Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2023 i Gardens Illustrated Magazine

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DIG IN WISE WORDS Gardeners, I think it’s fair to say, have a fairly fraught relationship with plant taxonomy. Botanists want the way plants are classified and named to reflect our best understanding of their evolutionary relationships. Gardeners just wish they would leave well enough alone. In recent years, the whole subject has been revolutionised, in part, by our ability to look directly at plant DNA, which has often revealed that some of our earlier ideas weren’t quite right, and that plants’ names need to change. Aster But change how? Sometimes we need new names, and a good example is Aster. When Carl Linnaeus was handing out our modern Latin binomial names, he picked the European aster as the ‘type’ species of his new Aster genus and called it Aster…

GARDEN COUNTRY The perennial meadow used by Sue throughout this garden is from a range by meadow company Pictorial Meadows, which was started by planting expert Nigel Dunnett, who is among those designing and continually improving the range of mixes. The aim is to create wildlifefriendly meadow mixes that are as colourful and long-flowering as more traditional ornamental planting, and provide pollen over a long period. The company has been successful in encouraging several local councils to start planting meadows as a low-maintenance and wildlife-friendly alternative to more traditional plantings and along road verges. Sue chose a mix called Purple Haze in her clients’ preferred cool colour palette of blues, purples and whites; and drifted it throughout the garden, tying its various areas together. The mix includes Achillea millefolium, Aster…

IN BRIEF What Private garden with a naturalistic planting style. Where Central Portugal. Size 4,000 square metres. Soil Alkaline clay. Climate Mediterranean with cool, wet winters and hot dry summers. Hardiness rating USDA Zone 9. The Ribatejo region of Portugal is a landscape of gently rolling hills, fields, small farms, eucalyptus plantations and occasional patches of wilder landscape. High on a hilltop, some way from the nearest village, is the home of retired paediatrician Margarida Maia and her husband António, a cartoonist for the Portuguese daily newspaper Correio da Manhã. Here, Margarida has created a garden that is fast becoming something of a social-media sensation. Margarida is very much an accidental gardener. With little gardening background, she only started making a garden here in 2017 because her son was getting…

I noticed the shift in March; the last blast of wintry weather may have had something to do with it. As the smorgåsbord of narcissi I planted two autumns ago came to fruition, I was tempted to brave the sideways-driving sleet to run out and gather them up, rather than leave them to pepper the garden with yellow. For someone who grows things to admire, rather than eat, this is the rarely discussed rub: I find it so hard to cut the damn things. When thinking about my fantasy garden something I was recently invited to do on the Gardens Illustrated podcast - I put in a cutflower bed. In my imagination, it was tucked away in a sunny corner, conveniently placed for me to nip out on summer mornings,…

IN BRIEF What Garden for contemporary house with green roofs and a woodland garden. Where The Netherlands. Size Four-fifths of an acre. Soil Existing sand, compost-enriched for the woodland. Engineered soil substrate for the roof plantings. Climate Maritime, temperate with occasional severe winter frosts. Hardiness zone USDA 8a. Perhaps it’s the tidal pull of the nearby North Sea, but when you stand at ground level in this garden in Zeeland, the Netherlands, the entire house appears to be floating above its concrete base. This impression is only enhanced by a series of three green-roof gardens suspended above ground level. It turns out this floating illusion is entirely by design, in a split-level collaboration between Dutch architect Bart Vos and landscape designer Piet Oudolf, with logistical support from Dutch designer Tom…

IN BRIEF Name Ivy Cottage. What Designer Chris Moss’s private, naturalistic cottage garden with contemporary-style planting. Where West Sussex, Size Front garden of 144 square metres (12m × 12m) and rear garden of 240 square metres (12m x 20m). Soil Heavy clay, enriched over many years by continuous cultivation. Climate Temperate, east-facing front garden and west-facing rear garden. Hardiness zone USDA 9. When you live in a chocolate-box country cottage, there is something of an imperative to create a suitably picturesque garden to complement it. But if you are a well-established garden designer and avid plant collector who is creating their own private garden, there are other priorities at play, too, such as having a place to experiment, creating a tranquil bolt hole and avoiding cliché. Landscape designer Chris Moss…

IN BRIEF Name Coldstone House. What Traditionally planted walled garden of a Scottish manse. Where Aberdeenshire. Size Walled garden is about one acre. Soil Heavy soil, improved with organic matter. Climate Cold winters and dry summers. Hardiness zone USDA 7. KEY PLANTS When Jonathan Snow was commissioned to design the garden of a former Scottish manse on the edge of the Highlands, he discovered that the owners wanted two very different approaches: simple and unadorned in front of the house, and full and romantic at the back. The solution for the front, which has open views across sloping fields and forestry plantation to low hills on the horizon, was clipped yew balls that grounded the white house, calming grass areas and gravel paths. The back garden slopes up a grassy…

DESIGN INSIGHT The brief The owners of this new-build house in north London – a Swedish couple with three teenage children – brought garden designer Sara Jane Rothwell on board during extensive internal renovations. For the garden, their brief was simple: to fill the space with plants. The owners wanted lots of flowering plants and references to their Swedish heritage, as well as a gazebo getaway for their teenagers. The plot, a rectangle of around 40m by 16.5m, was not without its challenges. It was sloping and dominated by a rendered retaining wall that snaked, free-form, around the back and one side of the garden. Near the house it bulged out to surround a raised planting bed, which was dominated by scrubby shrubs and a large oak tree, Quercus robur.…

DESIGN Conservation champion British garden designer Joe Perkins picked up the prestigious Horticultural Excellence Award at this year’s Greater Bay Area Flower Show in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. “Conservation is a passion of mine,” said Joe, whose garden, The Shenzhen City Garden - Community of Life, addressed the show’s theme of conservation by drawing attention to the importance of the nearby mangrove forests. While these forests can absorb and store more carbon than tropical rainforests, in many parts of Asia they are being cleared at an alarming rate. Shenzhen, however, has been recognised as an international centre for their regeneration and preservation. Joe’s plant-filled design featured a stylised river to reflect the merging waterways of the sediment-rich Pearl River Delta, which supports Shenzhen’s unique saline mangrove habitat, and a…

GARDEN COUNTRY IN BRIEF What Family garden created from two cottage gardens featuring an Apothecary’s Garden and contemporary, cottage-garden planting Size 300 square metres, Where Buckinghamshire, Soil Clay. Climate Temperate English climate, not too cold or too wet. Hardiness zone USDA 9. You could be forgiven for thinking that you had walked into a particularly floriferous meadow throughout much of the garden that designer Sue Townsend has created in the Chilterns. This was entirely intentional. The garden was originally two separate cottage gardens, and part of Sue’s brief was to make the two gardens blend together, as well as out into the surrounding countryside. “It is an amazing spot with hardly any houses around,” says Sue. “To the front of the house is hazel woodland - you can hardly see…

What A small genus of bulbous plants in the Iridaceae family, with brightly coloured flowers, usually red or orange, and upright, sword-shaped leaves. The eight species include C. aurea, C. pottsii, C. masoniorum and the semi-naturalised C. paniculata. They are commonly known as montbretia, falling stars and, in the USA, as coppertops. Origins Southern and Eastern Africa. Season Flowers between June and August, some lasting into September. Size From 50cm to 1.8m tall. Conditions Thrives in sunny situations in rich, well-drained soil. Hardiness Some are hardy throughout the UK, but others will need winter protection. Most have an RHS hardiness rating of H4-H5, and are suitable for gardens in USDA zones 5a to 10b. *Holds an Award of Garden Merit from the Royal Horticultural Society. †Hardiness ratings given where available.…

GARDN SMALL IN BRIEF What An exotic, plantsperson’s paradise in a small suburban garden. Where Surrey. Size 8m × 9m. Soil Clay, heavily modified in parts. Climate Temperate, south-facing garden. Hardiness zone USDA 9. Visitors to Robert Stacewicz’s small urban garden marvel at the speed and extent of its transformation. He took possession of a fairly featureless rectangular patch of lawn in autumn 2019, started work on it the following spring, and by summer 2022 the garden was ready for the Gardeners’ World cameras. The space now works on multiple levels: as a haven for biodiversity, as a place of huge interest for plant-lovers, and as an atmospheric retreat from the real world of traffic and suburbia outside. But in a way, this act of creation has not been sudden…

ACROSS 6 Genus of spiny shrub, Japanese quince - ‘Chelsea omen’ possibly (11) 8 Extent of a root’s growth… needs some pruning (3) 10 A larva might emerge from this - for example by gravity initially (3) 11 Term for a shrub that protects a young plant - state registered? (5) 12 Charles Dowdings gardening method with minimal soil disturbance (2-3) 13 A named rodgersia with tall flower spikes - a source of shade from the sun (7) 15 _flower, one of calceolaria’s common names - found in cowslip perhaps (7) 17 Genus of perennials in the ginger (Zingiberaceae) family, with orchid-like flowers - oddly coarse with nothing inside (7) 19 Species name meaning common (7) 21 Frost-hardy orchid - requires sort of open lie (7) 23 Person who goes…