Tag Archives: Great Dixter

Succession planning and gardening values

Somewhat unrelated flower photos from this week to make the text pretty – captions at the end

“A garden dies with its owner.” Those words were attributed to the late Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter fame and repeated to us by one who worked with him. At the time, the renowned gardener Lloyd was being asked about succession plans. In the event, Dixter was transferred to a private trust and has continued to change and develop under the control of Lloyd’s former head gardener, Fergus Garrett, who has earned his own place in the annals of UK garden history. That is a comparatively rare example of the successful transfer of a garden after the death of its originator.

We visited Great Dixter in 2009 and planned to return on the 2020 trip we had to cancel when Covid struck.

The big difference at Great Dixter is that Fergus Garrett was not tasked with the requirement that he preserve the garden as it was in the time of Christopher Lloyd, frozen in time, as it were. It appears he was given a free hand to continue to develop and change the garden as he saw appropriate. Too often, when a garden transfers ownership or management, with it comes the expectation that it will be preserved as the originator created it and that rarely, if ever works. Time moves on, trees grow, micro-climates change and so do techniques and expectations.

Great Dixter again

I realised recently that when I visit gardens, I want to see elements of dynamic change, of current energies, dreams and visions, not just the preservation of the past, no matter how famous or significant that past was. As Mark and I age, I often think how lucky Mark’s dad Felix was to have Mark at his gardening side for the last 17 years of his life. He died knowing that his garden was in safe hands, going forward, not just being maintained or, worse, going back. That is a rare situation. Most of us just have to accept that our gardens may well die with us and hope that at least the good long-term trees may survive. As I say, relatively cheerfully, we will be dead and we won’t know. Christopher Lloyd was just being realistic.

The Lloyd quote came from Australian garden designer, writer, educator and presenter, Michael McCoy who brought a tour through here last week. Michael first visited here this time last year as he was scouting for this tour and we spent a remarkable couple of hours going around our garden in the rain. I have never met anybody before who was so utterly in tune with how we garden here – with our dreams and aspirations, who knew and admired the same international gardens, trends and people who have inspired us, who has walked such a similar gardening path across the decades – yet we had never met before. We don’t accept many tour bookings these days but it was on the strength of that shared ground that I agreed to Michael bringing his masterclass tour here.

A tour is not the time for extended conversations between the tour leader and the garden host because it is focused on making the experience as good as possible for the tour participants but we did have a brief conversation – again – about garden edgings. Regular readers will recognise this topic from earlier writings. I am not a fan and I am busy removing unnecessary edgings, particularly in the Avenue Garden. Michael McCoy and I agree on this topic. As far as I am concerned, there are only a few reasons for garden edgings – be they in a row of identical plants or a more permanent material. One practical reason is to retain mulch on the garden bed when the birds will otherwise scratch and distribute it onto adjacent areas; another is to retain the garden when there is a variation in level with the path either higher or lower than the surrounding planted areas; the third reason is to stop people walking on planted areas but this no longer applies now that we no longer open to the public. I have been reviewing all our garden edgings and removing those that are not necessary. When we cut a sharp line at the edge of a lawn, do we need another sharp line on the edge of the garden? No, we do not.

The fourth reason for edgings is entirely aesthetic and values-based. It is to make a garden look tidy. I laughed when, immediately after the tour left, I came inside and my news feed showed me this: Gardening: Hedges and edges add structure – and hide weeds. It is paywalled, I am  sorry, but just the heading, the accompanying photo and the bio note on the author will give you the flavour of the piece. I read the whole article and it is not that there is anything wrong in what the author has written. It is just that he is espousing the widespread use of both hedging and particularly edging plants to give definition to a garden and to add formality. His views on good gardening are very different to where our thinking is. Many gardeners favour this approach and will happily edge their gardens in compact buxus (B. koreana is a better option than the more common suffruticosa or sempervirens in these days of buxus blight), euonymus, liriope or dwarf carex.

It made me realise again just how far we have moved from seeing gardens as orderly, tidy affairs that sit on the landscape. Instead, we want to garden in a way that sits harmoniously within the wider environment, working with nature rather than imposing rigid control. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks, as the saying goes. There are other ways to garden.

Not exactly straightjacketed into tidy orderliness down by the stream where the Higo iris are blooming

It was most affirming to meet somebody with considerable international experience who shares our gardening values. If you want to see more of Michael McCoy’s writings, photographs and videos on related topics, you will find him by his name on both Facebook and Instagram or his own site, https://thegardenist.com.au/

Not a lion in the meadow, a Ralph in the meadow

We have had Ralph for over two years now and he has met a reasonable number of visitors and several tours but I have never seen him perform as he did with this tour. He was sure he was the star in front of an appreciative audience. “Look at me! See how high I can jump! I can almost fly!” as he launched himself in the air after a passing bumblebee. “Follow me. This way please.” “Look over here!” “And here!” “Stand aside, dog coming through.” This continued all the way around the garden, where he must have covered ten times the distance of the humans. I suspect he was rewarded at afternoon tea with tastings of cake and biscuits – thereby breaking our iron rule of never feeding him tidbits when we are eating – but that is the way of tour groups. He was exhausted when they left and zonked out to sleep. Life has been very quiet for him in the days since.

The Higo iris are flowering in the park and truly, it is one of my favourite times of year in that area. Every year they make my heart sing in delight.

Purple penstemons, euphorbia and bright alstromeria in the borders. I haven’t had much success with penstemons in the past but now think I should try more.

It seems that the rabbit family who live beneath the swimming pool deck, who used to chew the lilac blue campanula to the ground, have gone and the next generations haven’t realised they are edible. One of the more compact alstromerias behind – name unknown.

Sisyrinchium striatum, I think, with white Iris sibirica. It is a pretty iris but very soft in the petal so it is inclined to weather mark more than other Siberian iris we grow.

Even with the best laid plans, volunteers can arrive and look as if they belong. I have NO recollection of planting the purple Higo iris by the the Phlomis russeliana and I am sure I never planted the euphorbia. The colour contrasts are startling but I like that in the summer borders.

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.