When we saw advance publicity on Monty Don’s new ‘British Gardens’ TV series, we wondered how long we would have to wait to see it here. We are old, you see, so it took our younger gardener Zach to alert us to the fact that it is readily available online. We watched it on You Tube (just go to their home page and type in Monty Don) but it is probably available on other streaming services too. It is worth watching.
We visited Upton Grey Manor in 2009. Featured in episode 4, it has been meticulously restored by the owner to its original Gertude Jekyll plan and is now kept frozen tin time.
Love him or not, Monty Don knows his stuff and this is not just a happy jaunt around various gardens – sixty of them, I believe, in an attempt to define what characterises British gardens. That comes to about twelve gardens per hour of TV time so some are once over lightly but Monty’s thoughtful commentary and analysis is what knits it all together. I imagine there is fierce debate over his selection of gardens in UK gardening communities but all I want to say on that is that out of sixty gardens, there were only two that made us raise our eyebrows and wonder at their inclusion.
We have a great deal of respect for the English gardening tradition. The standards set there are high, due in no small part to the fact that gardening and working with plants is a respected profession with high skill levels. I did a cursory trawl through the memory banks and photo files and was a bit surprised to find that on our trips, we have seen more than seventy gardens in Britain, both great and small, so we are not inexperienced. We had been to quite a number that Monty Don included in his five part series which added to our viewing interest.
Scampston Hall (episode 2) gets extensive coverage. The Oudolf planting of perennials was the best of it to our eyes when we visited in 2014.
Still at Scampston. *Conceptual gardens* are not my cup of tea but we all like different things and there are a few examples of the genre covered in the series.
He started in the north, in Scotland and Northumberland which is an area that is unfamiliar to us. The only times I have been to Scotland were before I started gardening. But the gardens in the far north with low winter light levels and exposed to North Sea storms are very different to our gardening experience. Starting a garden there might be akin to starting a garden on Chatham Island – not for the faint-hearted.
Tom Stuart Smith’s planting at Trentham Gardens which are not included in the series, although Tom Stuart Smith is.
Episode two was somewhat poignant for us. In the north of England with a foray over to Northern Ireland, it was more familiar territory. We had another trip planned in 2020 which had to be cancelled due to Covid and that included some of the gardens in this episode – Lowther Castle, Levens Hall, Nigel Dunnett’s private garden and Chatsworth. I wish we had managed to get to see them in person but there comes a point in life when realism means accepting things that will not happen after all. Other highlights of this episode include a local competitive gooseberry show – British eccentricity at its very best – and landscape architect Tom Stuart-Smith talking with Monty Don at Chatsworth. When I had Chatsworth on our list of places to visit, it was primarily to see the area designed and executed by Dan Pearson. I didn’t even know that there were major new borders that are the work of Tom Stuart Smith so that would have been a bonus.
Bressingham in episode 3 is credited with pioneering island beds. Also, maybe, the origin of what we refer to as ‘kiwi hosepipe style’ here, in a case of what might be renaming by cultural appropriation.
Bressingham had the best Alchemilla mollis I have seen. It never looks quite like that here.
Episode three covers the area from Wales to Norfolk, four is in London and the Home Counties and five is in south. There were quite a few gardens we had been to and we were waiting with anticipation for Monty Don’s visit to Wildside, one of our most favourite gardens of all. The interview between Don and Keith Wiley was fine, as were Don’s interpretative comments. The timing of the visit was not. Wildside is predominantly perennials full of flowers, colour and interesting plant combinations but on screen it just looked, well, green. Mark’s comment was “Could they have picked a time to visit when there was less colour in the garden?”
Wildside without the flowers is not quite the same.
There is enough meat in this series to make us want to view it a second time. I think I am coming to a slightly different conclusion as to what sets British gardening apart but that will have to wait until after the second viewing. Also thoughts on what the Brits are calling ‘rewilding’, what makes a garden film or photograph well as opposed to being in the garden in person and how much they are talking about the impact of climate change which many people are resolutely ignoring in this country.
I am still wondering about the gooseberry show where the top award went to the heaviest gooseberry. What I want to know is how they guarded against cheating. Is it possible to increase the weight of one’s show gooseberry by nefarious means, maybe injecting the fruit with additional water just before tabling it at the show? This may remain one of life’s little mysteries.
Every year I photograph our swathe of Scadoxus katherinae, more accurately Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae. It is a remarkable display, especially to those who know plants and those who have one treasured plant that they nurse along in a pot.
Mark told me the story behind it this week. His father, Felix, had a few plants of it, but not many. He will have started with one single specimen. Back in the days, Jack Goodwin was director of Parks and Reserves in New Plymouth and Jack had a different selection of katherinae that he had picked out which he was very pleased with. It had a bigger flower and a shorter, sturdier stem. He gave one to Felix but Felix was less impressed by it.
Mark was in his earlier days of dabbling with plant breeding – a man with a paintbrush. He crossed Jack’s form with Felix’s form. Because he was crossing one clone of the species with another clone of the same species, the progeny remain the species, not hybrids. Clonal crossing doesn’t create hybrids – hybrids are a mix of different species – but it can result in increased vigour.
The rest, as they say, is history. Mark planted the seedlings at the end of the Avenue Garden where they have thrived down the decades. It is a rare example of a plant that naturalises without becoming a weed. They have just gently increased their range around the perimeter. The seeds are fairly heavy and fleshy so they are not spread by wind and presumably the birds don’t like them so they get to fall on the ground by the parent plant. I used to relocate the germinating seedlings from the paths back into the garden but now we just pull them out. We have enough.
We refer to katherinae as a bulb from South Africa but botanically, it is a bulbous perennial or a rhizomatous perennial. The bulb part is just a swollen lower stem. They are evergreen but they replace all their foliage every year so there is a period in late winter to early spring when the old foliage drops down and looks sad just as the new shoots are emerging. They are a plant for shaded woodland and will thrive in fairly tough, dry conditions with no attention at all – as seen here. However, they are not a plant for cold climates. The internet says zone 10, although we usually refer to ourselves as more zone 9 than 10. If your temperature drops below zero celsius in winter, you are in trouble.
We don’t often boast but this is a sight we doubt you will see anywhere else, except maybe in the wild.
I made that term up. It is when I spend a fair amount of time working through an area, removing a large amount of plant material and at the end of it, most people wouldn’t even see the difference because it all looks pretty much the same. Just a bit tidier.
This times ten is a lot of waste to remove from an area that is not large
In the past week, I have spent five days meticulously going through the area we refer to as ‘the grasslands’. It is a very simple planting, mostly our native Carex buchananii and Carex comans ‘Bronze’. In the process, I have removed about ten overloaded wheelbarrows full of vegetation but honestly, nobody else is likely to notice the difference. That is fine. In fact, I regard it as something of a triumph because I know it is a lot better.
The ‘before’ scene
And the ‘after’ scene looks very similar
Most of the grasses we grow are evergreen and it seems that taking the time to work them over once a year, removing spent foliage, dead patches and debris buildup in the crown of the plant keeps them looking healthy and attractive as garden plants. That is the big difference between how they grow in the wild and keeping them in the garden – the human hand making an intervention now and then. While they will seed down and establish as a colony in the wild where some dead plants and strugglers are just part of the natural cycle, a garden situation only looks natural. My intervention makes sure that each plant is standing in its own space with limited competition, either from its seedlings or indeed weeds. I also comb out the foliage on each plant to remove the buildup and to keep the festooning form rather than it becoming a tangle.
The Rimu Walk is maintained with one major, annual blitz and just the occasional tidy-up of fallen debris inbetween
We have a few other areas that also thrive and look good all year round with just one concentrated, annual blitz on maintenance. The Rimu Walk is notable. Every year, I spend a couple of weeks working my way over every plant from one end to the other and the garden waste is shipped out by the wool bale load to compost in a patch of bush elsewhere on the property. I work on rotating two wool bales and, at a rough guess, we probably move out over fifteen bales full. That is to say, I fill them and Lloyd or Zach remove them for me. At the end of it, there are no gaps in the garden, no bare areas and no indication of the time and care that has been spent but it just looks tidy, cared-for, healthy and loved. My efforts are largely invisible and I like it that way.
The spectacular Scadoxus multiflorus ssp katherinae is also managed with one major clean-up a year and very little inbetween
I refer to areas like these as ‘low maintenance’. With one thorough, detailed effort a year, there is little that needs to be done between those big clean-outs. We did one weeding round on the grasslands area in spring but nothing else. The scadoxus area will remain largely untouched until late winter again. Beneath the rimus, we will pick up fallen branches and sticks brought down by the wind and pull out the odd weed that has sneaked in but that is about it. They feel as though they are low maintenance, but if you averaged out the hours spent on that annual blitz, they are possibly not that low. It is just different maintenance, albeit that it only works in areas that are largely weed-free to start with, filled with plants that do not require ongoing staking, deadheading, cutting back, dividing, restricting or training and where a thick layer of natural mulch has built up over the years. Nor do they have edgings that need to be maintained, grass that needs to be cut or paths that need to be swept.
It is perhaps easier to see in close-up. Before…
… and after
Garden maintenance can be a bore as well as a chore. There are areas I don’t enjoy working in. But it is oddly satisfying to focus entirely on just one block, working over it in minute detail and wrapping up after a few days, a week or even more and having the area look its well-furnished best at the end of it all, despite the removal of prodigious amounts of green waste. Even better is knowing that it will remain looking fine for the better part of the next year.
Maybe it is more discreet gardening than invisible. it is also a sign of somebody who has the time and inclination to spend on such fine tuning. I am aware that for many people, garden maintenance sits somewhere closer to crisis management and that is a very different scenario.
The need for a Christmas tree became pressing. I admit that when none of the children get home for Christmas, I tend to skip that festive accoutrement. Our three all live overseas these days. But with two of them making it back this year, one with partner and daughter who was a baby last time I saw her in May but is now very much a small child, there was clearly a need for a decorated tree.
Family tradition decrees that said Christmas tree can not be a) purchased or b) a fake tinsel affair. It must be harvested or repurposed from home. This has led to considerable variation in size and type down the years.
We know it as a pohutukawa – the New Zealand Christmas tree but really only in the landscape
In the warmer parts of Aotearoa New Zealand, the pohutukawa (Metrosideros excelsa) is firmly established as the iconic ‘New Zealand Christmas tree’ but it does not lend itself to cutting to bring indoors. It is an outdoor tree. Being one of the few trees that will grow right on the coast, even on crumbling, eroding land, tolerating both wind and salt spray, it is widely grown as a street tree, on golf courses, as shelter belts and generally all round the place. Its flowering season may be short but it always comes in the lead-up to Christmas.
Pinus radiata is the main choice for Christmas trees here – quick-growing, expendable, suitable foliage and the Christmas pine scent. Christmas tree farms supply them as dense, clipped pyramids but wild collected specimens or just branches are generally more sparse. Mark has been known to wire in extra pieces to fill out bare spaces. It used to be a time-honoured tradition that families would head out to the country to harvest a tree or branch from the roadside but I am not sure that still goes on since tree farms made better specimens easily available, albeit at a price. That practice of wild collection had the potential to go wrong, of course.
The falling branch of the rather large Pinus montezumae
We lacked even a wilding pine to harvest this year. What could we use? The first plan was to retrieve some of the huge branch of Pinus montezumaewhich has split but not yet fully snapped off the tree in our park. I could see it would be messy and we would have to be creative in wiring in extra pieces because it is sparse when viewed close-up. But I felt sure a collective effort would see us equal to the task.
Ralph accompanied me on an inspection of the fallen Cercis ‘Forest Pansy’
Then the Cercis ‘Forest Pansy’ fell over. It seems to have root problems and it hadn’t even been windy when we noticed it down. It seemed more manageable than the Montezuma Pine although Mark doubted its capacity to take up enough water to keep it alive when cut off. So far, so good. It only has to last another three days so I think it will make it. It is nicely colour-toned to our pink sitting room; it cost nothing either in dollar terms or in environmental impact. It is just not your traditional Christmas tree. I had to bypass all the small decorations because of the big foliage so the decorative aspects are… restrained, shall I say? Golden balls, feather birds and my glass decorations I made back in the days when I was a moderately competent leadlighter and copper foiler and the remaining Christmas lights.
It matches the colour scheme of the sitting room – or, as daughter described it, the marshmallow lounge. On account of it being pink and white, you understand.
The long term prognosis of the propped up cercis is unknown
Lloyd and Zach took 90% of the foliage and branches off the remaining cercis and propped it back up. Only time will tell if it can recover.
Poor management, allowing the ailanthus to have two leaders at the start
Despite the fact that we have had settled, calm weather recently, we have had more than the cercis and the Montezuma branch fall. I include the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) which lost a trunk last weekend. It is a quick growing tree and something of a weed so it is no loss. But you can see how a trunk split out at the base and it is a good example of why trees should be kept to a single leader from the very start.
That is quite a long straight trunk whn seen lying on the ground, but low grade wood
The wood is too soft and light to be of any use. Lloyd has cut it into manageable lengths and at some stage soon, Zach will create one of his natural compositions in a wooded areas where they can stand as random uprights and start the process of rotting down to return to the soil.
This bird looks as though it may have come off second best in an encounter with a cat but we do not have a cat. Maybe it just had a hard life in the box of Christmas decorations.
May you and those close to you find happiness and congeniality in the festive season. Here, in Aotearoa with our summer Christmas, the country has already started the big shut down when some people at least can breathe out, indulge too much, relax and take time out as much of the country closes down for the next few weeks.
Our Wild North Garden – an experiment in a much looser style of gardening
Following on from yesterday’s post considering sustainability in gardens, a new book out of the UK take the issues of sustainability and reducing negative environmental impacts to a far more holistic view. I admit I have not yet read ‘Pastoral Gardens’ by Clare Foster with photographs by Andrew Montgomery. I am not sure it is in this country yet. I am working from the interview with her on Dig Delve, the site of Dan Pearson – an English garden designer whose work we greatly admire.
I am not sure that the term ‘pastoral gardens’ will ever catch on in this country. While the word ‘pastoral’ is evocative in England with its connotations of bucolic nostalgia, here it is more likely to be associated with ‘pasture’ which immediately summons up the mental image of intensive dairy farming. I prefer the term the ‘New Naturalism’ or even our shorthand of ‘wild gardening’.
Nigel Dunnet’s garden at the Barbican is included in the book but I hesitate over the inclusion of this Central London garden under the descriptor of a ‘pastoral garden’. It is a wonderful example, however, of a naturalistic-styled garden in a challenging environment.
What comes through very strongly in the interview, and presumably the book, is the embrace of gardening styles that work with Nature, that prioritise biodiversity and garden practices that enhance the natural environment. It is still gardening and still focused on aesthetics, but not at the cost of damaging the environment. The author won me with this quote:
“Another uniting factor for all these gardens is their need to be gardened. So many people think that wildlife-friendly gardens are relaxed, neglected spaces, that can be left to their own devices. This is certainly not the case with the gardens we showcase in this book. The role of the gardener is almost more important than ever in overseeing, managing and editing each planting scheme, ensuring that diversity is maintained, rather than one or two species taking over.”
We saw this deterioration happen over time in in the Missouri Meadow Garden at Wisley where a dominant aster had swamped out large parts of the meadow.The role of the gardeners had fallen well short on maintaining this area and I assume it had to do with the fact it needed to be monitored and maintained in a very different way to more traditional perennial plantings and they had yet to learn those skills.
Wildside, Keith Wiley’s garden in Devon, was a revelation to us in terms of complex biodiversity and still stands in our memory as one of the most exciting gardens we have visited. It is not in the book, though.
I think the author is dancing on a pin head when she attempts to differentiate current trends in naturalistic gardening from the earlier work by Irish gardener, William Robinson of Gravetye Manor in the 1880s and the more recent New Perennials movement. I may be doing her an injustice but I think she is saying that ‘pastoral gardens’ are basically the new naturalism but sitting on the higher moral ground of biodiversity. I see the difference as more linguistic. The term biodiversity is an amalgam of biological & diversity and was first coined in 1968 but didn’t enter common usage until the 1980s. Robinson didn’t have the same language to draw on but that doesn’t mean that his gardening in harmony with nature is any less for that. The loss of biodiversity, the impact of climate change and questioning of many current garden norms which run counter to the natural environment combine to give considerable urgency to the matter, but it is not necessarily new.
We grow good hostas without needing to lay slug bait or add fertiliser
We have never done any scientific study to determine the changes to our immediate garden environment when we consciously switched to more sustainable practices. That would, I am guessing, involve analysing small sections across the property, maybe 10cm squares, maybe metre squares, starting before we changed our practices and then at various points along the way. Counting the number of different insects, fungi, bacteria, animals, plant species and analysing the soil profile could prove the case. We rely on anecdotal evidence. We never use slug bait but our hostas are largely clean and lush which would suggest that we have a very healthy bird population which keeps the slugs and snails in check and indeed, we see a great deal of bird activity all the time here. But we have never taken a census of the bird population or done any comparisons. Observation tells us that it is a healthier environment but that is not scientific proof so I am somewhat cautious about making sweeping environmental claims for how we garden.
When we changed the management of the grass in our park to go with a Taranaki version of a meadow, we were not at all sure how others would react. It was even more the case when we opened the Wild North Garden which is several steps further on the naturalistic, wild gardening spectrum. When you open your garden to the public, you also open yourself to being judged. It was heartening to see an overwhelmingly positive response. It may be that the visitors who dismissed it as lazy or unkempt were too polite to say so but if that is the case, they didn’t question us or express their dislike. Most visitors visibly breathed out, relaxed and often responded to the casual environment with emotion rather than detached observation. These days, we don’t open any longer so we don’t feel at all sensitive to judgement of our garden but I have thought about it recently. In a country which places a high value on immaculate maintenance and overall tidiness in open gardens, why did visitors respond so positively to large areas which were anything but?
A marked contrast between the house gardens and the looser management in the park and the wild garden
Our Wild North Garden again
I think it is likely the contrast in our garden. We always maintain the house gardens – the area of close to two acres on the flat around the house which includes the summer gardens, the rockery, the Rimu Walk and the Avenue Gardens – to a weed-free, tidy state with areas that are quite sharply defined. The switch to the loose style of the park and the Wild North is very different and it is that contrast that makes it appear by design, not laissez faire management.
A Dan Pearson designed garden in the Cotswolds that we were lucky to visit. Formalised blocks of meadow beneath apple trees on the edge of of an otherwise tightly maintained garden.
There is a lesson there that can be applied to those gardening on a smaller scale. The juxtaposition of some formality and form with more naturalistic, wilder plantings can pull it all together. It is what Dan Pearson does really well, if you scroll through to the photos of the garden he designed and planted at Little Dartmouth Farm. You can start small. We have experimented with letting our front lawn grow and flower over summer but giving it form by mowing a double width around the edge and paths on our main walking tracks across the lawn. It is not an option if your priority is an immaculate monoculture of a lawn that resembles a green velvet sward but we long ago abandoned that approach as a crime against nature.
I would suggest that if you are starting this particular journey and struggling to reconcile it with the traditional values of tidiness and visibly tight maintenance, you may find it easier if you keep the gardens closest to the house in a controlled, tidy state but start loosening that iron grip as you move further away. It creates a transition that seems to make sense to the logical parts of our brains.
It is fine to start small; it is recognising the need to change many of the ways we garden that is the very first step. Clare Foster’s book promises to show just how successful it can be to take a much more expansive view and to integrate concerns about sustainability, biodiversity and the longer term environment alongside placing a high value on aesthetics.
When I have written about working with Nature rather than gardening by controlling Nature, about gardens that sit within the landscape rather than on the land, about gardens that are immersive and not just pictorial, I think they are just variations on the topic that Clare Foster has grouped under her term of pastoral gardens. It is the same ground that I traversed with Australian gardener, Michael McCoy and it comes through repeatedly in his social media posts.
No matter the words and terms we use, I think we are all singing from the same song sheet and it is reassuring to find that the directions we have chosen in our little corner of Tikorangi are part of a wider international trend of questioning how we garden, what we value and how we can garden more positively to support an environment that gets more degraded and threatened every day.
Soft-edged romanticism at Wildside in an area on the margins of more intensively gardened areas
For New Zealand readers: I went to order the book on line but blenched when it was going to cost as much for postage as the book. I can cope with £55 for the book but £54.95 for postage was an additional cost I will need to ponder further.
Tikorangi The Jury Garden 