A hard look at the Japanese garden - Part One

Garden at Tenryu-ji monastery, Kyoto. Classic sand garden, pool and borrowed scenery.

I have a clear memory of a favourite book in the library at school – it was about traditional Japanese architecture and included quite an extensive section on gardens. I remember taking it out again and again – I was utterly fascinated by those gardens. Like many other western teenagers (including to some extent my son) I developed something of a passion for Japanese art and design. Finally, after many years, arriving here and seeing them for the first time feels like meeting someone you have corresponded with for a long time but never actually met – certain things are just as you imagined, but much remains unexpected – and certain things you do not feel comfortable with. Anyone who knows me knows I am interested in naturalistic plant-focused design - so I was interested to see what my reactions would be. I feel a bit sensitive about critiquing someone else's garden heritage, but there has been so much unthinking adoration of traditional Japanese gardens in the west, I think it's fair enough to be a bit more critical.

Some of the greatest beauty is in the detail and finishing. Paving at the Katsura Palace.

In many ways I am sorry I have not visited Japan before, to begin to explore this extraordinarily creative and complex civilisation at an earlier stage in my life. As far as gardens are concerned though, I do feel it has been good to see them 'in the green' after having seen and experienced so much else in the world of making gardens, growing plants and designing landscapes. I can look at them as an experienced adult rather than a naïve youth, too ready to be smitten by the exotic. I was interested to feel my reactions to the gardens and see them not only for what they were themselves but what they offered us as garden practitioners and garden users today. To sum it up, I felt distinctly underwhelmed by much of what I saw; maybe I just knew these gardens too well before I saw them; there is plenty to admire and learn from, but also a lot that I did not respond to. I can imagine that if I were Japanese I might have been very critical of the garden tradition here.

Like many traditional garden styles, plentiful labour is essential.

Moss when it works, is wonderful.

But very often it doesn't.

Good examples of tree pruning at the Katsura Palace.

I recently spent five days in Kyoto with Juliet Roberts, editor of Gardens Illustrated magazine. We started out looking at Tenryu-Ji, like many gardens, created around a monastary on the hillier outer edges of the city (14^th Century). As we came in, a work crew were bent hands and knees over areas of moss beside and extensive areas of immaculately raked sand, a reminder that these gardens are immensely high maintenance. Most of the garden was however composed of heavily pruned trees growing out of what was for the most part bare earth. The overall effect reminded me of roses sprouting out of bare earth in a British municipal rosebed. 

Many gardens are built for viewing from a particular point. If however you get up and walk into the view, what you see is actually rather uninteresting. The analogy is with a stage set - effective and dramatic when see from the seats but wander amongst it and all you see is MDF and support struts. Planting is only relevant if it can be seen from the privileged viewpoint. We (and interestingly, the Chinese), expect to be able to wander around our gardens and see them from lots of different angles.

The bare earth effect we saw in many other places, so it is worth looking at in a bit more detail. Moss appeared to be growing, and I can imagine that a moss surface was probably what was desired, or originally intended. Moss only works as a ground cover if the soil is consistently moist, and preferably shaded. In sunlight, with regular summer temperatures of over 30C, it simply does not do, and either bare earth or algae-stained dried mud is the result. I found myself wondering how come a garden tradition with access to an incredibly rich woodland flora had not come up with an alternative ground cover to moss. Even the moss surrounding the stones in the great Ryoanji was burnt-up and patchy.

View from the sublimely beautiful Katsura Palace.

 

A hot and sweaty traipse through some rather featureless suburbs brought us to the Katsura Palace, where the garden was laid out in the 17^thcentury. There was almost no signage and several people who we asked had never heard of it. It turns out that whereas foreigners can get in by applying to the Imperial Household Agency a week in advance, Japanese citizens have to apply for tickets in a lottery. The palace is a characteristic piece of Japanese understatement with several acres of grounds dotted with tea houses and small water bodies. It is how many of us imagine a Japanese garden, as presented to us from over a century and a half of imagery, from Gilbert and Sullivans Mikado on. It has the hump-backed bridges, the pines with layered foliage, rocks and little thatched pavilions we expect. A set of images which have become so cliched with endless repetition that it is actually very difficult to see beyond them to get a genuine reaction.

 

Ryoanji - and its worshippers. Quite rightly. I think this is a masterpiece of understatement.

An early morning taxi ride gets us to the most famous of Japanese gardens, Ryoanji, shortly after opening at 8.00. We have a precious ten minutes in the company of the famous fifteen stones before the first tour party. It is really rather special, very condensed, a garden in the abstract. The nearest thing I have ever seen to it were 'dry tray landscapes' in China. It is so designed that you can never see all fifteen stones at once and it is impossible to see the whole thing at once, although it is not that big. It is the ultimate Zen koan, or puzzle. All this seemingly modern abstraction is all the more impressive when you realise this is similar in age to our European Renaissance.

Context is all important. Japan often feels a claustrophobic country, its population squeezed into a narrow coastal plain between the mountains (thickly forested) and the sea. Rice paddies jostle factories and apartment blocks. Most people can only garden in tiny backyards, on balconies or at the front of their houses. One of the joys of walking around residential districts is seeing how gardeners create incredible assemblages of pots and other containers in front of their houses: bonsai, shrubs, perennials, annuals, barrels of water with waterlilies. When you have as strip only half a metre wide, the only way to go is up, so plants get stacked onto shelves and climbers reach up to the second storey. Landscape designers do similar tricks – with three-layered shrub plantings against walls which can stretch for long distances along walkways, but fit into the narrowest of strips. Courtyard gardens are created in the tiniest of spaces, wherever a shaft of sunlight reaches the ground. This use of minimal space is the real miracle of Japanese gardens.

 

A tiny courtyard garden in an old Kyoto house. The simple planning of such tiny spaces is perhaps the Japanese garden tradition's greatest contribution to the world.

The only other garden that made a similar impact on me was one of the sand gardens in the Daitokuji temple complex. A not dissimilar size to Ryoanji it was simple and stark, with a healthy aura of Polytrichum moss around a group of two stones and neat little tuft of Selaginella, ferns and sedges around some others. Interesting that it dates to the 1980s when a venerable tree finally fell down, and something had to replace it. Elsewhere at Daitokuji there is an extensive tea garden which had good ground cover planting, and a balance between the clipped elements and naturally-free growing plants. It felt lush, quite naturalistic, calm and cool, the most relaxed planting we had seen. 'Cool' is important – Kyoto in summer is very hot and humid – we looked like beetroots for much of the time. It was almost the only garden where I felt at home with the planting.

Sand garden at Daitokuji

Wild Japan

Angelica ursina

A recent trip to Japan (the purpose of which will have to wait until another blog post) has been a wonderful opportunity to see some wild habitats on the other side of our continent. Always too briefly, as I am sure I spent far more time rattling along in suburban trains than I managed to be out in natural habitats. Precious moments snatched have to be made the most of.

The main purpose of my trip was actually in Hokkaido, the great northern island, which looks and feels a totally different place to the rest of Japan. Sparsely populated, with huge forests and extensive agriculture it has a sense of space impossible to find anywhere else. Botanically I think it has more in common with the Russian far east. Long cold winters end with a thorough soaking with snow melt topped up with summer rainfall. Warm, without the suffocating humid heat of further south, make for a brief but intense growing season.

Lush is the best word to start with. Very green. And so much that seems to be giant, including too all-too familiar species, Fallopia sacchalinense, the larger version of Japanese knotweed and Petasites japonicus, another plant we have at home as an aggressive escape from cultivation. The three metre knotweed is a very prominent part of the landscape, in a land naturally forested, it runs amok when there aren't trees or grazing or mowing to restrain it. The petasites, with its vast leaves appears more restrained than at home, never forming the monocultures which sprawl along laybys in Britain where was thrown out of the back of a car twenty years ago. I wonder whether these species, and of course the 'normal' Japanese knotweed, F. japonica, actually do better in our climate, somehow the longer growing season more than offseting its being cooler, and sometimes drier.

The two metre plus meadowsweet Filipendula camschatense is also very common. Judging by how well it grows with us (our one day a week gardener Diana says it is her favourite plant in the garden), I am surprised it has not escaped from cultivation. Maybe in time it will.

Petasites japonicus  and Aralia cordata

The other plant that you can't avoid noticing along Hokkaido roadsides is what looks like a slightly squashed version of another of our bête-noires, giant hogweed, except that it isn't. You can shake hands with Angelica ursina without burning your skin, which is just as well as the plant is everywhere, its vast leaves common in woodland but only seeming to flower in sunlight.

Otherwise the woodland floor is a solid mass of things we pay good money for in nurseries back home: aralia, aruncus, astilbe, aconitum, glaucidium, hosta, cardiocrinum – and trilliums earlier on apparently. The woodland itself seems dominated by some very nice looking oaks, with much larger foliage than ours and maples. So frustrating to be here, at what feels like a very very long way from home, for such a short time. Definitely a place to come back to.

A dear friend from Sheffield (in oriental terms we are classmates, a very important bond), Ayako Nagase, now an asst. prof. at Chiba University had, some time ago, told me of her interest in sea coast flora for green roofs. I was surprised we in Europe hadn't paid more attention to those tough little plants that grow on the very thin soils of clifftops. Indeed, it was at Ayako's prompting that I spent some time crawling about the clifftops of the Gower peninsula in south Wales only a few weeks ago, in search of the seed of the little blue bulb Scilla verna, which hardly appears to be in cultivation (we found plenty).

Ayako Nagase with her green roof based on Jogasaki coast flora

Japan's coastal flora is very different to what we can offer. She took me to Jogasaki, one of those rare places on the eastern Tokyo to Osaka coastal strip which is not built up. A pleasant green seasidey town, where it feels like people come to have fun (a rare commodity here – people work far too hard), Jogasaki's volcanic coast feels like an exotic Pembrokeshire. The flora includes some amazingly high quality foliage plants like Chrysanthemum pacificum and Farfugium japonicum. Sometimes these arrange themselves into compositions which look, well, designed. A very attractive flora indeed. These are plants which are not necessarily exposed to salt spray but are to cold northerly winds, and grow in little more than crevices in lava. Other species include **

See the Jogasaki flora here  on Flikr.

Another Japanese friend, Yuko Tanabe, had once told me about a place called Ibukiyama (Mt. Ibuki) not that far from Kyoto, with an incredible perennial flora. So, accompanied by several other colleagues, we all got the bullet train down from Tokyo and then piled into a hire car to have a look. Arriving halfway up a massive limestone mountain, we find that a great many other people had come with the same idea, including Yuko's mother who had come on a coach trip. In Japan and China one so often has to share nature with a great many others, but at least here the visitors are quiet and respectful and seem to be mainly interested in photographing the flowers.

They're all here to photograph the flowers

Ibukiyama is pretty incredible. The summit is covered in perennials, with the occasional gnarled shrub (often a hydrangea). No grasses or sedges – not until our way down did we come across a few grass tussocks. Filipendula multijuga in bright pink and Ligularia stenocephala in yellow made for a combination that garden designers always try to do their best to avoid. There are also Angelica pubescens, Veronicastrum sibiricum, Lilium leichtlinii and Veronica subsessilis in full flower. On the way down we past through acres of aconitum and actaea species just about to come into flower and Leucosceptrum japonicum - a plant I had only ever seen one of before, at Chanticleer; marvelling at it, I never believed I would be hiking through acres of the stuff half a year later. The dominant plant in terms of biomass though is Boehmeria tricuspis. In fact I would say that an awareness of this genus was one of my big discoveries of the trip – fantastic well-shaped foliage plants, the only point against them being that they look a bit too like their relative, the stinging nettle.

Ibukiyama is an extraordinary place. As you look around at the surrounding mountains and hills all you see is forested summits. Here, for some reason, massive snowfalls occur (including the heaviest every recorded) and appear to prevent tree or shrub growth. Most extraordinary though is what Yuko explained about the history of the place. During the 15the century it was used as an enormous herb farm, with medicinal herbs from all over Japan being grown here. When it fell into disuse, the plants took over. It really is an enormous garden gone wild. 

See the Ibukiyama flora here.

Global Gardeners explore northern Holland

Seed mix, sown last year, created by Piet Oudolf using seed from Cruydt Hoek

Garden tours are always special experiences, but our recent tour to the northern Dutch provinces, which Jo and I led for Gardens Illustrated readers (and run by Distant Horizons) was a particularly special one. We had ten garden designers from Argentina, most of whom had never been on a garden tour before, along with people from the US, Germany, New Zealand, Italy and the UK. It was a very special experience for the Argentinians, to visit somewhere where gardening is a mainstream activity, and where there is such a long history of growing plants and making gardens. They explored, photographed and discussed each garden with a passionate intensity. For them this was a very special experience, to come such a long way, to make a trip in difficult economic conditions – I was very moved that so many should choose to join us. They were a wonderful group to travel with.

The new meadow style area at the Oudolfs' - created three years ago: perennials with Dutch wildlflower mix sown between.

The three provinces of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe were a very good choice. They make up the bump at the top of the country and form one of those regions which feel very remote. You get the feeling that not many people go there (apart from holidaymakers on the way to the sandy Frisian Islands. Its not on the way to anywhere else, and at first sight you wonder whether there is anything more than fields of potatoes. What it has are the big open skies typical of the Netherlands but with a much sparser population, and some wonderful historic villages and towns; in places there are remnants of traditional landscapes where small fields are bounded by hedges with rows of alder trees. There is also a lot going on culturally and Groningen is famous for its contemporary architecture.

Aruncus and Rodgersia at Kwekerij Jacobs

Some of the gardens we visited were made by people who had always lived in the area, but others by those who had moved out of the cities and the crowded Amsterdam to Rotterdam strip back in the 1980s. With cheaper property prices it was a good place to make gardens and open nurseries. The result is an area with a huge variety of private gardens to visit, and – frustrating for most of us, nurseries with very good ranges of plants. One of our party, a designer from Lake Como in Italy, kept us amused by constantly buying plants, which would all get crammed into her luggage and flown home.

Thermopsis carolina at Jacobs

We actually started off further south with a workshop at the Oudolfs, where it was interesting to see some new developments where Piet has been using seed mixes rather than only just planting. One was a seed mix based on the lists of a supplier of Dutch native species and the other was the old nursery area which is using native grasses/wildflowers amongst perennials and Calamagrostis Karl Foerster grass - so far so good - the sandy soil here is low fertility so it looks as if a good perennial-grass balance is developing.

The garden and nursery of Henk and Dori Jacobs in Drenthe was one of our first stops. This does not feel like a consciously designed garden, which perhaps is its secret. Perennials planted across wide areas, one area very much dominated by the house and some light shade and featuring many lush rodgersias, aruncus and geraniums and the other much more relating to the local landscape and a large pond. Views out into the landscape (always flat and mostly agricultural) were to develop as one of the themes of the week. Intimacy and openness combined.

 De Kleine Plantage is a wonderful nursery near the north coast, run by Fleur van Zonneveld and Eric Spruit, who I first met years ago. Here we first see the crisp hedging we get so used to on this tour but as a framework for lush perennial planting. Fleur's colour-themed arrangements of pots, of both annuals and perennials are always a special feature.

We like our group to colour co-ordinate - Amalia Robredo with one of the plant selections at de Kleine Plantage.

Sculpture exhibits are always a strong feature at de Kleine Plantage.

Aristolochia macrophylla on the magnificent late C19 Landhuis Oosterhouw.

Lunch at Landhuis Oosterhouw was an event. Beautifully presented food followed by a wander around the garden. A truly extraordinary place - formal, but getting pretty wild and unkempt in places, deeply mysterious, oddly decadent, deliberate faded glory?, creepy in places, a forgotten world. The house (in which you can apparently stay) stuffed with antiques and enigmatic paintings. "A monk came one day.... and never left" said the owner. One of the most distinctive places I have ever been. Unforgettable.

Very Mien Ruys this. Modernist quirky hedging at Tuinfleur.

Tuinfleur is a bravura performance of a garden created by a middle-aged couple, who obviously devote their lives to the garden. It's extraordinarily long and narrow, and you move from room to room, with a range of garden themes. The view above is of a watergarden with a bit of a slope displaying lush wetland plants with their leaves tumbling towards the water. The hedging here must be a major job to cut every year - it's crisp and (particularly compared to what we are used to in Britain, creative).

 A small garden made by Alie Stoffers, a garden designer, playing with colour schemes in the way people have rather given up on back home. What I was particularly interested in, and this applied to some of the perennial planting at Tuinfleur too, was how dense the planting was – this would have been unthinkable a few years ago, one impact of the naturalistic planting movement has been, I suppose, that people are much more relaxed about cramming plants in and letting them spread. A lot of perennials actually work better supporting each other and the result is a kind of generous quality to the planting, although there is an unpredictability to it which needs confidence in managing. One of the things I do bang on about in lectures and workshops is how much greater plant density is in nature, compared to garden conditions, so its good to see garden designers getting in more plants per square metre.

 A new prairie style garden, laid out three years ago, by Jaap de Vries, was good to see. Jaap is a keen member of a facebook gardening community who were in touch with each other before the trip. It's an incredibly ambitious garden, and will take time to fill out, but a good rhythm of planting has already been established. You need rhythm on this scale.

A day with Nico Kloppenburg, who is a well-established designer in the historic village of Mantgum. It is interesting to see his work, as it is more dependent on clipping foliage than on perennials. Very clever much of it: hedges that gradually taper, hornbeam drums to block a view rather than use a solid hedge, beautifully shaped columns, wavy-topped hedges, common enough material but endlessly re-invented into new forms. So exciting.

Roberta Ketzler discovers a hedge to lean on.

One of Nico's best inventions is a new way of treating lime to form a hedge, bending it around rather than cutting, so that you end up with a dense interwoven mass of branches. The result is very strong, so you can lean against it without either falling through or damaging it.

The Ton ter Linden garden

The prairie garden made by Lianne Pot, mostly lupins at this time of year.

 

Lianne Pot's prairie garden and Ton terLinden's garden were two more we visited. Both are actually at their best later. Ton's garden has particularly big views over the local landscape, with a pond making a romantic foreground. Tractors cutting silage purring away in the background – its amazing how fast modern agricultural machinery work. Lianne's prairie garden aims to show what can be done with later flowering prairie perennials - in combinations. This it does very well, with some good input too from Michael King.

 

Back just outside Groningen, we go to Hortus Haren, a botanic garden which I had heard was going through rather a rough time – shortage of funding. I'd chosen to go there though because of the Chinese garden, which is supposed to be one of the best and largest in Europe. One of our party had been with me in China a few years ago, and we agreed, it was pretty good. with all the various elements that makes Chinese gardens so distinctive in their use of space. Even its being a bit run-down didn't seem to matter, as the gardens we had been to in China were all a bit over-maintained. Surprising number of spontaneous marsh orchids popping up.

 

Not actually a member of the party turned to bronze.

Museum de Buitenplaats has a 'modern-baroque' garden where formality is given some real twists or segues into wild masses of ferns or lush Darmera leaves; lots of brick which contrasts so nicely with the foliage. Part of its function is as a backdrop for a collection of contemporary sculpture. Unfortunately, they have just lost their head gardener to financial cutbacks by the provincial government on cultural spending.Very imaginative design here, we all thought.

A small town garden in Groningen, we visited on our last night

We end on a high, the Mien Ruys gardenat Dedemswaart. This is about the third time I have been and I'm delighted to see some serious fund-raising has brought them a new study centre, and even some new areas of garden. The veteran 20^thcentury Dutch garden designer worked and experimented here for all her adult life, the best part of 70 years. It feels like the birthplace of the modern movement in gardening, something which has made a real impact in the Netherlands, but which didn't in Britain. Its combination of obvious love of plants with a clear graphic sense made a fitting end to a remarkably stimulating trip.

Nico Kloppenburg explains

The group feeling generated on the tour was so good, a facebook page has even been made to share memories and information.

Next year, I am planning trips to gardens in mid-Devon and New York. Keep a look out!

The garden at Bryansground - better than ever!

We went to Bryansground the other day for the first time in years. Silly really, as it is only half an hour's drive away. Mind you, they (David Wheeler and Simon Dorrell) of Hortus fame, have never been to us. All too often we don't visit places that are just under our noses.

The last time we went it was August and looking distinctly worse for wear. I found Simon's retro-formal design a bit oppressive too. Things have changed in the intervening years. The garden has gotten really wild, but still held within a very formal framework, and so the classical formality feels easier, and better balanced. As Simon says it is the only “formal wild garden” he knows. It really does both at once, a very successful bit of creative tension. Borders burst with self-sowing and spreading geraniums, aquilegias and thalictrums. There does not appear to be too much for later flower, although some Anemone x hybridahave got predictably large and spreading. One major theme added since our last visit though is the junk. A whole array of objets have appeared: some rather classy like a row of gargoyles, some garden-relevant like a huge rusty old lawnmower, but many completely 'inappropriate' such as galvanised corrugated iron sheeting. The impact is surprising, at times almost shocking. Very effective, I loved it.

Bryansground has long had a tendency towards the playfully decadent. On earlier visits we had admired the 'sulking house', a gazebo which fronted a sultry border of dark flowers and foliage, and which was decorated with vast bunches of dried flowers. This tendency is now a big part of the garden's appeal, as urns tilt, shrubs lean over pathways making them all but impassable and seeding perennials take over borders. It reminds me of so many formal gardens in a state of decay, but the decay here is clearly meant and is carefully staged; I almost wondered whether the tilting urns were carefully set that way. It's fun, very theatrical, and a feast of discovery. The management is also very skilful. If you haven't already been - go!

 

 

 

 

Where have all the wildflowers gone? ..... (apart from the ones on the way to the airport).

We had a few days recently in Austria. One of the things I  had been looking forward to was seeing hay meadows. A long time ago (an embarrassingly long time ago) I had driven from Salzburg to Vienna over the mountains in early June and been blown away by the incredibly wildflower-rich meadows. One place I particularly remember, Iris sibirica was flowering amongst orchids and 'the usual' selection of ranunculus, knautia, lychnis, campanula etc. Traditional hay meadows have a high proportion of non-grasses to grass, many of which are very colourful wildflower species, so biodiversity is very high. The herb-rich grass makes for an interesting chemistry for the cows to eat, and is one of the main factors behind the very distinctive taste of Bergkäse - mountain cheese.

Where have all the flowers gone? Into plastic bags, every one.

This time I saw very few wildflowers - the reason being that farmers have largely gone over to silage rather than hay as a means of storing grass to feed to cattle over the winter. Hay is a nightmare to make as it needs several days to dry, and things can go badly wrong if it is stored too wet (like spontaneous combustion!). As one farming website says "All in all hay is a vale of tears".  <http://www.farm-direct.co.uk/farming/stockcrop/grass/silagedet.html > Silage is the stuff that is stored in those big plastic bags that can be seen lining the edges of fields, or it is stored in a big 'clamp' on the farm. It is essentially a fermented grass, with a higher moisture content than hay. Though it is difficult for us to believe, it is more palatable and digestible for the cows than hay.


Silage is cut earlier than hay, before most of the wildflowers in the grass flower and certainly before they seed. The bad news is: a huge drop in wildflowers and for biodiversity; it must be particularly bad news for pollinators such as bees. I discussed this with some Austrian colleagues who said that in some areas where conservation is more of a priority, there are subsidies for farmers who make hay rather than silage, but otherwise, no, over the last ten years there has been a huge increase in silage at the expense of wildflowers.

In Britain and the Netherlands farmers had done this for some time, and is part of the reason for the almost total disappearance of hay meadows - along with conversion to ryegrass monocultures and increased use of nitrogen-rich fertilisers (which include organic as well as synthetic fertiliser). Farmers have to make a living, so one can hardly blame them. In addition to which, not many farmers have any real interest in conservation (although more do now than in the past). There is no real difference between organic and non-organic either. The marketing departments of the organic food industry like to portray their products as being in tune with nature and conservation friendly, but the fact is that they are under the same economic pressures as anyone else - even more so, as organic farming is about 35% less productive per acre or hectare than non-organic, and is therefore a greater enemy of biodiversity than non-organic as it means considerably more land has to be farmed in the first place.

We have several acres of grassland on the England/Wales border, which has an interesting wildflower flora, in places very diverse indeed, and we try to manage it for wildflower biodiversity as well as we can. In this way we are very similar to many other middle-class people who have moved to the country and bought land which is now too uneconomic to farm. Some people (and a lot do this in Austria) get in a local farmer to cut their grass - mostly this means silage of course, although a few in our area still do hay. But trying to get a local farmer in to do anything is a complete nightmare - cutting a small field for not much economic return is hardly a priority for them, added to which is a completely different attitude to time and to commitment (a polite way of saying that they often seem to be utterly hopeless at getting things done, keeping you informed, and in the case of one local character never knowing what the weather is going to do - yes really! - to be brutally frank, I think a lot of small farmers are actually pretty bad at what they do).  There is of course no understanding of priorities for biodiversity management.

On the big scale, the preservation of hay meadows will only happen if farmers and landowners are given an economic reason to do so, i.e. subsidies. I am not generally a fan of subsidies, which are a vote-bank for politicians in many cases (just look at the farmers of the US Midwest, a great case of welfare-dependency if ever there was one), but here we can argue that through subsidies for conservation-friendly practices, we as taxpayers are paying for a product - biodiversity, which in turn can benefit tourism. On the small scale, an interesting example of people getting together is the Monmouthshire Meadows Group where people in the lower Wye valley, many of them with very small areas of hay meadow have banded together to share experiences and have bought an alpine hay baler so enabling them to make hay on a small scale and so preserve their wildflower rich meadows.

Actually in Austria, we did get to see some fantastic wildflowers, with one of the most biodiverse and colourful places I have ever seen in Europe - when we were on our way back to the airport. This has happened before - I remember Roy Diblik taking me to Chicago O'Hare Airport and stopping to look at the wonderfully named Shoe Factory Road Prairie on the way. Eichkogel, just south of Mödling, is a limestone hillock with a long history of management for hay cutting and a fantastically diverse dry meadow flora. Famous amongst Austrian botanists apparently. A wonderful way to end a trip.

Melampyrum arvense - a semi-parasite makes a dramatic splash at Eichkogel.

Funky art-plant-human hybrids in Vienna make us look again at plant breeding

I was in Vienna last week to do a lecture as part of an exhibition on plant breeding as an art form. One of those events which displays the city's imaginative thinking and creativity at its best. Check out their website:http://www.landscapewithflowers.net/ - most of the entries on the website are bilingual German/English. It is interesting, beautiful and well-worth looking at in some detail.

Its not often that plant breeding is defined as an art. Here it is explored as such through both the exhibition, at the Vienna Botanic Garden and on the website and through some imaginative, almost whacky artworks. A painting by two artists and landscape designers - Anita Duller and Hannah Stippl merges with a planting in a downtown gallery which includes both real and plastic flowers both inside the gallery and immediately outside in a window box. Hannah (also the exhibition curator) and Anita have run workshops in London at last year's Chelsea Fringe where they get people to paint and then create plantings based on the paintings.

Their website is:
http://theflowerbeds.com

The opening event at the Botanic Gardens featured edible flower jelly (very Vienna) while the gallery includes a small petunia plant which contains a gene from an artist. In a country where attitudes to GM food are amongst the most hostile (and quite honestly most irrational) I would have expected the place to be bombarded with protesting biodynamic eco-warriors. But not a bit of it - no-one has objected - progress indeed!