Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i The English Garden

Constance Craig-Smith Constance grew up in Tuscany, where the big garden challenge was deterring boar and porcupines. She now tends a more tranquil garden in London and writes about Glenarm Castle on page 26. Britt Willoughby Britt focuses on garden, flora and nature photography. She is known for immersing herself in her surroundings to capture the heart of a garden, as seen in her shoot at Middleton House on page 46. Richard Bloom Richard is an award-winning professional garden photographer based in Suffolk. He travels widely and his photographs of eminent naturalist Richard Mabey and his Norfolk garden can be found on page 23.…

Gill Hodgson The founder of the Flowers from the Farm cooperative has a new network for growers of plastic-free, compostable funeral flowers I grew up on the family farm in Yorkshire, where I still live, so I’ve been aware that the weather is in charge and soil is important for as long as I can remember. My mum loved flowers and got me gardening by making a game of it. Growing cut flowers as a business happened by accident. In 2009, a friend asked if I could grow some for her wedding. I bought packets of hardy annual seed from Wilko and they came up brilliantly. I kept on cutting to keep them flowering and sold excess blooms from my drive. I made £70: a considerable return on those seed…

The herb garden here represents the largest herb collection in the National Trust The land at Acorn Bank gardens in Temple Sowerby, Cumbria, can be traced back to the 1200s when it was owned by the Knights Templar. While there is no evidence of buildings or gardens from that period, however, what is certainly known is that the current garden walls were erected during the 16th and 17th century. During this time, a section of the house facing onto the Sunken Garden was given an Italianate-style makeover with ashlar stone facing and ornate windows. This correlates with the adjacent Italianate Sunken Garden and its terraces and ornamental pond, an area that can be seen on one of the earliest hand-drawn maps showing the garden from 1838. Over a century later,…

Architectural Heritage York stone steps, putti finials and classical figures are all within the remit of this Cotswold dealership. Tel: 01386 584414; architectural-heritage.co.uk Brownrigg Interiors Fashionable interiors dealer, located in Tetbury, offering a good selection of garden antiques. Tel: 01666 500887; brownrigg-interiors.co.uk Bulbeck Foundry Quality hand-cast leadwork reproductions and antique repair. Tel: 01638 743153; bulbeckfoundry.co.uk Chilstone Reconstituted stone specialists, with ornamental and architectural moulds, bespoke items made to order and a Kent sculpture garden displaying items in situ. Tel: 01892 740866; chilstone.com Coade Cast stone pieces from Stephen Pettifer in the 18th-century Coade style, plus restoration of original Coade stone items. Tel: 01722 744499; coade.co.uk English Salvage Leominster-based company with a well-stocked yard, open by appointment, selling arches, gazebos and millstones.Tel: 01568 616205; englishsalvage.co.uk Garden and Wood Garden tools and…

Rachel Siegfried Rachel has been growing cut flowers at her Oxfordshire farm, Green & Gorgeous, since 2008. She shares which seeds she’s excited about sowing this autumn: pretty pastels and perennials Icelandic poppies are one of our best sellers and work well sown in autumn. There’s a lovely coral one called Papaver nudicaule ‘Champagne Bubbles Pink’ that’s very popular, but I’m trying to develop a pastel range because pastels – buttermilk-yellow, soft peach – are popular colours for any flower where wedding florists are concerned, and those colours aren’t easy to get hold of in Icelandic poppies. They’re biennial and I find sowing in autumn and overwintering in a cold greenhouse or coldframe seems to work better than having seed in the ground where it can rot off. Another plant that’s…

Sometimes, gardening does make me feel as though I’m wishing my life away. We’re in the middle of summer and I’ve already got half an eye on next spring as I start mulling over the bulbs I’d like to order this autumn – not helped by the emails I receive from the bulb companies I order from, who obviously know my weaknesses! I’m sowing biennials in anticipation of their flowers next summer, and I’m thinking about the seeds I’ll sow in autumn and over the course of next year. But it’s this aspect of gardening that makes it such a positive and uplifting hobby. It’s the epitome of optimism to invest time and effort into something that will bear fruit (or flowers) and deliver happiness in the future. I mention…

SHOPPING…

When it comes to planting her garden, Jenny Woodall is all about colour. Starting out “very originally” as she puts it, Jenny was a fashion buyer for John Lewis and her passion for colour and form has stood her in good stead throughout the creation of her garden. “I am definitely more artistic than I am academic,” she notes with a laugh. “Although my very first foray into gardening did involve planting white and blue lobelia alternately!” Her tastes have moved on since then, spanning several gardens including Priory House in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, which was featured on BBC Gardeners’ World, and Nyewood House in West Sussex. Both also featured in The English Garden and both were opened by Jenny and her husband, Tim, for ten years apiece to…

Tucked away near the picture-postcard Devonshire village of Kenn, with its thatched roofs, idyllic church and busy pub, is Bickham House, a rambling 17th-century pile set amid six acres of gardens. It has been in Julia Tremlett’s family since it was built, and the gardens encompass lawns and flower beds, a woodland dotted with rhododendrons, some majestic trees (including a vast Liriodendron tulipifera), and a small lake that was actually created 30 years ago. Sloping away from the house is a walled vegetable garden of about an acre, accessed via a paved passageway lined with garden tools. This was once entirely given over to vegetables, and Julia, remembering her grandmother living here alone, jokes that her grandmother’s gardener must have had a friend who was a greengrocer! The current gardener,…

TOP 10 PLANTS Paula Fleming manages the fruit trees at Raymond Blanc’s hotel Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxfordshire. “Le Manoir’s orchard has around 2,500 fruit trees and about 230 varieties, which are a mix of heritage, eaters and culinary types,” she says. Apples and pears dominate, but stone fruits such as apricots, nectarines, plums and peaches feature. Paula explains that climate change means “all orchardists are thinking on their feet at the moment” especially in regard to resilient rootstocks. Mild winters, however, bring early blossom, which means trees may be pollinated and set fruit more often. Here Paula picks ten reliable stone fruits to grow. Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons, Church Road, Great Milton, Oxfordshire OX44 7PD. Tel: 01844 278881; belmond.com 1 ‘Cambridge Gage’ “This gage is easy to grow,…

Originally an area of industrial riverfront, The Hepworth Wakefield’s one-acre site stretches between the modernist gallery designed by Sir David Chipperfield and the recently restored Grade II Victorian Mills opposite. The River Calder spans one end of the site, and at the other is the busy six-lane Doncaster Road. Designer Tom Stuart-Smith determined to make the garden a destination in its own right, not simply a pleasant adjunct to the gallery. Having been named after Barbara Hepworth, who was born in Wakefield, the gallery’s garden was always going to be a place to display sculpture and there’s a pleasing mix of Hepworth’s own work and more contemporary pieces. Tom took inspiration for the garden’s layout from the angular shapes of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Kneeling Figure and was guided by the…

Late summer has settled upon the walled garden at Tresillian House in Cornwall. Days are warm and languid, and although there is still plenty of fine weather to come, the sun rises later and sets earlier and plants are responding accordingly. The growth they put on at the beginning of the season is slowing, and energies are being redirected towards flowers, fruits and seeds in the ultimate bid to reproduce before the season turns for good. All this makes for a busy harvest time. There’s a bounty to be shared with friends and brought into the house, from sweetcorn, tomatoes and peppers to herbs and cut flowers. And the race is on to catch courgettes before they turn into marrows – although there is always one that grows unseen beneath…

Over the course of my gardening career, I have been called on a surprising number of times to deal with an unproductive apple tree. Typically the owner, in a bid to reduce the size of the tree, has had it severely pruned during a previous winter. The butchered limbs have responded by sending up a thicket of mainly vertical water shoots. These have varied in thickness from pencil to broomstick depending on how many years had passed since the attempt at renovation. A gradual opening out and reduction in branch length over several winters would have achieved a better result. Winter pruning encourages growth. Summer pruning can control it, so all is not necessarily lost if you are the custodian of a gnarled tree sporting a punkish topknot of water…

The central idea of what I’ve tried to do in the garden is to question the impression many gardeners have that they’re somehow ‘reconnecting with nature’. I have doubts about that. I’d prefer to say that they’re controlling nature. But, given our power, it’s impossible not to be controlling, so I wanted to try an experiment in what I’d call parallel development. All organisms, from mammals right down to lichens, are welcome to improvise their own landscapes within our gardens, with just two rules: don’t wreck the place and recognise that humans live here too. It’s rather like an open-mic night, where I say, “Hey, you’re welcome here, let me see what you can create.” I share the garden with my partner, Polly. The balance in my part of the…

This is the story of a miraculous conversion. Not one of those visions-of-angels, crashing thunderbolts, hallelujah moments but something a little less spectacular yet equally life changing. It is the story of how someone went from being a fair-weather gardener to a borderline obsessive. It is a vivid illustration of how a garden can change a life and how irresistible the siren call of the seed tray and secateurs can be. Middleton House belongs to Mark and Donna Cooper. It sits on the main street of a pretty village in south Northamptonshire. I first saw it on a cold February day a few years ago, and I don’t think I am out of line to say that there was absolutely nothing there of any horticultural merit beyond a scattering of…

If you’ve ever fancied something unusual for the garden, a novelty or focal point that elicits conversation, you might consider a particularly rare hand-carved limestone gargoyle dating from the early 15th century. On sale for £850 through Lichen Garden Antiques (lichengardenantiques.com), it originates from Gloucester Cathedral, where it once served as a rainwater gully. Notably its face has been damaged, a misfortune that occurred during the English Civil War when it was already 200 years old. That may, admittedly, be a step too far. Not every garden suits a 600-year-old gargoyle after all, and there are other more intact examples on the market, albeit with a higher price tag. But antiques are a reliable way to bring an immediate sense of age to a garden and are widely used by…

Prairie-style planting, also known as New Perennial planting, has been one of the most influential trends in gardening of the past few decades. Combining ornamental grasses with drifts of colourful perennials and celebrating the faded beauty and intricate details of their seedheads and structure during the autumn and winter months, it has also introduced gardeners to an array of interesting plants that had seldom featured in British gardens previously. One such genus is sanguisorba, commonly known as burnet, which has quickly gone from garden obscurity to border stalwart. Sanguisorba is a member of the rose family, surprisingly so, since looking at the plants it’s hard to see any resemblance beyond the pinnate leaves with toothed edges, which provide a hint that they are related. There are 34 species of sanguisorba,…

NURSERIES Deep in the Norfolk countryside, just east of King’s Lynn and not far from roads oft-travelled by holiday makers en route to the coast, lies the marvellous West Acre Gardens. With a diverse free-to-view collection of rare and beautiful plants and an accompanying nursery filled with temptations to tease even strong-willed gardeners (a rare breed), this is a destination that would surely please anyone with even a modicum of interest in plants, and it’s all set within the impressive 2.4-acre D-shaped walled garden of West Acre High House. Even the approach is promising: a short drive through parkland studded with vast wellingtonias leads visitors to garden and nursery, its front wall softened by clinging Hydrangea petiolaris, the entrance providing views into the sales area, which lies just beyond the…

TO CONCLUDE “My dream garden would include shoals of papery yellow Welsh poppy to self-seed everywhere” The request was a first: to design a front garden consisting entirely of plants with yellow flowers. The young artist clients had even sent me a list of plants that, although they realised might not work well in this hottest south-facing spot, nonetheless set me off in a tantalising direction. The list included the palest yellow water avens Geum rivale ‘Album’, the crazy spiky daffodil ‘Rip van Winkle’ and the towering – and definitely invasive – Verbascum phlomoides. The plot was small and set against a rather monumental backdrop, so in addition to the colour yellow the brief was for the planting to look as energised as possible. In the end, a plant from…