Today I went on a garden club coach trip to Great Dixter. I am not a member of the garden club, but I bumped into one of their committee members at the Plant Heritage lecture last weekend, and so when the next day they had a last minute drop-out, my name bobbed into her mind as she was thinking how to fill the spare seat on the coach. I was chuffed to be asked. I really like Great Dixter, and it's nice to think that acquaintances would like more rather than less of your company. It bore out my instinct that since I was a newish member of Plant Heritage I ought to make the effort to go to their meetings regularly, unless they clashed with anything important I really couldn't rearrange. I didn't have anything else in the offing last Saturday but did have rather a headache, and for choice wouldn't have driven all the way to Stowupland, but apart from the fact that it was a good lecture, my efforts were rewarded in today's outing.
Anyone who believes that gardens can't be worth visiting as late in the year as September should pay a visit to Great Dixter in early October. There is still a lot of colour. Dahlias and borderline hardy salvias play a big role, but there are many other flowers still out, plus berries and the first of the autumn colour, and the architectural shapes of succulents and grasses. I scribbled down almost two pages of plant names in my garden visiting notebook to remind myself, and that left much more that I didn't write down.
Just as interesting, though not as pretty, was noticing which plants had been meticulously deadheaded. There had been a lot, when you looked closely, including all the phlox in the long border, and even an entire hebe. Removing the spent flowers but leaving the bulk of the foliage intact makes the border look fresher than it would otherwise, though any autumn border is going to be somewhat browned and tousled, but keeps the height and volume. It's a nice question, at what point and by how much to start reducing plants that have gone over. Leaving everything in place on the basis that plants should be appreciated at all stages of their growth means late flowers appearing against a brown and black sea of dead petals and seed heads. That can look pretty dingy, but the opposite extreme of cutting things right down as soon as they finish flowering to get the tidying all over in one go can leave the late performers looking ridiculously exposed. Dixter steers a brilliant middle path, though having all those pairs of eager horticultural student hands must help.
The planting spaces around the circular Lutyens steps leading down from the walk by the long border are now planted out with succulents for the summer. That was new since our last visit, which was years ago, and I liked it. The exotic garden was quite absurdly jungly, and as well as the bananas and ginger lilies used young specimens of foliage shrubs that if left in place permanently would grow far too big for the space. Acacia pravissima doesn't want to remain a cute fountain of triangular grey leaves less than three feet high, it wants to be a large shrub at least four times the size, and soon will be given half a chance.
As part of our coach trip we got a quick look inside the house. It is surprisingly deep from the front to the back of the original hall, requiring long beams which must have originally been very tall trees. It's an impressive piece of vernacular architecture, but I thought it must have been cold as originally commissioned by Nathaniel and Daisy Lloyd, and the main life of the building was going on elsewhere. From outside you could hear dogs barking somewhere within, and there were little gaggles of young people standing around the nursery carrying bedding rolls, and talking to each other with that youthful combination of bravado and lurking uncertainty, while not having got the knack of stepping out of the way of the paying customers who were trying to inspect the contents of the sales beds, who I gathered were students come for the weekend.
For this was the weekend of the Great Dixter Plant Fair. It was very nicely done. Stands with simple galvanised roofs and hessian backdrops were ranged around the bottom meadow, with small straw bales providing additional display areas and seating. There were other plant nurseries there, the criteria for being invited seeming to be that you had to be either a top notch specialist or extremely local, and assorted caterers, including the Bodiam WI who were operating their stand on a semi honesty box system in that you paid a lady with a cash box and then told the other ladies you'd like tea or cake or whatever it was. The whole effect was charmingly Village Preservation Society.
I bought more plants than I'd imagined I would, though with a clear idea of where and how I intended to use each of them. One was from Rosy Hardy, a low growing, drought tolerant knapweed relative she recommended in her talk, and while I was there I asked her why my Baptisia australis might have gone blind. Answer, heavy clay soil not an issue, dry springs could be, likeliest cause that it had exhausted the soil after several years and should be given a high potash feed. Another stand specialised in Plectranthus so I picked their brains about how to overwinter my seed raised P. argentatus.
It was a good coach trip, though it was a shock to the system getting up in time for the shipping forecast.
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