Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i The English Garden

Troy Scott Smith A gardener for over 30 years, Troy was head gardener at both Bodnant and Sissinghurst. He now combines his work at Iford Manor with writing, lecturing and designing. His new column starts on p12. Matthew Biggs Matthew is a gardener, writer and broadcaster and a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Gardeners’ Question Time. He has a passionate interest in plant history and bulbous plants. He visits Waddesdon and Eythrope on p30. Anna Omiotek-Tott London-based photographer Anna specialises in gardens, plants and florals. She loves finding amazing gardens to capture, like the frosty scenes at Benington Lordship on page 46.…

Lip na Cloiche Isle of Mull Gardens are deeply personal places. This tiny little sloping garden in the Hebrides is completely idiosyncratic. Owner Lucy Mackenzie collects seashore debris to display among her amazing plant collection here. Tel: 01688 500257; lipnacloiche.co.uk Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew London A botanical treasure house. You can see more representations of the botany of the world at Kew than anywhere else on the planet. As a plant collection, it is absolutely without peer. Tel: 020 8332 5655; kew.org…

Choose new plants With so many plants available, it is easy to end up with a garden that looks a little like a ‘fruit salad’. When designing borders, I’ve learned to pare down my plant selection and think about the narrative of the border. Repeating white foxgloves throughout, for example, adds unity and rhythm, which can be further strengthened by echoing the same minaret shape at a different height with ‘Noble Maiden’ lupins (below). Plan container displays I love the indulgence of using pots and containers in the garden, both in spring to display treasured bulbs or in summer, brimming over with generosity and flowering exuberance. They can add a dash of colour where there is none or, as at Iford, by using a narrow palette of Mediterranean plants, evoke…

CYCLAMEN COUM SILVER GROUP A highly decorative cyclamen with almost entirely metallic-silver leaves. ERANTHIS HYEMALIS CILICICA GROUP Seek out this winter aconite for flowers a little later than those of the species. GALANTHUS ‘GREENISH’ Fine green lines adorn this snowdrop’s outer segments and, unlike other green varieties, it’s a little less finicky to grow. HEPATICA JAPONICA Japanese hepaticas are often the most intricate, but usually need to be grown under cover rather than in the garden. IRIS ‘FRANK ELDER’ This cultivar is similar to more familiar ‘Katharine Hodgkin’, but is an even paler and more delicate shade of blue. HELLEBORUS ASHWOOD GARDEN HYBRIDS These hellebores are renowned for their detailed markings and clear colours. EDGEWORTHIA CHRYSANTHA A deciduous shrub bearing…

Snowdrops are happy anywhere in shade and will tolerate most soils, apart from the heaviest clay or the sourest acid conditions. These are hungry plants and will appreciate the application of an annual dressing of bonemeal and leafmould in autumn. Lift and transplant snowdrops ‘in the green’ after flowering and before they die back, planting at three times the depth of the bulb. New clumps should contain somewhere in the region of five bulbs. Do not let the soil dry out until the foliage has started to die back. Protect the leaves from slugs. When naturalising snowdrops in grass, take out a core with a bulb planter, replace the bottom half of the core in the hole, put the clump on top and crumble the soil around it. Alternatively, cut…

Candlemas bells, fair maids, Mary’s taper, Eve’s tear, white cup, white queen and snow dropper: the many regional names for snowdrops in English folklore point to their value in our gardens and churchyards when the year is on the cusp of spring and little else is bold enough to bloom. Like the Roman god Janus, the snowdrops at Benington Lordship, a seven-acre garden near Stevenage, Hertfordshire, are at once about looking back and looking forward. They mark the turn of winter to spring, but here they also signify the long history of the property and how a new generation has taken on the mantle of its custodianship. “The snowdrops look beautiful in February, especially in the wilder areas where there are lovely paths to walk along,” says Susanna Bott, who,…

Why do so many English houses, from Victorian villas to Betjemanesque suburban dwellings and post-war council estates, have front gardens? The answer is not difficult: they were designed to protect privacy, enhance dignity, provide a sense of spaciousness, and keep the town-dweller in touch with the sense of a rural idyll that underlies so much of the English approach to town living. So what do we see today? Car parks, dustbin enclosures, and brutal stretches of tarmac and concrete. A recent study carried out by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Universities of Sheffield, Westminster and Virginia urges the rediscovery of value in our front gardens: properly treated, they can contribute to happiness and relaxation, not only in terms of our mood, but actually having an effect on cortisol levels.…

‘GLOWING PHOENIX’ A Backhouse cultivar with double primrose-yellow petals and a frilly orange centre. ‘SCARLET LEADER’ A large-cupped daffodil bred by Sarah Dodgson, with creamy-yellow petals and a short, orange-red trumpet. ‘DESERT FOX’ Bred by William Ormston Backhouse, with golden yellow petals and a fiery orange trumpet. ‘MERKARA’ This cultivar, bred by Sarah Elizabeth Dodgson, has creamy-white petals and a large orange cup. ‘ROSY TRUMPET’ A pretty daffodil created by Robert Ormston Backhouse with creamy-white petals and a fluted apricot trumpet. ‘RED IKE’ The pure white petals and bright orange cup of this daffodil, bred by Major Brodie, make a striking contrast.…

Sow most climbers in March, in order to allow as long a growing season as possible, and cosset them in a warm, brightly lit spot under cover. The exception is ipomoea which I sow in late April since it grows rapidly and doesn’t like its growth to be checked. Avoid root disturbance, which most of these climbers seem to resent when young. To ensure their roots are damaged as little as possible, I sow seeds individually into modules or small pots, potting on once, if necessary, to ensure stocky growth when I plant out after the risk of frost has passed. Sow nasturtiums outdoors in situ in April or May or, if you want to give them a head start, they can be planted out in pots indoors in March…

Great Dixter: Then & Now by Fergus Garrett Pimpernel, £12.99 The ease with which we can create an image on a mobile phone these days often means thousands of pictures end up languishing on a digital cloud, perhaps unseen until storage space runs out and some must be deleted. Contrast this, with, say, 50 or 100 years ago, when film and print-making were costly and images far less prolific. The value of making, archiving and retrieving an image is brought home in Great Dixter: Then & Now. This is a wonderful compilation of photographic material dating from the earliest days of Great Dixter as we know it, from just after World War I to the present day. Images come from various sources, including family snaps, and garden portraiture by Carol…

TENDERCARE NURSERIES Specialising in more mature and specimen plants, from Hostas to Hamamelis, Tendercare’s 12 acres are a joy to visit for anyone with a garden in the making. Our site visit and warrantied planting service is very popular to help rejuvenate a tired garden or change the focus of the garden after building works. Our award-winning design service will create a beautiful garden for you to enjoy all year through. Book your visit for assistance with one of our horticulturists, by golf buggy, or pop into our office and we can give you a map, a route to follow, and suggestions to get you started. Tel: 01895 837120 sales@tendercare.co.uk | www.tendercare.co.uk. Southlands Road, Denham UB9 4HD. Next to Junction 2 on the M40. SPRING REACH NURSERY A plant fanatic’s…

LEONARDSLEE LAKES & GARDENS Visit the famous Grade I Listed gardens to enjoy outstanding spring displays and our new sculpture park, as the gardens come alive with a riot of colour. Enjoy magnolias, camellias in groves, footpaths winding through hills carpeted in bluebells and hundreds of rhododendrons and azaleas. There’s so much to see and do: Dolls’ House Museum, cafés, garden centre, Michelin Starred Restaurant and year-round event calendar. Visit our website to see what’s on during Covid-19. Tel: 08718 733389info@leonardsleegardens.co.uk|www.leonardsleegardens.co.uk.Brighton Road, Lower Beeding, Horsham RH13 6PP TWELVE NUNNS At Twelve Nunns we are well known for our Harvington Hellebores® and have many beautiful colours and forms to choose from. They are available to order from our website now, so why not brighten up your winter garden. We also specialise…

The new year hasn’t got off to the most promising start, with unrelentingly gloomy news at every turn. It is easy to lose heart, in another lockdown and faced with this barrage, so I am trying to concentrate instead solely on things that cheer me up, and right now that is bulbs. The simplest things are often the most cheering: snowdrops and crocuses are peeping through the soil in my garden; in the house, a huge striped hippeastrum looks spectacular in full bloom; and I have a bowl of pink hyacinths just starting to flower as well as paperwhites on the way (they were both supposed to be for Christmas, but I was a little late planting them). This issue is full of the happy sight of masses of bulbs,…

Improve your soil with sand and grit, and ensure the snowdrops have some form of shade in the summer. It doesn’t need to be a tree, it can just be a geranium, so long as it keeps the soil cool. Use upturned wire hanging baskets to keep clumps safe as they emerge in spring, both from your feet as you work in the borders, and from pheasants. I’d rather trip up over them than destroy my snowdrops! I quarantine all my new snowdrops in the vegetable garden for a couple of years. They can be prone to fungal disease and you don’t want that getting into the garden. It also gives them a chance to bulk up, and for you to check they are the right thing. Good varieties to…

Choose good plants There is such a wonderful palette of lovely things to choose from. Have something that you like and that looks good when it’s coming up, when it’s flowering and when it’s going down. If it doesn’t work well, it goes. If it doesn’t behave well, it goes. Invest in mulch This is money well spent in my opinion. It improves the soil, keeps in water and reduces weeds. Be disciplined In terms of border design, I think less is more and the effect is more lovely if you limit your palette. It disciplines you if you say to yourself: ‘I can only have two new plants, they’ve got to perform, they mustn’t be thugs and can’t demand too much attention.’ Work with nature I take the view…

Myddelton House Gardens in Enfield, North London, was the home of Edward Augustus Bowles, who lived there until his death in 1954. His influence on British gardening is enduring, evident not least in the number of plants named for him. Consider Anemone ‘Bowles’s Pink’, Crocus sieberi ‘Bowles’s White’ and of course Galanthus plicatus ‘E. A. Bowles’. In the Alpine Meadow, snowdrops, narcissus and camassia bring soft colour to early spring, along with two National Collections of crocus. Here, Myddelton’s head gardener Richard Harmes selects ten time-honoured favourites for early flowers. Myddelton House Gardens, Enfield EN2 9HG. Tel: 0300 0030610; visitleevalley.org.uk and eabowlessociety.org.uk 1 Pulmonaria rubra ‘Bowles’s Red’ Red lungwort flowers from late winter through spring. I favour varieties with a more distinctive pattern on their leaves, but these striking coral…

A good way to bulk up a favourite daffodil that you might not know the name of or be able to find in plant catalogues is by vegetative propagation of the bulbs, which is known as chipping. At the end of the summer, carefully lift a bulb from the soil. Trim any roots and remove the bulb’s papery outer skin. Divide the bulb into six equal pieces using a sharp knife, ensuring that each one has a portion of the bulb’s basal plate. Dust each piece with sulphur to prevent fungal infections. Place in a clear plastic bag on a bed of moist vermiculite, seal and keep in a warm dark place such as an airing cupboard for about 12 weeks. Each section should develop bulblets. Pot up the sections…

In the cheese room of what used to be a dairy farm in Cheselbourne, Dorset, you’ll find curing racks stacked not with hunks of cheddar or Dorset Blue Vinny, but with petal-scattered soap bars, great orange moulding blocks and countless glass bottles of essential oils. Here, whiffs of lavender, geranium, pine and clementine have replaced the more earthy odours of fermentation and cow flank. “Saponification is the name given to the process of soap making,” explains Silvana de Soissons of Farm Soap Co., “and it’s just like cheese making. You’ve got to be very accurate.” Silvana is no slouch. Hailing from Italy but raised on farms all over Africa, she moved to England to take a degree in Economics at the University of Bath, before embarking on a corporate career…

“Rachel wore her guernsey with pearls and a long skirt, while I wore mine with dungarees” ‘Adam the Gardener’ was a Sunday Express cartoon strip that raised the morale of the nation during World War II. With his craggy features and Abraham Lincoln-style beard, Adam could be seen, week by week, steadfastly digging in, tying up and potting on, no matter what was happening in the world outside and always in shirtsleeves and waistcoat, whatever the weather. The original Adam would have gardened, one presumes, without benefit of clothes – doubtless the climate of Eden was kinder than that of the British Isles – but one would surely miss the pockets. I gather there are people who garden naked. I confess to having gardened in a bikini in very hot…

Stefan Buczacki The horticulturist, botanist, author, broadcaster and expert witness describes his sources of inspiration and particular passion for fungi Inspiration for my books comes from three places: my head, where ideas occur to me for no obvious reason; my own garden, where I discover something new every day; and the British countryside – I’ve travelled all over the world, but I always love returning to it. I hated doing rehearsals before camera while I was a regular broadcaster and had a reputation for doing things in one take. It’s the same with writing: I like to keep ideas fresh. I’ve now written over 60 books. Ground Rules for Gardeners was an original idea as an attempt to analyse gardens in ecological terms. A fairly eminent reviewer described it as…

Spring SOWINGS Straddling the spring equinox, March can be an unpredictable month – “In like a lion, out like a lamb”, as the old saying goes – but with the change of season comes lengthening days, a warming of the soil and a surge in plant growth with the promise of a feast of flowers to come. You may have already sown in August or September last year the seed of annuals that you want to flower later this year. These late-summer sowings will provide you with earlier-flowering, larger plants, but now, from mid-February to mid-May is the perfect time for annual seed propagation. Annuals complete their life cycle in a single season, flowering, setting seed and dying over a few months. They can be divided into two groups: hardy…

HYACINTHOIDES ITALICA The Italian bluebell has starry flowers held on conical flowerheads. Order the bulbs for planting in autumn. ANEMONE BLANDA ‘WHITE SPLENDOUR’ Ideal for naturalising in areas of sun or dappled shade for drifts of white. EUPHORBIA AMYGDALOIDES VAR. ROBBIAE Excellent groundcover for the dry soil beneath large trees, flowering in spring. OSMANTHUS X BURKWOODII A leathery-leaved evergreen shrub with scented flowers in March and April. PRIMULA DENTICULATA Drumstick primulas can be relied on for bright colour in spring. Grow in moist, well-drained soil in sun or light shade. ORNITHOGALUM NUTANS Plant this attractive bulb in light, free-draining soil in autumn for sprays of silver-grey blooms in spring. EUPHORBIA ‘BLACKBIRD’ Gorgeous purple-tinged foliage contrasts beautifully with zingy…

The burgeoning middle classes, scientific advances and plant discoveries of the 19th century resulted in an unprecedented interest in the natural world. ‘Fern fever’, or pteridomania as it became known, gripped the country, with these beautiful but often understated plants becoming the inspiration for Victorian design, ranging from textiles, pottery and glass to stone and metalwork. They also became a must-have for plant collectors, and the advent of the railways combined with a plethora of articles and books about ferns spurred thousands of amateur botanists to head off on fern forays into remote countryside, where they’d risk life and limb climbing rocky outcrops and descending steep, slippery gorges in search of additions to their collections. The craze led to accidents and even fatalities, and over-collecting caused some ferns to become…

Up until the mid-19th century, all the daffodils growing in Britain would have been the wild species, Narcissus pseudonarcissus, immortalised by William Wordsworth. It was only in the mid-1800s, when botanists began to understand how hybridisation worked, that new forms of daffodils were created. Daffodils weren’t popular garden plants at the time; the Victorians thought of them as wild flowers, and their dainty blooms couldn’t compete with more exotic plants being introduced from abroad. There were, however, a couple of daffodil lovers who were also enthusiastic plant breeders. Edward Leeds and William Backhouse began their hybridising in the mid-19th century, building up important collections, while the Reverend George Engleheart became known for his work breeding the poeticus species of daffodils. Peter Barr, a Scot who owned a nursery in London,…

Often, I dread the gift of plants from others. What if it’s something that doesn’t suit the style of my garden or, worse still, a plant I downright dislike? A couple of years ago as I left the garden of a friend, she pressed a small brown envelope labelled Asarina ‘Joan Lorraine’ into my hand. I was unsure what exactly I had been gifted. “Grow this climber and you won’t be disappointed,” she told me. Feeling like Jack of the beanstalk I duly sowed the seeds a few days later. They sprouted within a couple of weeks and grew quickly, I planted them out mid-June and by early August the first flowers appeared, each a velvety purple-blue trumpet with a flared mouth. Over the following months, the plant rampantly twined…

William Purdom, who died suddenly in Peking 100 years ago this November, packed a great deal into his short life. A head gardener’s son from Westmoreland (now Cumbria) he trained at Kew where he was elected Secretary of the Kew Employees Union. In 1905, aged just 25, he lobbied the Board of Agriculture for better pay and conditions at Kew and was promptly sacked for “agitation” by the director, William Thiselton-Dyer. Labour Members of Parliament protested that civil servants were entitled to join a union and Thiselton-Dyer was ordered to reinstate Will. Faced with this humiliating public reversal, he resigned – an extraordinary outcome to a David-and-Goliath dispute between the director and a ‘student gardener’, the most junior grade of Kew employee. In 1907, Will led the only ever strike…

What did you hope to achieve with this book? I wanted to highlight the unique meadows of England and our wildflower inheritance. I wanted to show that our native wildflowers, which have exotic and often charming names like creeping ladies’ tresses and snake’s head fritillary, are irreplaceable and valuable forms of life on our green planet. There is a map of all the meadows in the book and there will be a meadow near everyone. The Coronation Meadows managed by the charity Plantlife have public access, and all the others are open to the public, putting them within everyone’s grasp. What is the state of our meadows presently? Unlike trees and woods, wildflower meadows are not protected by wildlife legislation at all. Collectively, meadows of all kinds support 800 different…