Friday 1 December 2017

a garden talk

Last night's snow and sleet did not materialise, and I drove to Wrabness in patchy light drizzle.  The village hall was packed and my ticket was waiting on the door as promised.  Fergus Garrett had arrived and was not stuck in a traffic jam on the A12, and all was well.

Great Dixter remains one of my favourite gardens.  Certainly Christopher Lloyd's writings were a huge influence on me, albeit not always a benign one.  Just as many young poets failed to find their own voices under the sway of the great W. B. Yeats, so a garden on rich clay that has been cultivated for decades is not the best model for somebody starting out on acid sand that's spent the past half century as a commercial orchard, soaked in weedkillers to make sure that no blade of grass competed with the apple trees.  And it rains more at Northiam than north Essex.  Not as much more as I thought, since Fergus Garrett said they have 28 to 30 inches, but that's still thirty per cent more than us.  And Great Dixter has four full time gardeners and a minimum of three or four students, who are all energetic and young, when I just have me, plus as much of the Systems Administrator as I can muster.

Still, I have huge respect for Fergus Garrett, and hope that by now I know enough not to take some of his ideas too literally, so while twenty-five years ago I attempted to grow border phlox after reading The Well Tempered Garden, now my mind zones out when he mentions them.  Even so I noticed how much fatter and leafier the drought tolerant Artemisia 'Powis Castle' grew in his photographs of Great Dixter than it does in my front garden.

The subject of the talk was succession planting, how to get the longest possible season of interest from your garden, and it covered the points you would expect.  Plan so that something is in flower throughout the year, choose varieties that have longer flowering seasons, extend your definition of interest to include good stems, leaves, form, fruit, and seed heads, as well as simply flowers, combine plants that are active at different times of the year in the same space.  That is all good standard advice.  The real interest was in the detail.

Neighbours can so easily crowd each other out, if one is already in full leafy growth just as the other is trying to get going at ground level.  I have proved this to myself most recently with the rambling roses planted at a foot high along the side of the wood, that never found the strength to send their first tall shoots into the light as everything around them shot up first.  You can do the same damage with combinations of herbaceous plants, and with bulb foliage.  He cautioned us that some of the larger leafed allium varieties would shade out and kill companions like asters, and forget-me-nots were singled out for special mention, as they self-seed generously and those innocent looking seedlings can quickly grow to bushy clumps a full spade's length across (on Dixter's soil.  I have never produced a forget-me-not here that would not have comfortably packed in a shoe box).

The practical solution, apart from very careful observation of when and how fast the plants in your garden come into growth, was to create no-man's-lands between the patches of herbaceous plants and use those to host the alliums, the opium poppies, and other bulbs and self seeders that would otherwise swamp the asters and suchlike.  Some of the photographs showed sections of winter border looking unfathomably neat, with the position of each individual herbaceous plant marked with a little stake, bamboo canes laid down to delineate the boundary of each clump, and the gaps between.  My borders never seem that organized, but it was a great idea.

My major doubt, which I wasn't going to try and argue in front of a hall full of a hundred people, was the extent to which the layer upon layer planting style of Dixter can ever transplant truly successfully to the driest part of the country.  Fergus Garrett may tell me to look critically at my borders in spring and find the gaps are between perennials where I could put more primroses, but the gaps between my clumps of daylilies are solidly packed with Hemerocallis roots battling for existence, and I am pretty sure that if I put primroses in there they would simply fade away from lack of water.  A couple of years ago I was given a book about the natural vegetation of the world's steppes, which was absolutely fascinating, but one of the characteristics of plant communities in dry areas is that the individual plants tend to be well spaced out.  That is the way plants often try to grow in our garden, despite my best efforts with mulch and fish, blood and bone to reach a more burgeoning aesthetic, and that is the distinctive look of some of East Anglia's famous and feted plantings like Beth Chatto's dry garden and the desert wash at East Ruston.

But that's not to say that trying to choose plants so that you have something interesting to look at on any day of the year, and fitting in as many plants as your growing conditions will support, is not a thoroughly good idea.

No comments:

Post a Comment