Tag Archives: naturalistic gardening

Seamless transitions – doing away with garden edgings

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Beth Chatto’s dry garden in the UK was a revelation for us and, to this day, we see it as a major influence in the whole shift of direction with the New Perennials or New Naturalism movement that is more commonly attributed to Piet Oudolf.

Beth Chatto’s dry garden

Beth Chatto was planting on an old riverbed in an extremely low rainfall area and she wanted a garden that did not rely on any irrigation at all. Clearly this bears no relationship to our conditions. We never irrigate because we don’t have to; we never suffer from low rainfall. But it is the absence of garden edgings I want to draw attention to.

I don’t for one minute think that they have to do as much maintenance on their perennials in these testing conditions in Beth Chatto’s garden. We would be digging through that mulch and bringing up the soil from below all year round.

Garden edgings are basically about containing the garden and giving definition. To do away with them altogether completely changes the look and makes it far more natural in appearance – albeit while not being natural at all. I really like the look and debated about it when we were putting in the Court Garden but decided not to for practical reasons.

The Chatto garden again

It came back to mind recently, firstly with the visit of Australian, Michael McCoy and then looking at some of Penny Zino’s photographs of her summer gardens in North Canterbury. I don’t have permission to use their photos here  but you can find them both on Facebook where they post photos able to be viewed by anyone or go to their own sites – https://www.flaxmeregarden.co.nz/gallery for Penny Zino and https://thegardenist.com.au/ for Michael McCoy. I am not an Instagram user but Michael is active on that forum too as @michaelmccoyongardens. If you browse their photos, you will find examples of these seamless transitions – paths meandering through plantings in the Chatto style and very charming it is, to my eyes at least.

We used a fine, cream coloured grit that compacts well throughout the summer gardens

All of us appear to have chosen the same path surface in fine, cream grit and that, in itself, gives definition and lightness. Our grit is 50% crushed limestone and 50% crushed shell, bought from a local supplier of gravels and rocks. Beth Chatto used a mulch around the plants that is the same colour as the path grit but pebble-sized so it looks the same at first glance but it is in fact easier to rake to the side when digging is required. I didn’t notice that at the time but it is clear in my photo records. Not having seen their gardens except in photos, I don’t know whether Zino and McCoy have also carpeted their entire area in the same as mulch or whether they just allow the paths to peter out into leaf litter and soil as it goes further into the plantings.

I chose to go with an edging in the Court Garden for reasons that were entirely related to ease of maintenance but we chose an informal edge in lengths of pine bark from on site

It made me reflect on why it is not a practical option for us and why I decided against it. There are several reasons – climate, the presence of large trees, plant selection and maintenance. I think it is a dry garden technique and we are anything but. If the path surface extends through the garden as mulch, it looks best if there isn’t a whole lot of leaf litter and debris on the surface. With the number of large trees we have and being in a windy climate, we have falling leaves and debris all year round. Keeping the cream-coloured paths clear is a big enough job for us, without having to leaf rake or blow all the garden surface too.

Added to that, in our soft climate, we have rampant growth and managing perennials means constant cutting back, digging and dividing, restricting and deadheading to prevent too many self-sown seedlings. Plant selection becomes critical if you want that seamless look because every time you dig a plant, you disturb the mulch and make a mess. When set in cream grit mulch, it would be easier from the start to choose plants that grow from a central stem – lavender, euphorbias, roses, and salvias come to mind. Plants that form rosettes or spread beneath the ground – like perennial lobelias, alstromerias, asters, echinaceas, rudbeckias – all need regular attention to restrict spread or to keep healthy by dividing. I want to grow all these, too.

It is why we favour composted wood chip mulch. It is easy to top up at the end, cheap to use and, when weathered and composted, it just adds natural humus to the soil. It is best to source a woodchip that isn’t too coarse. Some mulching machines make a big chunky chip which takes much longer to weather and is not attractive to my eyes. Our friendly, local arborist (he lives up our road) provides a good grade of chip which soon becomes anonymous in appearance.  When I cut back or deadhead, I often snip the pieces to smaller sizes and leave them in situ to break down naturally. If I had decorative mulch, I couldn’t do that. 

Ralph tones in particularly well with the grassland

Our compromise was to go for that seamless look and meandering paths in the area we now loosely refer to as ‘the grassland’. It is a transitional filler space, primarily using just two native brown grasses, Carex buchananii and Carex coman’s ‘Bronze’ along with a fair swag of interlopers (‘volunteers’ as we call plants that just arrive of their own accord), residual survivors from its earlier uses and bulbs I have added for seasonal interest. So, a limited plant palette overall and most of the maintenance is pulling out seedlings (particularly of the carex) and a bit of occasional grooming of the grasses. It is not carpeted in cream grit but in woodchip – paths and mulch. It is a lower-key look that lacks the contrast and lightness given by the cream grit but it is a long-term, sustainable option in our conditions.

Seamless in woodchip

What makes a garden? The wild garden debate.

‘Wild’ gardening may be all the rage in the UK these days but it is not a discussion that we are rushing into with any enthusiasm in Aotearoa New Zealand. Maybe we are a bit sensitive in this country to the status of weeds, given that so many of our biological time bombs are garden escapes. Or maybe not. There is a possibility that the majority of homeowners in this country still prefer a neatly maintained section with tidy borders, sharp lines and an immaculate lawn.

We call this our ‘Wild North Garden’ but it would not pass the test of a wild garden in more purist circles

Whatever the case, I found this article interesting. We will gloss over the fact it is in The Telegraph, a UK publication of somewhat questionable political affiliations; it does seem to have some good gardening pieces. I will park Alan Titchmarsh to one side because I think he is a spokesperson for a past generation of gardeners. It was Monty Don’s comments that interested me because some of us are familiar with his garden through BBC’s Gardeners’ World and I would have described much of his garden as being ‘naturalistic’ in style, verging on ‘wild gardening’ at times. It seems that ‘wild gardening’ in the UK is a great deal wilder than I had thought.

“It is as though a so-called ‘wild’ garden that mimics natural conditions is somehow worthier and more moral than one in which mankind’s creative skills are more obviously played out.

“This is puritanical nonsense.  If you want a truly wild garden then simply walk away. Leave any patch of ground completely untouched by human hand and it will happily become whatever it wants to be.

“The result might be beautiful and richly satisfying as well as very good for wildlife of all kinds, but it will not be a garden.”.

Monty Don in The Telegraph
This was the first deliberately wild or naturalistic garden I had seen, in Marlborough back in 2008. While looking very natural, the whole area had been recontoured and replanted, using native plants of the area. I loved it and how it sat in its wild landscape, even though it was not pretty and contained no elements traditionally associated with gardens. At the time, I wondered if it was a garden or a landscape; now I am happy to describe it as a garden.

I think he makes a useful distinction. I see he has been on this topic for a while. The best in show title at Chelsea Flower Show last year was won by a so-called wild garden created by two people who describe themselves as “passionate ecological restorationists”, rather than gardeners. I can’t read the whole article about Monty Don questioning whether their display was actually a garden at all because I am not willing to sign up to The Telegraph, even though they offer the first month free. I have my own standards when it comes to media. Ecological restoration is a different kettle of fish, to my mind. It involves eco-sourcing plant material (limiting plants to those sourced from local plant populations), keeping to native plants only with a purist vision of returning land to how we think it may have been in earlier times, usually prior to European settlement. Aesthetics are not a factor when it comes to ecological restoration, although the end result may well be visually pleasing to some.

Yes, we do ‘garden’ this area, but differently to other areas.

Of course, many of our weeds in this country are native wildflowers in the UK so rewilding with those may have a prettier result without being tainted by the connotations of rampant, invasive pest plants. We are a bit thin on pretty- flowered, native perennials and annuals in this country, although we have a wealth of beautiful flowering trees and shrubs and some splendid grasses.

Our personal take on wild gardening here at Tikorangi would not meet the purity test. Not by a long shot. We started the Wild North Garden with a mix of both native plants and exotics and have continued with that. We still carry out weed control. We have to in our conditions or it would deteriorate into a weedy mess in a single season. But we don’t remove every weed as we attempt to in the more tightly managed areas of the garden.

Wild gardening is NOT a case of shutting up an area and letting Nature take over, as some assume. It is not an excuse for lazy gardening. It is a different way of managing an area, a lighter hand, way less emphasis on tight control and instead viewing an area through different eyes with different expectations.  

Simple solutions, not man-made focal points

We have shunned contrived ‘focal points’ and garden features that are clearly made by human hands. The simple bridges and a couple of bench seats are the only man-made structures although, in reality, the whole area has been reshaped, re-formed and planted by human hands. We do a lot of lifting and limbing to get view shafts and a sense of distance in the area. There are no defined borders or garden beds but we continue to add plants that we think can blend in, add interest, compete with competition from other plants and survive with minimal maintenance. There is no deadheading, seasonal cutting back or staking. Management of the area – which our property title tells me is close to 4 acres or a hectare – is light-handed but manage it we do.

We do a lot of lifting and limbing of trees and shrubs to create view shafts and vistas while keeping a more natural feel.

That is what we are calling wild gardening. At a personal level, when I am leading people through the garden, I always finish up in the Wild North Garden and as I walk down the hillside to enter it, I can feel myself breathing out and relaxing. I find I talk less and more quietly. It feels different to every other area of the garden and very, very different to the more tightly maintained, detailed areas. I love that different feel.

Regenerating native vegetation on a roadside bank just north of the Tongaporutu Bridge. it was beautiful enough in the morning light to make me stop the car to look but it is not a garden.

I am with Monty Don, though. I think, by definition, a garden requires a human vision, a sense of aesthetics and human hands in its creation and ongoing management. Nature can be very beautiful and natural environments can nourish the human spirit or even take one’s breath away; Nature can establish and support an extensive ecosystem if given the opportunity. But that does not make it a garden. Wild gardening or naturalistic gardening is a human attempt to find the meeting ground between a garden and the natural environment that also fulfils a purely human aesthetic.  

This is from one of our most favourite gardens ever – Wildside in North Devon. Most of Keith Wiley’s remarkable garden is anything but wild – it is highly detailed naturalistic plantings. This was a new area he was just starting to expand into and it had that loose, soft feeling that I associate with wild gardens.

In partnership with Nature

Mark counted more than sixty rings in the cut trunk so the abies must have been planted around 1960

The clean-up from Cyclone Dovi is continuing here at a cracking pace. Zach started on the large, fallen abies in the park and has almost finished it. We were relieved to find that damage to the bridge beneath is minimal. A few more centimetres to one side and it could have wiped out most of the bridge. This would have been a problem for us, had it twisted the metal chassis beneath the bridge timbers.

Wisteria Blue Sapphire on the bridge has been hammered but will recover, the azalea has been extensively damaged but should also recover and Magnolia Lotus on the right lost some branches as the abies fell but the bridge just had railings broken.

Because it is right at the bottom of the park, dealing with the debris is an issue. Mark was not interested in the timber for firewood. We burned the Abies procera we dropped a few years ago but it proved to be a very light timber and we have better options. Access issues mean it isn’t practical to offer the wood to people who are less picky about their firewood and we don’t want to haul the whole lot out with our baby tractor, so creativity is required.

We debated about hiring an industrial-grade mulcher to deal with all the branches and foliage but decided in the end to burn it nearby. It leaves a dead patch in the grass but that can be resown and will disappear in a year or so. It is less work than having to disperse a mountain of wood chip in an area where we don’t need mulch.

But what to do with the lengths of trunk that can’t be left where the tree fell across the stream?

I like the shape of this fallen pine tree that perched itself up on its side branches like some freeform crocodile or giant lizard. It is decaying so it will drop at some point but that is fine.

We re-use a lot of fallen material here. Suitable thinner lengths of branches are sometimes used to edge garden beds and borders where appropriate. Where we can, we clean up fallen trees, reducing them just to the main trunk and then garden around them. Over time, they rot down and start to disintegrate but that is part of the long-term cycle.

This was a substantial length of pine tree that fell and then rolled into a most convenient position on the edge of a path.

Where this is not an option, we will cut the trunks to manageable lengths, take out what we want for firewood and place the rest. Other gardens may have sculptures and installations that are clearly made by human hands; we have casual installations of wood, sometimes as stumperies and sometimes just as low-key placements.

Defining the path with pine tree sections

We have already placed the pine lengths from the Avenue Gardens that were surplus to firewood replacements. At least some of the abies is destined for another use – giving height and structure to a rather casual area of planting. This is an area that has no name yet, where the Avenue Gardens transition down the hill to the park – I wrote about it once on blurring the transition from well-tended gardens to more laissez-faire outer reaches. We may have to come up with some shorthand name rather than referring to it as ‘the bit beside the steps coming down from the Avenue Gardens to the Mangletia insignis”.

Stacking lengths of abies to use in a different area

This is Mark’s vision. Neither Zach nor I can grasp yet what he has in mind, although Zach has carted abies lengths to this area in preparation. Zach and I are pretty good on placing individual bits as punctuation marks in the garden but not on creating entire structures. We will both watch and learn as it happens. I have every confidence in Mark’s skills in this endeavour

Felix used ponga logs and stumps to create his section of what we now call the Rimu Avenue

Our feature Rimu Avenue is essentially a stumpery, created as a pragmatic solution to enable plants to grow in dry shade where the enormous trees above are sucking all the goodness and moisture from the ground beneath. They are a naturalistic, raised bed solution. The oldest section was created in the 1950s by Mark’s dad, Felix and he used ponga logs and stumps (NZ tree ferns, for overseas readers). These are remarkably durable – still serving their purpose after 70 years.

Mark used whatever timber he had to hand when he doubled the length of the Rimu Avenue to give both structure and raised beds

When Mark doubled the length of the Rimu Avenue 20 years ago, he was disinclined to go out to the bush to harvest ponga so he used what we had to hand – a bit of ponga but mostly lengths of trees that have fallen here.

A simple feature. It will only last a few years because it is just a section of banglow palm trunk but it will decay gracefully

Somewhat unintentionally, our labour saving strategies are creating a theme throughout the entire garden – the re-use of fallen timber to create focal points, casual structure and different environments for plants as well as stowing lengths of fallen or felled trees in a way we find aesthetically and environmentally pleasing. It has been happening here for years. Cyclone Dovi has just accelerated it.

It all decays over time but don’t we all?

I see the date on this photo is 2004, probably very soon after Mark asked Lloyd to bury the upturned plum tree stumps to make a natural feature
In 2022 – today in fact – those stumps are getting ever smaller and less of a feature but that is part of Nature doing what Nature does.

When is a wild garden too wild to be comfortable?

I have never written about Waltham Place in Berkshire that we visited in 2014. To a large extent that is because there was a total ban on taking photos there – I have no idea why. But also, we weren’t at all sure when we walked out of the garden if we had just seen something cutting-edge as claimed by some or whether it was a case of the emperor’s new clothes. The fact that we are still talking about six years later suggests the former – that it was indeed sufficiently cutting-edge to challenge our preconceived notions.

Resorting to photographing photos in a book….

I couldn’t find photographs on line that were available for reuse though you may wish to google the name and see more for yourself. I had to resort to photographing pages from ‘The New English Garden’ by Tim Richardson. These images are a fine example of how structure photographs well and gives form and solid shape to a scene that may not look quite the same to the naked eye. Make that ‘does not look the same to the naked eye’. This garden pushed the concept of naturalism further than we were comfortable with and it was considerably wilder, or rougher, than it appears in photos.

Thinking about it again recently, I figure it took the conventions of what I call the pictorial English manor style of garden design and turned them on their head. Most, if not all of the structure pre-dated the current garden and that suited the style of Dutch designer, Henk Gerritsen. He was heavily influenced by the famous Dutch landscape designer from the preceding generation, Mien Ruys with the philosophy of ‘a wild planting in a strong design’. Gerritsen was attracted to wild plants and his approach was to utilise many wild plants – what are often referred to as weeds. Memorably, his willingness to use plants like burdock, docks, teasels and bindweed (common convolvulus) in decorative situations is disconcerting. He was good friends with Piet Oudolf – these days crowned the undisputed king of the New Perennials movement – and drew on at least of the garden plants that Oudolf had picked out as excellent options but pushed his gardens right to the wild, most naturalistic end of the spectrum. Oudolf is far more controlled and painterly in his use of plants.

From ‘The New English Garden’ by Tim Richardson

The twin borders also use strong design which looks far more effective viewed from above than at ground level – and indeed the main upstairs rooms in the house look down at them. At ground level, I remember them being very brown. This was not a pretty garden.

Although Gerritsen’s interest in plants started with looking at wild flowers in their natural habitats all over Europe over a period of quite a few years, his palette of plants had far more to do with wild plants naturalised at Waltham Place. I can not say that we recall much botanical depth in terms of drawing on many of the remarkable wild flowers especially bulbs, that occur in those parts of the world. It was more of an intellectual exercise looking at the plants used within that garden situation where it becomes survival of the fittest with a very light hand indeed on garden maintenance. So, as a garden, it lacked two of the elements we value highly – botanical curiosity and some level of prettiness and beauty in plant combinations. It is a garden that needs to be viewed through a different set of glasses altogether and we only partially succeeded at that. We did at least leave with an open mind.

Sunset Garden near New Plymouth

As New Zealanders, these wild plants are introduced and often invasive weeds in our country. It is a bit different when they are in fact native to your land. Maybe we would feel more comfortable with this style of gardening were the emphasis on our indigenous plants. In fact, I have seen it done locally in Sunset Garden, I think it was called, on a chilly site set with some elevation on the flanks of our local mountain. I believe the site was once the home of the local naturist club before they moved to a warmer location down by the sea. That garden certainly had a charm of its own, albeit with zero hard landscaping and a light hand on maintenance but some may struggle to view it as a garden in the usual understanding of the word.

Sunset Garden again

It is all food for thought when we consider how our garden practices fit in to the wider environment, what we value visually and our relationship with nature.

Finally two quotes from Henk Gerritsen which, I think, come from his renowned Essay on Gardening, published just before his premature death in 2008. I haven’t bought it yet (it is a book length essay) because I haven’t psyched myself up to spend $120 on a book with black and white photos:

‘What is straight, should be curved, what is curved, should be straight. Meaning: in a garden where everything is straight, the walls or hedges around it and the path through it, the secondary landscaping should be curved: sloping or freakish paths, hedges, lawns or borders and the other way around: in a freakish or shapeless garden the secondary landscaping should be straight, in order to obtain a harmonious image.’

‘Plants that can’t live without the use of chemical fertilizers or pesticides don’t belong in my garden.’

Sunset Garden may not be sufficiently gardenesque for some tastes

 

Green breathing space

Informal green space at Pettifers in Oxfordshire, a private garden created by Gina Price

Have you ever walked around a garden that is so full, hectic even, that you come out feeling exhausted? I have. Several in fact, but one in particular. I don’t like to show a photo of it because while I think he may have died, I am pretty sure a number of his friends will read this. It is an affliction more commonly seen in small urban gardens where the owner is so keen that they want to use every bit of available space. And uncultivated space is seen as wasted space.

I am sure that trained garden designers are taught the value of incorporating open space – part of what is often referred to as ‘negative space’, I think. I call it breathing space – a restful area which gives respite in a particularly busy garden. But not many of us use skilled garden designers and the notion that quiet areas need as much attention in planning as actively maintained areas filled with plants and colour may be a foreign idea.

Wild green space at Hestercomb

In practice, most of us use mown grass to achieve this. When I first wrote about green breathing spaces in 2010, I clearly had not looked past the garden lawn as an option. And we still have extensive grass lawns and pathways that we mow to fill this function. Mark is missing Lloyd during lockdown here as the mowing of the grass is his role. Yesterday, Mark hopped on the new lawnmower and headed over to mow our tenants’ lawns across the road. He came back somewhat stunned at how fast the new Walker mower goes. Slightly unnerved, he was, by its top speed, comparing it to a race the mower would win if competing against a sprinting human.

Mondo grass instead of lawn

I was recently asked about using mondo grass instead of lawn grass which had me finding a piece I published in 2015, showing the use Auckland gardener and photographer, Gil Hanly has made of mondo grass to give a green breathing space in her very busy and full city garden.

Lawns have a purpose if you have children who like to play cricket or any ball games outside. We used to play family badminton on our front lawn way back when we still undertook such wholesome family fun. It is a better home option than tennis when you don’t have a fully netted court. And lawns have a function if you entertain larger numbers of people outdoors. Beyond that, they are basically green space, framing garden and landscape views, or keeping the amount of garden space to a manageable level. It is easier to mow grass than to maintain most garden areas.

Pictorial green space as perfect circle at Sissinghurst 

Green space at Wildside 

Wildside again

But what if you have a wilder or more naturalistic garden and don’t want to mow green spaces? I found a few examples when I was going through photos for my last post. While Sissinghurst and Hidcote have very clearly constructed green breathing spaces integral to the garden, the modern gardens we have visited have their own take on the same need.

This area could have been all mown lawn but how lovely is that combination of mown grass and molinia meadow? Piet Oudolf at Bury Court

The combination of both lawns and green space in the molinia meadow at Bury Court may strike a chord with many, as it did with me. Definitely less wild, more designer-led and immaculate in its own way, it still fills the function of giving a calming experience in a complex garden.

Green space doesn’t have to be mown lawn.

I find Piet Oudolf’s molinia meadows a great deal more pleasing as green space 

… than his more formal green breathing space at Scampston that was altogether too redolent of a graveyard for my liking

Easter greetings from my corner of a locked down world to all of you in your lock down locations.