Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2025 i The English Garden

I’ve always been in awe of anyone brave enough to open their garden to the public. I found gardening on an allotment in full view of other plot holders stressful enough, never mind inviting people into my garden to look around it! Happily there are many gardeners who are much braver than I, willing to bare their gardening souls to perfect strangers. If there weren’t, the National Garden Scheme wouldn’t be able to raise the impressive sums it does for nursing and health charities like Macmillan and Marie Curie through garden visits. Our Nation’s Favourite Gardens competition celebrates the gardeners who open for the Scheme, our readers voting for their favourite NGS gardens – in a lighthearted way, of course: everyone who opens their garden for the charity is a…

Jim Jermyn The author, lecturer, horticultural consultant and passionate alpine expert reflects on his long and colourful career in gardening As a child, I received a gift of book tokens and used them to buy an encyclopaedia of plants with beautiful photos of alpines by Valerie Finnis. Later, as a young man visiting the Chelsea Flower Show, I was captivated by Will Ingwersen’s alpine stand. I ended up working at his nursery, Birch Farm in Sussex, for a year. Mr Ingwersen put me in touch with the main alpinist from Munich Botanical Garden and I trained there, leaving qualified to work for a German millionaire who wanted me to help set up an alpine nursery near Lake Garda. Here, I was able to drive around the Alps observing alpines in…

Set among the gently rolling hills of the Kent Downs, Old Bladbean Stud could easily fool you into thinking it is a classic English garden. In its three acres there are impeccably edged lawns, painted obelisks, tumbling roses and towering delphiniums, punctuated and stitched together throughout by Irish yews and box balls. Yet it is never watered or fertilised, and there is no compost heap. Carol Bruce, who designed the garden from scratch and works on it five hours a day, employs no gardener but has an army of shrews who take care of the slugs. “I’ve spent 21 years designing a system that harnesses natural processes rather than opposing them,” she says. “I’ve basically made a garden that looks like a well-tended English garden but functions like a wild…

Ask a British gardener what they think about cryptomeria and unless they’re a die-hard conifer fan, chances are you’ll be met with a quizzical look. Ask a Japanese gardener on the other hand, and you might fare better. In Japan, which along with South East China is the native home of cryptomeria (or sugi), these conifers are revered and much more widely grown. They’re largely cultivated for their timber, which is used in construction and for furniture, but they also have symbolic meaning and are often planted around temples. Visitors to the Kantō region might take in the spectacular Cedar Avenue of Nikkō, where 13,000 lofty cryptomeria trees line the roads to the shrines and temples of Nikkō. Legend has it that a lord who couldn’t afford to donate a…

The world is filled with the most incredible gardens. This year, seize the moment and book an adventure to visit a garden you’ve always wanted to see – or make a tour of an entire region or country, stopping at a number of gardens along the way. From the many hundreds of notable gardens out there, we present a list of 20 incomparable places to see, modest and grand, exotic and conventional, urban and rural. EUROPE Château de Villandry, France The Loire Valley has several remarkable gardens attached to châteaux, but those at Château de Villandry are probably the grandest. The gardens date to the construction of the château in 1532 but they’ve changed with horticultural fashion over the centuries. In the 20th century they came into the possession of…

There is a lone tree at the exact centre of a gap between two white stucco buildings opposite my South London house. Just now it is dark, leafless and rain-washed, but soon, as January shifts into February, the whole thing will become a flame of yellow. This solitary mimosa tree, radiant in the cool sunshine of an early-spring day, becomes a sunny beacon of hope: a sure sign that the new season is beginning. Mimosa trees – usually Acacia dealbata in the UK – are glorious fast-growing trees, evergreen with feathery blue-grey leaves and clusters of downy yellow flowers that have a distinctive honeyed scent. They enjoy well-drained but not chalky soil and are hardy to about -5°C making them best suited to southern or coastal areas. In the right…

Stephen Anderton An author, lecturer and garden writer for The Times, Stephen has also worked for historic gardens. His own garden is near the Black Mountains, not far from Highfield Farm, which he visits on page 46. Posy Gentles Posy’s early writing career segued into designing gardens, and she has a particular interest in renovation. She co-founded and writes for Faversham Life, and visits Old Bladbean Stud near Canterbury on p32. Ian Thwaites Garden photographer Ian is always happiest around plants, either with a camera or with his hands in the soil, and he loves chatting to gardeners to learn more. His images of The Picton Garden’s ferns are on page 83.…

SHOPPING…

At The Picton Garden, the expanse of winding paths and woodland that adjoins Old Court Nurseries in Colwall, Malvern, autumn ushers in a blast of colour. Both garden and nursery are renowned for their asters, and crowds of visitors come to see the showstopping autumn finale – a sea of blues, purples and pinks. So impressive is this spectacle that it’s easy to overlook the host of other plants quietly doing their thing in the background. But, once the final aster flowers have faded, this supporting cast steps modestly into the limelight, and one of its most important components is a huge collection of ferns. Helen Picton, who manages the garden and nursery with her husband Ross Barbour, having taken over the reins from her father, Paul, in 2014, explains:…

PLAS CADNANT When Anthony Tavernor bought Plas Cadnant on Anglesey in 1996, he had little idea that the project to restore a forgotten, hidden garden, a true labour of love, would take 28 years to complete. A farmer from Staffordshire, he bought the property for its land, the woodland, the house and the near-derelict outbuildings. “I knew there was a walled garden,” he says, “but you couldn’t see anything because it was so overgrown – it looked like a dense wood. The gardens hadn’t been touched for 80 years, and you couldn’t walk through them without a chainsaw.” What Anthony hadn’t expected was the additional discovery of early 19th-century Picturesque gardens in the valley that slopes down to the River Cadnant. “You could hear the water at the bottom of…

Back in my impatient young head-gardener days, I used to find January never-ending: a long, bleak month when nothing much happened. Older and wiser, I nowadays recognise January as a lovely, calm, quiet sort of month, where the garden plays host to sweeping flocks of blue tits, nervous blackbirds scratching about and fearless little robins vying over a tasty morsel disturbed by my activity. A cold, crisp, sunny day is ideal for pottering about the garden, and a brilliant time for pruning – especially apple and pear trees. At home, my dainty little apple tree has been espaliered into submission. To stop it outgrowing its bounds, I give it a good prune every summer, followed up diligently by another snipping session in winter. Whatever the woody plant, I always adopt…

TOP 10 PLANTS These first, quiet weeks of the new year are the ideal time to prepare a seed order. If your seed tin contains more almost-empty or out-of-date packets than you realise, or if you’re weary of growing the same old things every year, then try something new. Ollie Hutson is head gardener at The Pig group of hotels which includes Rosemary Verey’s erstwhile home of Barnsley House, now known as The Pig in the Cotswolds. Rosemary’s old potager is a highlight here, but beyond the garden walls Ollie oversees a large working kitchen garden that supplies the hotel kitchen. Here he suggests ten excellent and distinctive vegetables to try this year. The Pig in the Cotswolds, Barnsley, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 5EE. Tel: 0345 2259494; thepighotel.com 1 Tomato ‘Sungold’…