Second career guidance

For a couple of years now we've had trainees from the WRAG scheme,

Read on.....

Indian trails.......

A visit to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad region of Kerala in south-

west India is a real inspiration and a very special place. Its basically a private trust who own a slab of virgin forest (in the Western Ghats bio-region, where only 3% of the original forest is left) and who are involved in habitat restoration on former tea and coffee plantations. They do also have a very good display garden of tropical flora (local, Indian and global) for educational purposes. Their conservation and research work is clearly rooted in a lot of good horticulture. I have a fantasy of coming here and spending time learning about the very different ways that have to be used to manage tropical species; there is clearly a lot to learn. Read on........

Planting up is a nerve-wracking job.

 

Most of this went in 3 years ago, some 2. Mostly filled out nicely. Its actually a north-facing slope but gets sun for most of the day. Grass is Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’

Planting up a client's garden the day before yesterday. The third winter I have done this particular one. Good design jobs go like this – it’s an illusion, partly fostered by TV design and 'make-over' programmes that you can go in and plant up, and before you can say "Bob's yer uncle" the garden is "done". No garden in ever "done". And ideally, you and the client build up a relationship, you come back and see how it all turned out, you make suggestions, they ask your advice, you come back with more plants, and so it goes on, hopefully with an annual visit. 

       In this instance, a friend and colleague had done the levels and basic spatial stuff, and I came in to do the planting - three years ago. Quite a big site, so we all agree it would have been very foolish to plant up all at once. We agreed a section and I returned a few months later with the plants. The house has a spectacular view, as it is on the top of a hill with a steep drop below, and you can see the house when you drive into their property below. It needed to make an impact at first sight - so lots of big grasses for a long season of impact.

    Most of my initial planting was a series of perennial combinations, each one designed to have a particular colour scheme but to have some interest at all seasons, along with willows and dogwoods for winter stem colour. Doing a planting scheme like this, where the beds have very rounded, flowing shapes is quite a challenge for working out quantities. In any case it is actually very difficult to match a plan with reality on the ground, unless you lay out a grid and relate that to a grid on the plan. The reality of soils and clients is that the ground never really matches the plan - slopes can create distortions, some patches of soil turn out to be unusable, setting out plants can often accumulates errors over large areas, clients shove in their own plants (annoying, but there is nothing you can do about this - I know Wolfgang Oehme would rip such plants out with his own hands while lecturing the client (following to be read in a heavy Saxon accent) "this is not your garden, this is my garden" but most of us are too nice to do this.

     In this case I did not use a plan, in fact I very rarely do these days, I work out lists of plants, work out what proportions of one to another there should be, and then calculate on the basis of how much space they take up. All on an Excel spreadsheet.  Its about a planting combinations, the overall effect, not a precise, 'this looks nice next to this' kind of approach. It saves a lot of time, and therefore the client's money; in particular it makes a lot of sense for big jobs.

    The big stress on site is worrying about whether you have brought enough plants, whether I have got the decimal place right in the calculations etc. But its usually ok. Surprisingly  usually ok. But this first time we had far too many plants - so we just carried on planting another area.

    Next year, you are back, because the client likes it, and the maintenance has worked out ok, so they want more. Hurray! So you do another area. But this is more difficult as there are young trees, and its even more difficult to work out quantities. This time around there aren't enough plants, so the best thing to do is to leave some large gaps - thin planting looks awful so you might as well make the gaps look deliberate. Next summer I came to have a look and to estimate the size of the gaps so as to order more of the same to fill in, plus some others. This is serious guestimating but to my astonishment the other day when I came back with the plants, the quantity was all but perfect. None of this very unprofessional squeezing things in too tightly, or working out how to pad out big spaces between plants. Come on, admit it, every designer has been here.

    This being the west of England the main issue long-term issue has turned out to be geranium management - Geranium x oxonianum management to be precise. This plant, parents from southern Europe (long mild wet winters) is tailor-made to cover gardens in the English south-west, and it seeds. Few complain - it flowers pinkly for a month in June and then again September to November. There are so many hybrids/varieties produced by nurserymen who obviously think "I can name this after my pretty niece and put it in the catalogue and boost my own ego into the bargain rather than throw it onto the compost heap", everything from not-quite-white to the well-known 'Claridge Druce' screaming magenta-pink. The bottom line is this, the worst thing that can happen is that the garden just becomes geranium city. There are far worse fates.

For those of you who don't read Groei & Bloei

The magical 'Katje's Garden' at the late Henk Gerritsen's Priona Garden

    I don't either, but I have had a piece translated and published in the leading Dutch garden magazine - about the Dutch exhibition at the Garden Museum. So here, is the original text:

Visitors at Piet and Anja Oudolf's Hummelo garden

The Dutch are arguably the nearest neighbours of the British – quite apart from language, history and culture, we are both gardening nations. The period of the late 17th century, when Dutch forces invaded Britain (with our permission!) to install William of Orange on the throne, was a particularly important one for the exchange of ideas about garden making, with William taking time out from his march on London to go and look at new gardens.
    Nowadays Dutch influence on British gardening is most obvious through sales of plants from the hightly  efficient Dutch nursery industry to British commercial growers and gardeners - any of the bulbs, perennials, shrubs and trees planted in parks and gardens began their lives in The Netherlands. But there are other influences too. Amongst the ‘opinion-forming’  elite of gardeners and garden professionals, it is probably Dutch designer Piet Oudolf who has made the most impact as a garden maker; although many of the gardening public would not know his name, the fact that they will probably have a few ornamental grasses in their garden is largely down to him.
    For much of the 20th century the British were largely self-sufficient in their gardening. Some American garden makers came and went, but by and large a locally-evolved blend of formality and informality known as the Arts and Crafts garden held sway. Its combination of firmly clipped hedges, geometric layouts, and lush relaxed borders of perennial and annual flowers answered the need of a nation with a rather conservative artistic temperament, for gardens which evoked a romanticised ‘Merrie England’ past of sturdy yeoman farmers and chivalrous aristocrats. The Modern movement in architecture and design made little impact, except in a watered-down and mediocre form in architecture and landscape planning.  The fact that most Britons had their own gardens meant that there was little interest in public spaces.

Hardscape/softscape at the Mien Ruys Garden, Dedemsvaart

    By the 1990s, the less formal successor to the Arts and Crafts garden, a poorly-characterised, and rather spineless form of gardening built around wavy-edged borders and curving lawns was succeeded by an obsessive interest in re-discovering traditional and historic garden styles – the Arts and Crafts garden was brought out of the cupboard and dusted off for re-use. Interest in foreign models of gardening was minimal. Then rumours began to spread of a “Dutch nurseryman, with wonderful perennials, who also designs gardens”. A few brave ones amongst us took the ferry to Calais to drive up and see him, and in my case to go much further and visit parks and gardens in Germany too.
    It was of course typical that the plant-obsessed amongst British gardeners discovered Piet first, and rather ironical that many of his plants had originated in British nurseries. Articles about Piet and his gardens began to appear in the more upmarket garden magazines, and then articles about some other Dutch practitioners and places. Marijke Heuff’s wonderfully romantic and atmospheric photographs of the late Henk Gerritsen’s Priona Garden in Overijssel and Ton ter Linden’s garden in South Limburg also began to appear in books and magazines. There were even a few articles about the parks of Amstelveen with their wonderful wildflowers.

    What the British gardener saw in these photographs was something they responded to. The mass perennial plantings in German garden shows and parks did not make the same impact – they were too formless, and no-one quite saw how they could recreate similar effects on a smaller scale at home. Contemporary Dutch planting styles however were homely and contained, the use of plant colour and form exuberant, the clipped hedges gave a sense of ‘backbone’  and the occasional wild excesses of seedheads and rank herbaceous growth appealed to a desire amongst many for a more ‘ecological’ style. Above all, the balance between formal structure and burgeoning plant life had the same appeal as the Arts and Crafts garden. Ton ter Linden’s stature as a painter gave him an added credibility too ; the final phase of the British Arts and Crafts garden in the 1990s was a period when there was a great deal of experimentation with  colour, and the thoughts and plantings of artists carried great weight.
    The wildness appealed too. During the 1980s and 1990s there had been a burst of interest in growing native wildflowers in gardens and parks, but the hard fact that the British flora is extremely limited and not very ornamental, led to many people sowing hay meadow seed mixes and getting messy pasture grass instead. A more ornamental alternative was needed; seeing Dutch gardens with wild-looking perennials gave gardeners permission to go a bit wilder too. Particularly with grasses, such as varieties of Miscanthus, Molinia and Pennisetum; grasses had been around a long time but they never looked their best in the conventional British border where a ‘tallest at the back, shortest at the front’ style had meant that they were often not shown off to best advantage. Dutch (and German) planting styles allowed more flexibility and openness and few could resist the site of grasses like Stipa gigantea when they were back-lit by the sun, sparkling and shimmering with gold.
    Henk Gerritsen’s acceptance of dead foliage into the garden and Piet Oudolf’s showing the value of late autumn sun on dead grass and perennial seedheads made a huge impact. November has traditionally been seen as the dreariest month in the British garden, with driving rain and storms competing with the shears of the gardener to reduce perennials to ground level as soon as possible. Grasses, and many of the more robust Oudolf-style perennials were seen to stand the autumn weather better than traditional border perennials – the idea then spread that cutting back should be delayed and the warm sunlight of late autumn and winter be seen to work its magic. Piet’s own photographs of plants covered in hoar frost were also hugely influential, sending many garden photographers scurrying out hours before dawn when frosty weather was forecast. The Amsterdam-based photographer Marijke Heuff also made an impact in British books and magazines with her dreamily romantic pictures of wild gardens.
    The Dutch influence on the British planting palette extended well beyond grasses. The herbaceous plants of traditional British borders had been very labour-intensive: manuring, staking and regular dividing were all essential. The ‘new perennials’ were often much less work: plants like Aster divaricatus, Veronicastrum virginicum and Persicaria amplexicaulis will flourish for years with virtually no attention. Even the more short-lived ones such as the varieties of Echinacea and Monarda which Piet and others bred and introduced    do not need staking or feeding to perform well. Now that the gardener need not be a slave to their herbaceous border, there has been a huge revival of interest in this garden feature and herbaceous plants dominate many of the new generation of small nurseries which have sprung up over the last twenty years.

more Mien Ruys

    Piet Oudolf’s style is rooted firmly in the work of Mien Ruys, a name unfortunately almost unknown in Britain (there is very little information on her in English) – so British gardeners are getting, through the back door so as to speak, a gentle dose of Bauhaus-derived modernism.  They are also getting, through Piet, a dose  of  the German nurseryman and writer on gardening, Karl Foerster, who was immensely influential in developing  the use of perennials in  Germany; one of Foerster’s insights was to look at plants which had not been a traditional component of ornamental planting schemes, such as grasses and ferns, and see their potential. Piet has been particularly assiduous in using umbellifers, members of the cow-parsley family, which he rates for their long season of structure. Many of these are appearing in British gardens now too, and it was an umbellifer  - Cenelophium denudatum which was the star of the 2010 Chelsea Flower Show in designer Tom Stuart-Smith’s garden. Now probably Britain’s leading garden designer, Stuart-Smith’s debt to Oudolf is strikingly clear.
    For younger up-and-coming designers,  Oudolf’s work is often one of the most important models, for both concrete ideas about putting plants together and sheer inspiration. Sarah Price, one of the team involved with the design of the Olympic Park (to be completed in 2012), and a rising star in the design world, described seeing Oudolf’s new double herbaceous border at the Royal Horticultural Society garden at Wisley soon its completion in 2001, and feeling “that this was a revelation, so different to anything I had seen before” and admiring its “scale and its repetition, it made everything else at Wisley look so twee”. It turned out to be a pivotal moment in her decision to become a garden designer.
    In terms of square metres, the biggest influence on British gardening life has actually been in public space. Not that we are seeing perennials spread into parks (there is unfortunately no money for this, and no political well to increase budgets) but instead there are some highly successful mixtures of annuals which local councils can use – cheap to apply over large areas and immensely popular with the public. These have been developed by Dr. Nigel Dunnett of the Landscape Department at the University of Sheffield, but the original idea came from Rob Leopold and Dick van den Burg who established the seed company Cruydt-hoek in 1978, originally to see native plants, but branching out into annual seed mixes in 1990. Leopold’s idea – to use mixtures of hardy annuals which could be sown to create a series of flushes of bloom through the summer, has been scaled up by Dunnett so that roundabouts and parks in deprived residential areas become a sea of colour for up to five months.
    Having run out of ideas in the mid-1990s, the British gradually began to look abroad for them. In the work of contemporary Dutch designers we found plenty to like, and in a nation we had good feelings about. The Dutch approach to gardening, combining a love of plants and a clear sense of architectural structure, is so similar to our own, so it should not be surprising that the ‘Dutch wave’ should be so readily accepted.

BOX
Christopher Woodward is the Director of the Garden Museum in London. His decision to hold an exhibition on the Dutch Wave (a term originally coined by Swedish horticulturist Rune Bengtsson) came about because “we may be a museum, but we are a centre for the exploration of contemporary garden culture too… we have had exhibitions on great British gardeners, like Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, but when doing these it struck me that when you talk to garden people about influences they talk about the Dutch more than anyone else”. “It was in the mid 1990s when everyone was really excited about these gardens” he says, “and the American writer Derek Fell wrote that “the future is Dutch”. For many he thinks, the Dutch influence is “an escape from the British tradition whereby the apex of achievement is the garden of the grand country house”. Woodward recognises that a lot else has happened in The Netherlands, “to which the Dutch seem oblivious” but which others recognise as very important, such as the ruin garden of Louis Le Roi”.

Time for the CHOP

        I think everyone on the garden lecture circuit has a least favourite, but frequently asked question from the audience. Mine is “what about small gardens?” my own fault as the most dramatic pictures I show are usually of larger ones. Piet Oudolf’s is “when do I cut my perennials back?” There is a somewhat pained look on his face, as to him this is a rather absurd question. His reply is always “when you want to”....read on.... 

       You've gotta "read on" because I've recently been asked to make some guest contributions to Gardening Gone Wild, a leading garden group blog. I'm the only non-American in the group, so that's a great honour (even a great honor!) to be included. So, many, but not all, my blogs will now link to GWG. Which has a great rollcall of writers and photographers to check out.
    

THE COLD

            So with temperatures down to –13C (which I suppose might be regarded as a rather pleasant day in some places where this is being read), what else is there to talk about. We have had several weeks of this, which seems to add insult to injury.

            Last winter was pretty bad too. Anyone who wants to see what survived and what didn’t should have a look a the RHS report, based on a nationwide survey. Losses as interesting as survivals.

            I wonder just what impact this winter will have on the fashion that has developed over the last twenty years for growing tender stuff. During that time a whole generation of people have become gardeners without knowing what a ‘proper’ British winter is (though in fact this is worse - a central European winter) – this 20 years has co-incided with a time when the garden industry went on its great expansion.

            I’d better put my hand up. Back in the late 1980s, early 1990s I was certainly one of the early pioneers of the great gardening boom’s promotion of the less-than-hardy. I was actually primarily interested in widening the range of cool conservatory plants – that great swathe of flora which just needs protection from freezing (and in many cases are ok above (round about ) –5C. Selling plants at RHS flower shows in London (remember them, before the RHS decided it could make more money renting the halls out than running flower shows – which some of us naively thought was their core mission) I remember being vaguely shocked by people saying that they have planted some of my stuff out and it had survived. We began to realise just what a warm microclimate London has – and indeed any big city is warmer than its surroundings.

            I long ago moved onto hardy perennials, which are nearly all from climates far more severe than ours, and living in the Welsh borders I am not tempted to be too experimental on the hardiness front. Maybe one day I’ll live by the sea and have one of those fabulous west coast gardens where you can mix and match from different climate zones. Maybe in my old age. But back then, I was certainly part of that zeitgeist, and I remember thinking that some of my colleagues who just got deeper and deeper into the whole hardy exotic thing were doing something which was just going to end in tears.

            Anyway, what happened in the 1990s was a coming together of several things: a long run of mild winters (assume global warming, probably on top of cyclical climate change), an increase in plant introductions from borderline frost climates all over the world which went hand-in-hand with the great consumer gardening boom. Lavandula stoechas was never seriously regarded as hardy, maybe a few folk in Cornwall grew it. Mild winters created an opening for introductions from different parts of its range – we got aware of the concept of provenance, where something came from, how (in some species) there are appreciable genetic differences  in ability to survive cold depending on between plants over an altitudinal and latitudinal range. And then of course you can hybridise, so Lavandula stoechas blossoms into , quick look at RHS Plant Finder – 55 taxa in commercial cultivation in Britain.

            By the way I do like Lavandula stoechas, but I am going to use it to illustrate my point. Wholesalers started selling it, probably run by people too young to remember a cold winter (am I sounding like a grumpy old man here?), what with those little rabbit-ear ‘flags’ on the flowers the gardening public just love it. I remember, years ago, looking at some in a garden centre, at the little plastic tag which tries to give information without actually using any language (like IKEA flat-pack furniture), and no mention of (lack of) hardiness.

            So here we are, with a whole new diversity of plant life in our gardens, being subjected to a big experiment. There will be lots of surprises when the big thaw finally happens. I just hope that the growers of ‘plants on the edge’ make notes and let the rest of us know about survivals and casualties.

"I'd give it three years"....... how perennial are perennials? and other awkward questions.

Ever bought a 'perennial' from a garden centre and then wondered why it drops dead after a number of years? You like the thing so you try it again. Ditto. Naturally you blame yourself/the soil/the fact that the dog peed on it, but then you discover that everyone else has the same problem.

Welcome to the world of the 'not-perennial'.

Annual, biennial, perennial - three words which actually represent points on a gradient - from ephemeral to Bob Brown's "bomb-proof". Between 'biennial' and 'perennial' there are a host of short-lived perennials which do generally die after a few years. Their saving grace is that often they self-seed. If they don't its a bit of a con the hort industry telling us they are perennial.

How often do the garden reference books tell you that a perennial is short-lived? Or if it runs about, and if it does, how rapidly or its mechanism of spread. Lots of questions the books don't tell you the answers to.

But go to something like a Hardy Plant Society meeting and the air is thick with anecdotal material on just these kind of questions. So, I thought, why not design a research questionnaire which aims to get experienced gardeners answering carefully targeted questions on just these issues? As it happens there was an EU project: European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), European Territorial Cooperation 2007-2013.Interreg IVB North Sea Region Programme, which I was able to join and get (pretty decent) funding. Hurray for the EU! And of course to the Landscape Department of the University of Sheffield, in particular Nigel Dunnett and Mel Burton.

So, here are the results.

There is the 'lite' version, reprinted from the Hardy Plant Society journal (long-term plant performance), and for those of you who feel up to it, the full report.