Tag Archives: Tikorangi: The Jury garden

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’s British Gardens. Part 2 – from a New Zealand perspective.

“What do you think the ingredients of a typical English or British garden are?”

“That is an interesting one. I would say hedges, borders, grass, (something inaudible to a NZ ear) and enough manicuring in some parts that it looks cared for. I think it is that mix of formality, the manicured elements and the wilder, more romantic parts that make the British garden especially British.”

Monty Don in conversation with Chris Crowder, head gardener at Levens Hall in episode two of the TV series ‘British Gardens’.

“Yesss!” I said out loud and went back and replayed it. Not just British gardens – that is a pretty accurate description of how we personally garden in Aotearoa NZ. I would qualify that we don’t do topiary here so much as some heavy clipping but it serves the same end of giving definition and form in the garden. And I would add a high level of plant interest which is another feature of British gardens (and very much so in our own garden). It is perhaps an understandable omission on Chris Crowder’s part, given that he manages a garden that dates back to 1690 (!) and is famed for its topiary.

In brief, Monty Don’s summary of the essence of British gardening seemed to come down to a few key points.

Gregarth Hall, the home and garden of Arabella Lennox-Boyd, was not featured in the TV series. To us, it is a fine example of the quintessential British garden of the late twentieth century built around some splendid architecture from earlier generations.
Gresgarth incorporated topiary.

Firstly that British gardening is deeply rooted in eighteenth century landscape design (think Capability Brown and his peers designing grand landscapes for the rich and powerful) and that, to this day, a high value is placed on that long history. Many British gardens have wonderful, historic architecture features – be they massive walls from old walled gardens, ruins, follies, pretty manor houses or even castles.

Those early funders also supported plant hunters combing the world for new plants which were welcomed with delight back in their homeland in a rarified pursuit of competition and one-upmanship. To this day, British gardening is a celebration of the ability to grow a huge range of different plants collected from around the globe and plant range is a defining feature. I remember quipping after my first trip to Italy – a magnolia conference tour – that they basically gardened with the same ten plants but that is not true of British gardens, or indeed New Zealand ones.

British botanists kept up the tradition of plant collecting. The Tetracentron sinensis in our park dates back to Frank Kingdon-Ward who financed some of his expeditions by subscription. Felix Jury paid in advance to receive seed back in the 1950s. We could have done without the rhus but the tetracentron is a fine tree.

Secondly, climate. In global terms, Britain generally enjoys a moderately temperate climate and there is no doubt that it is easier to garden in a climate without extremes. I don’t think their climate is quite as good as some of the people in the programme asserted but I would say that, as a New Zealander.

Thirdly, Monty Don talked about his homeland as a place where people ‘learn the language from an early age’. I think it is a bit more complex than that. What I see is a place where gardening has been both professionalised and institutionalised over a long period of time, which has given leadership and placed a value on it which is often lacking in other countries. Gardening, not just the broader notion of horticulture, is a respected profession. There is an established career path and high-quality training. Added to that, there is considerable support from institutions like Kew, The Royal Horticulture Society with their major gardens and in the media. BBC Gardeners’ World has been running since 1968 on primetime television, for goodness sake, and still has a loyal following. There is quite the collection of other TV garden programmes, both good and execrable, and garden celebrities who are actually celebrated, as opposed to just being recognisable. The vast majority of domestic gardening is done by amateurs but there is institutional knowledge to underpin much of that, and a strongly educative side.

In this country we haven’t had a proper TV garden programme for over two decades. That is despite census data regularly showing that gardening is one of the most popular leisure pursuits. I have long figured that nobody in the TV programme commissioning area has understood this simple fact, nor have they seen past the dated formula of instant garden makeovers.

Britain is a densely populated country with much more restricted personal space. This means that large numbers of people want to get out and about in their leisure time. With gardening so embedded in the national psyche, that often includes garden visiting and the level of visitor numbers supports both public and private gardens.

Hatfield House – again not in the Monty Don series – but an example of the style emulated by some aspirational NZ gardeners.

In Aotearoa NZ, we have taken on some of the same gardening values, although our colonial interpretation of British garden design is more Arts and Crafts (garden rooms) than 17th century pastoral landscape. With our benign climate, we certainly place a high value on growing a wide range of plants and having an attractive home garden – albeit quite a few want it to be both attractive and low maintenance. With a small population and overall low density of housing, the majority of people have private outdoor space. So yes, we do garden a lot. But overall, we lack that professional and institutional backbone of British gardening.

Great Dixter, the garden of the late Christopher Lloyd, is given credit for its significant contribution to gardening directions in recent decades in Britain.
Similarly, Beth Chatto is accorded a major place in the history of British gardening. She was pioneering sustainability long before we were even aware of climate change.

It was interesting to hear discussion on the impacts of climate change threaded throughout all the episodes. Many gardeners and Don himself referenced it as they discussed the gardens and future considerations. All I can say is that I am not seeing that sort of discussion in this country where the prevailing views seem to be either a loud ‘harrumph’ of denial or, at best, issues of climate change are pushed out to the margins as not being a relevant issue at a personal or local level. We have not normalised it as a factor in planning for the immediate – or even distant – future. We may be in for a shock as we continue to treat extreme weather events as one-offs rather than part of a larger pattern which is set to get considerably more extreme in a shorter space of time than originally thought.

Allotments – this one in suburban London. It is not from the TV programme but Mark and I often wandered allotments on our travels. These have a long history and are basically areas divided into small plots which are leased to individuals at a low annual rent, predominantly – but not exclusively – to grow food on a non-commercial basis. Their continued popularity is testament to the drive to grow gardens even in densely populated areas where people do not have personal space around their home.

Facebook showed me a post by Gardens Illustrated on one of our most favourite gardens, Wildside and I read the comments. “Lovely series but it would be nice to see some ‘normal’ gardens”. Reader, what is a ‘normal garden’? The series gave considerable attention to both the wonderful British phenomenon of allotments as well as community gardens, alongside a potted history of the evolution of gardening down the past 450 years, touching on the most innovative recent developments.

I suspect a ‘normal garden’ equals ‘a garden like mine’ to that Facebook commenter.

“Rewilding” will have to wait. I will return to Knepp Castle and Waltham Place and the questions they raise in the future.

Harbingers of autumn

It may still feel like high summer where we are, but the flowers do not lie. We are on the cusp of autumn.

Colchicum autumnale

Summer here in North Taranaki has not followed its usual pattern. While we are always slower to warm up in November and December than the east coast, it didn’t really feel like summer until mid January. I don’t swim in cold water and I wasn’t tempted into the pool until well into January. Since then, we have been in and out of the water every day in an unseasonably warm and dry spell. A couple of degrees of extra heat on an ongoing basis makes quite a difference when you spend most of your days outdoors in the garden.

A stray belladonna in the raspberry cage was the first autumn bulb I noticed this season

And dry. I know when we talk about dryness, others may scoff. We all adapt to our own, local conditions and we expect rain on a regular basis all through the year. Mark, a keen weather watcher who could have happily pursued a career on meteorology, tells me we only had 40ml in January and that fell basically on one day, late in the month. We don’t ever water the garden (except for some of the vegetables) and we have no irrigation system; it isn’t necessary in our climate and nor does it seem like good practice but we are seeing some floppy looking plants and some early dropping of leaves.

Even the first nerines are opening

When the autumn bulbs started flowering in what still feels like high summer, I assumed they were being triggered by day length, as vireya rhododendrons are. They are certainly not being triggered by change in temperature, either day or night. Mark pointed out that it may well be that one day of rain in January that triggered them into growth and that makes sense because many bulbs are identified as summer rainfall bulbs.

Lilium formasanaum is a bit controversial in this country. It is on the Pest Plants Accord so illegal to propagate or sell. We keep it because it is showy and not a problem in our garden but also, it is not in a situation where it can escape from the garden to become a problem elsewhere.

Zach and I are waiting for rain so we can move plants again. We have plans we want to get underway. At least we know that here, with a temperate, maritime climate, the rains will come. While our high summer may be of short duration, so too is the depth of winter which we measure in weeks, not months. We have exceptionally long autumn and spring seasons and that does make for a good gardening climate.

A self-seeded Moraea polystachya on the side of the drive. Of all the autumn bulbs, this moraea probably has the longest flowering season.

The autumn bulbs are one of our seasonal highlights.

The Worsleya procera is opening! This bulb is one we take some pride in because it is rare in cultivation, even rarer to see it flowering in a garden situation and it is very choice. It is generally grown as a pot plant in carefully controlled conditions. The lilac colour deepens and spreads as the flower opens.

Finding form

I meant to continue with Monty Don’s British Gardens series this week but I haven’t spent the time watching a second time to clarify my thoughts so that must wait. Instead, I channelled my former garden writer persona to capture a before and after as I pruned a camellia.

I was flattered when a gardening friend and camellia aficionado complimented us on our camellia pruning last year. I think his comment was along the lines of how much he notices and admires it every time he comes into the garden. It is not that we prune all our camellias by any manner of means and we do clip, shape, restrict or clean up in many different styles, depending on the role each plant plays in the garden. One size does not fit all.

The before photo…

Camellia minutiflora is a dainty little species with the prettiest of tiny flowers and naturally arching growth which we like enough to have maybe half a dozen specimens through the garden. Normally, we try and prune in early to mid-spring but, as I cleaned up the border in which this one sits this week, I could not ignore that it needed some work done on it, albeit in the height of summer. In so doing, I cut a lot of flower buds off but it has so many that it doesn’t matter and the form is more important, really.

I started by taking off all the growths that were shooting straight up because we want to accentuate the arching growth. Second was pruning back the branches that were arching out too far; third was lifting and thinning from the bottom up. Finally, I thinned out what remained, tracing branches back to the trunk and checking how much bulk we would lose if I took off the whole branch. Always, I try to cut flush to the junction point and to make sure that the outermost cuts are, to all intents and purposes, invisible so no stumpy bits half way down the branches.

It used to take me ages to prune a plant like this but I am getting faster with practice and this was an hour from start to finish, using secateurs and a pruning saw. The pile in the wheelbarrow is well over half the plant in volume. Ralph supervised, as he does, but did not offer advice.

And voilà. The finished product. It is all about freezing this plant in size, finding its form and making it a shapely statement, rather than an unruly blob.

It is growing at an angle and we don’t mind that. It is perhaps a form of bonsai on steroids and in the garden rather than a pot. We want the plant to feature on its own, not to meld with its surroundings.

Camellia minutiflora – dainty, floriferous and characterful, in an understated sort of way

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.