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Today’s is a very short piece, as events at home and work have allowed me very little time. I have been wanting to share this recipe for several weeks though and not doing so just wasn’t an option.
The recipe isn’t mine. It is by the London-based Ukrainian cook and food writer, Olia Hercules. Her family are in Ukraine and it has primarily been through following her impassioned and emotive Instagram feed that I owe my awareness and understanding of the events of the past month.
My admiration for her is unbounded. She has campaigned relentlessly. Spoken and written in the press. Raised funds personally and through her activism and doubtless been responsible for educating a huge number of people about the realities of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. All this while being profoundly concerned about the wellbeing of her extended family, friends and fellow Ukrainians.
One of the ways in which she has been raising funds is through the Cook For Ukraine initiative, which she started with Russian food writer, Alissa Timoshkina. Funds raised through supper clubs, bake sales and pop ups are going to Unicef to help families and children affected by the conflict. To date they have raised nearly £325,000.
By cooking and sharing Ukrainian and Eastern European recipes the campaign aims to increase awareness of the humanitarian crisis and bring people together over a shared love of food and Ukrainian culture.
This recipe is incredibly timely. Nettles, wild sorrel and wild garlic are all now growing in profusion in the fields and woods around us. Foraging the amount required for this recipe is the work of a half hour or so and a great activity to do with friends or family. The root vegetables and alliums are all still in store after the winter, while the fresh green herbs are growing plentifully in our polytunnel.
In however small a way, foraging in the fields for the wild herbs in the quiet of the morning to the sound of birdsong and cooking the recipe to the letter of Olia’s instructions definitely brought me closer to an appreciation of the Ukrainian way life of that is currently being threatened so critically. It is through understanding this common humanity that we appreciate our own freedoms and understand how important it is to speak out when others are at risk of losing theirs.
2 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil
1 onion, peeled and cut into 1cm dice
2 carrots, scrubbed and cut into 1cm dice
1 small celeriac, peeled and cut into 1cm dice
3 celery sticks, cut into 1cm dice
1 leek, white part only, trimmed and cut into 1cm dice
3 big garlic cloves, peeled
1 bay leaf
Salt and black pepper
6 baby potatoes
100g sorrel, sliced
75g young nettle tops (the top few leaves on each stem)
50g wild garlic leaves, sliced (flowers kept for garnish)
3 spring onions, thinly sliced
A handful of chopped dill
A handful of chopped parsley
Creme fraiche, to serve (optional)
Pour the oil into a cast-iron casserole set over a medium-high heat. Once the oil is sizzling, add the onion, carrots, celeriac, celery and leek, and saute, stirring from time to time, for about five minutes: you want them to become caramelised in parts, but not scorched. (If the pan feels too crowded, fry the vegetables in batches.) Add the garlic and cook, still stirring, for about two minutes, until fragrant and starting to colour.
Add two and a half litres of cold water and the bay leaf, season lightly with salt and bring to a boil. Turn down to a simmer and cook, partially covered, for about 40 minutes.
Add the potatoes whole and cook for 10 minutes, or until they are soft, then add the sorrel, nettles and wild garlic and take off the heat. Taste the soup and add more salt if needed.
Put a potato in each soup bowl and lightly crush it with a spoon. Ladle over the broth,then sprinkle with the wild garlic flowers (if using), spring onions and herbs. Serve with a dollop of creme fraiche, if you like, and a good grinding of pepper.
Words: Huw Morgan | Recipe: Olia Hercules from Summer Kitchens | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 26 March 2022
Where just a fortnight ago time felt like it was still in hand, spring stirrings are now telling us otherwise. Green in the hawthorn hedges reminds me that I still have the remains of bare root whips that have yet to be found a home. Flower buds fattening on the pears might well need protection and at ground level there is activity everywhere. Bittercress rearing to flower to seed another generation and shoots on the peonies already scarlet and glistening with the vigour of the new season. All change and no holding back now.
We are pushing to finish the mulching, combing the beds one last time for weeds and seedlings that might go unnoticed once the mulch goes down. The rash of Digitalis ferruginea, which has germinated in the last fortnight will be stifled by the mulch, but we will apply it only thinly or not at all where we want them to replace the older generation. The Great Dixter team call this ‘intelligent mulching’ which always seems like such a good way of engaging with what you do and don’t want when applying this protective eiderdown.
The first sightings of self-sown Beth’s poppy and eschscholzia are a good litmus and we start to sow other hardy annuals as soon as we see them. Larkspur, Love-in-a-Mist and Shirley poppies are sown directly, disturbing the ground where we want them and making sure they retain enough headspace to grow sufficiently strong to be able to run up to flower without being outcompeted by neighbours. We sow plugs of Orlaya grandiflora, Ammi majus and Ammi visnaga so that they can be introduced into any unplanned gaps that might appear. These are started off in the polytunnel where we also have plugs of early vegetables that appreciate the start of early warmth. Salad, chard, slow to germinate parsley and pots of dwarf French beans to steal a march on open sowings in the garden.
Triggered by the shift in the season and a growing feeling of needing to get a move on, I’ve been going through the seed boxes and found to my dismay that we’d completely overlooked sowing the Lathyrus odoratus alongside the other sweet peas in the autumn. They will be not be as strong as autumn or February sown sweet peas, but they may well provide us with a nicely staggered supply of blooms. We will be sure to watch them for the mice by keeping them out of reach on the staging, as they can so easily ravage a generation of peas before they have even germinated. The stocky young plants from last autumn’s sowing are ready to go out now after being hardened off in a well-ventilated frame.
I sow a number of perennials from seed so that I can grow them on and produce them in the numbers I need to make a planting flow. The green form of Bupleurum perfoliatum and unusual umbellifers that are hard to find. With bulbs such as Tulipa sprengeri and locally harvested Bath Asparagus (Ornithogalum pyreniacum) I sow every year so that I have a steady flow of plants. The four to five year wait feels like nothing once you have them in relay and the first three years behind you.
I started the same process with Anemone pavonina (main image) last summer. I bought the parent plants from Beth Chatto. She was originally given them by Cedric Morris who had collected seed from plants on a Greek hillside. Knowing the provenance of a plant adds immeasurably to both the feeling of belonging to a community of plant lovers and an understanding of where they will do best. It is warming to think about them sharing stories about where they grew and with what and then their experiences as they went on to grow them here in England.
The seed is as soft as down when the seed head ripens and ruptures. It was sown fresh last June in an open compost with a dusting of grit to hold it down and make it feel at home. Sowing seed fresh is always the best option because you sow it with the plant and your vision of more of them firmly in mind. Fresh seed also tends not to lose its viability, where saved seed often triggers a longer dormancy to help protect it. Primrose seed, for instance, germinates erratically if kept on a shelf until the autumn, but if you sow it fresh it will have begun its life by July to overwinter as youngsters and be that much faster the following spring.
The anemone seed germinated in December as it might with winter rains ahead of it in Greece. I kept them in the frame to prevent them from getting too wet here in Somerset and will keep them in their pots for another two years before planting them out in a little stock bed where I will grow them on to flowering size. Being seed-raised there will be variability in the offspring, but in this case I will welcome the unexpected. Anemone pavonina is famed for its candy colourings and my original plants range from white with a blue eye to lipstick pink, deep rose and blazing scarlet. Colours you are as happy to see in spring as the promise of germinating seedlings.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 March 2022
I planted Leucojum aestivum into the banks behind the house ten years ago now. I had a vision of them below the crab apples, following on neatly after the Crocus tomassinianus, but being there for the duration of spring. First with the sky-blue spangle of Anemone blanda and then, as the meadow turf lengthened and the crabs came into flower, with Pheasant’s Eye Narcissus and the creaminess of tapering camassia.
Having a vision in your mind’s eye is important when planning a garden and I always have one at the beginning even though the reality may take many years to come to fruition. The years needed for the Anemone blanda to naturalise and for the turf under the crab apples to be fine enough in their young shadows to introduce a scarlet slash of Tulipa sprengeri. But things do not always come to pass, despite best judgement. Gardens are places where a myriad of unseen elements have to be negotiated.
The getting to know, what does and what doesn’t do, is a conversation of sorts, a silent one based on observation, response and adjustment. Sometimes you have to let go of an idea and I feel I have waited long enough for this particular vision to materialise. The leucojum appear and flower, but never flourish as I had imagined they might with lush clumps of strappy foliage and arching droplets of flower. Though our ground is heavy and retentive, the bank is drier than I had thought with a native hedge at the top drawing upon resources and a steep slope that drains freely. The primroses love it, proving there is spring moisture, and the winter snowdrops thrive here too as they like to dry out in the summer, but the leucojum simply do not thrive and I can feel it.
So it is time to change tack, a response that very often yields the results you had planned for. A plant may simply not like the place you have chosen for it and moving it somewhere that it may prefer is often all that is required.
Though they are adaptable garden plants, I want to open up the best possible opportunity now that I have decided to try them in a new position. Read about the native habitat of Leucojum aestivum in Europe and one particular image of them growing in a Croatian wet meadow amongst crack willows stays very much in mind. In ground that lies damp and may well flood in winter, the leucojum find a niche in a competitive environment where they have the moisture they need to thrive in company and to naturalise.
Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’, is a strong-growing form selected by the naturalist William Robinson and named after his home at Gravetye Manor. The bulbs were potted last autumn so that I could introduce them after the ditch has been trimmed in early winter. I have planted two new colonies. One in the garden in a non-competitive environment, in open ground amongst the sanguisorbas where they will have the early window of April to flower and feed before the burnets fill out and take the position. The other in the wet banks that slope steeply into the ditch.
The damp ground in the ditch near our own crack willow is where I am hoping to naturalise snakeshead fritillaries and winter aconites. The bulb layer will come ahead of the early summer rush of damp-loving natives that thrive here. Meadowsweet, giant horsetails and wild angelicas take this ground, but I’ve been working in a number of bulky perennials that can tough it out in what become rough growing conditions come high summer, amongst them marsh spurge (Euphorbia palustris) and moist woodlander, Aruncus dioicus. Plants that like wet feet and can get their head and shoulders above the crowd as the leucojum fade and retreat into dormancy. My hope is that the summer snowflakes will find their niche here. A place where they can thrive rather than simply do and somewhere that will help me fulfil a vision that is still very much up and running, but has simply moved locations.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 12 March 2022
The time we put aside to looking after this place is time that is given without question. It is time that has true value, because every year we accumulate a better understanding of how to apply our energies. As the garden has grown from the original test ground on the site of the farmer’s old vegetable patch to what we have here now, the way in which we use our time has to be carefully apportioned. We’ve learned that in August the harvest demands all our energies if we are not to waste all the efforts that got us to that point and that the winter tasks have a cut off that is marked by emptying the compost bay to allow for the spring preparations to get underway at the end of February.
The domain of the tended spaces has a direct correlation to the man hours we have available and, simply put, we couldn’t do this on our own. We had a day a week from our good friend Anna Benn, when the garden sat in the old vegetable patch, but then she moved away and in 2016, when I lit the touch paper and landscaped the spine that runs to either side of the house, Jacky Mills and Ian Mannall came to help. We gardened together on a Saturday so that we always had cross over time. They helped prepare the ground and plant and unruffled the rougher areas where I am experimenting with a lighter touch in the landscape. But when Covid hit they retreated to Herefordshire, much as we retreated here to Somerset, and I wrote here on Dig Delve about how we would manage alone. John Davies, who helps us here now, responded to the piece to say that he was very local and would be happy to offer help. He now does two days a week so that between us, roughly speaking, we maintain the place on four to five days a week.
At the very end of winter and the beginning of spring the rhythm changes as we go about the big cut back and preparations which set the garden up for the growing season. Over a month or so we make light of this big effort with a many hands approach like a community might have done in the old days with the harvest. Over the years this help has come from different quarters with keen gardeners like Artur Serra Costa (now gardening for Luciano Giubbilei in Mallorca) offering help one year, and Ray Pemberton, a local gardener recommended by Alison Jenkins, a regular for several years. Jonny Bruce, an ex-Dixter scholar, has been bolstering our Saturdays since he returned to the UK last year and over two weekends we invite people who have expressed an interest in helping to make a day of it, with soup and cheese for lunch and banter as we work. It is a fun process that sees one season stripped away and the next made room for in a fraction of the time and allows the skeletons to stay standing until the very last minute. Last weekend we were joined by Rachel Seaton-Lucas and Daniel James and we thought that this week it would be interesting for everyone to share a bit about themselves and their thoughts about gardening.
John Davies
What is your background and how did you arrive at gardening or working with plants?
Growing up in South Africa, I spent most of my formative years outside and one of the highlights of the weekends was spending time in the garden with my family doing the numerous tasks involved in caring for a garden. We took regular family holidays into the bush and to the coastline along the Garden Route of SA which helped develop a deep love and respect for the natural world. This led me to study Nature Conservation. Unfortunately the bright lights of the city pulled me back in like a moth to the flame and before I knew it I was in London where, in 2004, I was introduced to the landscaping industry.
What are you doing currently for work and what are your future plans?
I’m currently focusing my attentions on Harrington Porter, a garden management, design and build company in London, working at Hillside and at Arvensis Perennials. Not sure I could find three more contrasting work environs, but variety is the spice of life!
The future remains unmapped, but for the foreseeable I will continue to use the practical skills gained through my experience and knowledge of design learnt through the Oxford College Of Garden Design to help people get the most from their outside space. I would love to own some of my own woodland to manage and work in a responsible way to aid biodiversity and do something for the state of nature on this island while continuing to help people.
What do you get out of working at Hillside?
Hillside! What can I say about Hillside… In all my time in the United Kingdom, I am not sure I have ever felt more alive in the landscape. Birds, insects, vegetation, Dan and Huw, dogs, dogs, more dogs, good people, fresh food, coffee and work I love. In one word, HARMONY.
Why do you feel gardening is important?
I’m not entirely convinced it is gardening that is important. Interacting with the natural world is what is important. How you do that is not for me to say, but the more available we make it, the better we will all be in the future.
Jonny Bruce
What is your background and how did you arrive at gardening or working with plants?
Summers spent working on organic farms and convincing my college – where I was studying Art History – to let me set up a student allotment was an introduction to how gardens go beyond growing food. I also chose Derek Jarman’s windswept Prospect Cottage for my final dissertation, a place that really opened my eyes to how a garden can be so much more than decorative. Immediately after graduating I headed to South Wales for a year’s apprenticeship at Aberglasney Gardens before securing the Christopher Lloyd scholarship at Great Dixter in East Sussex.
The plant fairs were always a highlight of the Dixter calendar and it was here I met Hans and Miranda Kramer from De Hessenhof nursery in the Netherlands. This special nursery not only had plants I had never heard of, but was certified organic and grew their perennials exclusively in leaf mould. Inspired by the opportunity to deepen my plant knowledge and understanding of sustainable growing techniques I left Dixter to spend a year at Hessenhof – never imagining that it would turn into four.
What are you doing currently for work and what are your future plans?
At the end of 2020 I returned to the UK to work freelance and enjoy the mix of experiences, working for designers and two specialist nurseries, as well as providing some planting consultancy. Since 2018 I have been the primary gardener at Prospect Cottage and it is rewarding to see it finally handed over to a local arts charity to be developed as a residency space, as Keith Collins – the cottage’s last owner – wished. Alongside gardening I write for a range of publications, but consider myself a gardener who writes rather than a writer who gardens. I look forward to a point in the near future when I can start my own organic nursery to help maintain the diversity of our garden plants and promote sustainable methods of growing.
What do you get out of working at Hillside?
This is my second winter working at Hillside and it has been such a rewarding experience returning to the garden throughout the seasons, understanding the subtle complexity of its borders and sensitive relationship to its landscape. There are so many plants packed into this modestly sized garden, but each one sits comfortably in its particular corner – the epitome of ‘right plant, right place.’ Every time I garden here I discover something new which inevitably leads to multi-stranded discussions with Dan and Huw about the plants and the people that grow them. Beyond the plants there are often new and friendly faces around the lunch table – good conversation facilitated by fresh and delicious food.
Why do you feel gardening is important?
As an Art student I dismissed ornamental gardening for lacking depth but now, having studied horticulture for almost a decade, I am ever more convinced of its importance as a place to engage an increasingly urban population with natural experience and biodiversity. As well as providing flowers and food for our tables, gardens can be sites of artistic expression which reveal something unexpected about the way we live. They facilitate outreach and community, but also solace from a busy and often fractious world. Gardens, even a few pots on a windowsill, fulfil that vocation of care which brings such profound satisfaction to so many. At school the idea of being a professional gardener was never considered, but looking back I could not have asked for a more creative and engaging career. It is just a shame many people only make this realisation later in life.
Rachel Seaton-Lucas
What is your background and how did you arrive at gardening or working with plants?
My route into horticulture was a circuitous one. I grew up wholly immersed in nature, running wild and free in the rolling valleys of south west Wales. However, after completing a degree in Geography I was tempted away for fifteen years by the (apparent) glamour of television, and then fashion, where I most recently worked as a photographic shoot producer. I was drawn back to the natural world after my two children were born, particularly to the beauty and complexity of gardens. I completed an RHS Level 2 qualification and did as much volunteering as I could, first with Joshua Sparkes at Forde Abbey and Derry Watkins at Special Plants, then with Troy Scott-Smith during his time at Iford Manor. It was a delight to put aside all that I thought I knew and learn from scratch again. I love that horticulture is so all-encompassing, combining both science and artistic creativity, and that after a lifetime of gardening you’ll still have more to learn. I feel as though I’m at the beginning of a long and wonderful journey.
What are you doing currently for work and what are your future plans?
After re-training, I landed on my feet with a role as a Garden Designer at Sarah Price Landscapes. Sarah’s studio is modestly sized, so I am lucky enough to work very closely and collaboratively with her, across all aspects of the practice. Our range of work is incredibly broad, from rural Welsh estates, through hospital gardens and community centres, to town gardens for private clients in London. Last summer we produced a rapidly-brought together temporary garden for Hermès on the roof terrace of their New Bond Street store. When it was dismantled Hermès donated the plants to another project of ours, a community centre called The Exchange in a beautiful old Carnegie Library in Erith, on the outskirts of London.
These two projects demonstrate the breadth of work we enjoy – one quick-fire, hi-octane and dazzling, the other longer-term, community-focussed and earthy, but both equally beautiful. I feel so lucky to have arrived where I have. The work requires me to use all the skills I developed in my previous lives – a clear aesthetic perspective, the ability to express an idea clearly with words and visuals, good organisation and practical problem-solving – as well as continuing to imbibe as much as I can about plants and gardens. As to the future, I’d like to be doing more gardening alongside my design work. Gardening time was rather subsumed by the homeschool-work juggle during the last two years of Covid. But we’ve been talking about spending a day a week in the garden at the studio, which would make us all very happy indeed. I’d also like to find the time to return to writing again in the not too distant future.
What do you get out of working at Hillside?
What is there not to love about Hillside?! The situation of the garden truly stirs my spirit, sitting exposed to the elements on the side of the valley, the stream running through the trees below. The garden itself is so multi-layered and is always changing and developing – there is something new to see and learn every time I visit. Not least, the people are so friendly, welcoming and interesting – Huw and Dan are generous, both with their knowledge and their home, serving up delicious home-cooked food for lunch and providing rounds of warm drinks. But they also attract interesting people, so it’s not uncommon to meet someone new with stories of horticultural adventures to tell and alternative perspectives on the world to learn from. It’s a place that stimulates all the senses as well as the mind.
Why do you feel gardening is important?
For me, gardening feels like a kind of moving meditation. The physicality of it and the closeness to something beyond the human world, is good for the soul. When I worked with Josh Sparkes he gave me The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka to read. Fukuoka wrote of the importance of combining the physical and the spiritual parts of agriculture by allowing ourselves just to be in the world, rather than focusing on productivity or searching for the meaning of life as separate enterprises. To allow yourself to be lost in the process of gardening, whilst surrounded by beauty… that, to me, is a form of paradise.
Daniel James
What is your background and how did you arrive at gardening or working with plants?
Though I can trace back a love of plants to a very early age, my plant journey began in earnest when I left university and started to farm. I gradually moved from vegetables into growing cut flowers and then started a floral design business. In searching for more unique cut flowers I came to perennials and from there fell completely for perennial plants, gardening and propagation.
My most recent position was managing a large farm and estate on a remote ridge top in Northern California. Over the years we built on the bones of an established, though overgrown garden, finding the balance between the wilderness and the cultivated. The farm holds a historic fruit orchard, production gardens for cut flowers and vegetables, and formal landscaped gardens all feeding my partner and family’s restaurant Barndiva.
What are you doing currently for work and what are your future plans?
After a handful of years managing the farm and my own floral design business, I decided to leave the wedding industry and focus completely on plants and propagation. I moved to England to join the gardening community here. I was lucky enough to find a job at Great Dixter in the nursery where I am learning all aspects of propagation and running a nursery. I see a future in nursery work. I think I found my niche: getting the plants to the people, creating more plants, being able to give back to communities and the planet by supplying more plants for more gardens. There is such a joy in being able to pass along plants, to share, and remain connected to more than just your own plot.
What do you get out of working at Hillside?
Hillside symbolizes a style of gardening I highly respect and strive towards. A sensitive hand, working with plants – guiding them as opposed to asserting dominance over them which can happen in traditional horticulture. A symbiotic relationship with the land and what springs forth. Having the opportunity to spend time at Hillside, hands in the garden, further cemented my feelings of being on the right path. In the cut back of the garden, as we tip-toed through emerging shoots, we found that the very end of the gardening season is so clearly the beginning .
Why do you feel gardening is important?
I recall being a beginner in gardening. I was constantly clamouring to visit other gardeners in their gardens. Invariably, I’d follow them around, hearing stories of plants and where they originated, who the plant reminds them of, how each plant had a delightful past. Then, I would invariably be offered a split, a pinch of seeds, or a cutting. It’s precious. A part of living history. I think gardeners embody the generosity of plants. Gardening ties you to community, art, culture, climate, history, science, politics, and just about every other part of our humanity. It could not be more important.
Introduction: Dan Pearson | Interviews & photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 5 March 2022
Today could not be more different from the rip of storms that howled through the valley a week ago. The air is barely moving, the sounds different for the echo of birdsong and the landscape shimmers in welcome sunshine. There is sun for the first time in months on the back of the house and blackbirds singing into a gloaming that is already nudging towards a longer evening.
We respond accordingly, our rhythm taking the extra hour at the beginning and end of the day to take in the changes. A time of transition that neatly moves from one season to the next. Snowdrops fade with the first of the primroses. Celandines blink in sunshine, their rosettes of flat foliage basking and ready to throw more flower and make this time their own.
Spring stirs through the remains of the winter in the garden, the old foliage now suddenly feeling at odds with the push of the new. Where the air is entirely still and the light falls quietly in the mornings, a colony of violets has taken to the set of steps that negotiate the steep slopes around the milking barn. Walk them at this moment and you move into a cloud of their particular scent. An invisible shape but a discernible one as you pass in and out of perfume.
The violets that we found close to the house when we arrived were likely vestiges of the old market garden here that utilised these slopes. A floriferous form (probably ‘Queen Charlotte’) with large flowers and tenacious behaviour when you find a place that it likes. Viola odorata will flourish as a lustrous groundcover in shade and is a welcome sub-storey to taller perennials, but give it somewhere to bask in early sunshine and you will get the best flower. It is worth considering how to harvest the perfume when planting violets as it is always better for spring sunshine and travels with the breeze so position your plants upwind if you are not to miss it.
The transition in the garden calls for change and the beginning of the great clear up. Part the epimedium foliage and you see the start of new growth and flower protected under last year’s foliage. Good practice recommends cutting away the old foliage to make way for the new and now is the perfect time to do it, but I like to do this on biannual rotation. Taking one area in the group one year and leaving another for the coppery burnish, which this year is particularly good on the Epimedium sulphureum. I have teamed them with red-flushed hellebores and one looks more interesting for the combination with the other.
I am fastidious about the hellebores, combining them in ranges of colour rather than allowing them to mingle freely. I hope in doing so that the seedlings are truer to type rather than muddied by too much mixing, so the yellows are kept low in the garden where they are backlit by sunshine and can flare. The picotee pinks are given their own place under a hawthorn, whilst the blacks are teamed with the greens which prevent their darker partners from being lost against the mulch. I leave clearing the debris of the miscanthus that provide summer shade to the whites until last so that the transition is marked, the new life pushing through old. By the time we reach this last corner in the great clear up I will be ready for a clean start. The old season behind us and the new one green and alive and stretching out ahead of us.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 26 February 2022
As I write, storm Eunice is raging. The sheep have found the stillest place on the slopes beneath us, but the house is shuddering and I am trying not to look at the garden as it is hurled this way and that. At the hamamelis in its prime and the long-awaited wintersweet, which is flowering well for the first time this year, but with such unfortunate timing.
Though we are just one hillside away from the Bristol Channel and would never say that our conditions are as extreme as coastal exposure, there is more often than not a breeze blowing through the valley that has a taste of the sea in it. The decision not to plant out the views to provide more shelter means that the garden has to flex with the openness and what comes with it and the shrubby willows help with this pliable backbone.
I originally grew the willows as a trial in the very first year we arrived here. They were planted in a row on the front line of a rectangle we had cut from the field in which to garden. They grew fast and provided a buffer and a little shade and, of the ten or so I tested, there were at least half a dozen that felt right here. Right for being easy on our retentive ground, but also for sitting so well in the landscape and not competing with the backdrop of the crack willow (Salix x fragilis) that stands alone in the ditch.
Though I have grown them before, the rusty-red flare of Salix alba ‘Chermesina’ would have been too demanding here in winter when we like to enjoy the pared back tones of the landscape. The willows that worked here have been muted in tone with silvery stems that rise easily from winter grassland or the darkness of moody purples that you have to find or wait for the right winter light to strike them. Salix daphnoides ‘Aglaia’ (main image) with mahogany-red wood and silver catkin and the grey-leaved Salix candida that provides a little lightness on the edge of the wood work both in winter and the summer.
I used three shrubby willows in the garden and stepped them out to draw the garden into landscape. Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ sits close to the house and is perhaps the most ornamental, with laurel-green stems and coal black catkins that just this week have shed their protective sheaths. In a fortnight or so on a bright day you will see they have pushed a flurry of red anthers that are tipped with gold pollen. This is a neat shrub that I am gently tipping into shape rather than stooling as I do some of the others for their stems. It sits in one of the most exposed places here on the edge of the drive where the rubble cannot make living easy. In its shadows I have interplanted lime green Helleborus foetidus and selected primroses where they sometimes seed a pinky-mauve.
Further down the garden, at the threshold to the gate into the field, I have grouped the straight species, Salix gracilistyla, which is as light as its cousin is charcoal. This plant has sage green leaves rather than lime green and grey stems which catkin early in a conspicuous shimmer of silver. The pussies are made better for being backlit by morning light and when the weather warms and the catkins push their pollen, they will be alive with early bees. I cut these willows back as you might a buddleia, to a framework of stems after they have dropped their catkins so that they retain some structure on the edge of the garden. They are underplanted with azure blue pulmonarias for now and pale wood aster for the autumn.
A selected form of our purple osier, Salix purpurea ‘Nancy Saunders’ is the plant that bridges the garden and the wet ditch that runs down to the stream at the bottom. This willow is fine in all its parts with wire thin growth and grey-green leaves that are wider than needles, but not by much. The wind is good in their limbs whenever it blows, they animate how it moves over the course of a day – or in a storm. Late into full catkin in about three week’s time, they produce shoals of tiny grey pussies that throw a ephemeral grey cast over the bushes. I coppice these plants hard on a three-year rotation in the garden, but leave the shrubs standing in the ditch where they form rangy shrubs that start to lean after about six years. They are as happy in the wet soil there as they are on the exposed slopes higher up in the garden.
The first of all to catkin is Salix purpurea ‘Howkii’ which I have planted with S. irrorata on the banks near the Cornus mas. The two are good together, one being as many-limbed and catkinned as the other is sparse, each moving differently one against the other. We are lucky to have the room to stand back and let them do what they are good at here and they are remarkably easy. A rod or wand of growth as long as a walking stick, pushed into the soil in winter will send out roots. For the first year we keep the grass away from them and then they can stand their own with the willowherb and the meadowsweet and a storm or two to keep them company.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 February 2022
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