What are gardens for?

I’ve recently been to a Society of Garden Designers seminar, where members gather together to listen to the wisdom of the most respected in the profession and the title of this year’s was ‘What are gardens for?’

Gardens are made by people and as people are all different, then the reasons for making them, although superficially similar, are as diverse as we are but I don’t think it’s unfair to say that most of us don’t really think about it that much, just carrying on mowing the lawn and pruning the roses with a bit of a change here and there as the babies become toddlers with trikes and a sandpit and then a trampoline and goal posts.

Eventually the children grow up, fly the nest and mum and dad can sit back and relax on a new patio.

Well that is a least how it used to be when children liked playing outside, but the sad fact is that being outside is now the least favourite occupation of seven to eleven year olds, according to an excellent speaker at the seminar, Wendy Titman. Sedentary pastimes are much more popular, with the dreadful consequence that by the time children leave primary school, countrywide one in three are overweight and if statistics are to be believed that figure is set to keep on rising.

Is it because so many children are now brought up in densely populated cities lacking in green space, or is it that gardens are so far down on planners’ and house builders’ agendas that they’ve dwindled in size to become only slightly bigger than the new kitchen?

I’m sure they are many and varied but whatever the reasons, many children have become alienated form the natural world right from the very beginnings of their lives. It’s hard for me to reconcile this fact as I watch my neighbour’s children hurtle along the street on their bikes, but a sad fact nonetheless.

 For the New Year what about this as a resolution. Get the kids outside in the garden more, encourage them to poke about in the soil, dig up worms if they want to, show them how to plant seeds, grow a few veg to eat or just chill out with them and listen to the birds.

It’s the earliest years which make the difference and maybe this is one of the most important answers to ‘What are gardens for?’

They are places to play and as children we don’t just play for the sake of it, it burns calories, it gives us vital vitamin D and stimulates our immune systems. 

It’s how our species learn to understand about the world around us - important or what!

Nobody will care about the natural world unless they understand it.

Sir David Attenborough

Evergreens

If there’s one thing my garden will never be accused of, it’s being too neat and tidy.

From the first sighting of spring’s new and vibrant shoots, through the gay abandon of exuberant summer and on into the rich colour and swirling leaves of autumn, order is way down the list of my garden’s priorities. There are far too many lovely things to grow for me to consider giving houseroom to any more boring evergreens than the few token box balls by the front path.

That is until the time inevitably comes when all the lovely things withdraw below ground to patiently wait out the cold dark days of winter and I’m grudgingly forced to admit that far from being boring, it’s the evergreens in the garden which give it form, structure and a strong winter silhouette.

Throughout the rest of the year the formality of clipped hedges, the mounds of evergreen shrubs and the balls, cones and spirals of topiary are like corsetry, they underpin and support the billowing skirts of all the blowsy flowers, unobtrusive and discretely hard working, just waiting for their time to shine.

And here it is. In the cold grip of winter the box, privet, holly, laurel and yew stand solid and dependable, marking out the lines of the garden, unflinching in the teeth of biting winds and freezing temperatures and now the very thing I condemn them for, being static and immobile, becomes a virtue.

Their dense foliage offers a perfect shelter for over wintering insects and a hunting ground for hungry insectivorous birds. A bitter night’s frost sees them dusted with icing sugar and a fall of snow exaggerates their shape, transforming the ordinary into oversized chess pieces from Alice In Wonderland.

The smaller and denser the leaves the finer the texture and the easier the plant is to trim into elaborate shapes, this and their ability to throw out new shoots  from mature wood has made yew and box the plants of choice for formal hedging and topiary for centuries.

If plain dark green is just too dull, lots of conifers come in coloured leaved forms from the subtle blue grey and dramatic spire of Juniperus scopulorum ‘Blue Arrow’, a good choice for a focal point, to the many yellow leaved varieties of Chamaecyparis lawsoniana like ‘Golden Wonder’, better restricted to town gardens as the strong colour stands out like a sore thumb in a rural landscape.

The main drawback of most conifers, Taxus and Thuja being the exception, is that they don’t re-grow from old wood and their lack of regular care is responsible for some of the ugliest plants ever to disgrace a garden.

For coloured leaves of a different kind holly is very versatile, happy to grow in sun and shade it has lots of variegated forms with flowers to attract holly blue butterflies, berries for the birds and of course still as popular as ever for Christmas decorations. 

 Lord Leycester Hospital garden, Warwick

Hampton Court, Herefordshire

Horticultural Fireworks

Autumn began to creep in very early this year, there were Acers turning colour in  August, the hawthorn hedges have been weighed down by berries for weeks and my favourite shrub in Monmouth has spent the whole of September and October looking absolutely spectacular.

If you’re passing Bridges Community Centre it’s worth a detour into the car park just to see the Cotinus, the translucent oval leaves are the colours of glowing embers, from gold and orange to scarlet, cerise and rich deep burgundy. The transformation from a dull shade of dark green began on one side and has gradually suffused the whole shrub until it’s become a flaming bonfire.

If you’re there on a sunny day have a wander into Drybridge park too where the rich butter yellow and ambers of the lime trees are perfect against a clear blue sky and the lonely Acer griseum, dwarfed by the big old trees makes up for its lack of stature with  vivid vermillion leaves and ginger peeling bark.

It’s a great tree for autumn colour and for a small garden it’s pretty near perfect. Like Amelanchier lamarckii and Sorbus ‘Vilmorinii’ it’s small enough for most of us to accommodate and now is a good time to think about planting a new tree or three, the soil is still relatively warm and the roots will have the winter to settle in before the top growth gets underway again next spring.

November isn’t all horticultural fireworks though, it can be a melancholic time of year especially as the mists settle in along the Wye, but we gardeners are always looking forward and now is a brilliant time for making plans for next year whether just on paper as sketches and notes, or as I’ve done recently taking cuttings and collecting seed. I have to curb my enthusiasm for new plants at the moment as our house is up for sale and so I’m restricting purchases to bulbs for pots which is no bad thing for any of us to splash out on.  They’ll be a welcome burst of colour next spring and can be chosen for placing in any aspect or in any colour scheme, from vivid orange and cerise tulips to clash violently in full sun to quiet and refined snowdrops and aconites placed with ferns in a shady corner.

They’re temporary flowers and fairly inexpensive to buy so we can have fun without the guilt of an expensive and embarrassingly permanent horticultural mistake. If orange and cerise become a bit much together they can be separated after flowering and planted at either ends of the garden to flower happily for years to come.

If we’re still here next spring, mine will make a great entrance either side the front door and if we’ve moved on, together with my cuttings from favourite shrubs and all those saved seeds, they’ll move house too and be the beginnings of a brand new garden.

Grasses – high fashion and here to stay.

The shelter and seclusion of the garden is no place to hide from the fleeting fads and fancies of high fashion as anyone who fell victim to the ‘Majorelle blue deck’ phase will admit. Like it, the ‘heathers and dwarf conifers’ era has also long since been and gone, except for the once dwarf, now fairly sizeable specimen conifers towering over front gardens reminding us that in reality the term ‘dwarf’ actually  meant slow growing.

We can still see heathers of course where they look their best, vast purple swathes of them still grace our acid uplands, at home in their native environment, not with alien conifers but sedges and grasses, their natural partners of windswept hillsides and the latest addition to the plant world’s fashion palette.

In recent years the ‘new perennial’ movement has swept through northern Europe,  its free and easy natural style emulating the steppes of  Russia the North American prairies and for this time of year it’s the current fashion statement of choice.

A mix of long and late flowering perennials and architectural grasses there’s something for every early autumn garden here except perhaps those of the very neat and tidy brigade of gardeners who can’t keep their well oiled shears and sharpened secateurs away from anything which doesn’t form a tightly clipped blob. Who knows, one day this might become the latest ‘must have’ look.

Personally I’ve welcomed the move away from rigidity to a looser planting style and use grasses not only with perennials but shrubs too.

Clipped balls of balls are transformed by the arching waves of Hakonechloa macra and taller columnar shapes like Cupressus sempervirens look wonderful with the great sprays of Molinia flowers. 

I love them too with species roses, Viburnum, Cotoneaster and Berberis where they’re an accompaniment to hips, berries and turning leaves their colours heightening and fading together as the season slowly changes and we’re nudged unwillingly into shorter and colder days.

Many grasses have wonderful autumn colours in their leaves and flowers, and for those of you who haven’t yet been seduced by this latest garden style some of the best  are the Panicum family, one of my favourites is ‘Shenandoah’, a real beauty, turning wonderfully red later in the year.  For stunning leaves, Imperata cylindrica is striking all year, the ends of its leaves suffused with vivid red right through the summer and autumn.

If it’s structure and shape you’re after then Miscanthus are hard to beat, tall and statuesque in both leaf and flower and for the absolute ultimate in elegance, Miscanthus ‘Morning Light’ has the timeless grace and elegance of Joanna Lumley in flowing white linen. How’s that for high fashion!

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    ‘Live and let live’

Two very rare things have happened to me recently, the first being that because there were no immediate deadline to meet I  had time to just potter in my garden and enjoy it and the second is that I’ve just been watching two fat fluffy young thrushes sitting together sunbathing on the patio; it’s uncommon for me to see one thrush in my garden never mind two.

It’s odd isn’t it that we take more pleasure in the rare or unusual, than the common and everyday animals and plants.  I’ve hardly paid any attention to the six or seven blue and great tit babies that are around the bird feeder almost all the time, like collectors of trophies we would rather see warblers than sparrows and orchids than dandelions in our gardens. We even classify the most prolific plant separately as ‘weeds’.

I think it must go a long way back into our early human ancestry when we perceived successful species to be a threat and now we begrudge the success of species that do well, ridiculous isn’t it considering what a threat we are to the rest of life on the planet.

Not a week goes by without someone telling me that a once interesting insect is

‘a pest’, a shrub chosen for its speed of growth, now ‘completely overgrown’ or a creeping perennial, pretty it’s early days has  ‘taken over the whole garden’.

Surely we should appreciate the cabbage white butterflies as we do the holly blues and congratulate ourselves that we have such fertile soil that the honeysuckle we put in a foot high is now up to the bedroom window and those lovely little wild violets, so delicate in a pot, are now seeding themselves into every nook and cranny in the garden.

I think it’s time to live and let live, celebrate the successful, consider them in more detail, appreciate their many good qualities and to that end I’m going to sow again the wild carrot romping through the border, close up its flowers are covered in hundreds of tiny beetles and the white mallow where little wasps hide in it’s lovely shiny cups.

This isn’t just the wildlife fanatic in me being given free reign here, there are some sound principles of design at work too. The boldness and solidity of bigger clumps and drifts of the same plant help to make a small garden seem larger, repetition of the same plant creates cohesion and harmony and if a plant has seeded itself and spread around happily and healthily, then it has to be from it’s own perspective at least, ‘the right plant in the right place’.

Any horticulturalist would agree I think that that is the basis for successful planting and by association a successful garden.

As long of course that it’s not a species being too successful … and when it comes to the number of snails eating the leaves of my runner beans…..but then again, without the snails I wouldn’t have the thrushes.

New favourites

This month's new favourite plant combination, wild carrot and greater burnet. I haven't grown these two native plants together before but absolutely love them; the way the burnet waves and bobs about in the wind is pure magic. Wild and wonderful!

Wild about my garden

I’ve just had a quick whip round my garden to pick a few flowers for a vase to cheer up a shelf in the hallway. It’s a hastily gathered bunch and I’m no great shakes at flower arranging but it does look very pretty with all the artless grace and freshness of early summer. Shining yellow buttercups, tall white willow herb, pink and white  campions, burnt orange fox and cubs, spires of purple toadflax and dog daisies, their faces turned up to the sun.

You’ll notice from the names that there’s nothing terribly exotic here, no hybridised and interbred garden flowers, in fact they are all common native flowers or very close relatives and no less lovely for that.

I enjoy having them in the garden even more than in the house, they are a perfect example of ‘the right plant in the right place’ perfectly suited to the conditions they’ve evolved in. Growing healthily and vigorously, full of flower and joie de vivre they are also full of pollen and nectar for the local insect population and importantly, a food source for bees.

We all know what a hard time bees are having now and how vital they are to our economy as well as our ecology, it’s a scary thought that we couldn’t grow many of our food crops without them but as gardeners there’s so much we can do to help.

Choosing flowers which are bee friendly, rich in pollen and nectar which is easily accessible to them isn’t difficult, lots of traditional ornamental garden flowers like Nepeta, Sedum, Aster, Anemone and Verbena are great but many wild flowers are even easier to grow and lovely to look at too, they are an essential part of my summer garden 

There are flowers arranged in flat topped bunches called umbels, like cow parsley, wild carrot and hogweed and daisies, big and small, are not single flowers they’re masses of tiny ones jam packed together in the centre of a circle of ray florets. These arrangements allow bees to eat and drink their fill within a small area, not wasting energy flying between widely spaced flowers.

Tubular shaped flowers like honeysuckle, foxgloves and clovers often grow close together in spires or ball shapes and are perfect for bees too, some like white clover are better for honey bees while bumble bees prefer red clover, apparently it’s all to do with the length of their tongues.

It isn’t just their wildlife benefit which makes wild flowers so valuable to my garden, or their lovely vibrant colours, it’s the combining and contrasting of their shapes which gives my garden its summer structure. Just like a flower arranger I can use their forms to create interest, harmony and balance.

No wonder they look so good in a vase!