Sheffield - city of flowers?

 

Sheffield. Once 'steel city', then 'The People's Republic of South Yorkshire', now just another post-industrial regeneration site. BUT for those in the know in the garden and landscape world, a centre for good and wonderfully colourful ideas.  

 About 12 years ago Nigel Dunnett (know Professor) in the university Dept. of Landscape started working on annual seed mixes. The idea being to develop something which could be used by local councils to quickly and cheaply do something bright and uplifting, not just on roundabouts and parks but problem housing estates. These pictures were taken on the Manor and Castle Estates.

 They have been very successful, and hugely morale-inspiring to the folk who live in what can be very forlorn areas. I'm not suggesting that passive enjoyment of beautiful flowers significently reduces the rate of car theft, drug taking and the other traditional local pastimes, but it may do something. Nigel's experience in talking to local people is that the flowers are a huge morale-booster.

 Actually, the annual flower mixes are part of a much larger package of environment-led community regeneration organised by Green Estates, a not-for-profit who sell the seed under the brand name of Pictorial Meadows.

 There are now about half a dozen different mixes, based on colour or height. Each one includes around a dozen species, which flowers in succession. From a March sowing, flowers can be expected from June/July through to November.

  

Annuals actually vary in how long they live, from 'ephemerals' like field poppies which are nine-day wonders to longer-lived species like Californian poppies which can flower for months, and well into the winter given mild weather.

Nigel has also worked on perennial mixes, such as these, although they are slower to establish.

From left, Sheffield PhD students Jia Yuan and Ye Hang, Nigel Dunnett and Amalia Robredo.

I had gone to Sheffield for  a flying visit with Amalia Robredo after a Gardens Illustrated tour of Berlin and eastern Germany. Amalia is a pioneer garden and landscape designer who works in the coastal area of Uruguay. She has recently published the first popular guide to wildflowers of the area, with a view to encouraging their use in landscaping, and planted the first locally-native green roof. Sheffield gave her lots of inspiration.
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The 'Special Relationship'

About a month ago the leading flag on the ‘flag counter’ on my blog finally tipped from the Union Jack to the Stars and Stripes. So perhaps this is a good moment to reflect on Anglo-American relations in the garden. With the recent visit of Mr. Obama (who we Europeans by the way all adore) there has been yet another spate of politicians and commentators discussing the so-called ‘Special Relationship’. There certainly is one in gardening, and like the political version, it is complex, constantly changing, and sometimes controversial.
Read more ............

BREAKING NEWS – Oudolf rips out hedge shock …and the joy of pleasing the inhabitants of Bexhill-on-Sea.

A lot of us will know the famous hedge at the back of Piet Oudolf's garden... well it's gone..

Read all about it here........

Wisteria

Four year old wisteria on our house. Rather raggedy Tibetan prayer flags in front.

Wisteria tunnel at Antony House, Cornwall

There’s a house just down from the Garden Museum in London’s Lambeth where in April you can smell the wisteria quite a long way before you see it. It is a vast plant, covering three stories of a 19^th century house with flower. The scent is really something, especially as it is on an otherwise rather dreary road.

Flowers are produced on old wood.

We are actually rather proud of our wisteria – it is now four years old and has flowered well for the first time. Yet the plant is notorious for not flowering. What happens is that it just grows masses of stems and foliage. Think of wisteria as a temperate zone liana – an immense woody stemmed climber with more in common with tropical Tarzan vines than tame old clematis and honeysuckle. It basically wants to climb to the top of large trees, up to 25m, where it can then flower. On houses, there is rarely the space available for them to develop anything like their full size.

No not our house - worse luck, but Wisteria running up the tower of the Landesmuseum in Zürich - 20-25m high.

Pruning is normally used to restrict size of the plant, and to stimulate flowering, on younger and smaller plants than would happen in nature. You have to be ruthless – in fact I think we have taken off 90% of the plant’s growth over the years.

Restricting the growth of the plant to a framework is crucial to develop a tidy plant and flowering.

Important to cut back all fresh stems from the main stem, otherwise you'll end up with a tangled mess.

Wisteria will twist any vertical support wires around it

So, you need to have an adjustable link to the bottom of any vertical wire supports.

A finger in the ocean - Cornwall

A classic Cornish garden view of rhododendron with bluebells and wild garlic - Antony House.

Vast rhododendrons, vaster than you ever imagined you’d see, magnolias with their impossibly large flowers on as yet leafless branches, camellias forming virtual forests, Gunnera manicata spreading like an ambitious triffid along a valley floor, sheets of bluebells and other wildflowers, bamboos with stems as thick as drainpipe, cordylines spiking the sky, banks of azaleas beckoning with that scent you could almost drink, and oddities, things you have never seen before and send you scurrying into the leafage to try to find a label, and failing that starting off earnest discussions with your gardening companions.
Read on............

Daffodiliphilia

Daffodils are somehow the quintessential spring flower. The appearance of their distinctive yellow flowers is a sure sign that winter has either ended or is about to soon. Unlike the tulip, which appears to be dependent on us for its continued re-emergence in the garden, daffodils re-appear faithfully every year; and not just in the garden but in places such as roadsides, churchyards and parks where they have been planted, often decades ago – in some cases over a century ago. These plants are clearly great survivors, as witnessed by the number of flowers which appear in places where they have clearly been accidentally dropped or discarded – the flowers frequently mark where someone emptied the boot of their car of garden waste into a ditch or hedge, little thinking that the event and scene of their crime would be annually and flamboyantly marked for so many years to come. Read on.........

A weekend in Hummelo

Piet Oudolf laying bricks to mark out a new perennial planting bed. Dragon back hedge in the background.

                  A weekend with Piet and Anja Oudolf. We need to discuss collaborating on another book, reflecting Piet’s increasingly sophisticated planting design. He has to a considerable extent broken away from the blocks of planting which has always so dominated the thinking of garden designers. So we spend a lot of time looking through plans groping for words to describe the different ways he mixes plants to get them sparking off each other, which is not easy as he is a very visual person and words and concepts don’t always match up. And photographs – by the end of Sunday we've looked at hundreds, and then on Monday morning I go through a big pile of his slides, looking for good (but unpublished) shots of plant combinations, and am rapidly reminded of how  it used to be looking at slides through a loupe on a lightbox, and now even harder now as my eyesight isn’t what it was. Hurray for digital technology. Piet takes vast numbers of pictures of his projects, at every stage, talking to the funders and politicians, earth-moving, laying out, planting.

New book out - Monacelli Press, a monograph of 25 of Oudolf projects, public and private, see my online bookshop.

Looks a bit of a desert, but it won't be for long. Anja watering a newly planted Calamagrostis in what was the old nursery area

                  An interesting weekend to be chez Oudolf, both the boys are there: Pieter who runs a business selling repro Delft tiles (Dutch made) and Hugo who lives in Ecuador, in his wife’s village running an eco-tourism and community ranching business. And to see the first planting in a big new space; Anja has decided to retire from the nursery business, so the old nursery area is a vast expanse of sandy soil. The next day saw some Calamagrostis ‘Karl Foerster’ going in and some young trees – Sorbus sargentii. Piet told me that the plan was to sow perennials in between some planted material, and develop a big prairie look. I look forward to it.

Mertensia virginica runs in my garden and the Oudolf's. In Hummelo it has spread amongst perennials in conditions of great competition pressure, even in the middle of a Panicum clump. Like a bulb this exquisite flower is summer dormant.

Ranunculus ficaria (Lesser Celendine) is also summer-dormant. I've never seen the point of weeding it out, I'm glad Piet agrees.

Viola canina has sown itself into some of the perennial borders.

A clipped Pyrus salicifolia outside the new office building.