Tag Archives: Waltham Place

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.

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