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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 first of the early season snowdrops are already brightening these darkened days and the season is made that much lighter for their companionship. A winter without them would be a very different thing and I freely admit to being thrown under their spell. A charm that was cast a few years ago with a handful of treasures that were kindly gifted to me by Mary Keen at one of her snowdrop lunches. Snowdrops that she took us to meet in her wintery garden and plants she had taken her time to get to know and were different enough from the usual Galanthus. Plants that gently entice you from the standing position to slow and ponder their particular qualities. A nod that distinguishes them from the crowd, a green tip to the outer petal perhaps, a puckering like seersucker or a completely albino or even gold interior. 

I have never been a collector for the sake of collecting and I know from friends who have also found themselves spellbound, that galanthophilia is a slippery slope that can easily lead to a world of obsession and acquisition. That said, and knowing that I wanted to get to know more than a couple of hands full, I struck a pact with myself. To only grow good garden plants.  Those which ‘do’ and not those that are fussy and fail on me. I want to be able to see the character of a plant from several paces when it is established and doing what it does best and for each one to offer something distinct.  I also want to extend the season forward from February, the main snowdrop season, and to have the company of snowdrops in every week of the winter. Just as I do not want to have hundreds of friends – and bearing in mind that there are 900 or so varieties of galanthus – I just want the ones I can build a relationship with and rely upon. I want the keepers. 

It takes time to get to know a plant, so over time I will share with you what I have learned with forms and varieties that are still new to me. The autumn flowering Galanthus reginae-olgae which I have only known for the last three years for instance, which prefer a sunnier, free draining position. It takes three years or so for a single bulb to start to clump and really five before you can see its specific character. How it does in a garden and feels as an individual. A plant such as ‘Fly Fishing’ (kindly gifted, thank you, by our friend Marcia) needs air around it to allow its suspended flowers to dance on elongated pedicels. Timing is also all important, so pairing a variety to coincide with a winter-flowering companion gives a red hamamelis or dark hellebore a bright undercurrent whilst having its moment.

Galanthus are the same as any garden plant. You get a better result for knowing their requirements and how that can be played to best effect in company. As a rule, galanthus like good living and a retentive ground that drains freely and does not lie wet. I planted part of my snowdrop trail in the heavy wet soil at the bottom of the hill where the ground never dries out in summer. The bulbs there failed in the wet areas where the juncus thrived, but the very same soil at the base of trees yielded entirely different results where the trees used the moisture in the summer to give the dormant galanthus a rest. On heavy ground slopes are ideal and hedge banks often provide an ideal position. Lighter soils that are free-draining will benefit from the addition of humus. 

Getting to know my collection of ‘specials’ is a learning curve that I am happy to take my time to understand. I buy one bulb of each variety, ideally at the beginning of the growing season so that I can see them complete a life cycle. Paul Barney at Edulis Nursery has a distractingly good collection. I grow them in a stock bed at the base of a hawthorn hedge where in summer they can retreat into safe dormancy. Once they have started bulking, in the third year or so, the clumps are lifted as soon as they have flowered and moved to where I want them to be in the garden. Somewhere close to a path so that I can get to them easily and planted in good company so that they are not overwhelmed too early by precocious pulmonarias or cow parsley. 

Of the three plants I am sharing with you this early into my chapter of snowdrop distraction, Galanthus plicatus ‘Three Ships’ (main image) is the first to flower after the relay of autumn snowdrops.  ‘Three Ships’ was found under an ancient cork oak by John Morley in Suffolk and is reliably in flower at Christmas. Rare for G. plicatus to flower this early, it sits low to the ground over broad widely-spreading foliage, the rounded petals puckered and distinctly textured to capture dew or low, raking light. 

Galanthus elwesii ‘Maidwell L’ was kindly gifted by Simon Bagnall, head gardener at Worcester College, Oxford, once again with the generosity of one galanthus lover to another (thank you). This is an early flowering form of G. elwesii, the broad-leaved species that has spawned a number of early to rise varieties. This is a good one, welcoming the first of January this year and showing vigour and willingness to do well on our heavy ground. I have loved this plant for the graceful unfurling of grey-green foliage, leaves which are broad and unroll like a scroll. A selection from Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire made by Oliver Wyatt, the flowers stand tall at about 22cm and hold good poise. 

Nearby, under the medlar I have a group of Galanthus elwesii ‘Mrs Macnamara’ (thank you Mary). Named after Dylan Thomas’s mother-in-law who grew it in her garden, it is reliably early and well known for good behaviour. Again, in flower by the first of the month or sometimes a little earlier, this is a nicely proportioned plant that you can recognise from a distance. Narrow, glaucous foliage is not as much part of the mood as it is with ‘Maidwell L’, but it all sits together very pleasingly, the large, slender flowers held perfectly, each in their own space like a drawing of a perfect snowdrop, but with perhaps a little more of everything. 

Snowdrops should be split every five or six years to retain vigour in the clumps. I like to plant a couple of bulbs together or three for company as some sit and sulk and are slow to increase if planted alone. Do not ask me why and this is not the case for everybody. Divisions are best made after flowering or as the leaves fade into dormancy and before your attention is drawn elsewhere in spring and the spell they have cast over the winter is broken.  As you lift and divide and extend the reach of the plant in question you are left with nothing but good feeling, as you pat the soil and say a little prayer that you will see them again after the commotion of a growing season is spent and done and quietened to allow them their glory. 

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 15 January 2022

A chill is in the air. Mist in the valley. The wood tawny and bronzing. This is one of the most beautiful moments in the garden, standing still and voluminous, but beginning the decline. A decline suggests something lost, but the turn from the growing season is anything but. Colour in the grasses, the tail ends of the Verbena ‘Lavender Spires’ smattering violet. 

Running in an undercurrent much like the cool air that sits in the hollows, the asters claim this moment. Softly spoken as flowers but enduring, they have been mustering quietly. The feeling of potential they provide is valuable as the summer plants fade around them in August, a month that often feels suspended between two seasons. Energy yet to be spent is good then and this is when the first of the asters begin their relay, one handing over to the next until frost finally does for them in November. 

I made a trial of asters before making the garden here, testing a couple of dozen varieties to find the ones that felt ‘wild’ enough in the planting. I was looking for forms that were light on their feet, with air in the sprays and not too heavy with flower. It was also important that they were reliably clump-forming and without the tendency to run so prevalent in many, though I have been prepared to make the exception for Eurybia x herveyi ‘Twilight’. This is one of the earliest to flower here in late July and I always forget then the time I have to spend in March keeping them within bounds. I am probably going to move them to a corner where they can have a space amongst other plants that can deal with their wandering habits. Somewhere that feels akin to their home in Eastern North America, on the edge of woodland and reaching through grasses and scrub towards the light. 

Symphyotrichum ‘Photograph’ was moved back into the garden last year from the stock beds, where I had kept the best of those from the original trial not used in the garden to further get to know them. A stock bed is a wonderful luxury. It is a practical place where one of each plant sits cheek by jowl with an unlikely neighbour and can be observed more closely than in the mind’s eye. It was this time last year when we felt we needed a lift amongst the Molinia ‘Transparent’ in the lower part of the garden. We picked a number of sprays from the stock plant and set them there to see how they felt. Then four canes were pushed into the beds with a label to remind me on the other side of winter what they were for. In March, after the garden was cleared, the original stock plant was split into four in text-book fashion with two forks placed back to back and levered apart to quarter the clump. 

Symphyotrichum cordifolium, the Heartleaf Aster or Common Blue Wood Aster, is the parent of several good plants; ‘Chieftain’, ‘Little Carlow’ and ‘Primrose Path’ to name three in my original trial. The first two were rejected because they were too dense in flower and too showy.  ‘Primrose Path’, which is lighter in feeling, made it briefly into the garden, until the fact that it was a seeder looked like it might become a problem.  

‘Photograph’, a 1920’s S. cordifolium hybrid raised by Ernest Ballard, is tall at 1.2 m and needs a little staking if you do not have the room to let it sprawl. A Chelsea Chop in mid-May to reduce it to knee height encourages branching and curbs the tendency to lean. We have found it the room is has been waiting for, the benefit of patience and observation allowing it the opportunity to light up the molinia at this tail end of the season. Arching with the sweep of the grasses, the constellations of just-violet flower are alive with pollinators and capture the low October light to illuminate a garden that is on the wane. Falling away yes, but far from yet spent. 

Post Script:
Asters, lamentably, have been reclassified and renamed in recent years. Retain the original name in your mind and forgive the awkwardness of the new names – Symphyotrichum, Eurybia, Doellingeria – which capture (to the non-botanist’s mind) nothing of the magic and rightness of Aster, which means ‘star’.

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 23 October 2021

When we arrived here, we took back some of the field to make a trial garden. It was workmanlike in its layout, with dirt paths between manageably sized beds and functioned as a test ground to see what the conditions here were capable of. We grew a range of perennials to see what would feel right and do well on our south-facing slopes as well as vegetables and flowers for cutting for immediate rewards in that first exciting growing season. 

The annuals were the immediate litmus, rearing out of virgin ground where they were bathed in sunshine. The response was immediate and immediately rewarding, the cabbages bulking up to a couple of feet across and letting us know exactly why this had once been a market garden and that, yes, it was right to turn field back to garden. For fun, and as a celebration of this new space, we planted a bed of five or six types of sunflower. They grew like you remember things growing as a child, the seedlings popping through the newly turned dirt and not looking back as they raced skyward. I hadn’t seen growth like it and before long they were standing literally twice as tall as me and rejoicing as we were in this wonderful new ground. 

We picked them by the bucket and took vigorous bunches back to the studio in London to tide us over during the week and stop us pining for the hillside. They kept us going through July and were at their peak in August, reminding me by the end of the month of that back to school feeling. The time of the year when the summer is nearly done, but still caught in their energy. 

In September we let them form seed and those that didn’t get ravaged by an October storm stood blackened by frost, the seed cases scattered at their feet where the birds had feasted. Seedlings returned in the garden and I left them where I could work around them in the following years, but when we developed the kitchen garden to the east of the house and then the perennial garden to the west, they temporarily lost their home. 

Last year’s response to the pandemic saw us putting up a polytunnel so that we could extend our season of growing to eat. This year I extended a new growing area around it to make an area for continued trials and a spill over for vegetables that need more space. Potatoes were planted to ‘clean’ the ground in this first year of transition from pasture and to repeat the experiments from our first years here we planted a new bed of dahlias, annuals for cutting and sunflowers. It has been so very good to have them back and in generous amount, once again letting us know that, yes, this is a good place for growing. 

We have three varieties of Helianthus annuus that have done splendidly.  ‘Lemon Queen’, ‘Velvet Queen’ and ‘Chocolate Cherry’. This will be the last year though that we grow ‘Italian White’, a more demure variety that has proven once again to be a shadow of its cousins. Perhaps it is my own experience and I have been unlucky, but every time it germinates poorly and then limps through life. Shy is appealing sometimes, but when you have such boisterous cousins that literally throw you into shade, it makes comparison difficult.  

As a complement and for the saturation of pure orange, the Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia, has been easy and rewarding. Grown from seed sown inside and planted out after frost, we have combined it with lime green Nictotiana langsdorfii. The new ground is here to spur ideas and a few plants, the Tithonia included, have already found their way into the perennial garden to punch some late indelible colour. Annuals are good for that, taking this month as their own with no apologies and covering for anything that tends to that back to school feeling. 

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 21 August 2021

The first Cyclamen hederifolium are already in flower and letting us know that autumn isn’t far off. Although I love their coil from bare earth, their arrival always triggers a pang of melancholy. Surely it cannot already be this time and summer already waning ? 

In truth I find August one of the most difficult of months and always have, time showing in the garden where you haven’t quite got it right or where you haven’t built in a degree of expectation to keep the energy up. Knowing myself, I have learned to not give the mood purchase and plan for it with an undercurrent of asters and a stride of late-flowering grasses that still have energy in them and are yet to come into their own. 

Where we leave the meadows long on the banks beneath the house, they have mostly run to seed and lie akimbo after summer storms. Wild carrot, a good latecomer and a reason to leave the meadows long until the end of the month in places, offer their flat creamy heads for the wealth of life that still occupies this place. The late cut allows for the last of the scabious, the knapweed and the late-blooming wild origanum and I have added to the banks with a slow but measured introduction of everlasting peas.  

Lathyrus latifolius is a long-lived perennial usually seen in a bright magenta and often taking hold on the sunny sides of railway embankments. Perhaps these plants, often seen with running asters, were originally an escapee, hurled over a fence for being too vigorous in garden company. They could just as easily have been flung over the fence naturally, their seedpods splitting on a hot day, cracking open and catapulting their contents. 

I have ‘White Pearl’, a clean creamy form here and I plan for there to be a flotsam of lathyrus to sit amongst the choppy hollows of the spent meadows.  I plant twenty or so every year, which I raise from seed to extend their domain. You have to get to the seed as the pods dry and brown, but before they rupture and the seeds are jettisoned. Sown fresh they are often up in the autumn to overwinter in the frame to be the right size to plant out the following spring. 

Being nitrogen fixing, the peas are happy to take to poor ground and where the company isn’t too vigorous on the dry banks they rise up and take hold as the meadows around them begin to fade. We have the narrow-leaved everlasting pea, Lathyrus sylvestris here also. The seed originally came as a gift from my friend Jane who collected it on the cliffs above Branscombe Bay in Devon. Though it is naturalised in many parts of Britain it is speculated that it wasn’t also an escapee originally. It is a pretty thing with small flowers of a dull rose-pink and growth that reminds me of a stick insect. Long, straight limbs to rise up and above the competition and tendrils that allow it to attach and suspend itself in a scaffolding of growth using nothing more than the spent stems of the grasses to provide purchase. Touch the plant and you can feel how structural its cage of growth becomes despite its delicate appearance. 

I would not plant either pea in the garden for fear of being over-run, as they are more than capable of growing to 2 metres in a season. Neither have scent, but this is a small price to pay for such a welcome interlude in the high and teetering summer. 

Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 7 August 2021

Nothing smells like early summer quite like a sweet pea. Fresh and intoxicating, innocent and sensual in equal measure. The scent of my grandparent’s garden, which wafted through the windows of my bedroom on hot summer nights in Swansea. The vines planted at the ends of the runner bean supports, which brought the sweet peas down to earth while exalting the beans. They were never cut for the house, just allowed free reign to scramble and scent the vegetable patch. Now that I grow my own the house is filled with their scent as long as I can keep up with picking them, although there is always a point in the summer where the stems get so short or you have better things to do (like bottling tomatoes, freezing soft fruit, making jams and chutneys) that it is finally better to leave them on the plant and allow them their natural decline.

This year, for the first time we got our sweet pea seeds sown early. Before the arrival of the polytunnel we had always waited until late March before sowing, but we got a head start this year and planted them in early-February. The seeds were soaked in cold water overnight, which is reputed to make them faster to germinate, although it is difficult to ascertain whether this is the case or not. Three seeds of each were sown in a 9cm pot with two pots of each variety and put into our unheated toolshed, which has the frost kept from it by virtue of also being where the boiler is located. When we posted news of the seed sowing on Instagram some queried why we weren’t using root trainers and, although it is true that all legumes tend to benefit from deep pots due to their searching root growth, we have never had an issue with pot-grown sweet peas, as long as you get them in the ground before they become pot-bound. That said we have been collecting the insides of our toilet rolls to use next year to see if it makes a difference.   

As soon as the seeds started to germinate they went into the Milking Barn, where we have a dedicated propagation shelf set up in the picture window, which gets direct light for most of the day. A week after germination, to prevent them becoming etiolated, I would ferry them down to the polytunnel every morning to get as much light as possible, before bringing them back up to the heated barn every evening. By early March the polytunnel was warm enough to leave them in there overnight and soon they were large enough – with four sets of true leaves – to pinch out the tops, which encourages strong root growth and stockier plants.

Once the seedlings had reached a height of 15cm they were brought up to the cold frames by the barns and hardened off for a week before planting out. However, this was delayed by the prolonged frosts in late March and early April and so, when we did eventually get them in the ground in the second week of April, they were protected with fleece for a few days until the cold snap had passed. Sweet peas are hardier then they look and although one frost was hard enough to get through the fleece, despite their wilted appearance the plants recovered very quickly. 

We have grown sweet peas every year since we moved here and have tried a wide range of varieties, but we always return to the Old Fashioneds and Grandifloras. These are the smaller flowered varieties, many of which are very old, and which have the strongest scent. They have a tendency to shorter stems, which means that they are not so popular with flower arrangers and florists, but I simply cut longer stems from the plants with leaves and tendrils intact. The Modern Grandiflora varieties were bred in the 20^th century to provide the scent of the old varieties with the larger flowers and longer stem length of the more popular Spencer types, which have large, more ruffled flowers and long stems, but little scent. As with roses there seems little point in growing sweet peas unless they overpower with perfume. 

I’ve tried several of the text book methods for prolonging the flowering season, including one year following the wisdom of the professionals and pinching out every single side shoot to encourage upward growth which, when it reaches the top of the hazel poles, is then trained down the neighbouring pole to double the height of the plant and, therefore, the number of flowers it produces. All very educational, but frankly life’s too short. Now I simply ensure that each time I pick a flower (and regular, daily, picking is the best way to ensure longevity) I snip out the side shoot that develops at its base, as the energy required for these prevents the main stem from reaching its full height and the flowers produced on them always have much shorter stems. 

Each year we plant a range of colours and, although we have some stalwart favourites like ‘Cupani’, ‘Painted Lady’, ‘Almost Black’ and ‘Lord Nelson’, we always trial some new varieties. Here is this year’s selection.

Words and photographs: Huw Morgan

Published 26 June 2021

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