The joys of spring

There are surprisingly few good spring gardens around. So often, a 'spring garden' consists of drifts of daffodils let loose in grass. Very nice, but so easy to do, it hardly counts as gardening once its done, just mowing at the right time. Then there are that small number of gardens where there are thousands of tulips, which, given that tulips are generally one-year wonders, means that the cost, not only of tulips but of putting them in, limits this form of horticultural expression to the very wealthy. And in times of austerity, such flaunting of wealth is perhaps a little rude (I remember Prince Charles planting tulips in meadow grass once, I don't suppose even his budget allows a repeat of that gesture; if it is, I look forward to the appropriate peasants' revolt throwing down the gates to Highgrove).

So, I was very glad to finally get round to visiting Olive Mason's garden in Worcestershire a few weeks ago, a garden well and truly full of the joys of spring. She opens for her snowdrops in Feb (for the NGS) and hopefully one day might do later too. A medium-sized and very intensely planted garden clearly relies on clipped box and perennials for its impact most of the year, but amongst these are a great number of bulbs and spring-flowering perennials. For many years, Olive has looked after a severely disabled son at home, and making and maintaining a garden has been something which she could do, whilst caring for him. Clearly, she spends a lot of time gardening, but at the same time it is an example of what I call intelligent management – a great deal of self-seeding and spreading is allowed or even encouraged, and so weeding and other plant control is very much like sub-editing – dealing with the detail.

Corydalis 'G.P. Baker'

Olive's plant management encourages what is key to making a good spring garden which then turns into a good summer garden – integration. Most spring-performing plants have a different annual cycle to summer-performing; they grow at lower temperatures, and by the time they are dying back, the summer species are coming into growth. Their growth cycles are complementary, so it is possible to shoehorn both into almost the same space. Summer perennials, and bulbs, and spring-flowering but summer-dormant perennials can be cheek by jowl. Those which are not summer dormant, such as many primulas, cannot be quite so close, but will still tolerate summer shading by taller perennials. Given this neat complementarity, it is possible to think of having two, completely different, planting schemes: spring and summer/autumn. A summer planting scheme, as it uses larger plants with a longer period of growth, can be the 'main' one, and then the spring planting can be thought of as another layer, dropped on top. The only real points of interaction will be perennial clumps emerging amongst the bulbs and spring perennials; for the most part these will just be blobs of background green, but a few with dark foliage (peonies and Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing') do look very nice alongside the predominantly blues and yellows of spring.

Primula wanda types seed attractively, low enough to fit in a variety of places.

...even seeding beneath a box hedge.

Visiting Dial Park made me realise how much harder I must work at this. We have plenty of Barnhaven primulas and Primula elatior which is simply the toughest primula out, some daffodils (not as many as I'd like, as so many have rotted off in our wet ground) and a few scatterings of scillas and muscari. Primula wanda will be on the seed shopping list this summer, nicely coloured very short and very spready primulas for seeding around the front of borders and amongst perennials. And I must try harder with corydalis – C. solida clearly seeds well.

Thinking of a garden as a two layer project: spring and summer, seems a good thing to keep in mind, one of those ways of looking, which can be very useful.

Good integration between bulbs and summer perennials in this and following pictures.

The vandal in the park - Margaret Thatcher

Council contractor planting team April 2006. Good people. They deserve better.

Margaret Thatcher had an impact on everything that happened in Britain, and in a way still does. She was not known to have any particular interest in gardening or landscape, but her effect on Britain's public urban landscapes was enormous, and arguably, very indirectly, on a particular era of private garden design too (but more of that another time). Here I'd like to reflect on what she set in motion has affected our public parks and other planted greenspace. It has important lessons.

Those who are not British, were too young at the time or indeed who benefited from her rule (1979-1990) have no idea of the sheer loathing, the deep and visceral hatred she inspired in those at the sharp end of her policies. Change is always difficult (and an awful lot in Britain in 1979, when she was elected, was in desperate need of change), but it was her seeming contempt for the whole idea of community which caused so much suffering and anger. For everyone who admired her leadership and policies there was at least another who found her arrogant to the point of being dictatorial, viciously divisive and intolerant (of opposition and of minorities). After a decade or so of privatising state assets (sometimes to our benefit, but more usually to the benefit of those who bought the underpriced shares) she turned her attention to our public parks – which are a community resource if they are anything, and it is an irony that the privatisation of their management occurred in the very last year of her rule.

In 1990, Compulsory Competitive Tendering was introduced, so that the management of parks and greenspace had to be put put to companies who bid for the services – the most competitive (i.e. the cheapest) winning the contract. The impact was “horrendous” in the words of Ivor Stokes, who had a career in Swansea parks and ended up as Curator of Swansea Botanical Complex. “A lot of young people used to get apprenticeships with the parks... that all went” he recalls. Park services, like the railways, and to some extent the other state-owned industries had something which cannot be expressed in monetary terms – a culture, which passes on knowledge from one generation of the workforce to another, but also shares that knowledge within the profession. Park services used to be run “very hierarchically” says Ivor, but everyone would have horticultural training and people could work their way up. The new system involved contractor companies providing services, with managers who knew nothing about horticulture and unskilled staff, who only knew how to mow and cut, “you had time and motion people assessing jobs, and staff decision making replaced by computer-driven programmes instead... its week ten, so we can to cut all the shrubs now, just the other day I saw some forsythia which isn't going to flower because it had been cut back by someone on schedule”. Horticulture cannot be managed with this kind of dogmatic inflexibility.

Not surprisingly, standards plummeted, young people lost the opportunity to move into a healthy and interesting (if badly paid) profession where there was a real opportunity for progression, and many public spaces simply got duller, less well managed and often more dangerous. I remember in Bristol staff employed by one company (contracted to manage parks) would throw rubbish into the playgrounds (managed by another company), who would throw it back again. It summed up the shambles of the whole exercise. My conversations with parks staff always revealed deep frustration at the lack of opportunity to use and develop their skills, at the way management failed to respect them, and how everything was dominated by the need to cut costs.

Although quality plummeted, the very best parks were rescued, thanks to Baroness Trumpington who introduced a bill in the House of Lords to keep parks of botanical and historical interest in public ownership – hence Ivor's job at Swansea. It was a rare victory in a decade of government assets (which we all own and have some political control over) being sold off, and workforces being made redundant or de-skilled.

The decline in quality in public greenspace, the loss of jobs, the loss of skills and accumulated knowledge was symptomatic of what happened in the Thatcher years. The well-off generally did not notice, but for people who lived in working class communities, who saw factories and mines shut, public services reduced, public housing sold off and not replaced – what they saw was a heartless contemptuous vandalism. Contracting out in the parks was like so much else done in these years, not done to improve quality but done for reasons of political ideology and to save money.

Not that pre-1990 parks and greenspace was a golden age. Not at all. (Small 'c') conservatism, funding cuts and a rather dreary lack of imagination meant that there had been little in the way of innovation for years. I came across a rather interesting survival of this old mentality a few weeks ago. Shouldn't say where yet, until I do more research, but it is a council-run botanical garden that was in danger of sliding into being yet another mediocre park. The council wanted shot of it, sold it to a Community Interest Company who then engaged a business consultant who was passionate about the place. The chap in question has now invested a considerable sum of his own money into the place in order to turn it around. The whole thing was like one of those TV programmes where the business whizz kid goes into to rescue the failing country house or whatever. The entrepreneur described to me the great difficulty of finding out what went on, who did what, when they did it, or to get staff to change age-old working practices, such as working at weekends (when most of the public visit) etc. etc. It was a good example of 'the bad old days' that has given local government in Britain a bad name, and of course helped open the door to Thatcherism. The garden in question will be very interesting to watch. First signs are very hopeful - and again, more later.

There has to be a better way – to modernise the way public space is managed yet maintain flexibility. Germany, Sweden, Holland, France, all have much better parks and greenspace, although all very different. There are different emphases on public and private ownership, but what actually counts is a political commitment to continually improving quality, openness to innovation and a career path for staff.

Suburbia, red in tooth and claw

On a recent trip to the US I found myself in several conversations with people about animals in the garden. Some astonishment that we do not have coyotes in Britain, nor racoons, or groundhogs, and that our deer are relatively small and tend to run off at the mere glimpse or whiff of a human, and unless you are very unlucky, do little damage to the garden. There's a lot more wildlife out there in those American woods, and for gardeners a lot more capacity for damage. The deer for a start, are enormous, and remarkably fearless. No wonder so many gardeners get obsessed with them, or more accurately how to keep them out. Actually they are a much more serious problem, as nature reserves and other areas of habitat can suffer some pretty serious impact from continued deer browsing - to the point of major ecological damage.

Soon after I got back I got an email from Helen Yoest in Raleigh, NC, with a book review about this very issue. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/feb/21/visitors/?pagination=falseHow the woods are reclaiming the suburbs and the wildlife problems that result, or is it the suburbs invading the woods? Interesting stuff, and something which follows on from my recent blog with the rather lurid Martha Schwartz quote. The first few generations of European settlers felled every tree in sight, farmed, then realised that much of the land was too poor, and moved west, to plough up the much more fertile prairie. The woodland fought back. Very successfully. Whereas in Britain, woodland re-establishes itself through a fairly slow process, in the US, I feel that if all human beings disappeared one day (selective gamma ray burst that leaves other species standing?), then ten years later there would almost be no trace left of their presence. Trees re-establish so quickly. The upshot is that much of the area where people live is actually forest: roads, houses, gardens etc. are carved out of the forest. The wildlife, deer especially, have bounced back from the days when they hunted by anyone and everyone, to enormous numbers, numbers which in the absence of enough predators (i.e. not enough coyotes, bears, wolves, guys with guns who can shoot straight) have rocketed. Not good for gardeners, not actually very good for the environment, or even for the health of deer populations. For much of the wildlife, humanity is no longer a threat, but a source of food and habitat.

I am reminded of the British equivalent, the urban fox; cities support far more foxes than the countryside - all those bins to raid, discarded take-away meals, food left out for hedgehogs etc. No longer afraid, the wild animals creep back. Except that having exterminated all the big predators centuries ago (wolves, wild cats, bears, lynx) the urban wildlife we have is very unbalanced. Bring back the wolf? except that the farmers would complain (more than farmers complain anyway) and I somehow don't see large predators being welcome in British cities and suburbs.

Deer clearly need intelligent culling, and a more natural source of meat cannot be imagined. But in both the US and Britain, any mention of a cull brings storms of protest - often from people who are quite happy to sit down and eat meat from farmed animals. Another symptom of a failure to engage with the realities of life on earth.

What is so strange about this suburban woodland which so many US citizens choose to live in, is the extreme contrast with areas deemed to be landscaped: the vast deserts of grass mown to within an inch of its life, the extensive mulchscape which surround 'plantings' of evergreen shrubs ruthlessly pruned into meatballs. Much US landscaping and its management seems to express almost a hatred of vegetation, or as often with hatred, is it really fear (as with misogynist men). Or is it just job-creation? In the land of the ruthless corporate downsize, it seems strange that so many hands are paid to keep doing what is so apparently pointless. At one stage I got talking to a guy who worked as a landscape architect, he was fairly new into his career and was clearly on the bottom rung, designing landscapes for MacDonalds outlets etc.; he had almost no room for creativity - local zoning/planning requirements are incredibly prescriptive about how many shrubs had to be planted, what size, spacing etc. Driving through the junkscape outside Raleigh: endless auto retail outlets, strip malls, fast food outlets, box stores, made me feel very depressed. Such waste of space, such mediocrity on an epic scale, such obsession with control, above all the CONFORMITY. The conformity that we expected from Soviet communism, but which these supposedly free citizens embraced.

 Will it ever change? I thought about the various people over the years I have met who have fought for the right to grow meadow or prairie in their front yards. It is a battle that is still being fought, against the totalitarian instincts of lawn ordinances and neighbourhood associations. Thinking of the Highline, and the other projects which it is beginning to inspire which embrace wildness, I realised that it may be a very slow process, but things are changing. And - that I, with my writing and lecturing, am part of this process. My first American lecture tour was in 1996, as part of a group, organised by Horticulture magazine and called 'Wild Style'. My realisation made me feel less depressed, and left me with a strange feeling of subversive power; I, chuntering down the freeway in my anonymous rental Ford Fiesta (BTW Ford have a green roof on their Dearborn, MI, plant) am doing something about this. The ability of nature to take back lost ground is so obvious here, much more so than at home, it only needs permission. Let's give it, but remember, it will have some consequences which we need to be brave and sensible about.

Plant Delights Nursery

A particularly delicious Trillium underwoodii form.

Tony Avent's Plant Delights Nursery near Raleigh in North Carolina is legendary. 20,000 plus taxa. Primarily for the huge range of plants of course, but also for its display garden, its whacky sculpture and provocative, hate-mail-generating cartoon catalogue covers. Plant Delights shows that it is possible to stand out againt the herd and run a successful business selling a huge range of plants, many of them distinctly slow to grow.

Asarum takoi 'Roundabout'

Organisation is key here; everything is incredibly tidy, and very well-labelled. With an emphasis on woodland species, you can wander around, see and photograph more new plants in a couple of hours than many would believe possible. Researchers get involved too – for them the meticulously labelled clumps of innumerable geographic and other forms of plants are perfect material.

One of several dry berms, mostly but not entirely for dry land stuff.

“I'm very keen on ex situ conservation” says Tony, “although everyone bangs on about conserving plants in their place”. He has a point, habitat destruction can wipe out a rare variant of a species out overnight, but well-labelled collections in a protected location like this, will ensure survival. What's more, the public display of such a vast array of biodiversity is powerfully educational in its own right.

The soil here is very sandy, very acid, and was stripped of its nutrients by a century plus of tobacco farming (this is the greediest of crops). Wood mulch is used for the paths, and as it rots it gets shovelled onto borders, so steadily building up the humus content. Apart from some berms of imported soil and gravel, largely used for dry habitat plants, little effort is made to provide special soil conditions for plants; Tony is adamant that one size pretty well fits all here, he stabs a finger at an agave sitting next to an azalea on one of the berms to prove the point.

These are Rohdea.

 The whole, ten acre plus, site is managed as a rain garden, so as little water is allowed to run off as possible, and all water from the greenhouses (the only environment in which synthetic fertilizers are used) is cleaned by running through beds of wetland vegetation.

Water detention is a part of the nursery's rain garden approach to water management

I was there frustratingly early in the year. Trilliums were just beginning to show, and they illustrate perfectly Tony's passion for genetic diversity, with vast numbers of distinct forms on display, and thousands of seedlings coming up in the glasshouses. With their often exquisite leaf markings and mysteriously-coloured flowers, these are the ultimate collector plants. The US south-east is a major centre of diversity for them.

This is a floating island made from old drinks bottles, gently moving round the largest pool in the wind. 

Natural biodiversity may be the central passion, but Tony also oversees a number of breeding programmes to improve the plants available to gardeners; primarily with Epimedium, Baptisia and Hellebore. “With hellebores” he says, “we practice redneck breeding, just putting together groups of plants we want to cross, isolated from others, and let the bees get on with it.”

I can't wait to get back at another time of year.

Trillium maculatum

Episode Seven of Dig, Plant and Bitch, the world's only soap opera for gardeners is now available.
Iris stakes her claim
For years, Iris and Johnny Dalton have rather treated the almost-abandoned walled garden at Mere Castle as their own territory. Now aware that the Watkins-Smythes are thinking of renting it out, Iris decides to take matters into her own hands. Elsewhere, garden designer Sebastian Gilling-Jones is discovering that being a TV gardening personality pays a heavy price; nurseryman James Treasby increasingly feels like he is running a remedial class in basic horticulture, the Watkins-Smythes and their rivals, Wayne and Petunia Martin are playing a war of nerves over supplies of cakes for their respective tea-rooms, while Petunia makes a discovery that might be good news for local connoisseur gardeners, but will not be welcomed at Treasby’s Plants of Distinction.

Ever green in North Carolina

Prunus mume, an exquisite early-flowering plum,  thrives in the South, where the hot sticky summers are so much like its native Far East, almost ungrowable in England because of fungal diseases,. So unfair!

Don't they just luurve their evergreens in the South?
Am currently in North Carolina doing some lectures, brought here by the Davidson Symposium next week. I last came her 21 years ago, on the my first trip ever to the US. Its one one of those places which is a real gardening hot-spot. At the weather feels like home - cold - but the camellias are flowering well, and that's what reminds you that you are in the South. Look more closely, and you see lots of of evergreens. They are a big part of the garden culture here. Partly I suppose its because there are some very good native evergreens here, such as Magnolia grandiflora and M. virginiana, some good hollies including the charmingly named Ilex vomitoria. Partly also I suppose its a mark of distinction - most evergreens get treated very badly by the weather north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Buxus sempervirens 'Dee Runk'

Box, or boxwood as the natives so quaintly call it, has always been grown from, and often grown in a different way to the way Europeans treat it - it hasn't always been clipped, but sometimes allowed to grow free; I remember years ago visiting the Cathedral Garden in DC and seeing box 'grown loose', and rather liking it. If you always clip box you are not actually going to be that interested in what shapes it adopts naturally, whereas if you let it loose, then the shape is going to be very important. So people here started collecting and selecting different cultivars, so there has always been much more awareness here than back home of the genetic diversity of box.

Arbutus unedo 'Elfin King'. Whoever named this was a bit optimistic about it being dwarf, but the leaves are very distinctive.

One place I was really confronted with the incredible diversity of evergreens available here, and indeed of woody plants generally (try and find a nursery that does an interesting range of woodies in Britain now) was Camellia Forest Nursery, where Bri Gluvna Arthur had invited me to drop in. I didn't go to see camellias, which quite honestly, if I wanted a flower like a piece of soap I'd buy the soap. Polytunnel packed with loads of plants which i have never heard of - which always gets me excited, especially since most of them would be growable back home: Distyllum, Eurya, Gordonia, Schima, Serissa, then loads of species of genera where we have only a limited selection back home like Osmanthus and Illicium, or general we really couldn't grow outside like Gardenia  and Cinnamomum.

Ilex 'Carolina Sentinel' - a very nice upright-growing holly. The hollies here are wonderful.

Then to be fair to Camellia, BTW, of which there are 100+ species, there were some wonderful camellias here. I've always loved 'Cornish Snow' with little white single flowers, many of the species look like that, but with many different variations in their foliage: nice n'smelly C. odorata, C. fraterna and many more.

Not just a nice smell - Gardenia augusta 'Michael'

Would you believe it, this is a camellia - C. sasanqua 'Silverado'.

While a lot of evergreens were showing signs of winter stress, boxes in particular, this shrub (trained as a standard) looked incredibly fresh and unfazed; I was very impressed by the quality of the foliage, it's an intergeneric hybrid involving Raphiolepis and Eriobotrya (loquat) - x Raphiobotrya 'Conda'.

Another chance to appreciate the southern love of evergreens, and the incredibly adventurous US nursery industry is the Paul C. Ciener Botanic Garden where I did my first lecture of this little tour. The botanic garden isn't there yet, but it will be; they have a car park and a very nice building, and the first plantings, a plan, and what looks like the ability to pull in sponsorship and achieve things. Horticulturalist Adrienne Roethling has got the enviable job of gardening the place into existence, she worked for Plant Delights Nursery for 8 years ("we call it graduate school round here" Bri Arthur says), so almost every plant is one which is new on me, and all incredibly well-labelled. Its all a very good start to what should be an exceptional small-town botanic garden. Kernersville is a lucky place.

Look! the agave has impaled that SUV! If only. The car park at the Ciener Botanic Garden. Notice the kerb insets for sempervivum.

Euphorbia rigida, in the planting above, good early colour, and superior to myrsinites. Must get it.

A great idea planting up the border between the fence and the sidewalk.The hell-strip though is going to take some more determined plant selection though. Yucca rostrata is clearly visible, and its soft enough not to risk impaling small dogs.

There will be a garden here one day.

And it will look like this!

Nature improved upon in hellebore heaven

This almost-black hellebore looks like something straight out of a Victoran funeral. Of all black flowers they have to be the best

A wonderful day spent at Ashwood Nurseries in the Midlands, looking at hellebores and being more impressed than ever by their breeding programme but also by the plant itself, which seems to challenge and transcend our notions about the difference between the wild and the bred. This is their mother-plant greenhouse, where the plants are grown for the hand-pollinated seed. Seed to saleable plant is three years - unlike the one year of most perennials which are sold.

We are used to heavily hybridised plants looking very different to their wild ancestors, and making a big distinction between the two. Those of us who go for naturalistic planting tend to look askance at heavily-bred plants, but with hellebores it is somehow different. Here are plants which work very well indeed in naturalistic planting schemes and are not highly-strung cultivation-dependent like most intensively-bred groups. No do they have the mutant-with-a-cultivar-name look of many either. In fact they do not have cultivar names - and this is very important. They have broken free of the tyranny of the identical cloned cultivar trap which ornamental horticulture has got itself stuck in. Genetic variability rules!

Kevin Belcher cross-pollinates selected plants from mid-January. Hopefully not too many bees sneak into the glasshouse to wreak genetic havoc. Very simple crossing procedures. Everything is recorded but there are no complicated genetics here. This plant breeding is at the first level, where intuition is everything.

This is one of the 'Neon' strain, with yellow and apricoty colours predominant. The naming of particular genetic lineages which express particular colours is the nearest Ashwood get to giving names. The variation from one flower to another is one of the things which is most entrancing about them; looking at the plants in their sales glasshouse, thinking about what to buy (needless to say they are amongst the most expensive of perennials); spotting the little differences between two flowers which at first look identical - this is all part of the joy and you wonder why we are so hung up on the concept of the cultivar, where every individual must look the same. Clonal cultivars seem just so boring by comparison.

The doubles are beautiful but most of us are not so sure. For one thing the flowers are so heavy they hang down and are not so easy to see. And they do rupture that fundamental belief we have that they are not natural and there isn't one just like this in a wood in Croatia somewhere.

Single hellebores look - well, so natural. They are indeed not so far from their ancestors which are very common in the woods and meadow edges of the Balkans. Above all, they are so robust, long-lived plants which in our gardens in Britain at any rate, are very easy-going about where they grow.

The dark ones are the most vigorous by far, and look best when backlit. At our last house we had them on top of a wall so we could look up at them. A few years ago I planted out some of the many seedlings which were sprouting around the plants I bought from Ashwood 14 years ago. The ones which grew really fast all turned out to be red. However good plants did tend to produce good children, there was not much reversion to inferior forms.

I love spotted flowers. The level of spotting is highly variable. Early Ashwood spotties were red on white - they now have a strain with red on yellow.

And now there are double spotties.

The blacks are really special but difficult to use in the garden as they merge with the background. I like to plant snowdrops as contrast, and later on, dark-leaved Lysimachia 'Firecracker' makes a nice complement.

 

All of the ones so far are H. x hybridus, derived mostly from the very variable Balkan H. orientalis.

This is one of the x sternii group, where there is a lot of active breeding amongst several nurseries. Different hellebore species do not necessarily cross-breed (yet - someone will crack it one day, with a lab technique like 'embryo rescue', the plant equivalent of test-tube babies. At the moment varieties with good flowers tend not to have great foliage and vica versa, but I am sure this will change. There are so many species to play with. 

For more on hellebores this is a good introduction.

Beyond 'nature as virgin – garden as whore'.

Nature in the city has gotta look pretty. The New York High Line

In a recent, and well-argued post, fellow blogger Thomas Rainer quotes landscape architect Martha Schwartz as saying that “Americans treat nature like Victorians treated women: as virgins or whores”.

I know what she means: landscapes are either wild or they are not, and not-wild-landscapes in the US tend to be treated in a way which is almost abusive – the sadistically-mown grass and cruelly-clipped evergreens. Thomas though is interested in the nature side of the quotation – that “if nature (OUT THERE) is not some pristine wilderness, then it’s not nature”. As he points out there is very little pristine nature left.

All this is part of a discussion about a very thought-provoking book (Rambunctious Nature by scince writer Emma Marris) which I raised in a blog last year. I'd like to carry on the conversation.

Thomas announces that “now is the era of the designer”, that landscape designers will have an increasingly important role in designing nature, that “(t)he ecological warriors of the future will be gardeners, horticulturists, land managers, Department of Transportation staff, elementary school teachers, and community association board members. Anyone who can influence a small patch of land has the ability to create more nature. And the future nature will look more and more like a garden.”

Too right. Which raises all sorts of questions about “what is nature?”, “what is a garden?”.

They are liking it wild at last! - changing public perceptions of what a garden is

Increasingly people are appreciating gardens and public plantings that are far wilder than anything that would have been acceptable in the past. The New York High Line is probably the best example of that. Nature in the city is now seen as not just ok but highly desirable. At least in the industrialised world (it'll take a while to catch on in China!). Managing nature in the city involves habitat creation and management which is a kind of gardening. This is not actually that new – the Dutch have been doing this since the 1930s in the parks of Amstelveen.

Recently, on a trip to South America, I saw what garden designer Amalia Robredo was doing with her land in Uruguay. A lot of her 'gardening' is actually land management – deciding what to cut, when to cut it, on the basis of aesthetic decisions (to encourage spring or summer flowers for example) or functional (such as short-grass around seating areas to discourage snakes). Increasingly this land management will be seen as part and parcel of normal garden practice. Part of the reason for this is that more and more of us are gardening places which used to be farmland, but which is now uneconomic to farm; Amalia's land used to be rangeland, my own here in the Welsh borders used to be sheep pasture, and before that, arable crops.

BUT - people like their nature stylised

Especially in urban areas. Hence the incredible success of the Dunnett and Hitchmough Olympic Park plantings in London  and of course the High Line. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as people realise that this is 'enhanced nature' or 'stylised nature' and not the real thing. Given how difficult it is to actually see the 'real thing', it is probably more important for us all to realise that what we are looking at may be a fantastic wildlife habitat, but that there are a whole lot of species (mammal, bird, primarily) which will not choose to live here, because they need bigger territories or need to be well away from humans. The ReservaEcológica Costenera Sur in the middle of Buenos Aires for example is never going to have any jaguars, nor the NY High Line any mountain lions.

A point that Emma Marris makes in Rambunctious Natureis that this stylised nature offends some people, the 'ecologists' who are still wedded to the idea that 'nature' is something which can only happen 'out there' and untrammelled by us (Martha Schwartz's virgin/whore dichotomy). The central thrust of her book is that 'nature' should be seen as anywhere where natural processes have at least some leeway; certainly including the weedy waste ground at the end of the road.

Anyway, what is nature?

An awful lot of what we think of as 'natural' is actually human-managed, or human-impacted. This was one of the points I was trying to make from Bolivia a few weeks back.  So many cherished landscapes are actually farmland, or were trashed by our ancestors. Some human management actually improves biodiversity (a heretical thought for eco-purists), as in European hay meadows or fire-managed Midwest prairie and savannah.

Eco-illusions

One of the most insidious illusions of a particular romantic and often quite techno-phobic way of thinking is that our ancestors: 'traditional societies' or 'indigenous peoples', cherished nature, lived in balance with it, and we are somehow different. Hardly. We just have more destructive tools. Our ancestors consciously manipulated nature or made huge impacts on it in many different ways (again see the Bolivia post). These ways are sometimes so deep in the past that we are not aware of them – we do not even know what 'nature' is.

• Fire – some areas have had millennia of burning for game management (much of the grasslands of the Americas, Australia, Scotland)
• Mass extinction – our tribal ancestors wiped out wildlife on an epic scale, with the Maori killing of the giant moa birds in New Zealand simply one of the latest episodes.
• Farming – whether through slash-and-burn or more sophisticated methods, vast area of the globe have been cultivated at some stage.

I believe it is important that these illusions make it very difficult for us to appreciate the history of our wild and not-so-wild places, and therefore complicates the task of how we think about managing them in the future.

Farming, and more eco-illusions

Ok, we want wild: we like it, and we want it because we have finally recognised that the rest of creation has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of (whatever passes for happiness in a newt's brain) as we have. We are getting used to the idea of nature in cities, and gardens, and that we can garden in such a way as to maximise it. We want nature reserves and national parks and wilderness areas – the latter probably as much to feed our own illusions about the 'wilderness' as actually to protect nature. And many of us would actually like a lot more for this kind of nature than there is currently is. We like to hike in it, birdwatch in it, see in on telly in David Attenborough programmes, above all to know it is there.

But.

There is an awful lot of us, and we are getting more, and richer, and when people get richer they demand more food, and more cotton, and palm oil and all the other stuff that consumer-humans want.

And the biggest destroyer of unmanaged landscapes is the agriculture which produces all this stuff.

Which is why we need to ensure that agriculture uses land really efficiently. This is something which again attracts lots of feel-good sounding eco-illusions. Many of the so-called sustainable farming approaches, such as organics, may be good and appropriate for marginal regions but fail utterly to deliver the sheer volume of calories needed. It is right and proper that fertile flat places are used for intensive arable production – with some areas set aside for nature of course. They can take the pressure off more biodiverse, more vulnerable habitats.

In thinking about how we 'garden the earth' I would suggest that this is the biggest blind-spot many people have – the failure to appreciate how efficient farming and nature conservation actually dovetail. Think of the earth as a garden, with a well-run tidy vegetable patch, a lawn area to play on, some nice wild borders and a really wild unmanaged bit somewhere.

The nation as garden – the Dutch analogy

'Gardening the earth' – was an expression I dreamt up years ago, in a essay for a collection in a book called Vista – Culture and Politics of Gardens. 

It is interesting to develop this analogy: we need places to grow food, to live, and for nature. The Netherlands seems to have come pretty close to this, with its very dense juxtapositioning of land for living, working, recreation, some of the productive farming on the planet, and yet with a long and pioneering history of habitat creation, and one of the most radical departures in wilderness creation – the Oostvaardeersplassen.

We have far more to thank those sensible, level-headed Dutch for than just tulips!

Nurturing nature

So, we are getting used to the idea of the earth as a garden. Often badly managed by us, and by our deep ancestors, for sure, but as we learn more about our ecological history, and about ecological processes, we can become better managers. We need to. As we are just about to reach a point where designed vegetation will play a vital role in how we manage the planet.

In April Piet Oudolf and I are bringing out another book – on planting design. The introduction however makes the point that we are expecting plants to do more and more for us: wetlands to manage sustainable drainage systems, green roofs to moderate the extremes of urban climates, bioremediation planting to purify effluent, living walls to clean the air. Managed vegetation will play a more and more important role in reducing the impacts of climate change, and might even help reverse the rise in CO_2. Nurturing nature will not just be about creating habitat, but about planet-management too. As we nurture nature it in turn will nurture us.