You will soon have to learn German!

    The long process whereby one of the world's leading horticultural journals has been dumbed down to yet another magazine (albeit a very good one) seems to be complete. A member of the editorial staff admitted to me last week (regretfully and somewhat defensively) that The Garden is "no longer a journal of record". In other words no longer something you turn to reference or to back up a statement or argument.
    The whole process which began, I cannot remember when, 'The Journal' became 'The Garden' is complete - magazinification. I am all for breaking down the doors of elitism but I personally feel the process has gone too far. The Garden now seems to operate on the same principles as garden TV, that we are all beginners, that none of us want to know about the latest science, research results, innovative techniques or read what experts write (as opposed to in house journalists). There also seems to be an assumption that we are all interested in design. Hello! This is the Royal HORTICULTURAL Society - we are first and foremost gardeners. Design certainly has a place in the journal but I suspect many gardeners would like to see less snazzy decking and more horticultural know-how. Besides which, other magazines do the design side so much better. The Plantsman has taken over some of what The Journal used to do, but only partially. Can't we have something in-between.
     What `I think many of us object to is the assumption that a journal cannot cater for both beginners and experts alike, and that many people new to gardening or with little knowledge might actually be interested and stimulated by more in-depth 'expert' pieces.
    It is a relief to turn to Germany's 'Gartenpraxis' - apart from the fact that it is in German!, and therefore a bit of a slow read (though a dictionary on my computer helps a lot). It seems to combine a huge range of material, popular stuff and latest research, pieces by experts, and where to go on your holiday next to see good flowers and gardens. There seems to be an assumption in Germany that people should not be talked down to, that technical knowledge is something to aspire to. Is 'dumbing down' a peculiarly English phenomenon?
    The slow decline of The Garden is, I suspect, part of the commercialisation of the RHS. How many members want to be part of  a business as opposed to a society is an interesting question.

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Alasdair Forbes garden at Coombe House

    Anyone who came to the 'Vista debate' at the Museum of Garden History on Jan 8th or has  a copy of this month's House and Garden  (February) will be aware of a very exciting 'new' garden.

   Alasdair's garden is completly unlike any other, although very much in the tradition of the 18th landscape garden in its use of trees, hedges, sculpture and landforms to make philosophical points. In the H&G piece I said that I thought that the garden was the most important intellectual statement in gardening since Little Sparta. Much to my relief Tim Richardson said he agreed with me  after  a recent visit.

    Visiting the garden.
    It will be open for a local charity first weekend of June. Not sure of day or time yet. Keep logging on to find out!
    We would also hope to be able to organise a Vista Outing to the garden. People could either meet there (North Devon) or if there was enough interest, a coach could be organised from London. IF YOU ARE INTERESTED PLEASE EMAIL ME, and let me know whether you prefer an April visit or a June/July one. And whether weekend or weekday is preferred.

    Alasdair has kindly sent me his notes for the lecture, but does not want them posted, but made availalbe to anyone who wishes to see them. So, please email me if you want a copy.


My email is

noel@noelkingsbury.com


keep digging, keep talking!


Noel

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If you can’t beat creeping buttercup, creep past it

In the mild British climate the real winners are ‘weedy’ species which can grow at low temperatures. Amongst the most problematic for gardeners are native grasses, particularly aggressive species of rough pasture, and creeping buttercup. Such is their ability to grow at any temperature above freezing, I reckon these guys can often grow 365 day a year. Anyone with a herbaceous planting that does not have a thick layer of mulch will begin to notice around this time of year that there is often a haze of young grass seedlings, or clumps of grass which you did not notice the last time you looked at the border (which was probably November) have begun to grow and spread. Most alarming of all is the relentless march of creeping buttercup, as it extends its runners out of the clumps of perennials where it often settles down, inconspicuously for the winter (or since when you last thought you had weeded thoroughly). In the milder and wetter parts of Britain bare soil in borders can be practically covered in this stuff, practically while your back is turned.
What to do about it?
First – ask yourself how much a problem this really is. Look at the plant – it may spread like a virus, but it doesn’t grow very tall. In fact so short is it, that by the time most herbaceous plants get going in May, they will soon overtop it and shade it out. Meanwhile the yellow buttercups in April are quite pretty – an added bonus. So, it may be a case of live and let live – dense planting of medium to tall, or very spready herbaceous perennials will outcompete the yellow monster – and peaceful co-existence will be the result.
Amongst smaller plants or where you want to reduce competition, such as amongst fruit bushes or new plantings, you will need to control the beast. The best way is to leave it, until it really begins to spread, with lots of nice healthy foliage. Then get out the Roundup ®. The herbicide will spread back and kill the base of the plants, which may be a good 20-30 cms from where you have treated it. Winter spraying is slow to take effect – it’ll be a few weeks before that yellow and wan look begins to spread, the yellow and wan look which brings an instant smile of gratification to the gardener’s face. There is something insolent about creeping buttercup, the way it so suddenly takes advantage of our winter lack of interest in the garden to make so much progress. Get it now, before bulbs have begun to emerge, let alone anything herbaceous and you can minimise its impact for the rest of the year, and even admire the pretty yellow flowers of the survivors. You will never get rid of entirely so you might as well stand back and admit they’re pretty.

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ON CUTTING DOWN PERENNIALS

ON CUTTING DOWN PERENNIALS

Now that we have gone well past the period of garden history when herbaceous plants were cut back on a particular date in autumn, regardless of what they looked like, we have to make this decision ourselves. It is a decision that many gardeners seem to find difficult to take. Piet Oudolf has been asked it many times, and he tells me that the always tells people that only they can make the decision – “you do it when you want to” he says. Which is not actually what they want to know. They want to be told. As if there is a right time and a wrong time. As in the old-school gardening when there was always a right way and a wrong way. But isn’t it better to make your own decisions? Based on what you feel is right for your garden.
The only parameters are: 1) for seeds for wildlife and for some hope of the dead remains looking attractive it is good to leave stems standing for as long as possible, 2) they have to be cut down before the first bulbs begin to emerge, as otherwise you will squash the bulbs with your big feet.
What I usually do (is this any help?) is to cut down everything which looks a mess at the end of November and the remainder (grasses, very strong perennials like eupatoriums) in January. But the weather is the deciding factor. This year we had an early snowfall in November. Not much, but that classically English very wet and heavy snow which crushes almost everything, including miscanthus and eupatorium. The fine dry snow which inhabitants of Mitteleuropa and North America get and which drifts in between the stronger stems and looks very picturesque is quite alien to us. As a consequence practically everything has to end on the compost heap.
Which brings me to the next set of questions. How do you cut it all down and compost it?
Secateurs and shears can be surprisingly quick. Low clumps of leafy soft material can be cut through with a sharp sickle. For larger plantings where there are no labels the strimmer/brushcutter can be used. This is apparently what is done in the herbaceous plantings of Enkjöping in Sweden. The idea is to strim everything down to form a mulch – no need for carting away and composting. Great, but the very stout stems, almost woody in their hardness – some helianthus, vernonia (not called ‘ironweed’ for nothing and miscanthus, will only be scratched by a strimmer’s nylon cord. They can be cut down with a metal brushcutter attachment but not effectively strimmed unless you have lots of patience and strength (I have neither).
However you cut, you will be left with lots of material. Perhaps, if you have been an ambitious layer-outer of big borders, a rather intimidating amount of material. In my last garden I really did not have the space to effectively compost it, or at least to turn the resulting (vast) heap. Cutting thicker stems up to make them rot down more quickly helps – if you do, not the chances are that there will still be a pile of dry stems a year from now when you do the next annual cut. Some use a shredder. But shredders are designed primarily for woody material and many makes simply clog with softer herbaceous material. And anyway, they it can be a very slow process shredding a large prairie border.
My solution is actually to separate the material into 1) soft and/or easily cut and 2) recalcitrant near-woody. The former can be piled into a conventional compost heap, the latter stacked in an out of the way corner to rot down more slowly, or shredded/used as mulch. Or burnt. The stacking/slow composting route probably makes a good wildlife habitat in the same way that a pile of rotting logs does. The latter is more fun. Bonfires are a bit politically-incorrect these days, but a good burn up makes a fine centrepiece for a family evening. I haven’t done this yet, but the real American prairie types would probably burn in situ. More fun. Slightly scary. Actually very good for weed control (Sheffield University research) I’ll let you know when I do.

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noel@noelkingsbury.com

WHERE DO GARDENS END AND LANDSCAPE BEGIN? And what have bagels go to do with it?

This was originally written for Yue Zhuang, in an effort to clarify what some linguistic confusion about what we Brits mean when we go on about gardens. With any luck, there'll be some interesting stuff on Chinese gardens and garden concepts to follow on.

This a crucial point in the framing of discussions about gardens - more than in discussion about landscape. Landscape people have a longer history of reflection on their craft, and area of study – garden people have been unreflective by comparison, and are sometimes surprised to find that discourse about their subject has been ‘usurped’ by those who business is landscape.

This is also an important topic in any cross-cultural discussion – as every culture defines ‘garden’ and ‘landscape’ differently. These differences, once understood, can be very informative.

‘Landscape’ tends to include ‘garden’.
So it is not surprising that gardeners can feel that they are sometimes being spoken for by their more articulate subject-cousins.

‘Garden’ does mean different things in different languages, not just in
definition , but in nuance and cultural meaning.

The Garden as Private Property
The definition in western European languages centres on its separation from its surroundings by the presence of a boundary, which stresses its essentially private character. ‘Garden’ in English, Tradgård in Swedish, Garten in German, Jardin in French, all relate to English ‘yard’. Tuin in Dutch, Zahrada in Slovak I don’t know – enlighten me someone please?
Gardens vary in size according to the wealth of their owners, so it is no surprise that C18 landowners could develop an artform which involved thousands of acres being called ‘gardens’. Their definition in the sense of a visible boundary was minimised, because part of the design concept of many landowners was to visually borrow landscape which belonged to other people. The key issue was private ownership and a design concept which flowed from this private ownership.
‘Landscape’ has always been a much vaguer concept, and whereas most cultures have a word for ‘garden’ (can’t imagine that the Eskimoes do, or maybe not even the Mongolians), landscape is a word which is generally of a more recent historic origin (it would be so interesting to know what words you use in Chinese and their origin). It is also a word which is, somehow inescapably, vague. Everywhere is actually landscape – wild nature, where there is no human impact gets called landscape, and it is possible to talk of a completely unplanned and dysfunctional place like a shanty town as being a ‘slum landscape’. Whereas ‘garden’ speaks of definition, in terms of both physical boundary, possession, and design-intent (usually on the most minimal level ) ‘landscape’ is just what is. So, if a landscape received the attention of a landscape designer, then that is a kind of bonus for it.
Gardens are part of landscape. So, whereas all gardens are landscape, not all landscapes are garden. So inevitably landscape discourse includes and subsumes garden discourse. No wonder that many people who wish to talk about landscape end up talking about gardens – in many cases they are the most interesting landscapes of all, because they have been intensively cultivated and designed. But to let landscape discourse subsume garden discourse is to lose a meaningful boundary – which is why I think we garden people are actually quite jealous of that boundary.

The Public Garden and Horticulture
We do of course talk about some public parks as ‘gardens’. It would be interesting to trace the historic roots of this. It is not just an English affectation: Jardin Tuillieries in Paris, Englischer Garten in Munich etc. ‘Gardens’ have always tended to be smaller than parks, have usually had a much clearer sense of boundary, and crucially would involve a greater element of horticulture than was customary for parks.
Horticulture then, helps to define what a garden is, at least in British culture. Indeed the ‘garden’ and ‘gardening’ are inseparable. In Chinese culture I understand that gardens are much more architecturally defined. It would be interesting to know the root of the word for garden, and whether different words are used for small architectural urban gardens and for larger rural ones. Does the word imply horticulture or not?
Gardens are so inseparable from gardening that most British people accept only with difficulty that a garden may not include any plants.I shall never forget my father having a problem with the Boboli Gardens in Florence, never mind the clipped hedges, where were the flowers? Martha Schwartz and her infamous bagel garden and the ‘installation art as garden’ of Chaumont and the late Westonbirt garden shows have at least broadened out the definition for the British gardening public. A rather moving publication from the USA some years ago also addressed the surroundings of homeless and vagrant people as ‘gardens’ as well – so we can perhaps reach a definition which minimises horticulture and instead emphasises management and design intent.
So far so good. We can for the most part define gardens as being physically defined places with design intent, nearly always privately rather than publically owned. The private/public definition is a crucial one too. Parks and other public space which is owned by corporate bodies rather than individual ones are seen in so many cultures as places where less care is taken. They have less respect, particularly in cultures where there is little sense of the social good, as in Middle Eastern cultures. As public property, they inevitably suffer from ‘the tragedy of the commons’.

Gardens and who designs them
The garden/landscape division then is not so murky. But it is one which is very important to the British, where so many people have private gardens, and where the ‘public garden’ seems almost a piece of historical anachronism. We have ‘garden designers’ a new profession whose numbers have grown like …. weeds? (the comparison in not meant to be unkind, only descriptive of their rate of self-propagation) in recent years. Landscape architects only rarely get to design gardens. “Jolly good thing too” – one can almost hear the gardeners saying. In most other countries, the profession of ‘garden designer’ almost does not exist or is synonymous with landscape architect.
For most Brits, gardens are synonymous with plants and the activity of gardening - it is only pretentious foreigners who scatter them with plastic bagels or fibre-glass installations. But, to be honest, gardening and plants are what we are good at. They are at the core of what makes the British garden what it is. It is why more and more people from abroad come and visit our country. Do non-Americans go to the USA to look at Schwartz’s bagels?

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Letter to Uruguay

The following was written to Amalia Robredo, a pioneering garden designer in Uruguay, who is experimenting with designing with native plants and sculpting the existing vegetation of the Uruguayan coast - a dwarf shrub formation known as the Monte. It is pretty relevant to anybody in similar circumstances.




I am trying to think through what I would do if I beached up in a country with no tradition of ‘wild’ or naturalistic gardening or of using its native flora for gardens or landscapes. There is so much to do! But the rewards are to be a pioneer, to achieve a quantum leap, and perhaps even be remembered for it by future generations!

All too often a mystery - Plant lifespan
First of all, we often know so little about how wild plants behave in cultivation – there are certain basic facts that need to be established. So, even if you are planning to grow native plants only in wild-type communities, I think it pays to cultivate a few specimens of each species in the garden too, in order to learn about them. One of the key issues is plant lifespan, and the related topic of how they reproduce themselves. It is usually fairly obvious if something in the wild is an annual – they always produce masses of seed from a stem which enters the ground to connect to the roots at a single point. Less obvious are those short-lived perennials like Verbena bonariensis (which I am fascinated to learn from you is a wetland plant in its native habitat). They can play tricks on us – we think they are perennial but then die after a couple of years, a situation not helped by the inadequate terminology we have adopted for plant lifespan: annual, biennial, perennial – there is no recognition here of the ‘short-lived perennial’ category.

Annuals, biennials and short-lived perennials nearly always set plentiful seed which germinates rapidly (they would soon become extinct if they did not), and they do not form clear ‘ramets’ at the base. A ramet is a term (used by botanists and ecologists rather than gardeners) to describe a shoot at the base of a plant which grows its own roots and can become, in time, independent of the parent plant – such things sort out the true perennials from those of limited lifespan. Short-lived plants will generally self-seed, but are able to do so only on disturbed ground and are, over a number of years, replaced by longer-lived species. So, thinking about their ornamental effects, these may be spectacular but transient.

The Joys and Frustrations of Propagation
Growing a few native plants in ‘garden’ conditions is also an opportunity to learn about how they might be propagated. Becoming knowledgeable about propagation is something which is almost inevitable if you are experimenting with plants. There is something addictive about it – the thrill (and sometimes challenge – sometimes deep frustration) of making new plants – new life! Some people become obsessed with propagation – either they cannot stop making new plants or they take on the challenge of species which cannot be propagated so easily: cuttings which refuse to roots unless given some special treatment or seed which does not germinate unless likewise some magic is performed, even dipped in sulphuric acid!

Propagation ‘tendencies’ tend to go in families: compositae/asteraceae germinate quickly, labiatae cuttings root in a week; but herbaceous always tends to be easier than woody. Particularly frustrating are really beautiful plants you want lots of but where cuttings rot away after months of sitting in compost or have seeds which simply do not come up.

The truth is that you will end up with far more of the easy to propagate plants than the difficult ones. So cultivation ends up being dominated by plants which are easily propagated. For work with native plants, this tends to mean domination by the species which are important in the early stages of succession; species which dominate the established plant community (places which have been undisturbed for centuries) tend to be slower to grow and to spread themselves.

Whatever – you ought to make sure you have some good books on propagation!

The Cultivar Dilemma
When native plants are taken into cultivation, it is very often as cultivars – selections made for a variety of reasons: bigger, brighter flowers, longer flowering season, more compact habit etc. But behind these very obvious and prosaic reasons lies perhaps a deeper, cultural issue. Just as very few Uruguayans probably appreciate the monte, so few will appreciate native plant species. There is something fundamental about the human relationship with nature which demands that we separate ourselves off from it: so Australians despise the bush, Brazilians the jungle, Americans fear the forest (unless neatly packaged as National Park) etc. So, it should come as no surprise that ‘native’ plants are somehow made more acceptable once cultivars are chosen. They also help market the native plant as a product – consumers after all will be more likely to pay for a plant which bears a name they can relate to; this name also signals a kind of domestication: Solidago rugosa ‘Fireworks’ is going to sell so much better than plain Solidago rugosa, even though it is practically identical.

A great many plants in cultivation are simple selections from the wild – good forms which are then propagated so that they are all more or less identical. This is why vegetative propagation is so important for cultivars: division or cuttings, or grafting. Seed-grown, ie. sexually propagated, plants will nearly always show a range of differences between each other and the parents – and so cannot be relied on to ‘breed true’. With woody plants: shrub and trees, this is why vegetative propagation is so important – as a way of ensuring that what is identified by a cultivar name maintains the set of characteristics for which it was selected in the first place.

So, I would argue that a key part of domesticating native plants and making them popular is the choosing of good cultivars: the great plant hunters very often did this in the wild by taking seed from individuals they knew to be particularly good. The garden owners and nurserymen back home would line out hundreds of plants grown from the seed they sent back, and then select just one or two to propagate from – and of course give cultivar names to.

However, there is a catch.

If you are interested in really using native plants to create a naturalistic style of planting, you want them to reproduce, to seed themselves around, just as they do in nature; if they do not then the plant community you have will be static, and vulnerable to incursion by less desirable weedy species – often aggressive, non-native weeds.

Cultivars do not always propagate from seed – sexual reproduction is often dependent on plants being genetically different; and if they do, the results will show little genetic diversity. Genetic diversity is important for self-sustaining ecologically healthy plant populations. So, the implication is, that for creating genuine plant communities, cultivars are not always such a good idea, however good they might be for getting people attracted to and interested in, native flora. Cultivars are fine for those making conventional gardens, but if you are trying to create something wilder, where the role of the gardener is more ‘hands off’, where you want a dynamic plant community which regenerates itself – then cultivars are not so good. Instead you want multiples of seed-grown individuals, ie. plants of different genetic make-up.

The Great Gardening Challenge is to talk sense

Following on from an entry on garden designer James Alexander-Sinclair’s blog about the need to take gardening more seriously (ie. more intellectually). ……

http://web.mac.com/blackpittsgarden/Site_2/Blog/Entries/2007/9/27_“Fudge_pit_props_what_an_astounding_notion”_said_the_engineer.html#

The debates you mentioned (Great Garden Challenge) are a good example of what we need more of – garden people talking about what makes a good garden – in plain English. Ie. without descending to talking “pretentious tosh”.
The great danger of our little campaign to take gardens more seriously, is precisely this; that thinking gardeners will start talking that peculiar dialect of English widely known as ‘art bollocks’. The sort of gobbledock that gathers like a grey mystifying fog over whatever is being presented to as us ‘art’. Or the arguably even worse dialect spoken by students and teachers of academic cultural studies. Of course not all art, and by extension not all gardens, should ‘mean something’ on first sighting, but the kind of art which can only be understood by reading an essay, usually ridden with jargon and clichés, before having any incling as to what it is about, stands as a warning. In the garden world, the gardens which have come closest to this are the conceptual gardens of Chaumont, Westonbirt etc. It looks as if they have not been very popular with the public. What a surprise – but still a shame. Maybe they have fallen between two stools - too gardeny for the art crowd, too much like installations for gardeners.
I have looked around a couple of seriously ‘thinking’ gardens in the last few years, including Little Sparta, and loved them. What actually interests me, wearing my hat as a writer for the popular gardening/lifestyle press is this: how do make this style of garden not just comprehensible to the general public but inspirational? The organisers of Chaumont always intended the ideas shown in the gardens there to be “ideas to steal” – the organisers of Westonbirt stole that slogan too. But people need to be shown how to think about how they incorporate ideas, from their lives, memories, thoughts etc. into conceptual and metaphoric gardens. I would love to do a book, of the ‘twenty weekend projects for your garden’ variety based on Little Sparta and similar. You could have people creating sculptures, mini-installations, pieces of text, and dotting them around their gardens. The results might often be risible, kitsch or embarassing, but it would be great just to get people thinking laterally and creatively.
Talking intelligently about gardens must keep clear of the pretensions of joining the art world. Yes, it would be nice to be taken more seriously by the art and media elite, but we will not necessarily achieve this by trying to join them on their own terms. Better we put our own house in order first: have some serious discussion about what a good garden is? What is the role of plants? Of hardscape? The role of the house? The surroundings? What is the relationship between the other arts and gardening? etc. etc.
I very much hope we can begin to discuss some of these issues at the events that we are organising as part of the Vista Debates in London. They are invitation only (have to keep out the riff-raff you see), but if you would like to come, then drop me an ‘e’ and I’ll put you on the guest list.
By the way, here is a thought. What are you doing when you put a gnome into a garden? Are you being conceptual? Because you are not planting, or making hard landscaping, or somewhere for the kids to play, or to barbecue, or relating to nature. Or doing any of the other things people do when they make gardens. What is the gnome installer doing? It would be interesting to get some answers. But not in cultural studies language please.

noel@noelkingsbury.com