Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i The English Garden

The only thing I don’t like about our wintry Christmas issue is how quickly it seems to come around each year. But, that aside, I’m more than happy to celebrate the festive season and everything it brings. I wonder if our gardens will be subject to a cold snap like last December’s, which left gardens such as The Old Rectory in Bletchingley and Longstock Park Water Garden in Hampshire adorned with snow and crisp frost, or the spell of wintry weather that turned Horatio’s Garden Scotland into a Narnia-esque stage set. As well as extolling the joys of winter gardens, we’re also raising a glass to the winners of this year’s Nation’s Favourite Gardens competition, run in conjunction with the National Garden Scheme and supported by Sisley Garden Tours. Once…

Sue Kent The Gardeners’ World star on transforming her passion into a career in the spotlight My dad and I were thick as thieves when I was growing up, and one of my earliest memories is spending hours in his potting shed where I would make cups of tea from soil and water and listen to him talking about his asparagus. My grandfather was an asparagus grower by trade and Dad tried to emulate his success, but we never had quite the right soil. I started out in marketing, but when my parents became ill I needed something more flexible so I became a sports masseuse. Because I have an upper limb disability, I massage with my feet, and I think I was the first person in the UK to…

I first visited Longstock Park Water Garden more than 30 years ago and, as with so many garden visits, was amazed at what I found: a garden created around a seemingly completely natural landscape of streams and channels flowing between wider expanses of lake. Details, planting in particular, have inevitably changed since then, but the garden’s raison d’etre remains unchanged: the seemingly limitless quantities of water around which the whole garden has always been planned. There are a number of great gardens around the world where water is an integral feature, but a true water garden is one where an abundance of water is the primary feature around which everything else revolves. These are rarities: the mind turns to a few great historic examples such as Renaissance Villa d’Este in…

TOP 10 PLANTS The spring, summer or autumn garden is easy to love; winter is the true test of whether a garden is able to sustain interest all through the year. Clipped forms, be they hedges or topiary, are instrumental to a garden’s off-season success, and a good place to see these elements at work is at Hinton Ampner, the National Trust property some ten miles east of Winchester in Hampshire. Here topiary forms, including shaped yew and clipped hedges, are key to the mood of the garden. As box blight and box tree caterpillar take their toll, Hinton Ampner gardener Jen Harbrow suggests ten alternative candidates for hedges and topiary. Hinton Ampner, Alresford, Hampshire SO24 0LA. Tel: 01962 771305; nationaltrust.org.uk 1 Ilex aquifolium “Our dense, prickly, native holly…

GREENHOUSES Trays of seedlings, jewel-bright tomatoes, peppers and chillies and a store of curing pumpkins: a greenhouse is so often synonymous with spring and summer productivity that it’s easy to overlook its potential for use all year round. With some care and thought, however, this valuable garden asset can earn its keep right through late autumn and into winter. Making the most of your greenhouse at this time of year begins with tidying up. This work is often left until the first days of spring, but getting everything spruced up now will put you on the front foot when work in the garden picks up. Then think about what will thrive in this protective, even heated, suntrap: it’s the perfect place for cuttings of tender perennials, biennials sown earlier this…

Nicola Todd-Macnaughton Nicola owns The Bonnie Gardener, helping people through her learn-to-garden programme, and planting and design services. She visits Horatio’s Garden Scotland on page 38. George Plumptre Chief executive of the National Garden Scheme since 2010, George writes garden books and articles and was gardening correspondent for The Times in the 1990s. He visits Longstock Park on page 61. Beth Otway Beth is a horticulturist with a passion for plants and nature. She has a big collection of houseplants and two National Collections of miniature orchid species. She visits a peat-free houseplant grower on page 107.…

CHRISTMAS GIFTS…

THE NATION’S FAVOURITE GARDENS Thousands of you voted for your favourite gardens that open for the National Garden Scheme. Now we can reveal the winners of 2023’s Nation’s Favourite Gardens competition, supported by Sisley Garden Tours. There are six regional winners, one overall champion and a winning garden that usually opens to the public but donates takings from a particular day (or days) to the Scheme. Turn over to discover these seven superb gardens, and learn about the gardeners who created them. Rockcliffe, Gloucestershire Overall Winner & Regional Winner: South West Fronted by a flight of yew topiary birds, the dovecote at Rockcliffe is the garden’s most recognisable feature. This area was crying out for a beautiful focal point and, after much research, owners Emma and Simon Keswick settled on…

Like the Nutcracker Prince vanquishing the Mouse King, the Nordmann fir (Abies nordmanniana) has emerged triumphant in the battle of the Christmas trees. Ever since Prince Albert introduced the German custom of bringing a tree indoors and decorating it, Norway spruce (Picea abies) was the Christmas tree of choice but gradually, the Nordmann fir has taken the crown. It hasn’t got the same Christmassy aroma as the traditional spruce, but it has won fans everywhere thanks to its superior needle-retaining qualities and bushy shape – a joy to bedeck with baubles. Let loose in the garden however, Abies nordmanniana will ultimately grow into quite a large conifer, eventually reaching upwards of 20m, so it may not be the most sensible choice for those with smaller gardens. But there is more…

NURSERIES Will Clayton’s favourite houseplant is Pilea ‘Moon Valley’. And while he acknowledges his choice is “perhaps a little retro”, Will’s approach to horticulture is far from old fashioned. In fact, it’s fair to describe him as one of the most forward-thinking growers in the industry. Will is the managing director of Bury Lane, a family-run business with a diverse range of horticultural ventures. The Clayton family started Bury Lane in 1983 from a small hut in an orchard, and over 40 years the company has expanded and diversified. Cut flower crops include agapanthus, dahlias, lilies, peonies, and tulips. They also grow asparagus, pumpkins, and strawberries, and they use their extensive glasshouses to cultivate thousands of houseplants at their site in Melbourn, on the borders of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. Earlier…

To the north-east of the Deanery garden, down a steep wooded slope, nestles Llandaff Cathedral. As the last leaves fall and the vista clears, the ancient building seems more than ever a part of the garden. The sound of the choir rehearsing for Christmas reaches me as I potter during the precious daylight hours. I treasure this halfway point in the gardening year. The skeletal remains of ephemeral plants take me back to summer abundance. At the same time, I am planning ahead. There are gaps to fill and opportunities to try something new. The woodland edge is home to ‘Graham Thomas’, a good form of our native honeysuckle Lonicera periclymenum. The tight pyramids of red berries have been raided by thrushes and the occasional bullfinch as have the glistening…

At first glance, Fittleworth House might appear to be quite a traditional sort of garden. But dig a little deeper and you’ll discover that it has been quietly shrugging off convention under the care of its head gardener, Mark Saunders, for the past quarter of a century. The grand Georgian manor house – home to the Braham family for the past 60 years – is set on three acres of West Sussex downland. Built in the 1720s from locally quarried stone, it gazes through a curtain of wisteria across a tightly clipped croquet lawn, out and down over a gentle eastward-sloping sward to the distant walled gardens below. The house and lawns are overlooked on the outer fringes by two towering sentinels – a glorious 100-foot-tall cedar of Lebanon on…

Winter is a special time of year at RHS Garden Wisley. And in the grip of a subzero hoarfrost, macro and micro textures are magnified as ordinarily unnoticed details are brought into sharp focus. Spacious landscapes reveal the contrasting characteristics of individual shrubs and trees, with evergreens and conifers showing off their winter prowess. At ground level, fronds, flowers and foliage are freeze-framed. Hard landscaping elements, steely arbours and frozen pools, together with iced topiary add weight, punctuating and anchoring the winter-white garden. RHS Garden Wisley, Wisley Lane, Wisley, Surrey GU23 6QB. Opens every day except Christmas Day. Tel: 01483 224234; rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley…

TO CONCLUDE If perhaps it snows this Christmas, and if perhaps, you had decided five years ago to plant a row of maiden apple trees two feet apart against the wall of your house, (I am imagining Kentish white clapboard or honeyed Oxfordshire stone…), and if you had firmly wired the wall, immediately cut the trees to about 45cm above two buds, and trained the resultant branches at 45° to form Y-shapes, you would be in for a particularly elegant treat this December. As they grew, the branches would have crossed over to create a super-productive lattice. Snowfall would softly celebrate the repeated rhythms of the diamond pattern, but even if the snow failed to arrive, the crisp winter outlines of a Belgian fence would be a pleasure to behold…