Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2022 i The English Garden

I was living in Manchester when I (eventually) passed my driving test, and not too far away in Warrington, Bluebell Cottage Gardens, which you’ll find on page 40, was one of my earliest excursions in the car. It was still Lodge Lane Nursery then, since this was well before Sue Beesley took it on and reversed its ensuing decline, but more than 20 years later I can still recall that heady sense of freedom of those early trips in my very own car, and the sheer joy of being able to zoom off on garden visits. The Dorothy Clive Garden in Shropshire is still one of my favourite gardens for the same reason, indelibly associated in my mind with the exhilarating adrenaline of my first solo motorway drive. This was…

Isabella Tree One of the country’s foremost proponents of rewilding, Isabella manages the Sussex Knepp Estate and is the author of Wilding. Here she inspires gardeners to ‘think like a herbivore’ When we think of wild land, we tend to picture forest. But in the presence of herbivores, undisturbed land is more diverse. Animals trample, rootle, debark trees, paddle in the margins of water courses and transport seeds across a landscape: that’s what kick-starts a dynamic system. The ecologist Frans Vera pointed this out in Grazing Ecology and Forest History. The book was translated into English in 2000, just as my husband Charlie and I were wondering how to see the estate at Knepp through to a sustainable future. We’d inherited it in 1987, and after years of failing to…

August is a month when many gardens run out of steam, with the exuberance of spring and early summer a distant memory. At Patthana, in the pretty village of Kiltegan in County Wicklow, Ireland, it’s a different story, however, since it’s at this time of year that the garden of T. J. Maher and his husband Simon Kirby builds to a crescendo of stunning late-season colour. When T. J., an artist, and Simon moved here in 1996, the garden was blank canvas. “The house had been used as a holiday home for 25 years and the garden had been completely neglected; there was an old apple tree that had fallen over and some spindly, self-seeded hollies but not much else. I didn’t have a grand plan and there was no…

Eryngiums, more commonly known as sea hollies, are one of the most eye-catching garden plants, prized for their spiky, typically blue, thistle-like flowerheads, each one surrounded by a pointy ruff. The summer flowers are a magnet for pollinating insects, eventually fading to shades of buff in autumn and then providing interest as the weather turns cold and frost highlights the intricate detail of the architectural seedheads. While a handful of perennial eryngiums are popular as border plants, this is a much more diverse genus than you might realise, as Kathy and Brian Pike, holders of the Plant Heritage National Collection, have discovered. “Over the years, as we’ve done more research and grown more plants, we’ve found that eryngiums come from a range of habitats, including dry scree, forest glades and…

After the intense energy of June and July, the kitchen garden at Thyme at Southrop, Gloucestershire, is settling into a more relaxed pace. With autumn harvests on the horizon, this is the time to enjoy the benefits of the year’s earlier hard work and make sure plants have exactly what they need to produce good fruit – be it tomatoes, courgettes or fattening pumpkins. Among the fruit canes, gleaming berries are now ripening at speed, providing the makings of delicious summer puddings and jams for the chefs in the kitchen. Jewel-bright berries Summer pudding, fruit fools, pavlovas and ice-creams stained with fruit: these highlights of summer dining all involve berries. Head chef Charlie Hibbert and his colleagues often come down to the garden to gather what they need. “The berries…

Growing flowers for cutting is undoubtedly rewarding, but in a business where one bout of inclement weather or an outbreak of a damaging pest can spoil the crop, those who choose to become flower farmers also need a healthy dose of determination and grit. The three flower farms on the following pages all opened for business at around the same time Covid-19 hit, yet a global pandemic proved no impediment to their success. Visit them, and dozens of other UK flower farmers, over this year’s Flower Farmers’ Big Weekend on 5-7 August. A Fresh Start It took the pandemic to make Clare Greener’s dream of having her own flower farm a reality After going through a redundancy in the 1990s, Clare Greener dreamt of starting her own flower farm, but…

Carole Drake Carole is a garden photographer and writer based in a small town in South Somerset, and an active member of the Dorset branch of Butterfly Conservation. She visits College Barn on page 22. Jason Ingram Jason is an award-winning photographer based in Bristol. He travels widely, shooting for magazines, books, and garden designers on private projects worldwide. His photos of the garden at Patthana are on p33. Maria Burns Maria is a Dorset-based illustrator and graphic designer with a passion for nature, gardens and the stunning landscapes around her home on the Isle of Purbeck. She illustrates Non Morris’s column on page 130.…

ALL PRICES ARE CORRECT AT TIME OF GOING TO PRESS.…

Garden buildings are more than just buildings. In the case of sheds and greenhouses, they’re the engine room of the garden. A summerhouse or garden room can be a haven of creativity or a place of solace: somewhere to simply sit and enjoy the garden at leisure or to indulge in a hobby. These buildings are every bit as important as the plants in forming a garden’s fabric and identity. PRACTICAL, FUNCTIONAL SHEDS Our main raison d’être as gardeners may be growing plants, but if there’s nowhere to keep the things we need to grow them, a garden grinds to a halt. The shed is the beating heart of the garden and the place we head to first to gather our tools before we start work. In Shed Heaven, her…

Perfect PLACEMENT Position your garden table in a spot where your guests will have a full and colourful view of an abundant flower border. Forgo the need for shade, since this gathering is a celebration of sunshine and good weather – just make sure sunhats and sunscreen are available. Eston Sunflower tablecloth fabric, £40.50 per metre, Kemble Collection by Romo, romo.com. Lemon bistro chairs, £110 per pair, gardentrading.co.uk. Fermob bistro chair in red ochre, £89, le-petit-jardin.com. Frilly cushions handmade by Studio Blackwell from Romo fabrics, £55 each, romo.com; studioblackwell.co.uk. Handwoven cotton mattress in faded peach stripe, £119, and plaster pink linen napkins, £22 per pair, rowenandwren.co.uk. Vintage ceramic sunflower jug, £18, handmade ceramic spot jug, £15, green bowl, £8, all from etsy.com. Amber water glasses, £5.99 each, mustard napkins, £9.99…

Fiona Haser Bizony, the owner and creative mind behind Electric Daisy Flower Farm, laughs as she says: “If you’d told me 15 years ago, ‘You’re going to be growing flowers and doing floristry,’ I just wouldn’t have believed you!” Fiona is one of many women – and it is mainly women – who have established small, independent flower farms in this country over the past decade or so. This increase is a response to the desire for more natural-looking arrangements that don’t have the air miles attached to more commercial bouquets. These are ‘slow flowers’ that are grown in tune with the British seasons and their vicissitudes: sun, wind, rain, frost and snow. They’re often organic, even if they are not certified so, and gathered by hand. And because they…

ASHWOOD NURSERIES A plantsman’s paradise and an independent nursery situated in the West Midlands open seven days a week. We specialise in hellebores, hardy cyclamen, salvias, hepaticas, lewisias, hydrangeas, dwarf conifers, snowdrops, Primula auricula and many more beautiful plants. Our UK mail order service sends plants, garden essentials and gifts direct to your doorstep. John’s Garden is also open on Saturdays 10am-4pm. Please visit our website for full details. Tel: 01384 401996 mailorder@ashwoodnurseries.com | www.ashwoodnurseries.com Ashwood Lower Lane, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 0AE SPRING REACH NURSERY A plant fanatic’s paradise on the edge of the beautiful Surrey Hills, just 10 minutes from the A3/ M25. Brilliant home-grown trees, shrubs, climbers, grasses, perennials, roses, ferns, hedging and fruit, plus these August starlets: Hydrangea paniculata ‘Polar Bear’, Albizia ‘Summer Chocolate’, Campsis ‘Madame…

TOP 10 PLANTS First published in 1982, Beth Chatto’s The Damp Garden is a classic of British garden writing. Later updated, it draws on Beth’s maxim of ‘right plant right place’ and her sense of what worked in her own garden. Today, Beth’s Water Garden is cared for by Åsa Gregers-Warg. It includes ponds filled with moisture-loving plants, from those happiest submerged in water to those that prefer only to dip their toes. In addition to a cooling element in a hot summer, ponds offer a habitat for garden wildlife and host a range of insects and amphibians. Drawing from her own experience of Beth’s garden, Åsa chooses ten good marginal pond plants. Beth Chatto’s Plants and Gardens, Elmstead Market, Colchester, Essex CO7 7DB. Tel: 01206 822007; bethchatto.co.uk 1 Caltha…

SUSTAINABLE WATERING Every garden needs water. Sometimes it seems as though the weather gods provide all they need, but every good gardener knows this is fool’s gold: only mature trees and hardy shrubs will survive on a rain-only diet. Pots full of annuals will wither; vegetables will bolt and go to seed; newly planted perennials will give up the ghost; and seeds will fail to sprout. Supplemental water is essential, and every garden has a mains tap for this very reason – but not every invention is the right one. In fact, they may even bypass a simpler, more elegant solution, and nothing could be as elementary as harvesting and storing rain when it falls to use when it does not. Arit Anderson, television presenter and garden designer, agrees: “Collecting…

How to begin with the sea and the light? It is early evening in the middle of August and I am kneeling in the damp grass on a small island in the Outer Hebrides, picking sorrel from the base of a dense stand of flag iris. We will eat the sorrel, cool and lemony, with the mackerel we have caught for our supper. The light is delicate, shifting, creating impossibly beautiful layers of clearest colour: the smooth whiteness of the beach, the radiant turquoise sea and the inky violet stretched-out shapes of other islands. The curving burn that leads from the bothy to the sea is flanked by a further unstoppable army of flag iris. The silvery surface of the burn is speckled with the tiny flowers of water forget-me-not.…