open gardens

As I wasn't working this weekend we braved what yesterday's Daily Express billed the KILLER HEATWAVE and went to the Chelsworth Open Gardens Festival.  Chelsworth is towards Sudbury in the Brett valley, and sits in beautiful rolling Suffolk countryside.  It is still miraculously compact, about sixty houses according to the Open Gardens programme, and has somehow escaped the twentieth century sprawl that extended the reach of most villages with a row of 1930s rural district housing here and a 1960s close of bungalows there.  Most of Chelsworth seems to be mediaeval, Georgian or at the latest Edwardian, with one or two barn conversions that probably contain about as much of the original barn as grandfather's axe.  The gardens therefore look straight out over fields and water meadows.

They claim to be the longest running Open Gardens event in the country, 2011 being the 44th annual opening.  There were 22 gardens open, which out of a village of 60 houses must create a fair degree of social pressure to join in.  We saw in the programme notes that the people who had bought Chelsworth Hall only last year were taking part.  I suppose if you buy one of the grandest houses in the village and then spoil the Open Gardens by refusing to open for it, this wouldn't get you off to a flying start socially.  The proceeds of the Open Gardens were going to the church, which was mostly built between the thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and is a little gem, decorated for this weekend with big bunches of garden flowers.

The whole thing was done very well.  As well as the gardens there was a good collection of stands by local plant nurseries, craftspeople, and the National Trust.  There were a lot of places you could get refreshments and enough loos.  A horse drawn carriage was available for those who didn't want to walk the full length of the village, or just fancied a ride.  There were buskers in several gardens, mostly young and of variable quality but very keen, and an oompah band, or rather trio, in the pub gardens.  The programme looked professional, and we gathered that it was designed by a volunteer, and surmised that the advertising revenues probably covered the costs of production.  There were neat and well-executed signposts to the various events and features, and well-organised parking.  I suppose that after 44 years you are starting to get into the swing of it.

The gardens were of varying degrees of size, complexity and ambition.  All gardens are to some extent works in progress, and a couple of these were in the rather early stages, but most contained quite a lot to look at.  One was featured in The English Garden magazine this May.  Some of the Chelsworth gardens I liked a great deal, some not at all, and some I admired as good examples of their type while not wanting one like that myself, but it was interesting looking at all of them.  The programme quotes Laura Ingalls Wilder who asked 'Did you ever think how a bit of land shows the character of the owner?' and I have often thought that.

The day made me think about grass.  We saw some large expanses of grass, including some formal lawns, some rough grass cut to an inch or two, and some left to grow long with wildflowers.  The longer I garden, and the more I look at other people's gardens, the more I question the point of any large area of coarse mown grass, unless it is used for something, such as for children to play on.  Long grass with flowers, seedheads and insects is more beautiful, less work and kinder to the environment than flogging round fortnightly all through the growing season with a petrol mower.  The trick with long grass is to frame it by cutting paths across it or round it.  We saw some lovely examples of wildflower gardening today.  We couldn't tell how much of the short grass was used for play, but my bet is that a lot of it wasn't.  There are times when short grass is necessary, to give access or provide a neutral foil to masses of planting, but most gardens don't need too much of it.

Bright blue tiles are not a good look for rural English swimming pools.  They seem just right for David Hockney paintings of pools in Los Angeles, or Gardens Illustrated photos of streamlined modern gardens on the American west coast, but they are out of place in Suffolk.  The light isn't strong enough here, and the blue tiles are too bright for the surrounding countryside.  Go for black.  It will be much more chic, and not stick out like a dayglo funfair.

If you are surrounded by countryside, a gate suggesting that egress to the wider landscape is possible is very appealing, even if in fact you don't own the next field and the gate is padlocked shut.  If you have the remains of a green farm lane going over a lovely brick bridge towards the meadows then don't plant a tree that blocks the bridge.  Leave the illusion that you could drive over the bridge, even if it isn't your meadow and you couldn't.

A positive example of the psychological manipulation of space came in one of the more obviously designed gardens, which was done as a miniaturised East Ruston Old Vicarage.  Part of that garden was enclosed by brick wall, and divided in half by a further wall.  The nearer part contained double herbaceous borders running the breadth of the walled garden, and the further part was devoted to vegetables and fruit.  Doorways in all three walls lined up, and created a vista across the walled area.  It was only when I looked carefully that I saw that the far wall and gate were jammed up against the boundary hedge.  The gate went nowhere, for you could scarcely have squeezed through it, but with the other two gates it created the idea of a lateral  axis going off somewhere.

Gardens are very much about the division of space.  Even a cottage garden in the romantic planting style, if it is larger than pocket handkerchief size, needs to have a coherent layout, and not just be a charming collection of plants and objects plonked down somehow.  That is the biggest single area where otherwise keen and competent gardeners fall down.

Chickens are very popular in the countryside nowadays.  Chelsworth can't have as bad a fox problem as we have, to judge from the number of open-topped runs we saw.

If I were to get a flattish pan of succulents to go on the metal table in our Italian garden, it would look good and might not keep blowing off the table like my previous efforts with marguerites and geraniums.

I am very grateful to people who open their gardens.  I can't imagine us ever wanting to open ours.

two garden visits

I took a day off from doing our garden to go with a friend and look at other people's instead.  Essex and Suffolk are not especially well endowed with notable gardens open to the public.  There would probably be an entire doctoral thesis to be had in explaining why this should be so.  Essex was trendy in Tudor times and has not been so since, so we lack the large private gardens built by stockbrokers and bankers in the first part of the twentieth century.  Suffolk was rich on the back of the wool trade in the middle ages, hence its marvellous legacy of churches, but was never as prosperous again.  Some of the lack may be down to unlucky twists of fate, death and taxes.  Poor Lord Petre was a notable early collector of American trees, but his early demise meant that his collection was sold off.  Some of it may be down to earlier patterns of land ownership: maybe we lacked the great ducal estates that produced the Chatsworths of England.  Some of it is certainly random bad luck about what got restored.  One of Harold Peto's major commissions lies within a stone's throw of the proposed Stansted extension, which blighted any chance of it getting funding from sources like the Lottery Fund.  As I say, there is a whole thesis there waiting to be researched.

We do have our fair allocation of large private gardens of the middling sort, that open for the NGS, the Red Cross and other good causes.  I contacted one of them, that was open by arrangement, and enquired whether a party of two was sufficient.  The owner responded that we were most welcome, and that while he and his wife would not be there, the gardener would be happy to show us round, in exchange for a charity donation on the usual scale of five pounds a head, or more if we could manage it.  I find it very kind, and remarkable, that people are willing to have complete strangers traipse around their gardens and take their gardeners away from their proper work.  I should hate it myself, but I'm glad others don't feel the same way.

It is always interesting being shown around by the person who does the actual gardening.  The gardener told us that the soil was clay over sand, and was the worst site he had ever worked on in his entire career.  Even moderate rain made the surface unworkably squelchy, then after a window of about two days it would set as hard as concrete.  It can be good to hear about the trials of others, and I began to feel quite kindly towards my own sand, which is workable five minutes after the rain has stopped falling (if such a thing were ever to happen again).  The garden had been created out of fields by the present owners over a period of about forty years, stage by stage, and it was interesting to see how much tree cover they had got over that time.  Slightly piecemeal, but pretty, areas of formal garden near the house gave way to a grassy landscape with trees, leading down to a wood.  Three paths mown into the long grass led the eye into the distance, and formed a classic goose-foot as might have been designed two or three hundred years ago.  We saw a hare, which delighted me.  I love hares.  I know they can strip bark and do damage, but they are rare, and in a different league to the wretched rabbits.  The gardener maintained the garden and park single-handed.  Again, it is always interesting to find out how many bodies are at work to maintain a given size and type of garden to a given standard.  This one was much less weedy than mine, though the amount of intricate planting was probably smaller, and I can't do mine full time.

By way of contrast we dropped down to Mark's Hall, as my old tutor had tipped me off that the irises and peonies in the walled garden were at their peak.  This garden and arboretum are owned by a charitable trust, and are being gradually worked up as funds permit into what could be a very exciting landscape.  It's interesting that the single Essex entry in Tony Russell's 2010 guide to garden visiting was this garden, and not the more famous Chatto gardens.  A modernist garden designed by landscape architect Brita von Schoenaich was completed in 2003, within a large seventeenth century walled garden.  I love modernism, done well, and this is done superbly.  The division of space is elegant, the materials are weathering OK despite the UK climate (damp induced green mould rather takes the shine off the modernist look), and the planting is excellent.  I was last there in September, when there was still plenty of colour, and there was colour today, from bearded iris, peonies, Astilbe, Geranium x magnificum, roses and clematis.  If I were a good and conscientious blogger I would have taken photographs for you, but I dislike looking at gardens through the lens of a camera and didn't.  Much better you go and see for yourself.  I was also interested to see what had survived the winter and what had succumbed.  Eriobotrya japonica looked remarkably good, with wall protection, and Vitex agnus-castus made it through, but I saw a lot of new rosemary, Olearia and Cistus.  We didn't have time to look at the arboretum, but it was worth going for the walled garden.  We  shared the space with just two other visitors, which was nice for us, but seems a waste, when it is so good.  Admission is currently free to RHS members.