Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2023 i The English Garden

Jean Vernon Jean is an award-winning writer and the best-selling author of The Secret Lives of Garden Bees. She writes about gardens, plants, pollinators and especially bees. Jean explores The Bishop’s Palace, Wells, on p42. Antoinette Galbraith Antoinette is a garden writer who lives, works and gardens in the Scottish Borders. She writes regularly for The Scotsman, and visits the garden at the Aldourie Estate on page 50. Natasha Goodfellow Natasha writes and curates events like the Beautiful & Useful Craft Fair at the Sussex Prairie Garden and London’s Garden Museum. She profiles three garden printmakers on p117.…

Carol Klein The 2023 RHS Iconic Horticultural Hero on the thinking behind her multi-habitat design for this year’s Hampton Court Garden Festival Just before Christmas, Clare Matterson, director general of the RHS, wrote to ask if I would be RHS Hampton Court’s Iconic Horticultural Hero for 2023, which was both shocking and flattering in equal measure! Because of that, I was able to design a garden for the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. It’s a privilege, but it’s also the first time I’ve designed a garden since 1999, so it’s been very hard work. It’s a huge space, 375 square metres, and when I walked it out for the first time I was astonished. When you’re creating a show garden, it’s a very different proposition to a real garden, and…

Lucy and Richard Bartlett moved to Polstead Mill in the heart of Suffolk in 2002. Their previous gardening experience, during careers spent travelling the world, had been confined to containers on the balcony of their flat in central London. “We planted seriously and in profusion, but space was always limited,” Lucy recalls. At Polstead they acquired a garden and 11 acres of land, with a swimming pool and hard landscaping put in by the previous owners, along with a few shrubs – and shoulder-high nettles. “The grand plan was to get rid of the nettles then wait for a year to see what was there,” Lucy explains. In the meantime they cut down the line of outsized leylandii along the river, which was encroaching onto the lawn. Lucy recycled them,…

Just a mile inland from the sea, the garden is buffeted by drying onshore breezes and, in winter, a bitter wind The Suffolk coast has a particular charm. With its big skies, empty pebble beaches, reeded floodplains, and adjacent patches of heathland where nightingales sing, it is beloved of musicians, writers, artists – and anyone in search of a quieter, gentler life, including Sue Pearson. “We’d had family holidays in Aldeburgh since I was very young,” explains Sue, “so it was a dream come true when we finally moved here in 2019.” Sue’s home is not the classic pink-washed thatched cottage you might at first envisage for this sleepy part of the world. Rather it’s a 1970s bungalow and, when she moved in, she found that her one third of…

TOP 10 PLANTS Great Dixter in East Sussex, is a model of compelling planting schemes. Among the people contributing to this remarkable garden is Shaun Blower, who works in the nursery. Having started as a trainee four years ago, he is now a permanent member of staff dedicating himself to the propagation and cultivation of plants and teaching others. With an eye on summer heat and mindful use of water in the garden, here he selects ten robust and drought-tolerant plants for growing in containers. As with the gardens he helps tend, they’re inventive and will make a statement for this season and many more to come. Great Dixter, Northiam, Rye, East Sussex TN31 6PH. Tel: 01797 252878; greatdixter.co.uk 1 Convolvulus cneorum “Growing throughout the central Mediterranean, this shrub…

August is my favourite month in the kitchen garden and greenhouse, with much of the food we grow at its peak. Everywhere you look there’s something exciting to pick and eat, and no two days are the same. It can be hard to keep up with the produce but that’s a good feeling, particularly if you have a freezer in which to stash away the surplus. Unparalleled in their August marvellousness are of course tomatoes. The smell of the stems and leaves that lingers after pinching is almost as good as the taste of the fruit. We grow groves of tomatoes in the greenhouse here, and these are sometimes supplemented with the hardier and more reliable ones growing in a sunny spot in the garden. And we plant lots of…

This month’s issue has an arty thread running through it. First off we bring you a guide to superb gardens in which to view sculpture, and a directory of sculptors should you be planning a purchase. Then Selina Lake offers inspiration for a garden gathering with a flavour of the Bloomsbury Group at Charleston, and Natasha Goodfellow looks at the work of three garden- and plant-inspired printmakers. Lastly, Sandra Lawrence meets Dr Shirley Sherwood and delves into her remarkable life, most notably her time spent collecting and championing botanical art, some of which you may have seen at her eponymous gallery at Kew. Gardening is an art in itself of course, creating picture-perfect compositions with plants. And, as always, the gardens in this issue do so with aplomb. Tom Stuart-Smith…

100L water butt, £250. Tel: 01993 845559; gardentrading.co.uk…

Outdoor sculpture can do much to elevate parts of the garden but unless you have specific knowledge of the topic, it can be hard to know how to choose a piece. A reliable way to discover your taste, from style through material to finish, is to see plenty of it and to see it in situ rather than in a showroom or studio. As with art for interiors, there is a tremendous selection of garden sculpture on the market, with an accordant price range: expect to pay in the low hundreds for smaller items produced in volume and hundreds of thousands of pounds for large, singular pieces created by artists of note. Wood, stone, bronze and more affordable bronze resin are popular choices, but there are endless possibilities: glass and…

Prized for their tall, willowy beauty, thalictrums are the supermodels of the garden border, the airy transparency of their slender stems and frothy flowers creating a see-through veil of delicate height and structure. This is a diverse genus, however, and beyond these statuesque border stalwarts there are diminutive alpines and compact cultivars that are perfect for container growing. There are more than 120 species of thalictrum, including three that grow wild in Britain: Thalictrum flavum, which grows in stream margins, fens and water meadows; Thalictrum minus, found on limestone soil in parts of Cumbria and the Yorkshire Dales; and Thalictrum alpinum, which grows on Scottish mountainsides. Commonly known as meadow rue, thalictrums are part of the buttercup family, Ranunculaceae. They bear little obvious resemblance to their relatives, but they share…

A Room of ONE’S OWN This shaded spot enclosed by flint walls and a charming pergola makes a perfect place to craft or paint on a hot sunny day. Fancy a creative afternoon in your own garden? Set up a table and a comfortable chair in a quiet spot with dappled shade and be inspired by your surroundings. Stripe frill tablecloth, £240, projektityyny.com. Charleston stripe hexagonal pencil pot, £18, cambridgeimprint.co.uk. Cushion made from Italian Oak in Petal fabric, £120/m, thelinenladder.com. Adonis mini vase, £95, sashacompton.com. Blue floral milk jug, £18, jayneredmond.co.uk. Yellow ceramic jug, £14, etsy.com…

The dog days of summer are here again and, appropriately, Teilo, our half-Tibetan terrier half-sheepdog, sets the pace of life in the Deanery garden. While he alternates between sunbathing and dozing in the shade of an acer, I endeavour to enjoy simply being out among the plants I have tended rather than doing. There has been a subtle shift in the dominant flower colours towards the hotter end of the spectrum led by my many dahlias. Most of these originate from a single packet of ‘Bishop’s Children’ seed sown in spring 2022. This seed strain tends to have dark leaves and produces single flowers that are attractive to pollinators. To my eye they sit more easily in a garden that is semi-wild around the edges than more showy varieties. The…

TOPIARY What is it about a standard plant that makes it so elegant? Essentially it is nothing more than a ‘ball on a stick’, yet these pieces of topiary lend style, flair, formality and structure. Is it that they conjure visions of grand gardens? Is it because they denote a serious gardener at work, one with the skills to coax perfect shapes from plants? Or is it a case of knowing that, once mature, these standards would come with a hefty price tag? Whatever the reason, there’s no denying their panache. Their classic position is in smart pots either side of the front door: perfect leafy sentinels. A popular plant choice for this situation is handsome, glossy-leaved bay (Laurus nobilis), but other evergreen candidates include holly or privet species such…

TO CONCLUDE ‘‘I have always longed for a chamomile lawn.” It is such a resonant idea. Everyone around the table is immediately transported to a high-summer afternoon: cotton dresses, tea under the cherry tree, the delicious feeling of lying on a springy, faintly apple-scented lawn, your bare feet pressed into the feathery surface. So why do I respond like a world-weary diplomat, bracing my fellow diners for disappointment? “I’m afraid chamomile lawns never really work. They end up looking scruffy, there will be bare patches, they are not suited for walking on…” But later I wonder if I am right. Are there chamomile lawns that look and smell as good as their mythical status? Can they look great if you follow the rules? Chamomile lawns have made us swoon since…