Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2022 i The English Garden

Richard Bloom Richard is an award-winning photographer based in Suffolk, who travels widely photographing beautiful gardens for books, magazines and garden designers. Find his images of East Ruston on page 22. Sarah Cuttle When she’s not battling horsetail on her allotment, garden photographer Sarah travels around the country looking for small but perfectly formed gardens to photograph, like Jack Wallington’s on p31. Max Crisfield Max is a professional gardener, currently working for a private garden in West Sussex, and a writer for the national press and leading garden magazines. He explores Sussex Prairie Garden on page 36.…

Beth Handley Hyde Park’s first head gardener on the importance of public green spaces and the challenges of managing them sustainably in line with a rapidly changing climate I became a gardener in 2017, leaving my job as a solicitor to study for a horticultural qualification while working part-time for a private garden maintenance company. My first full-time role was assistant gardener with the City of London in 2019. Working through the lockdowns and seeing how treasured London’s green spaces were, I knew I wanted to keep working in public parks. So it was a dream to become Hyde Park’s head gardener in June – one of eight parks managed by the Royal Parks charity. My day begins as I walk through the park gates. I take a different route…

In April 2001, after 40 years spent working as a research biologist, Duncan Gates took a part-time job in the newly restored organic kitchen garden at Audley End in Essex. As the orchard trees grew, he became interested in the variety of fruit they produced – apples and pears in particular, of which there is now a collection of 130 and 50 heritage varieties respectively. “At Audley End, all are grown as restricted forms, such as espaliers, fans and Belgian palisades, on semi-dwarfing rootstocks, but all can be grown as a standard bush, too,” he says. For unrivalled detail on apple varieties, he recommends The New Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards (Ebury). Audley End House & Gardens, London Road, Saffron Walden, Essex CB11 4JF. Tel: 0370…

Before the invention of the plastic plant pot in the 1950s, gardeners had little choice over when they put new plants in the ground. Plants were either grown from seed yourself or supplied by nurseries, bare-root, for planting in autumn or spring. But when the plastic pot arrived, nurseries could container-grow their plants and sell them all year round. It revolutionised the horticultural trade and gave rise to the first garden centres. As an invention, plastic pots are up there with the wheel as far as the world of gardening is concerned. We’ve all got very used to popping new plants in the ground at any time of year. While it’s true that many of us still order bare-root fruit and roses during autumn and winter and a lot of…

HEDGING UK Hedging UK are specialist growers of quality hedging plants. Plants are available to purchase at wholesale prices across the UK through our mail order service. Buy direct from the grower, delivered direct to your door. Readers of The English Garden get a 5% discount (quote TEG2022). Tel: 01704 827224 or 07789 922457 sales@hedginguk.com | www.hedginguk.com Boundary House Farm, Holmeswood Road, Holmeswood, Lancashire L40 1UA 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 October starlets: Arbutus unedo ‘Roselily’, Cotoneaster x suecicus ‘Juliette’, Carex testacea ‘Priarie Fire’, Coprosma ‘Pacific Sunset’, Heuchera ‘Forever Red’, Lagerstroemia indica and Salvia ‘African Skies’. A really good range…

Luckily, not all my new neighbours know what I do for a living because my front garden is letting the side down right now. The dry summer and high temperatures have really taken their toll and it needs a rethink and a reshuffle already. I’ll do that this autumn, as soon as we’ve had some decent rain and moisture in the soil is replenished, then focus on plants that are better equipped to withstand more summers like this one. I’d completely underestimated how exposed the part nearest the road is, and constant warm wind coupled with the drought has tested plants that are normally pretty resilient. Thank goodness I included Oenothera lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’, Verbena bonariensis and grasses Stipa tenuissima and Deschampsia ‘Goldtau’, because without their solid performance I might…

Tucked in a wooded valley on the border of England and Wales, the garden at Lower House in Cusop Dingle appears like a horticultural Eden – a flashback to a time before box blight and box-tree moth caterpillar arrived. Its centrepiece is a congregation of remarkably healthy clipped box bushes gathered around a glossy umbrella of Portuguese laurel, Prunus lusitanica. The creation of Nicky and Pete Daw, the garden is so visually pleasing, with its confident sculptural shapes, contrasting textures and unfolding sequence of spaces, that it comes as little surprise to learn that the couple met at art school in Bristol in 1970. Pete excelled at design and construction; Nicky was a superb plantswoman with an artist’s eye. She had a passion for box and revelled in colour, filling…

Look at any planting scheme designed by a top garden designer these days, and you’ll almost certainly find a persicaria somewhere in the mix. Loved by the likes of Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Oudolf for their natural charm, textural foliage and ability to deliver flowers over an impressively long period, for the rest of us persicaria offer a simple answer to the age-old question of how to prolong the garden’s colour and interest as the season wears on. It’s only relatively recently that these kinds of persicaria have become so popular. Go back a decade or so and the persicaria you were more likely to find were those grown for their colourful foliage: cultivars like ‘Painter’s Palette’, for example, with its cream-, green- and red-splashed leaves, or ‘Red Dragon’, with…

By the time October arrives at the kitchen garden at Thyme in Southrop, there is the sense of an ending. In the adjacent water meadows, the migrant cuckoos that announced summer have departed along with the swallows that skimmed the grassy fields for insects. Hedgerows are packed with hips, haws and sloes, all of which can be turned into sweet-sharp jellies to brighten the winter months. In the kitchen garden itself, head gardener Victoria Bowsher is thinking ahead. Because it is so close to the River Leach, part of the garden floods in winter, so she has to ensure winter crops are growing out of harm’s way. But this is also a time for bounty, with pumpkins ripening in the greenhouse, and the last of the summer squash, blackberries, raspberries…

TO CONCLUDE Whenever I visit Paris, I naturally include a garden or two in my itinerary. Springtime is legendary, of course, but from the top of the Eiffel Tower on a clear autumn day you will revel in the rhythmic rows of trees turning yellow and orange along a network of pale Parisian paths. I lived in Paris between school and university and confess that I had not made this climb until we went with our son one October half term. As the last rays of sunshine danced over the city’s silvery white architecture, we were entranced by the scale and the unstoppable French precision of the Champ de Mars, the immaculate stretch of park – resembling a close-cut velvety runway – that leads towards the École Militaire. My favourite…

I used to think the soil in my area was too dry for growing big celeriac – until I met a man who grows 400 acres of it! Apparently, the key is to leave them in late: they can double in size between mid-September and mid-November. Now, with only a little extra watering, I grow whoppers. I start them off from seed sown in plugs in my cold greenhouse in March, plant them out in mid-May, then leave them in situ in a mild winter or lift them before the hard frosts – I find they keep well in a frost-free shed in a bucket. They are fab grated in winter salads, roasted or mashed. My ever-essential ‘hoarding borders’ are now filling up with a wide range of rooted cuttings.…

Readers with long memories may well recall a time in 2016, when a pair of charming young men took to our screens for the BBC2 series Big Dreams Small Spaces. Jack Wallington, who was then just a few months into his RHS Level 2 course, and his partner, Chris, had big plans for the tiny (6m x 5m) garden of their Clapham flat, a paved yard with a single raised bed running across the back. Under the guiding light of presenter Monty Don – “I still can’t believe how lucky we were there,” says Jack – the duo duly transformed it into a ‘dahlia and fern-tastic, neon jungle gardener’s practice ground’. And all this despite a major house renovation being in full swing: on the day the crew filmed the…

There couldn’t be a more fitting name for Philippa Stewart’s Cheshire-based business than Just Dahlias. Philippa grows and sells dahlias alone, bringing to market thousands of plump, fresh flowers and long-lasting dried blooms each year. The name and the premise may be simple, but it understates the complexity of her craft. Each year Philippa grows a carefully curated selection of dahlias in truly delectable tones. In addition, she has mastered the craft of gently air-drying her blooms, transforming them into covetable ‘everlasting flowers’. Increasingly, sales of these preserved dahlias are outstripping those of the sumptuous fresh flowers, which has led her to select specific varieties more suited to drying to grow in line with demand. “I am passionate about growing dahlias in beguiling shapes and beautiful shades,” Philippa explains. “I…

Emma Stothard is a sculptor whose outdoor pieces, mainly comprising lifelike portrayals of animals woven from willow and steel, have won plaudits from around the country. “I can’t sing and I can’t play an instrument, but I can draw, and as a child I was encouraged to,” she says of her early artistic awakening. Emma grew up on the banks of the River Humber, with the North Sea a stone’s throw away on one side and farmland and wild spaces on the other. Enthralled by her surrounds and obsessed with drawing, Emma knew the direction she wanted to take from a young age. “I was always immersed in the local landscape, the river and the North Sea. My dad built his own boat and we’d go crabbing and fishing together.…