A good new border plant - but not quite?

Senecio fuchsii (S. nemorensis seems to be more or less the same).

One of those plants that should have been a British native, but isn't, and although it does a fantastic job of brightening up the dark and dreary hedge bottom at a time of year when not much else does, is not the sort of thing which leaps out at you as the perfect new border plant.

A plant which raises questions then.

First of all, why is it all over woodland edge habitats in hilly areas from Belgium down to Bulgaria (from whence comes my stock) but not Britain? And why doens' it look quite garden worthy.

Its absence from the British flora can only be put down to everything having been scraped off by the last Ice Age and it not having a chance to blow back in, when the English Channel effectively pulled up the gangplank on the full flora of northern Europe re-establishing itself.

And its looks? Too much like ragwort for some (related of course, but completely different in its details of leaf and flower shape, and not toxic). The leaves are a lovely dark green, the flowers plentiful and a good yellow, but there are petals 'missing' so there is a kind of scruffy feel. And a re-design would definitely make it a bit shorter than its current 1.2m, and therefore less likely to flop.

One for some selection and improvement?

The Landscape Architects' Revenge

It’s the Swiss national day, so all the shops are shut and the multi-storey carpark at Sihlcity on the outskirts of Zürich is deserted, apart from us, and an idiot in a red Ferrari who is amusing himself screeching around the deserted building – a peculiarly Swiss form of social deviance.
I am with Rudolf Lehmann from the Swiss company, Jakob, who make the steel rope and other support mechanisms for the climbing plants that occasionally appear on contemporary buildings. Zürich is the best place to see them. Many climbers will go well beyond the modest two storey structures of wire and vine eyes timidly put up by gardeners. At Sihlcity, Fallopia baldschuanica and wisteria have already reached the top of a 25m high set of cables at the side of the car park in 4 1/2 years. At another location, a series of apartment buildins, climbers including akebia, celastrus, lonicera and clematis species have romped up 13m in 3 years.
The beneficial environmental effects are considerable, particularly for cooling buildings, all now being shown to have a strong evidence base with research being done at various Germany universities. But to many of us greening the side of a building, especially one which is inherently pretty ugly, like a multi-storey car park, is just a very nice thing to do. Green roofs are often invisible, green walls can make much more visual impact. Perhaps they are part of the landscape architects revenge against the architect, or a softening of the architects love of hard surfaces.
In what might be seen as the ultimate example of the architect turning landscape architect, Rudolf also took me to Futuro Liestal, outside Basel to visit a new office complex. Which I couldn’t see at first, because I appeared to be on gently sloping hill with walkways over it, and occasional green cube buildings. Walking onto the hill I realised I was on top of the building, which was covered in an enormous green roof, apparently contiguous with the surrounding landscape and planted up with dry meadow and dry garden flora. The green boxes housed various lift mechanisms etc, and access to the offices was through them or down stairs – the offices and laboratories etc. opened out onto large landscape courtyards, which of course you look down onto from above. Get it? It is a building turned upside down, instead of a footprint on the landscape with a desert of a roof, this is a building that you go down into from a new landscape. Needless to say it is all designed with maximum sustainability in mind. Utterly revolutionary, wonderful, quite one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen. Oh, and there is a new green wall of climbers running for what feels like several hundred metres along the side.
The next day I took myself off to see the MFO Park, a real favourite, where a giant pergola (35m long, 17m high) has been constructed in a square, to form a new public space. Inside the steel structure, there is a mysterious green light, a bit like that you get in a woodland, and plenty of bird song too. Its an outrageously innovative place – I cannot think of anywhere even remotely like it. A wonderful hint at a new coming together of architecture and horticulture.

See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36856545@N02/sets/72157621840358015/
and
http://www.flickr.com/photos/36856545@N02/sets/72157621971808922/

GREEN PORRIDGE

There is no getting away from the fact that it is difficult to photograph many wild-style plantings – like my garden. I sneak around with the camera and I always seem to end up with the yurt in the shot. It adds scale and a focal point. Without it, so much seems to be, well, green porridge. There is very little formal structure in the garden, and although there is a variety of foliage shape, texture etc. there clearly isn’t really enough to make obvious focal points, which photographs seem to need. And there aren’t great blobs of colour, as in many more conventional gardens.

The fact is that wilder gardens are very experiential – they need to be seen in three dimensions to be appreciated; the experience of actually being there is even more impossible to convey with a photograph than with a conventional garden. Which is frustrating as we have come to rely so heavily on photographs to convey our experience of gardens. Maybe video?

So many strongly structural plants look so gardenesque, or suburban, or exotic, by definition if you are trying to create a garden that fits into the Herefordshire (Wales/England borders) then so much of this stuff isn’t going to fit in. The ethos here is to create a garden which whilst very global in its plant origins belongs in a very unspoilt rural landscape. Things like Sanguisorba species or Telekia speciosa are consequently very useful for their ability to provide foliage structure/texture but not stand out like a sore thumb - or a Phormium in a hedgerow.

YOU CAN CALL ME DELIA

For those you (American readers perhaps) who don’t know who Delia Smith is – she is our equivalent of Martha Stewart, except that she only does cookery, hasn’t done time, and is, let’s fact it, a bit of a frump. So it was a bit of a double-edge sword when I heard that Alan Titchmarsh said that “having Noel Kingsbury visit your garden is a bit like having Delia Smith to supper” on this year’s Chelsea Flower Show TV coverage. The person who was being threatened with a visitation was Joe Swift.

In the end I never did get to see Joe’s garden, but have had to write it up for a book I’m doing on designers’ own gardens blind. He’s very busy, I only come to London once a month etc etc. Plus there was the article I found online, in either the Mail or the Express website about his garden. Neither of these is my favourite publication, so I didn’t take it too seriously, to be fair the photograph was only of the front ‘garden’, and featured some bare concrete, empty beer bottles, a bag of rubbish and an upside own milk crate – and a couple of local types saying things like “that Joe Swift outa get down here and tidy up his garden (to be read in cockney accent). A total gutter press non-story in other words. You should have seen our ‘front garden’ in Bristol.

Its been an interesting book to do, as a lot of designers have gardens which are real personal spaces. Somewhat surprisingly, Joe Swift did not do his garden for a TV make-over, but Penelope Hobhouse did (well part of her old garden at Bettescombe). Its been interesting too, hearing about design approaches too. Like Joe Swift’s ‘modular gardens’ concept which sounds like a complete negation of what many designers see as design (genius of the place and all that) – but I now can appreciate the rationale so much better. Cleve West has been my latest victim. Again a bit diffident about letting me in, but a wonderfully green oasis in the suburbs type garden, tiny, very intensely designed, contemporary but very planty.

Some designers use their gardens for experimenting with lots of new plants, or trying out new concepts – but none of the living ones do this on anything like the scale of the late Mien Ruys in Holland, whose garden was several acres of design laboratory (but she did inherit her father’s nursery), or the late Roberto Burle Marx, who had what amounted to a private botanical garden. Others are just very personal spaces where they simply do what they want to do, without worrying about clients. None yet features a rectangular lawn with yard wide borders around the edges.

Trusting the National Trust?

At the Hay festival back in May, I was on a panel with Dan Pearson, Tim Richardson, and Simon Jenkins – the leading political commentator on The Guardian, writer on historic churches, castles and houses and now Chairman of the National Trust – and according to my spies, very much a new broom. “So” said Simon, innocently trying to make small talk before the event, “are you writing about many Trust gardens these days?” “No”, said I through gritted teeth, “its almost impossible to find a photographer to work in a Trust garden, your system of licensing has put them all off”.

What had happened a few years ago was that the Trust decided to try to make some money out of all the images of its properties and demanded that all commercial photography had to go through its picture library. Photographers were only allowed in if they had a definite commission or were given agency status. So much garden photography is done ‘on spec’ by a growing army of people, very few of whom could get the coveted agency status. The result of the regulations was the killing of the proverbial goose that laid the golden eggs. Photographers were either not allowed in, or couldn’t make much money when they were. Writers and editors began to see fewer and fewer trust gardens – which must have begun to have a pretty negative impact on media coverage of the Trust – and a loss of income. The trust is heavily dependent on this kind of unquantifiable goodwill and promotion – the kind of thing which the bean counters at head office never thought of when the whole system was instituted.

Now, I have a kind of shop steward tendency, so I gathered a few submissions from photographer colleagues, one of which was headed ‘National Distrust’, attached them to a letter to Simon, cc.ed emails to Head of Gardens, Head of Communications, Head of Publications. Most gratified to have responses in a couple of hours. Long conversation with Head of Publications on the phone – I’m not going to divulge details, but he was effectively saying that the Trust had screwed up big time and needed to renegotiate. What a relief. Felt a bit like I had pushed at an open door and cleared a log jam, to horribly mix metaphors. Lovely warm glow of goodwill all round after lots of bitchiness. So hopefully we can see a new more generous set of arrangements and we can all start writing about the Trust's wonderful gardens again.

Only 24 hours in Ireland

It’s embarrassing. I realise that it is 27 years since I was last in Ireland. *o**! and my son’s called Kieran an’ all. And I just went for only 24 hours, to give what felt like a very successful workshop on designing with foliage for the Garden and Landscape Designers Association. I hate doing FIFOs (Fly In, Fly Out is the polite version), but schedule doesn’t allow much else at the moment.

Dublin is in a post-tiger-economy hangover, but the coastal strip looks great. Fantastic seaside exotic-looking gardens. Interesting to talk with people about what you can do/grow and what you can’t do/grow. Generally too cold and windy to sit out and treat the garden as an outside room for one thing. Reports that late herbaceous stuff like solidagoes just don’t perform – so little warmth, so little seasonality. Would be interesting to hear from other people about that. People’s complaints about the weather reminded me of Mark Twain about San Francisco, and the worst winter he ever had was a summer there, in that famously cool but never cold all the year round city.

Ok, this isn’t California, but there are similarities with the amazing range of exotica which does so well – practically anything from the Atlantic Islands and NZ, and a lot of South African. Just so long as it doesn’t want either a proper winter or a proper summer. Gardens can look really exotic, and echiums and Geranium maderense naturalise.

Met up with Oliver and Liat who run Mount Venus Nursery, which has an amazing range of plants. They’re German, not that you’d ever believe Oliver was anything but Irish – Liat sounds like Nico though). Trained with Dr.Hans Simon near Würzburg – owner of the world’s most untidy nursery. So were thoroughly grounded in all the right way of garden thinking. Catalogue looks very exciting.

Must go back.

‘Go Forth and Multiply’

The self-sowing of plants in borders has always fascinated me – and increasingly I’m inclined to think that it is crucial to the long-term stability of naturalistic plantings. There is a real thrill in suddenly seeing the seedlings of desirable plants popping up in the border.
Most of us are familiar with those plants which always seem to produce seedlings, like aquilegias and verbascums. The latter are a good example of self-sowing as too much of a good thing – how many of us have frantically hoed off thousands of their tiny seedlings, alarmed at the prospect of a take-over bid by big furry rosettes. Aquilegias though are generally better behaved, their behaviour illustrating what many of us welcome about self-sowing – the spontaneity of desirable plants occasionally popping up of their own accord.
A lot more species do self-sow however, indeed in theory any reasonably genetically diverse plant population should. Many garden plants though are not ‘genetically diverse’ but genetically identical clones (i.e. cultivars), which don’t self-fertilise. Even if plants produce viable seed, the likelihood of the seed germinating does seem to be contingent on soil conditions – but what those conditions are – well who knows? The unpredictability of self-sowing is one thing which makes it so fascinating. In theory, self-sowing is more likely on lighter soils, but then there is the case of a friend whose heavy clay produced remarkable crops of seedlings of just about anything. And then there are my hellebores – my last and present gardens are both on Old Red Sandstone, although this is quite a varied geological formation; in the last garden there was virtually no self-sowing, but in my new garden, almost every seed which hits the ground turns into a seedling. Most have to get hoed off!
One ‘rule’ of self-sowing is the inverse relationship between lifespan and seed production – the longer-lived the plant is, the fewer seeds it produces (and very often the slower they germinate). Short-lived plants put far more resources into seed production, and those seeds tend to be rapidly-germinating. The reasons are pretty obvious – short-lived species need to make sure they leave plenty of youthful replacements around to keep the species alive, long-lived plants don’t need to, and producing lots of seeds might even be counter-productive, taking resources away from more effective methods of reproduction in a competitive environment, like producing running roots or new shoots.
If things go well, seedlings of desired plants fill gaps, producing a steadily denser plant community, which helps to limit weed infiltration, and is probably better invertebrate habitat. A dense plant community, with a near complete canopy is far more ‘natural’ than the traditional border with big gaps between plants at ground level – even though there may be no gaps at foliage level. Self-seeding helps to produce a nature-like visual continuity; in my last garden Geranium sylvaticum ‘Birch Lilac’ self-fertilised and spread everywhere; I didn’t know this was going to happen, but the results were delightful, a continuous drift of purple in May. Ideally, several species will self-sow, so that one does not dominate, and a relative balance develop between them.
Self-sowing is a chance to see natural process in action, a sharing of the design and management of the garden with the energy and life-process of the plants themselves.