as you read this column. English summer gardens beckon.

Given the sudden upsurge in swine flu, Mark was tempted to grasp at straws and suggest that maybe we would be better staying at home. He is not the world’s most enthusiastic traveller, my Mark. When he worked out the scope of Google street map and individual websites, he ventured the suggestion that we could do a virtual tour without leaving the sofa, experiencing even the driving through London and the countryside in actual time. Was that not why I bought my lap top, he asked. But it is all part of the game and in fact this is a trip we have long hoped to share together.

English gardens are not new to us, but gardens in June are. We have tended to be spring time visitors but spring time gardens are what we can do very well indeed at home. Most of New Zealand, and Taranaki in particular, excels at spring gardens. We have a long spring and in the period between August and November, magnolias, blossom trees, rhododendrons, spring bulbs, spring perennials and early roses fill our gardens with flowers and fragrance. As I say often, in New Zealand it only takes about 10 years to build a very pretty tree and shrub garden. It is what we do. But gardens that peak in December and January and extend through to March are much less common here. So we want to go and look at summer gardening. We know the theories, now we want to see the practices and to see which parts we can apply at home.

Planning a garden visiting trip is certainly an interesting exercise, especially when you narrow your brief. We have done enough to know that while some of the very wealthy, large, historic gardens managed with many staff and a deep public purse are interesting to visit, we learn more from private gardens managed on small budgets but encompassing high skill levels. So while we will do the odd famous garden (Wisley, Hestercomb and maybe Sissinghurst) most of the gardens on our short list are ones many readers will never have heard of.

We have been lucky to be guided in our selection by An Expert who actually visits and reviews all of Britain and many of Europe’s best gardens. He commented that we should not expect too much of some of the Big Name gardens, that standards have lifted a great deal in the past two decades and some of those gardens have not necessarily lifted their game accordingly. Over the years we have heard the odd comment from New Zealanders on pilgrimage to English gardens citing cases where they were a little disappointed, so that all figures. We also learned from our Italian foray a few years ago that we enjoy looking at private gardens and that despite the very best of intentions, when private gardens go into public or shared trust ownership in order to preserve them, the genius and creativity of the original owner disappears over time.

Our brief to Trusted Advisor was that we wanted to see private gardens which combine good plantsmanship and design, have a summer focus and are managed without an army of staff and correspondingly deep pockets. He responded with a short list of 15 to 20 in our designated areas stretching from Norfolk to Cornwall. It takes a bit of planning and juggling because once you are away from the big name gardens which open daily, many of these private gardens are by appointment only or have odd set days and times. And with dear old Telecom here charging an extortionate amount to use our mobile phone in the UK (I just about fell off my chair when I read the rates), I don’t want to be relying on ringing while we are on the move.

In due course I will report back. We expect to see perennial gardening at its best. The English do it so well. Big swathes of flowering clumping plants in a sea of foliage and colour. It disappears away to nothing in winter. We have seen herbaceous borders in England in early spring – there is literally nothing visible at all bar the occasional giant gunnera wrapped up in straw and sacking to keep it alive. Yes the very same gunnera that is on our banned list here as a noxious weed. We have only seen on TV the near miraculous transformation from winter wasteland to summer carpet that is achieved with perennial gardening in this style. We want to assess whether we can achieve a similar effect here without the winter rest period (and without the gunnera). Here we have wind, torrential downpours which can flatten soft growth, rapid plant growth and very long gardening seasons. Our conditions may be less than ideal.

A couple of weeks of non stop garden visiting may not be everyone’s cup of tea but two heads are better than one and we hope to return inspired with new ideas. One thing is for sure though. When you are travelling across the world, it certainly helps to have good advisors who are switched on to what you want to see. We don’t have time to spend looking at very average gardens or queuing for tourist attractions. We are after hard-core gardening and hard-core gardeners.