Tag Archives: British Gardens TV series

Pushing the boundaries

I said in last week’s post that I would return to Waltham Place and Knepp Castle, along with ‘rewilding’. Both are visited in episode 4 of Monty Don’s British Gardens series.

Waltham Place first because we were fortunate to talk our way into seeing it in person in 2014. It was certainly challenging and interesting and continues to be food for thought a decade later. I have written about it here, but without photographs because one condition of entry was that we not take photographs. Did we like it? Not particularly. We prefer prettier gardens with more focus on plant interest but that was irrelevant then and remains so now.

This is my one and only photo from Waltham Place – taken when we parked the car before our pleasant host specified that the owners did not want photos taken by visitors.

In retrospect, I think it may sit as a side adjunct to the whole genre of conceptual gardens. In a pure form, conceptual gardens are where design, space and integrated art installations – the last being of a symbolic, architectural, intellectual-bordering-on-esoteric nature – take precedence over more traditional garden values. Think Little Sparta or Plaz Metaxu To some extent, I think Belgian designers Jacques and Peter Wirtz belong here too. They are landscape architects and their speciality is treating outdoor space as architecture where form and space are the most important aspects. We have never sought these gardens out because our interests take us in other directions.

Why would I put Waltham Place into this wider genre? Because the concept and philosophy that underpins the garden is arguably more important than what you see. It seemed very much an intellectual exercise.  Planted around 2000, it utilised all the existing elements of a traditional, English, Arts and Crafts garden (huge brick pergola, walled garden, gazebo on stilts, ponds, graceful manor house etc) but the plantings are on the wild side with a very light hand indeed on maintenance. The designer was Dutchman, Henk Gerritsen and it adheres closely to the philosophy of his muse from an earlier generation, Mien Ruys: “a wild planting in a strong design”. Dare I say it – the strong design element at Waltham Place means that it photographs and films rather better than the actual experience of visiting in person.

Gerritsen died at a relatively young age in 2007. Had he lived longer, I think it would have been interesting to see how his style evolved further over time because he was a philosopher with a passion for wildflowers as much as a landscape architect.  Waltham Place was certainly cutting edge at the start of the new millenium.

Neither Waltham Place nor Knepp Castle, but a wild-ish scene that charmed me on the day.

Knepp Castle, in the same episode, is very recent – just a few years old, in fact. I haven’t been there but it appears to be the new cutting edge, arousing strong opinions. I have heard it praised to the sky but also savaged as a travesty of a traditional, walled garden.

Walled gardens are not uncommon in Britain. Often encompassing areas that are measured in acres and a lasting monument to brickies of old, they were originally sheltered kitchen gardens, orchards and picking gardens so productive and utilitarian. These days, they are widely repurposed as ornamental gardens. It is quite a leap to change them from being a productive garden in times past to being purely ornamental as at Scampston Hall. Is it such a big leap to then heavily modify the contour and soil to make a naturalistic garden?

Not Knepp Castle – I have no photos of that location. This is Wildside in the rain and there seem to be strong parallels, albeit on very different budgets.

I was going to say that, to me, Knepp Castle looks like having its roots in Beth Chatto’s dry garden from the 1960s with strong elements of James Hitchmough’s Missouri meadow at Wisley from the mid 2000s, meeting Tom Stuart-Smith’s expansive perennial terraces, some modern European gardens and generous lashings of what Keith Wiley has created at Wildside – but all combined in a project started in 2020. I looked up their website and indeed the designers involved included Stuart-Smith and Hitchmough as well as Jekka McVicar and Mick Crawley whom I had not heard of but is apparently an emeritus professor of plant ecology at Imperial College in London. That is quite the team.

I am with Monty Don. I hesitate use the words rewilding, or even restorative gardening at Knepp Castle, but I love the naturalistic look and the underpinning principles of gardening in cooperation with Nature, not by iron-fisted, human control. But you have to intervene all the time, as the owner said, or it will just be taken over by weeds. My reservations – and, it seems, Monty’s – are about semantics not principles or indeed the end result which is a lovely example of modern naturalism in gardening, rich in plant interest.

To me, rewilding and restoration are more akin to what we know in this country as ‘riparian planting’***. Or maybe planting an area in eco-sourced natives or shutting up an existing area of native plants and then assiduously weeding out invading plants of exotic origin. That is not gardening.

What is being referred to as rewilding or restorative gardening in Britain is what we describe as naturalistic gardening, sometimes veering into wild gardening. Same principles, different words.

I don’t think there is a big difference between what we call our Wild North Garden here and what the Knepp Castle folk call ‘rewilding’
Naturalistic, maybe modern, here at Tikorangi but not what we would describe as rewilding.

It seems to me that the controversial aspect of Knepp Castle lies mostly in the repurposing of a walled garden to carry out this experiment in naturalism. I have only seen it in episode 4 of Monty Don’s British gardens but I have watched that segment three times. I much preferred it to the walled garden (I think in episode 3) which had been planted out in wide rows of perennials as a nod to its more traditional food producing days. That one had all the romance and panache of production nursery stock beds in our eyes (retired nursery people here) with none of the skills and delights of plant combinations, let alone any actual merit in design.

I would put Knepp Castle on my visiting list, were I planning another trip to Britain, even though I struggle with the idea of thinking like a beaver or a wild boar when it comes to garden maintenance.

***Riparian planting is being strongly promoted by our regional councils, mandatory in some situations. It is fencing off and planting the banks of waterways, generally in native plants, with the aim of preventing farmland runoff contaminating rivers and streams. In quaint rural parlance, I understand the measure of a waterway that should – or must – be fenced and planted is that it be ‘wider than a stride and deeper than a Redband’. Redband is the brand of gumboots most often worn in farming communities. That is probably what most people in this country would see as rewilding.

Our Wild North Garden again. I liked the layers from this angle.

Monty Don on British Gardens

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.