Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2024 i The English Garden

Annette Warren Annette is a garden writer and blogger at gardenvisitoruk.com. She also works as an assistant and stylist with photographer Clive Nichols. She visits Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen’s garden on page 30. Geoff Stebbings Gardener and author Geoff is currently creating a one-acre garden around his home in Ireland, where he’s enjoying the novelty of a blank canvas and acid soil. He writes about cyclamen on page 69. Zara Napier Photographing unknown gardens and meeting passionate gardeners is what motivates Zara to travel with her camera. She photographs Jane Steward’s medlar collection in Norfolk on page 105.…

Tom & Sue Stuart-Smith The award-winning garden designer and his psychotherapist wife on their shared community gardening project at home Tom: We met during our first week at Cambridge University. Sue was reading English and I was reading Natural Sciences, but it soon became clear that I wasn’t much of a natural scientist! My eye-opening moment happened at 18 when I went to Italy for the first time and realised I was motivated by the environment and how places are lived in. I was already a keen gardener, but it wasn’t until this trip that I considered gardening as a career. I was also inspired by the enthusiasm, freshness and brilliance of well-established landscape architects such as Lanning Roper and Geoffrey Jellicoe. So, after graduating, I went to Manchester to…

The garden of renowned interior designers Paolo Moschino and Philip Vergeylen in West Sussex is as beautiful as the homes they create for prestigious clients around the world. Set down a leafy single-track lane, the part-Tudor Grade II listed former farmhouse is draped with Virginia creeper and surrounded by a series of manicured gardens rooms, each with its own personality. The decision to buy the house 12 years ago was almost immediate. “We had arrived before the estate agent and only had to glimpse the house and garden to know that they were perfect for us,” Philip recalls. Major renovations were required to the dated interior, but the first thing the couple tackled was the two-acre garden. “We are interior designers, so we designed the garden as rooms. A friend…

NURSERIES When most of us think about making a new border, we’re thinking a few metres this way, a few metres that. When Steve Edney and Louise Dowle decided to create one on the parcel of land they’d bought to create a new garden and run a plant nursery, they had something larger in mind. The ‘Long Border’ is no misnomer for the couple’s creation. It’s 100 metres long and six metres wide, giving them 600 square metres of planting space – even the heartiest and most hands-on of gardeners might take a sharp intake of breath at the prospect of that. Luckily, both Steve and Louise are passionate about plants and gardening and their land and its large-scale border are the embodiment of their enthusiasm for all things horticultural.…

Autumn is well and truly under way at Tresillian this month. Even though there are still some warm days ahead, there is a nip in the air in the walled garden of this Cornish estate and the nights are longer. The first frosts may be some weeks away, but after months of abundant harvest, plants are responding to reduced daylight and any remaining late-summer crops are winding down: growth is slower, flowers are fewer and fruits are smaller. A point is coming when the last courgette will be picked and the final pumpkin brought into the greenhouse to cure, bolted lettuces uprooted and beans pulled down. Any tomatoes that are still fruiting will ripen slowly and are probably best used for chutney. Beyond the garden walls, in the orchard, plums,…

I write this in a state of distraction, because my mind is really on my bulb order. Am I the only one who thinks of little else at this time of year and finds it hard to concentrate on the task at hand because images of bulbs I’d like to buy and grow keep popping into my head? I’m surely not the only person who has a bulging shopping basket on the bulb supplier’s website, to which I’m constantly adding more bulbs (then seeing the new total, and sheepishly having to take something else out). Earlier this year I attended a Great Dixter online symposium on ‘layered planting’. One key takeaway: have more plants, especially bulbs, which you can put under and around all your other plants to create multiple…

SHOPPING…

Salford, in Greater Manchester, perhaps doesn’t seem the obvious location for an array of colourful and exotic plants from around the world nestled in a series of striking gardens. Well, Bridgewater, the Royal Horticultural Society’s fifth garden, is here to prove you wrong with 150 transformed acres of high horticulture set amid great tracts of naturalistic meadow, woodlands and lakes. The garden was hewn from the former grounds of Worsley New Hall, a Victorian manor demolished in the 1940s following a massive fire. Eighty years later, like a phoenix from those ashes, the forlorn and overgrown estate has been superbly reinvented with respect to its Victorian heritage but with the addition of 21st-century spirit. A masterplan by landscape architect and garden designer Tom Stuart-Smith has been instrumental to Bridgewater’s stunning…

TOP 10 PLANTS National Trust-owned Polesden Lacey in the North Downs is a place of Edwardian splendour in which bulbs play an important role. From late winter, meadows and paths are punctuated by drifts of Narcissus pseudonarcissus, while bulb underplantings bring early colour to beds and borders. The Winter Garden in particular offers a glowing display of winter aconites followed by snowdrops. Head gardener Natan Cointet has been working to enhance the garden and the woodland walks, planting bulbs to create undulating patterns that mimic their growth in the wild. Here he presents his favourite bulbs for naturalising. Polesden Lacey, Great Bookham, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6BB. Tel: 01372 452048; nationaltrust.org.uk 1 Anemone blanda ‘White Splendour’ “Despite its delicate looks, this is very robust and deer- and rabbit-resistant,” Natan observes. “Windflowers look…

BULBS Spring is synonymous with bulbs, and our delight at seeing their green shoots push up through the bare soil soon banishes all thoughts of winter. Whether it’s a scattering of snowdrops, a flash of yellow daffodil, or a painterly tulip, bulbs must surely be the year’s most anticipated – and uplifting – flowers. The joy associated with bulbs needn’t be limited to the main spring months of March and April, however. With some thought and planning, the pleasures of spring can be extended, with bulbs producing flowers from as early as January to as late as June. That’s bright cheery flowers for half the year – and all for a few days spent planting well-chosen bulbs in autumn: a super investment on return. We tend to think of snowdrops…

MEDLARS Medlars (Mespilus germanica) made their way into Jane Steward’s life almost by stealth, when, in 2008, she fell in love with David Steward, who had a medlar in his Cambridgeshire village garden. It was an unfamiliar tree to Jane, but she learned from David that his grandmother used to make medlar jelly for her farmworker husband. Dubbed a ‘forgotten fruit’, medlars are seldom seen on supermarket shelves or in markets in the UK. They grow in the wild between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and travelled west and north with the Greeks and Romans. The Anglo Saxons and Tudors gave medlars a favoured place in their gardens and kitchens, and this was continued by the Georgians and then the Victorians. But by the mid-20th century, these intriguing…

October is a month of change – for the garden and for the weather. It begins with the lingering vestiges of summer, the odd soft warm day that still demands ice cream, and finishes with everything wrapped up and tucked away for the winter. It’s always something of a judgement call to know just when to wrap up the tree ferns and haul the lemon trees into the greenhouse. I like to eke out every last moment of enjoyment from these summer specials, while always keeping a close eye on the weather forecast. The lemons love being outside in the summer, as do so smaller tender plants like aeoniums, echeveria and all the pelargoniums, and I think it does them a power of good. But the weather forecast will announce…

Autumn is a good time to visit the gardens at Scone Palace, just two miles outside Perth. Brian Cunningham, head gardener since 2012, describes the 100-acre garden as “basically one giant woodland with pockets of formal planting”. Visit in October to see ancient parkland trees turning myriad shades of yellow, gold and red, and admire seedheads, berries and brilliant scarlet Virginia creeper on the palace walls. There is so much to appreciate at Scone, not least its long and extraordinary history that began 2,000 years ago when Romans camped where the palace grounds and the racecourse now meet. Scottish kings were crowned here for centuries on the eponymous and contested stone (now on display in nearby Perth Museum). Lords would come from all over Scotland, bringing earth from their own…

Cyclamen are familiar as the bright components of autumn containers or as winter pot plants. These ‘bedding’ cyclamen are derived from the wild Cyclamen persicum, ‘persicum’ deriving from the ancient name for peach, since the flower colour resembles peach blossom. But this is just one of 24 species, mainly from around the Mediterranean. Most of them, including Cyclamen persicum, won’t grow in the UK, but some are tough and offer charming and colourful flowers almost all year round. Perhaps the most valuable are those that bloom in late summer and autumn, bringing welcome freshness to the over-mature garden. Cyclamen are curious in that they are tuberous perennials in the primula family. Their tubers let them survive excessive heat and drought in summer, and most flower with the arrival of autumn…

HEDGES FOR WILDLIFE For good looks and practicality, hedges are unbeatable. They can introduce privacy and shade from the sun, draw the eye to the far distance or bring it to a closer focal point. Hedges encourage exploration, initiate pauses or form secluded spaces. They can buffer sound, conceal unsightly elements and even provide an element of security. Evergreen hedges add year-round structure to your garden, while a deciduous hedge will bring changing interest, from fresh spring greenery to a filigree of bare branches in winter. Use them in large spaces along a boundary or as a low step-change on a terrace. Clipped and formal or shaggy and relaxed, there’s a hedge to suit every taste and location. Hedges offer a further function that is even more important. Grown in…

It’s the hardest working rose in my garden. If you know it already, I am sure you will love it. If you don’t know it, I am sure you will have inadvertently enjoyed the way it quietly illuminates so many planting combinations. Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ begins flowering in April with tightly wrapped cherry-red buds that soon open out to just five fragile petals. The petals are a delicate peachy yellow at first, but the pink tones soon intensify until the whole shrub is covered with little fluttering goblets of the most radiant magenta. On those first long warm evenings of early summer, ‘Mutabilis’ is impossibly lovely, as if on fire. This is a rose that is still flowering energetically in autumn, adding its warm red and apricot tones to…