Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i The English Garden

When I was studying horticulture, many of my fellow students were considering careers as gardeners. Some went on to be successful head gardeners for well-known gardens, but I knew that wasn’t the career path for me – for a start, I’m much too fair-weather. I’m far happier sitting in a warm magazine office over winter than watching my fingers turn blue outside. But mostly, I knew I wasn’t cut out for it: imagine the pressure, especially in a famous garden with lots of visitors, of keeping it looking perfect all the time. It’s disappointing enough in our own gardens when something doesn’t quite work as envisaged, and that’s before the expectations of thousands of visitors are added to the mix. And in historically important gardens, add caring for rare specimens:…

Claire Batten & Jeff Rowe The head gardeners of The Minack Theatre discuss the challenges of caring for a clifftop subtropical garden while running a nursery Claire: My gardening journey began when I studied Rural Science as a GCSE at school. After my RHS training, I got a job with the local authority working in parks and gardens and on roundabouts. Jeff is my brother-in-law, and we decided to join forces and take on Trewidden Plants (Penberth Plants as of 2016 when we relocated), supplying the Eden Project with exotic plants for retail. We’d never worked in commercial horticulture, so it was a giant learning curve. Jeff was travelling all over the country going to shows, and in 2017 we had a Best in Show at Chelsea in the floral…

Almost any fruitful visit to a garden centre or plant fair will drive home one main point: garden expenses soon add up. Creating a garden from scratch, redesigning a garden or finally getting round to including a new outdoor feature, can quickly become very expensive. The trick to managing costs, whatever your budget, is to think hard about exactly where and when to spend money. DESIGN Designers, who can be hired for varying levels of service, be it an initial plan or to manage a project from start to finish with ongoing maintenance, all agree that upfront design and planning are crucial. As London-based garden designer Sheila Jack (sheilajack.com) explains: “Whether you’re doing it yourself or hiring a design professional, correcting a line on a piece of paper is a…

Spring SPECTACULAR This beautiful oversized floral arrangement of British-grown tulips and green shoots, arranged by Gillie and Fi of Hortus Poeticus, makes a statement as you enter the inspiring studio at their flower garden in Hampshire. Gillie and Fi suggest using ceramic – rather than glass – vases for flower arranging: it keeps the water cooler so the blooms will last longer. hortuspoeticus.com FRILLS & SPILLS The warm sunshine has encouraged these tulip petals to open wide, revealing a fabulously overblown quality. Use sherbet blooms with striped Rembrandt varieties to create relaxed bucket displays. Fresh-cut tulips grown by and sourced from Hortus Poeticus. PRINTS CHARMING Add textiles emblazoned with yet more tulips to your garden table setting to elevate the theme with dizzying effect. This beautiful linen tablecloth design is…

HIDCOTE MANOR When someone starts to get serious about gardening, pretty soon they will visit one – if not all – of the ‘big three’ gardens: Great Dixter, Sissinghurst and Hidcote Manor. The latter two of these iconic places are cared for by the National Trust, and 2023 is a special year for Hidcote since it marks its 75th anniversary with the Trust. Until it began looking after Hidcote, the Trust’s portfolio comprised mainly stately homes and castles, nature reserves and tracts of countryside. But then an immaculately designed Arts & Crafts-inspired garden surrounding a Gloucestershire manor house joined that list – the first property taken on for the importance of its garden alone. It’s a garden that so many of us are familiar with, whether we’ve visited in person…

Kenneth Cox Ken is the managing director of Glendoick Gardens and Garden Centre and is a nurseryman, plant hunter, hybridiser, author and musician. He writes about Glendoick’s history and plants on page 62. Valerie McBride-Munro Valerie is a writer and gardening agony aunt based in West London. As Auntie Planty she encourages novice gardeners to discover the pleasures of the pastime. She visits Ramster on page 32. David Cummins-Egan Lancashire-based photographer and writer David has a passion for organic and wildlife-friendly gardening. He admires the diverse gardens of Sizergh Castle on page 42.…

William Robinson, pioneering garden writer and creator of the magnificent gardens at Gravetye Manor in rural West Sussex, believed spring should come with a touch of wildness about it. ‘In our islands, fanned by the winds of iceless seas, spring wakes early in the year...’ he wrote in his seminal 1893 book, The English Flower Garden. He then lets loose, with signature vigour, on all the ways in which spring should be liberated from the stranglehold of ‘unnatural’ formality. His remedy is simple yet radical. We should look to the sublime artistry of Nature herself for our inspiration: to the ‘woods, copses, heaths and meadows’, which ‘have no little loveliness in spring’. For Robinson, our opportunity – indeed our obligation – should be to take these ‘wild and half-wild spots’…

TOP 10 PLANTS Sally Petitt joined Cambridge University Botanic Garden 34 years ago and is now its head of horticulture. “I love the diversity of plants and the setting here. The landscape changes daily and we have a great team,” she enthuses. The garden has a historic Plant Heritage National Collection of Tulips, containing some 70 species. “When they’re in flower, they have such a diverse range of sizes, shapes and colours,” says Sally. “I like T. cornuta very much: it’s the epitome of what you think of as an old-fashioned Persian tulip. But T. montana is pretty good too.” Here she selects ten plants to perfectly complement these vibrant spring bulbs. Cambridge University Botanic Garden, 1 Brookside, Cambridge CB2 1JE. Tel: 01223 336265; botanic.cam.ac.uk 1 Lunaria annua “Annual…

One of the absolute joys of growing your own cut flowers is having the freedom to work with materials you would never be able to buy at a florist or flower market. It can feel immensely satisfying and empowering to know that you are able to create something that goes so much deeper than the standard shop-bought fare. Perennials and woody cuts make it easy to create a distinctive look that is different not just from imported flowers but also annuals. The range of annuals for cutting is much wider than it used to be, but still doesn’t come close to the almost limitless possibilities of these large plant groups. Each of us will choose our own unique blend of plants based on our style and growing conditions. It makes…

TO CONCLUDE The chance to explore a whole new palette of plants is rare. It is most likely to happen when you move house. It happened to me recently with an invitation to design a garden in Cornwall – excitingly far away from my usual territory. The garden in question is at the Leach Pottery, St Ives. This vibrant museum and working pottery is being redeveloped and extended by Dow Jones Architects, whose work for the Garden Museum in London has been transformative. As I explore planting possibilities for the different outside spaces, I have been luxuriating in a lush new world – and many of my initial ideas have been turned on their head. The first thing you notice when you are looking hard at Cornish gardens is that…

In the northern hemisphere our gardens are well and truly tipped towards the life-giving sun again. Emerging from my back door on a sunny morning gives me a jolt of joy, but the flood of crisp light threatens to bleach out the abundance of new growth in the Deanery garden. My eyes take a moment to adjust, and then the saturated colours shine through: vivid cardinal-red tulip ‘Oscar’, coral-orange tulip ‘Annie Schilder’, royal purple Anemone coronaria ‘Jerusalem Blue’ and the acid greens of Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii and Smyrnium perfoliatum. As I plan next season’s display, I turn to Sarah Raven for ideas on colour combinations. She helpfully thinks in terms of three palettes. First, the bright ‘boiled sweet’ purity of my spring blooms but mixed with some darker velvet…

The garden is planted on either side of swiftly flowing burn spanned by two bridges Jute, made from fibres imported from India and turned into rope, sacks and carpet lining, made the 19th-century Cox family fortune, with manufacturing taking place at a factory in Dundee. My great-grandfather Alfred Cox, who bought Glendoick House in 1899, expected his only son Euan to follow him into the family jute business – but Euan had other ideas. After graduating from Cambridge University, he joined London’s literary set and worked for writers Edmund Gosse and John Buchan, spending his weekends with the Bloomsbury Group. Later, while working at the War Office, Euan met Edwardian garden writer and plant hunter Reginald Farrer, who suggested Euan join him in Burma in search of plants in 1919.…

FOCUS When gardeners fall in love with clematis, it can quickly become an all-encompassing passion – no wonder, when the temptation to add ‘just one more’ is so strong. Clematis are the only climber to offer genuine year-round interest: there are blowsy, big-flowered summer varieties; an array of jewel-coloured autumn clematis; subtle winter-flowering species, including speckled Clematis cirrhosa; and, at this time of year, an assortment of delightful spring-flowering species and cultivars. The spring-flowering clematis seem particularly special: compared to the more flamboyant in-yourface summer bloomers, their flowers have an enchanting, ethereal delicacy. Their colours are demure, often faded pastel blues and mauves, dusky pink and fragile white. That they appear alongside this season’s billowing blossom and bright bulbs only enhances their charm. Peter Skeggs-Gooch, owner of Thorncroft Clematis in…

SARAH RAVEN My aim is to have a brilliantly colourful, productive patch for as many months as possible, and April is the kitchen garden’s first paintbox peak. Spring’s edible flowers now mix with an array of hyacinths, followed by tulips and the showiest of the salads and leafy greens (such as rainbow chard and kale ‘Redbor’), as well as purple leeks and the foliage of globe artichokes. Together this gives us full-on colour razzmatazz, which I love. Central to all parts of the garden are tulips and, as with dahlias, we scatter tulip petals over salad. In November we plant hundreds of bulbs through the vegetables, selecting varieties we’ve found to be most perennial, so they come up reliably year after year, such as ‘Green Wave’, ‘Spring Green’, ‘Ballerina’, ‘Mistress…