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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
As I write, the valley is unified by a deep freeze. Deep enough for the ground not to give underfoot and for the first time this winter an icy lens is thrown over the pond to blur its reflection. The farmers use this weather to tractor where they haven’t been able to for the mud. The thwack of post drivers echoes where repairs need to be made to the fences and slurry is spread on the fields that have for a while been inaccessible. It you are lucky, this is exactly the weather when you might get your manure delivery.
I welcome the freeze in the garden, for the last few weeks have been uncannily mild. Warm enough to push an occasional primrose and a smatter of violets. This year we have early hellebores, rising already from their basal rosettes and reminding me to cut away last year’s foliage so that the flowering stems can make a clean ascent. Good practice says to remove the leaves in December to diminish the risk of hellebore leaf spot. So far, whilst I have been nurturing young plants, I prefer to see the flowers pushing before I cut and know that the leaves have done all they can to charge the display.
As the garden matures it is already leaning on me to step in line where in its infancy I retained the upper hand in terms of control. I chose to wait until the end of February before doing the big cut back all in one go to allow as much as possible to run through the season without disturbance. Not so just five years on. I need to start engaging if I am not to make things more and not less labour intensive. It is all my own doing of course, because the more I add to the complexity of the garden, the earlier we have to start to be ready for spring. Where I have planted bulbs amongst the perennials for instance, the bulbs demand that I ready these areas to avoid snubbing their noses.
In terms of letting things be and allowing the garden to find its own balance, I want there to be a push and a pull between what really needs doing and where the natural processes can help me to tend the garden. The fallen leaf litter is already providing the mulch I need to protect the ground under the young trees, so it is in these areas I am concentrating the plants that need early attention. The hellebores and their associated bulbs can now push through the leaf litter. I no longer have need to mulch in these areas and save the annual trim to the hellebores and the shimmery Melica altissima ‘Alba’, the balance here is successfully struck.
We try to get our winter work, which tends to be bigger scale and mostly beyond the garden, all but done by the end of February. Our own fence and hedge work, tree planting and pruning. The ‘light touch’ beyond the garden will see us strim the length of the ditch before the snowdrops come up, but leave it standing for as long as possible where there are no bulbs. We come back on ourselves before the primroses start. Being further down the slope and colder, growth is later there, but the end of February date works. We leave the coppice beyond the ditch untouched, hitting the brambles every three or four years to curb their domain, because the coppice also needs time to establish without competition. Beyond that, and in the areas where we are letting the banks completely rewild, we watch the brambles spread and note how quickly the oaks that have been planted by the jays and squirrels, spring up amongst them. One day the shadow will put pressure on the brambles, which will fall in line and not be the dominating force. Watching what happens and applying your energies only to what is needed is a good reminder for what one should be doing as a gardener back in the cultivated domain.
The tussocky slopes that are too steep to cut on the hay meadows are a beautiful thing. They are very different as a habitat from the machine-managed sward that is kept in check by the hay cut, the grazing and the associated yellow rattle, which will only grow there where it is not outcompeted. The contrast of the tussocky land nearby with its peaks and troughs created by the grazing animals and not a combine provide a place where the rodents live and in turn where the owls and raptors come to feed. In summer you can look into these miniature landscapes and see the other world they offer for yourself. The cool side of a tussock and the warm side where the butterflies bask and the different webs or spiders that take advantage of the peaks and hollows of the undisturbed ground. From our own perspective as custodians and drivers of what happens here, the tussocky ground is a beautiful reminder. Catching the low winter light, its contours draw you to remember that it is good to touch down lightly where you can afford to and only apply your energies at the right time and in the right place.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 22 January 2022
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