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It has been the most wonderful spring. Cool and nicely drawn out and kind to the irises for being dry during their magnificent three week flurry.
The garden is coming into its third summer in the greater part and its second in the remainder. Time enough for perennial planting to mesh and to have settled into serious growth as opposed to establishment. The roots are down and with it there has been a tidal surge that has been expressed most graphically in the Ferula communis. Fergus Garrett gave me two pots of seedlings four years ago. The straight F. communis and its more slender variant, F. communis ssp. glauca. They were potted on into long-toms to encourage a good deep root and kept in the frame for a winter before being planted out as yearlings.
Two growing seasons putting their roots down saw their filigree mound of foliage ballooning over the winter. They are usefully winter-green, providing a counterpoint to most of the world being in dormancy and, being on the front foot, by spring they were the trigger that let us know that the sap was rising. You could feel the energy mustering at ground level. A clenched fist at first when you parted the foliage to see what was coming, but soon a racing limb which soared skyward before branching and flowering against blue like an acid yellow firework. They have been quite the proclamation. One of optimism and joy and a garden that is finally coming together.
Ferula communis ssp. glauca
In the perennial garden where the outer planting is now coming into its third growing season, I can see how things are playing out. The giants in the mix, in this case Sanguisorba ‘Cangshan Cranberry’ and Thalictrum ‘Elin’, have already muscled out anything that does not have the stamina for competition. I moved the asters that were showing me they didn’t like it out to the edges and replaced the gaps with shade-loving Cimicifuga rubifolia ‘Blickfang’, which were sent from Hessenhof Nursery in Holland. I like responding when a planting tells you it needs change and the thought of using the tall growing plants in our exposed, brightly lit site to shelter those that naturally prefer the cool ground. We could probably not have got away with this in the first year without the cover to prevent the cimicifuga from burning.
The iris here in the perennial garden are selected for their spearing foliage and refined form of flower. Iris fulva, the copper iris, is shown to best effect amongst bright Zizia aurea, and Iris orientalis from Turkey towering architecturally above their companions whilst the planting around them is still low. Early spears are one of the aspects I enjoy most in the early garden and Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’ have been as strong and definite as you could ever wish a plant to be. In colour they have taken over neatly from the camassia,which were introduced this year. I like to wait a year or so before introducing bulbs so that I know where change might occur and can be sure they have the space to establish unhindered. I’ve learned though that camassia that are prone to seeding do not make good bedfellows in open ground, for they are profligate. Camassia leitchlinii ssp. suksdorfii ‘Electra’ is reputedly sterile and finishes just as the iris come into flower. Self-seeders have proven to be problematic on our rich ground so, when I am in doubt, I deadhead and leave a sample to see how seeding plays out.
This is exactly how I will manage the Allium atropurpureum, which are now worked into the planting in the middle of the garden. We planted fifty bulbs last autumn in the gaps between the Digitalis ferruginea. They have been wonderful for enlivening this area early in the season with the promise of leaf and bud and now height amongst the acid green euphorbia.
With summer firmly here but fresh still in its infancy, it is the moment of the euphorbias and they are mounding luminously throughout the planting. Standing back and looking down on the garden from The Tump, they remind me of my first sighting of the giant fennels in the Golan Heights when I was studying at the Jerusalem Botanical Gardens in the mid-eighties. It was forbidden territory, the minefields floriferous for being completely inaccessible. As far as you could see there was a march of giant fennel with euphorbia and searing red anemone at their feet. Perhaps this memory was etched into my mind when I planned for spring and early summer here, for I find myself looking on and seeing the similarities. Euphorbia cornigera with its dark red stems high up in the garden, E. wallichiii with its weight and volume to the lower slopes where the ground lies damper and in the high, dry centre the Euphorbia x ceratocarpa nestle the black alliums. Scarlet Papaver ‘Beauty of Livermere’ dot and brighten.
As I look out of the window to the first proper rain we have had in quite some time, I can see the plants exhaling. The greens are brighter – if that were possible – the garden plumper already and readying to push again. There is promise and it is amplified.
Iris orientalis
Iris fulva and Zizia aurea
Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’
Papaver orientalis ‘Beauty of Livermere’ and Salvia ‘Jezebel’
Allium atropurpureum with Euphorbia x ceratocarpa
A chill wind is pushing the weather through the valley, tossing the garden and tearing the colour from the trees. This late autumn feeling is distinct for being burned clear into our memory of arriving here exactly eight years ago. We sat on the banks below the house wrapped in blankets on the same chairs that, just the day before, were out on the deck in Peckham, where we had willingly left a well-loved garden behind. The feeling of the new and the excitement of a prospect is still very clear to me and the anniversary has given us cause to ponder all that has happened since. The unloved land, grazed to the bone and up to the very foundations of the buildings, is now softened by growth. We look up the slopes into a little wood – our first planting project that winter, where an empty field gave way to a broken hedge – and down onto a new orchard where the trees are fruiting and casting their own proper shade. It is time marked very tangibly in growth.
Our thoughts that first weekend had not yet formed this place, but today it is better and more giving than I could ever have imagined. The reward comes from both the continuity and the luxury of being able to build something for yourself and be witness to its evolution. Every month we have been here has revealed something new, but the garden has amplified our connection with the land and the seasons. It is just a year since we completed the planting of the garden proper, but it is safe to say that every week has been provided for and, on this last full day of British summertime, the garden is still a place we can be where the season doesn’t quite have the upper hand.
This last push of flower before the frost takes hold is important, for soon all will be gone. Though I do not miss it then, for flower soon starts to feel out of place amongst the skeletons. Some of these late performers, the asters for instance, have been biding their time as they have built up their resources, and the place they have occupied until now is a necessary one that I have learned to see as a foundation for autumn rather than space wasted for earlier performers. The backdrop they provide in foliage to earlier-flowering perennials has offered stability and constancy. The filigree foliage of the October-blooming Aster turbinellus, for instance, is as delicate as netting and the flower equally beautiful and finely-rayed. Rising to almost a metre in height, but leaning as it comes to flower, it remains one of my favourites for its bright, clean colour and its thoroughly reliable, clump-forming habit.
Aster turbinellus growing through Panicum virgatum ‘Cloud Nine’
Aster turbinellus
I am not sure yet whether I can say the same for Aster ‘Ezo Murasaki’, which is bulking up steadily. Asters that stay put in a planting are important, but so far I have forgiven this Japanese native its lust for life. It has licorice-dark stems and serrated foliage which you might at first think belonged to a chrysanthemum and that colours with red tints as the temperature falls. It comes into flower in late September at about 60cm, and is at its zenith now. The flowers are single, with bright, violet centres, darkening towards the tips and ageing to royal purple, giving the mass of flower a variance in depth. They also have a bright gold eye which prevents them from feeling sombre. I have them paired with the muted tones of Teucrium hircanicum ‘Paradise Delight’ in an undercurrent beneath Molinia caerulea ssp. arundinacea ‘Transparent’. We will see in time if they creep too readily. Three years of growing them has shown me that they need to be watched, but not worried over like some asters.
Aster trifoliatus subsp. ageratoides ‘Ezo Murasaki’
Close by, and doing better than I had imagined on our open slopes because our soil is retentive, is Tricyrtis formosana ‘Dark Beauty’. I have them grouped under a young crab apple, which will provide them the dappling they need and look better for in time. ‘Dark Beauty’ is a named form that retains the spotting that gives them their common name, the Toad Lily, and I prefer these to the plain selections without spots. However, it isn’t as dark as I had imagined and I’m on the look-out for a deeper-coloured selection having seen and remembered them from my time at The Edinburgh Botanic Garden. If they can be bettered, I will replace them. That said, for the past six weeks they have been a delight and will continue until they are felled by frost.
Tricyrtis formosana ‘Dark Beauty’ and Teucrium hircanicum ‘Paradise Delight’
Tricyrtis formosana ‘Dark Beauty’
Also worth the wait if you can find it a place where the foliage doesn’t burn, are the actaea. A tribe of late-flowering perennials that occur both in Japan and North America, they prefer moisture or retentive soil and cool for their foliage. Where I have used them in the parterre at Lowther Castle, they thrive in the open with the wetter climate of Cumbria, whereas down here in the south, they prefer some shade. Although they are a long-standing favourite, they have often frustrated me in my own gardens over the years. They hated me in Peckham, where my ground was too dry and their leaves burned to a crisp. The dark, ferny foliage earlier in the season is half their appeal and in Actaea ‘Queen of Sheba’ (main image), the greater part of why they are worth the effort. If you can find them a place where they are happy, they never deviate from elegance, rising up tall and taking up no more space than they need in their ascent. ‘Queen of Sheba’ is distinct from the usual vertical line of most actaea, in that its flowers arc in beautifully drawn lines. Dark buds open from the bottom upward to form a wand of light-catching, highly-perfumed plumage that last until the dark nights are with us for sure and the flowers finally fade away.
Actaea ‘Queen of Sheba’
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 27 October 2018
We are on holiday for two weeks and so leave you with some recent images of the garden to keep you going until we return.
Selinum wallichianum, Sanguisorba ‘Red Thunder’, Salix purpurea ‘Nancy Saunders’ and Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’
Amicia zygomera and Agastache nepetoides
Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Little Henry’ and Agastache nepetoides
Aster umbellatus, Persicaria amplexicaule ‘Blackfield’, Salvia ‘Jezebel’ and foliage of Crocosmia ‘Hellfire’
Agastache ‘Blackadder’, Verbena macdougallii ‘Lavender Spires’ and Persicaria amplexicaule ‘September Spires’
Digitalis ferruginea, Achillea ‘Mondpagode’ and Scabiosa columbaria ssp. ochroleuca
Hesperantha coccinea ‘Major’
Anemone hupehensis var. japonica ‘Splendens’ and Aster ericoides ‘Pink Cloud’
Colchicum speciosum ‘Album’
Chasmanthium latifolium and Aster ericoides ‘Pink Cloud’
Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 6 October 2018
When we arrived here eight years ago, the fields lapped up to the yard at the front. Immediately to the west of the house a run of increasingly decrepit lean-tos made from a haphazard mix of cinder block, brick, stone and corrugated sheeting extended a semblance of domesticity along the slope. A rubble wall held back the track above and, along it, the structures made their way out towards the barns in stops and starts that charted their thrifty evolution; a scullery, an almost outside loo in a stone lean-to, then through a door into the original bathroom. Stand up washes at the sink in the winter, surely, as there was no evidence of heat. A recycled Victorian door then opened into a corrugated tin building where the coal had been stored and then finally, built onto the front of this, the piggery. Every room had a raking floor, pitching at some degrees down the slope. A seedling oak sprung from the brick floor of the coalhouse, the holes under the doors obviously big enough for squirrels or a rat, perhaps, who was planning a return visit, but never made it.
Our first project, the kitchen garden, lay beyond the reach of the lean-tos up around the barns. Several years ago we levelled the ground here in order to make the gardening easier. Two staggered troughs went in on this datum at the same time, echoing the horizontal line of beech on Freezing Hill in the distance and creating an informal gateway to the kitchen garden. By separating the kitchen garden off, when the lean-tos were demolished, we had a new garden space between the end of the house and the troughs. During building it was an area we had to traverse with caution, as it became more and more building site, with deep ruts, bonfires, rubble piles and the remains of the slope.
Although we had to knock down the lean-tos, we repaired and rebuilt the stone building that had previously been the pantry. The rubble wall now stood in splendid isolation, naked but shadowed with the ghosts of each of the buildings that had run along it. The tiles of the old bathroom, the blackened coal house and then, finally, a raggedy end up by the piggery. Word had it that ‘Mother’ had once had a vegetable garden on these slopes immediately beyond the piggery and, with the buildings gone, it was clear that this would be the space for the herb garden. A concrete pad was poured alongside the rubble wall in preparation for an open barn that would become our inside outside space and, in the summer of 2016, with the builders gone, we made a start to reclaim the ground.
Calamintha nepeta ‘Blue Cloud’
Ballota pseudodictamnus
A cut was required to make the level between the house and the troughs, and the fill from the cut was used to extend the level out and down to form banks that rolled into the field. Where the rubble wall ran out, we extended a breezeblock wall to hold back the banks that had been held together with sheet tin and bedsteads, and the remains of a hedge that was mostly elder and bramble with a couple of sickly plums. I replaced the hedge on top of the new wall, mingling hawthorn with eglantine for its scented foliage, and with wild privet and box for evergreen. Lonicera periclymenum ‘Sweet Sue’ – a short growing form of our native honeysuckle selected by Roy Lancaster, has been added along its length. The wall faces south and heats up in the day to throw the perfume back at night. I planted wild strawberries at the base of the hedge so we have easy pickings at shoulder height on the way to the steps. The perfume from the strawberries has been incredible during this recent run of long, hot days.
A set of new cast concrete steps sit half way along the wall and flare at the top where a landing forms a viewing platform. From here you can survey the kitchen garden to the west and this new space alongside the house. The concrete pour into a shuttered wooden framework took some engineering, but the steps have weight and their gravity is needed where they sit in the space between the troughs. We grow artichokes and the rhubarb here. Plants that need room.
The herb garden was a working title that has stuck. The actual herb beds are a pair of narrow raised beds up by the open barn where we can easily pick the annual herbs that like the morning shade thrown by the building. Coriander, dill, wild rocket, coriander, chervil and parsley, but not basil which needs the all-day heat that lies beyond in the kitchen garden. Further out the perennial herb bed gets the sun and provides us with sage, rosemary, thyme, marjoram, tarragon, summer and winter savory, sorrel and the like. Mint is contained in a pair of old zinc washing dollies in the shade of the building, where it stays lusher and leafier.
Lavandula x intermedia ‘Sussex’, bronze fennel (left) and Opopanax chrironium (right)
Basil ‘African Blue’
The extent of the planted area between here and the troughs had to be carefully re-soiled once the cut into the land was made into subsoil. I left it fallow the winter before last, as I wanted to see how easily it drained, since the ‘herb garden’ was where I wanted to grow my lavenders and salvias and other plants that associated well alongside them. I am pleased I did, because while the soil was settling down it drained very badly, puddling in the winter. I thought I was going to have to reconsider my palette, but couldn’t think of anywhere the lavenders would feel as right. It was only when the spring sun dried the soil out and natural fissures opened up in our clay subsoil that it started to behave as I wanted it to.
I planted last spring, late in April once the first phase of the main garden was in and mulched. The cut-leaved Ficus afghanistanica ‘Ice Crystal’ was planted close to the bottom of the steps to create a narrowing and a shaded exit point. Though not selected for fruit – they are small and sweet when they come, but require prolonged heat to ripen – I like the fineness of the dissected foliage immensely and, although I have never seen a large plant, I expect it not to take over as figs tend to when they like you. The willow-leaved bay, Laurus nobilis ‘Angustifolius’ anchors the inside corner nearest the house. With elegant, narrow foliage this bay also has a lightness about it. I will keep it loosely clipped into a dome at about shoulder height when, one day, it assumes its position.
I trialled three different lavenders in the old garden in anticipation of this planting. Lavandula x intermedia ‘Grosso’, a variety used in perfumery in France for its high production of essential oils. I liked it very much. It has good, strong colour and certainly good perfume, but the plants splayed under their weight when in full flower. The best time to harvest lavender for the oil is when the first flowers on the spike are just out, so good for perfumery, but not so good for the garden. L. x intermedia ‘Edelweiss’ came a close second with a camphor tang to the perfume and beautiful white flowers that were much loved by the bees, but they proved to be erratic here, with too many plants failing in winter making me lose confidence in committing to it. Our wet West Country weather was probably their downfall. Not L. x intermedia ‘Sussex’ which, though not as dark as ‘Grosso’, is good in every other respect. Tall, long flower spikes and a good form to the plant that, so far, has proven reliable here.
Salvia greggii ‘Blue Note’
Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’
Salvia uliginosa
So, the lavender form the backbone of the planting, thirty plants staggering their way across the space, but with openings left for light-footed emergents; Verbena bonariensis – only here and nowhere else for fear of overuse – and bronze fennel, just five plants to keep the airiness in the planting. I’ve direct sown the acid yellow Ridolfia segetum, bone white corncockle Agrostemma githago ‘Ocean Pearl’ and white Ammi majus to lighten the palette. The sparkle is important amongst the mauves. A darker counterpoint is provided by the purple spires of Basil ‘African Blue’, pot-grown nursery plants that we plant out yearly as annuals.
Rising up in this second year are the Opopanax chironium. A herb used for the incense resin that is extracted from the dried sap, this is another of the many umbellifers gifted to me by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter. Though they have yet to flower here, the Giant Fennel, Ferula communis, are planted towards the edges of the bed so that it doesn’t overshadow the lavender with its early growth. I hope to see them bolt skyward next year, but for the early part of the growing season their netted leaves have been wonderful.
I wanted this planting to have unity but, like the cloudscape it resembles, I also wanted to be able to find the shifts in tone and form. The palette of recessive mauves and blues also allows us the long view here, which is most important because the planting is all too often eclipsed by what is going on in the sky. I have built on the insect life that the lavender attracts with Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’, which is alive with bumblebees from the moment it starts flowering in April. The smaller in scale Calamintha nepeta ‘Blue Cloud’ is delicious by the path where, if you brush against it, you are rewarded with fresh menthol mintiness.
Agrostemma githago ‘Ocean Pearl’
Linum perenne
Dianthus ‘Miss Farrow’
The calamint comes later than the catmint and shortly after the Salvia greggii ‘Blue Note’, which starts into flower the last week in June. Its spicily scented leaves and flower spikes are sticky with essential oils and the deeply saturated indigo flowers are neverending from now until the frost. The rich blue globes of Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’ run through the planting and, along with the verbena, are the biggest draw for butterflies. Just starting now the cool blue spires of Salvia uliginosa continue the nectar flow until the first frosts. There are incidentals to be found in the undercurrent; Dianthus ‘Miss Farrow’, a D. carthusianorum selection with tiny pinpricks of palest pink flower, and floaty Linum perenne, which brings an underwater movement. I hope it seeds this year as we could have more for the cleanliness of its sky-blue flower.
The lavender will be cut in the last week of the school holidays or thereabouts so that it has time to regenerate before winter. This year I will also be cutting the verbena and fennel before winter to avoid the million seedlings which made their home in the gravel mulch this spring. By then I will be pleased to see the sharp line of the troughs again with the long view of Freezing Hill echoing their horizontal.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 28 July 2018
The two best times to look at the garden are to either end of the day. I would be up at four if I had the reserves, but we are up early when the light is soft and before the sun reaches over the hedge. The stillness of first thing is particular for the feeling of awakening, but there is a charge in the air with the day waiting to happen. When the sun breaks the spell, everything changes as the light flattens and the tasks of the day take over. We wait then until the sun dips low in the sky and the light is softened before resuming our observation.
The long evenings are remarkable in this country and particular this year for the brilliance and stillness of this summer. Evenings were always the time that I used to go down the garden at Hill Cottage to the pair of borders that my father and I made there when I was a teenager. His planting to the left in a border of whites and blues and mine to the right with yellows and clashing magentas. We would spend an hour or so talking things through, observing how things could be bettered or moments where briefly things sang. We would talk about the way the colours changed as the light dropped, the blues beginning to pulse and hover as the low light favoured them, and of the way that the brighter, hotter colours, which had flared during the day, dropped away first.
Huw and I do the same here, using the time when you can see best to workshop the planting and to enjoy the elements that have come together or shifted during the day. The slow evenings are in our favour, for they have an altogether different charge from the awakening of dawn. We let the colour go through its metamorphosis, as the reds, pinks and oranges heat up at sundown and then quickly dim to almost nothing. The violet end of the spectrum then takes over as the gloaming hour assumes its residency, the flowers with the most blue in them appearing to lift from their material origins in these fugitive last minutes. Then, in a shift that you feel but do not necessarily see, the colour is gone and you are left with something else. A garden of textures and form, readying for night. More often than not it is ten before we have even begun to think about supper. It is hard drag yourself inside when your senses are retuned and receptive.
This summer, as much out of desire as necessity, Huw has been photographing the night time garden to extend our experience. I will let him take it from here to explain why.
Dan Pearson
Over the years I have always experimented with my photography. Capturing movement by shooting digital film on a very slow shutter speed and then extracting single frames, selected for the painterly composition of their colour blur. On my old Polaroid camera I would cover the focus sensor, so that images of plantings resembled Impressionist paintings or colour fields. And I have used torches, lanterns and flash to see the garden in a different way by night. With each approach I have been happy, even seeking, to surrender some of my control over the final image to the equipment and technology itself.
However, over the past few years, and so that we can record the garden here properly, I have been actively working to improve my skill with a digital SLR camera and a number of lenses, so it has been a while since I have experimented in this way. At the beginning of June, with the start of the long warm nights, I found myself in the garden at the gloaming hour, having driven down to Somerset after a working day in London. With the warmth, growth had started in earnest and, as the light faded, there were parts of the new garden that it fast became too dark to see clearly. I got out my phone and switched the light on. Suddenly individual plants were thrown into sharp relief against the inky background of hedge, wood and sky. The composition of volumes and heights and the differences in textures became more apparent. Colour was heightened and where, by daylight, the plantings were soft and transparent, now they were graphic and architectural. I immediately started taking photographs on the phone with the flash.
It is a tricky process framing and composing an image when you are, quite literally, shooting in the dark. A series of test shots are necessary to establish the composition and to attain the right distance from the subject so that the flash doesn’t create too much of a hot spot. Even once this has been successfully done, the camera doesn’t always focus accurately in the dark, so each successful shot is arrived at after taking many that do not work. It is then a long process evaluating, editing and then adjusting contrast and colour balance to achieve a satisfactory result.
As the nights grew longer and we wandered the paths later and later each evening, I have been staying out after nightfall to try and capture aspects of the ever-changing picture. As in Tom’s Midnight Garden, the clarity of darkness reveals things invisible by day. The abstraction of the plantings against the velvet black and the fluttering of a thousand moths making of the garden a new mysterious and magical territory.
Huw Morgan
Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 21 July 2018
It has been an extraordinary run. Day after day, it seems, of clear sky and sunlight. I have been up early at five, before the sun has broken over the hill, to catch the awakening. Armed with tea, if I have been patient enough to make myself one before venturing out, my walk takes me to the saddle which rolls over into the garden between our little barn and the house. From here, with the house behind me and the garden beyond, I can take it all in before beginning my circuit of inspection. It is impossible to look at everything, as there are daily changes and you need to be here every day to witness them, but I like to try to complete one lap before the light fingers its way over the hedge. Silently, one shaft at a time, catching the tallest plants first, illuminating clouds of thalictrum and making spears of digitalis surrounded in deep shadow. It is spellbinding. You have to stop for a moment before the light floods in completely as, when you do, you are absolutely there, held in these precious few minutes of perfection.
Now that the planting is ‘finished’, the experience of being in the garden is altogether different. Exactly a year ago the two lower beds were just a few months old and they held our full attention in their infancy. The delight in the new eclipsed all else as the ground started to become what we wanted it to be and not what we had been waiting for during the endless churn of construction. We saw beyond the emptiness of the centre of the garden, which was still waiting to be planted in the autumn. The ideas for this remaining area were still forming, but this year, for the first time, we have something that is beginning to feel complete.
Looking down the central path from the saddle
The view from the barn verandah
Of course, a garden is never complete. One of the joys of making and tending one is in the process of working towards a vision, but today, and despite the fact that I am already planning adjustments, I am very happy with where we are. The paths lead through growth to both sides where last year one side gave way to naked ground, and the planting spans the entire canvas provided by the beds. You can feel the volume and the shift in the daily change all around you. It has suddenly become an immersive experience.
An architect I am collaborating with came to see the garden recently and asked immediately, and in analytical fashion, if there was a system to the apparent informality. It was good to have to explain myself and, in doing so without the headset of my detailed, daily inspection, I could express the thinking quite clearly. Working from the outside in was the appropriate place to start, as the past six years has all been about understanding how we sit in the surrounding landscape. So the outer orbit of the cultivated garden has links to the beyond. The Salix purpurea ‘Nancy Saunders’ on the perimeter skip and jump to join the froth of meadowsweet that has foamed this last fortnight along the descent of the ditch. They form a frayed edge to the garden, rather than the line and division created by a hedge, so that there is flow for the eye between the two worlds. From the outside the willows screen and filter the complexity and colour of the planting on the inside. From within the garden they also connect texturally to the old crack willow, our largest tree, on the far side of the ditch.
The far end of the garden which was planted in Spring 2017
Knautia macedonica, Salvia nemerosa ‘Amethyst’, Cirsium canum and Verbena macdougallii ‘Lavender Spires’
Thalictrum ‘Elin’ above Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’
Eupatorium fistulosum f. albidum ‘Ivory Towers’ emerging through Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’
Asclepias incarnata, Echinops sphaerocephalus ‘Arctic Glow’, Nepeta nuda ‘Romany Dusk’ and Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’
This first outer ripple of the garden is modulated. It is calm and delicate due to the undercurrent of the Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldtau’, but strong in its simplicity. From a distance colours are smoky mauves, deep pinks and recessive blues, although closer up it is enlivened by the shock of lime green euphorbia, and magenta Geranium psilostemon and Lythrum virgatum ‘Dropmore Purple’. Ascending plants such as thalictrum, eupatorium and, later, vernonia, rise tall through the grasses so that the drop of the land is compensated for. These key plants, the ones your eye goes to for their structure, are pulled together by a veil of sanguisorba which allows any strong colour that bolts through their gauzy thimbles to be tempered. Overall the texture of the planting is fine and semi-transparent, so as to blend with the texture of the meadows beyond.
The new planting, the inner ripple that comes closer but not quite up to the house, is the area that was planted last autumn. This is altogether more complex, with stronger, brighter colour so that your eye is held close before being allowed to drift out over the softer colour below. The plants are also more ‘ornamental’ – the outer ripple being their buffer and the house close-by their sanctuary. A little grove of Paeonia delavayi forms an informal gateway as you drop from the saddle onto the central path while, further down the slope a Heptacodium miconioides will eventually form an arch over the steps down to the verandah, where the old hollies stand close by the barn. In time I am hoping this area will benefit from the shade and will one day allow me to plant the things I miss here that like the cool. The black mulberry, planted in the upper stockbeds when we first arrived here, has retained its original position, and is now casting shade of its own. Enough for a pool of early pulmonaria and Tellima grandiflora ‘Purpurteppich’, the best and far better than the ‘Purpurea’ selection. It too has deep, coppery leaves, but the darkness runs up the stems to set off the lime-green bells.
Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Thunder’, Euphorbia wallichii and Thalictrum ‘Elin’
Lilium pardalinum, Geranium psilostemon and Euphorbia cornigera
The newly planted central area
Kniphofia rufa, Eryngium agavifolium and Digitalis ferruginea
Eryngium eburneum
There is little shade anywhere else and the higher up the site you go the drier it gets as the soil gets thinner. This is reflected in a palette of silvers and reds with plants that are adapted to the drier conditions. I am having to make shade here with tall perennials such as Aster umbellatus so that the Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Blackfield’, which run through the upper bed, do not scorch. Where the soil gets deeper again at the intersection of paths, a stand of Panicum virgatum ’Cloud Nine’ screens this strong colour so it can segue into the violets, purples and blues in the beds below. I have picked up the reds much further down into the garden with fiery Lilium pardalinum. They didn’t flower last year and have not grown as tall as they did in the shelter of our Peckham garden, but standing at shoulder height, they still pack the punch I need.
The central bed, and my favourite at the moment, is detailed more intensely, with finer-leaved plants and elegant spearing forms that rise up vertically so that your eye moves between them easily. Again a lime green undercurrent of Euphorbia ceratocarpa provides a pillowing link throughout and a constant from which the verticals emerge as individuals. Flowering perennials are predominantly white, yellow and brown, with a link made to the hot colours of the upper bed with an undercurrent of pulsating red Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’. Though just in their first summer, the Eryngium agavifolium and Eryngium eburneum are already providing the architecture, while the tan spires of Digitalis ferruginea, although short-lived, are reliable in their uprightness.
Echinacea pallida ‘Hula Dancer’ and Eryngium agavifolium
Scabiosa ochroleuca
Digitalis ferruginea, Eryngium agavifolium and E. eburneum
Hemerocallis ochroleuca var. citrina, Digitalis ferruginea, Achillea ‘Mondpagode’ and Scabiosa ochroleuca
It has been good to have had the pause between planting up the outer beds in spring last year, before planting the central and upper areas in the autumn. We are now seeing the whole garden for the first time as well as the softness and bulk of last year’s planting against the refinement and intensity of the new inner section. Constant looking and responding to how things are doing here is helping this new area to sit, and for it to express its rhythms and moments of surprise.
I am taking note with a critical eye. Will Achillea ‘Mondpagode’ have a stay of execution now that it is protected in the middle of the bed ? Last year, planted by the path, it toppled and split in the slightest wind. Where are the Rudbeckia subtomentosa ‘Henry Eilers’ and, if they have failed, how will I get them in again next year when everything will be so much bigger ? Have I put too many plants together that come too early ? Too much Cenolophium denudatum, perhaps ? How can this be remedied ? Later flowering asters and perhaps grasses where I need some later gauziness. Will the Dahlia coccinea var. palmeri grow strongly enough to provide a highlight above the cenolophium and, if not, where should I put them instead ? The season will soon tell me. The looking and the questioning keep things moving and ensure that the garden will never be complete.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 7 July 2018
The Thalictrum ‘Elin’ are as spectacular as they ever will be, topped out at what must be almost ten feet in height and clouding a myriad of tiny flower. They are in their second year now and have been good from the day they broke their winter dormancy. Last year they sent up just a couple of spires each but, with roots deep and a year behind them, they have powered a forest of lustrous growth. First, an early mound of feathery foliage of a glaucous, thunderous grey flushed with purple and bronze which, by the end of April, had reached its full expansion and was ready to charge the ascent of muscular vertical stems soaring towards the solstice. Slowing once they had reached their full height, the panicles broadened as the lateral limbs filled out with a million buds. The ascent was every bit as remarkable as the cloud of smoky violet flower. Arguably more so for the dramatic build and anticipation.
‘Elin’ march through the planting in the lower part of the garden to provide punctuation, and I am depending upon them now to stay standing. Last year, when their limbs were heavy with flower, a rain-laden wind toppled them like ninepins, so I staked them with a waist-height hoops in early May to prevent a repeat performance. In our deep, hearty soil with plenty of sunshine and no early competition around their crowns, there has been nothing to hold them back, so I have grown them hard and so far denied them extra water. I am hoping this will mean that they grow more strongly and that their companion sanguisorbas help them to stay true.
Thalictrum ‘Elin’
I have grown Thalictrum aquilegifolium for years, where it is reliable in both sun or shade. A basal clump of foliage – well named for its similarity to columbine – is an early presence in the spring garden and the flowers are sent up early, ahead of most other perennials, so that there is a clear storey between them and their foliage. The wiry stems support clusters of stamen-heavy flowers which, when they are out, resemble exotic plumage. In the true species, the flowers are an easy mauve, but ‘Black Stockings’ (main image with Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ and Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’) punches the colour up, with dark-stained stems and buds the colour of unripe grapes that open into flowers that register strong violet-pink. I have the white form too, which is strangely rare in cultivation, but not impossible to get. My plants came from the Beth Chatto Nursery, but I will be saving seed, which is viable if sown fresh, and I’m hoping will come true as they are quite some distance in the garden from their cousins. Seedlings that aren’t true white will easily be spotted for they have the purple stain, when the white form is pale, apple green. I plan to have plenty to play with and want to see if they will take in some open ground under the crack willow, where I let the Galium odoratum loose after it misbehaved and took too well to the garden.
Thalictrum ‘Black Stockings’
Until ‘Elin’ appeared on the scene relatively recently, Thalictrum rochebruneanum was the tallest and most dramatic of the tribe. I saw it first at Sissinghurst, where it towered with Cynara in the purple border. As a teenager I lusted after its rangy limbs, impossibly fine it seemed, and the suspense in the delicate flowers. It languished on our thin acidic ground in my parents’ garden, growing to half the height. I tried it again in the Peckham garden, but it hated the way our soil dried as the water table dropped in summer. However, I have grown it well in California where, with a little extra water and shade from the sun, it seeds freely to spring up spontaneously as ‘volunteer’ seedlings. I hope that it will do the same for me here. So far in year two, it has done well, certainly not as well as ‘Elin’ but, with three or four flowering stems per plant, which have enjoyed the light at the base where they have been planted amongst later-to-emerge persicaria.
Thalictrum rochebruneanum
Hailing from Japan, where they find a niche amongst other perennials that like a cool, retentive soil, they must be a spectacular sight to come upon. Where ‘Elin’ is all about quantity, the flowers forming a Milky Way when they come together, every flower of Thalictrum rochebruneanum is a jewel. Richly coloured like gemstones, held sparsely so that your eye is drawn to the individual, inviting you to spend some time to take in the space and the colour contrast of the inner parts of the flower. A cup of violet petals holds the gold provided by the pollen and projection of anther within.
Never getting everything completely as I want it to be, I see now that I need to bring a plant or two up closer to the path, so that I can take in the detail and enjoy looking up, for you have to, your neck craned. Being early days in this garden, I can only hope for a volunteer or two to take to this ground and let me know that I have finally found them a place they really want to be.
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 30 June 2018
The last of the perennial skeletons have now been cut to the base to make way for the turn in the season. It is just in the nick of time. Where just a fortnight ago the newly cleared ground gave away no more than a hint of what had been there before, we now have the evidence that spring is finally here. Held tight and close still, the flushed rosettes of embryonic foliage are bursting with energy.
This new life is remarkable for its break with dormancy and so begins our morning routine of combing the border for change. Sometimes, in the case of the lipstick red shoots on the peonies, it is a moment that is arguably as good as what comes later. The colour is strong and meaty and welcome against the dark ground. Team their flaming shoots with ‘Brazen Hussy’ celandines, which are up early too and done by the time the peony foliage shades them out, and you have a moment that is worthy of the weeks we have waited for such activity.
There is also the excitement of the appearance of new things. The autumn-planted Fritillaria imperialis ‘Rubra’ (main image) have speared the bare soil of the new garden with priapic vigour. We will be watching them closely for the first sign of lily beetle, which makes its appearance much earlier than expected with the first warmth of the sun. I always try and plant those bulbs that are prone to beetle attack close to the paths so that it is possible to pick them off without trampling into the beds.
Ranunculus ficaria ‘Brazen Hussy
Paeonia mlokosewitschii
Paeonia mascula
The rhubarb are at their best too and showing us now the huge reserves that they have built and stored in their crowns. The leaves, flushed copper, puckered and ready to expand, the crimson stems just waiting to push them to the light and the warmth that will very soon be in the sun. The rhubarb was moved just eighteen months ago, the autumn before last, and though I should be leaving it to build another year before forcing, it is clear that it has the heft. A quarter of the crown has been covered so that we can enjoy some early spears.
It is also a time to check that everything has made it. Just a week ago the fickle agastache, which easily succumb to winter wet, were looking like they might have done just that, but this morning I could see they have mostly made it through. Embryonic clusters of shoots held tight to the old wood, blue-purple and intensified in colour, but clearly identifying the plant that is yet to come. The pigmentation in new foliage is richest this early in the year with coppers, purples, blacks, reds and pale citrus greens. In the case of the Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’, the inky new growth is almost its best moment. New life, concentrated and full of anticipation.
Rhubarb ‘Timperley Early’
Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’
Other rosettes reveal an exponential increase, more than you can imagine might have been possible between autumn and now, but one that shows that the plants are happy. Coppery Zizia aurea doubled, if not trebled, in size from last year and angelicas erupting to let you know that they have got their roots down. This year, I can see it already, they mean business and in some cases will be sure to overwhelm their neighbours.
Understanding the rush of early season growth and the impact it can have on later-to-emerge neighbours is key to achieving balance when you are mingling plants. The late-season grasses for instance will see panicum smothered, if it is not teamed with neighbours that are also late risers – asters and rudbeckias – companions that will allow them the time to catch up. This early-season flush is wonderful for the way it marks the break with winter, but it can easily leave a hole when early energy is expended and there is still the bulk of the growing season to come. Although it feels far too soon to even be thinking about it, a late June cut-back of early geraniums and the Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ will be sure to provide a second crop of foliage.
The shift, mapped in these fingers of new life, and the clues to the growing season ahead, is a gathering tide. One that, if we photographed the garden again next weekend, would reveal something altogether different. Although I have savoured it this year, it is good to feel that we have finally reached the end of winter. A new year awaits in the joy of observing.
Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’
Zizia aurea
Allium christophii
Allium angulosum
Tulip ‘Apricot Impression’
Paeonia ‘Coral Charm’
Paeonia rockii
Angelica sp.
Lunaria annua ‘Corfu Blue’
Thalictrum flavum ssp. glaucum
Patrinia scabiosifolia
Aquilegia chrysantha ‘Yellow Queen’
Hesperis matronalis var. albiflora
Nerine bowdenii
Eryngium eburneum
Cirsium canum
Deschampsia cespitosa ‘Goldschleier’
Iris sibirica ‘Papillon’
Words: Dan Pearson / Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 17 March 2018
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