Homes, places we’ve grown

Most evenings I wander the Beth Chatto Gardens, where I now live, alone. I don’t quite have a route like I did at Dixter – but the spaces are slowly becoming familiar to me. Since the snowdrops peaked about a month ago, spring has accelerated to that point where the daily growth is now visible. Things bud, bloom and fade in what feels like a matter of days, especially in the woodland and shade beds, which are crammed with all manner of tiny gems.

Today I spent some time on my knees admiring the Erythronium ‘White Beauty’ dotted amongst a sea of Anemone nemorosa ‘Flore Pleno.’ They harmonize beautifully, with contrasting foliage and inflorescence, but the same flushed cream buds and pure white flowers.

While the woodland garden is very much a ground level show, the panorama views in the water garden are sublime, especially with the slanted evening light. Prunus ‘Tai-haku’ is absolutely stunning right now. The clouds of white blossoms with delicate pink stamens, reach down to meet the emerging fern fronds below. It stands out against a background of just barely budding trees and the enclosing black outlines of oaks.

I’ve enjoyed getting to know everyone at Beth’s and we’re slowly settling into some semblance of a routine. I alternate 4-day weeks in the nursery and the garden, with a flexible Friday that has lately been dedicated to things like making flower arrangements for the house and shop, and devising installations for the tea room, in addition to potting up various bulbs and tubers, and pricking out seedlings that are destined for my cut flower border. The joy of cutting and arranging from the garden hasn’t worn off, nor the pleasure of such tasks as cutting all the yellow hellebores in the stock beds (the flowers are just a waste of energy when the plant is to be divided).

The garden and nursery do lay bare the yawning gaps in my plant knowledge and I wear my company shirt with a bit of dread these days as more and more plants catch the visitors’ notice that I don’t know. I’m picking things up, but realistically I should be studying more. It’s hard to find the energy after work though, and I try to get a good chunk of socializing in on the weekends to stave off any feelings of being trapped in the middle of nowhere.

It’s strange to compare the differences a year and a new garden bring. I often felt like I was losing touch with reality at Dixter, high on plants and people willing to talk about them. April proved particularly surreal. The weekdays passed in a haze of weeding, planting, and potting on, and the weekends were consumed with road trips and gardens (Rousham, Stourhead, Gravetye, Sissinghurst, Chatsworth…). I moved into the house, with its particular smell of old fabric and woodsmoke, constantly creaking stairs, the tiny gabled kitchen that hardly had room for the five of us students, and happily shared a room overlooking the long border. I relished the constant company.

This exact weekend last year, we were caught up in the whirlwind that is the Dixter spring plant fair. I was in charge of organizing the plant stand and we duly cut down a willow tree to cascade over it, spent hours moving hay bales and trolleys of plants, baked lots of cake for the cake stand and over two days made countless pots of (bad) coffee and tea. I fawned over Barnhaven’s primulas and Monksilver’s tiny treasures, and bought Beth Chatto anemones as a present. It was exhilarating and exhausting; we ended up hiding out in the bluebell woods for a bit.

This year, I went down with the Beth Chatto crew on Saturday morning, gratefully free of the responsibilities Dixter-ites bear. We quickly set up the stand and were selling plants within two hours of arrival. Apparently we even had a sales record this year!

I have to admit, I was more excited to see everyone than the garden itself. The people are as warm as ever, but for all that the garden once felt like home, it is now largely impenetrable to me. I’ve been twice this spring and both times found myself staring with bemusement at the overflowing beds (although the crocus lawn this year had me on my knees with joy).

After a stumble through the stock beds, it was a relief to emerge into the familiar confines of the Peacock Garden. The view down towards the cat garden, with the flowering prunus in the meadow just visible over the top of the long border hedge, is a week or so away from exploding into technicolour with tulips and ferula. It immediately reminded me of the weeks we spent carefully tiptoeing around the hundreds of bulbs while weeding, planting, and (god help us) tickling out.

I miss being part of that motley crew some days, but I hope a few will come visit me. I keep offering a (non-luxury) stay in my caravan, but somehow that hasn’t been a selling point. The banana cake and peanut butter muffins I distributed at least proved I can still put together a decent tea. I thank Amazon for my toaster oven every day.

Walking Great Dixter

The first erythronium

For those first, heady weeks of spring, when the ephemerals began to bloom, a few of us played a little game: who can find the first bloom of x or the emergence of y. Initially, it was just me being stupidly excited by the first Tulipa turkestanica or frit in the meadow. The first violets, erythroniums, Narcissus cyclamineus. Sophora microphylla ‘Sun King’. I would drag everyone over to admire the miracle and they would all nod patiently. For a week or two it got so intense people started humoring me at lunch: “Ok, Amy, we’re ready for today’s nature walk. Lead on to the next 5 cm plant.”

Ophioglossum vulgatum

They ended up being some of my favourite times with the gardeners and students because they were always generous with their knowledge of the plants – even if they’d seen something bloom many times before – and they usually took you to see some of their favourites as well. A stray comment about an anemone (pavonina or fulgens) blooming alone in the meadow, had Fergus telling us about how it had been there thirty years and never seemed to expand. Then, he suddenly dropped to his knees to look for yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) germinating, which reminded him it was a good time of year to look for Ophioglossum vulgatum and so we all trailed after him through the meadows, squinting (some were eventually found in the same spot Christopher Lloyd first identified them after waking from a nap in the lower meadow). Or poor Graham, who patiently tolerated my hellebore ramblings and then showed me the best erythroniums and the location of the only yellow snowdrop. Things got a bit dicier with the students – some accusations of blatant cheating and an imposed rule of latin names – but you know, that’s only to be expected (if I’m playing…).

It’s interesting how little you end up walking around and just looking at a garden when you work in it, so I made a conscious effort to walk regularly, alone. In the morning, the dew or frost glistening, it was usually a brisk stroll, just to check on something from the day before, or maybe to visit the blooming Corylopsis glabrescens. And in the evening, it was often to catch the setting sun, or see what a warm day had pushed into blossom. At lunch though – those were scouting missions. It takes focus to be aware of the garden and small changes. Even now I can mentally walk through the garden with clarity. It’s a comfort that I left when the tulips were at their height – my Great Dixter is perpetually roiled in spring colour.

The thing about Great Dixter is that almost every day a plant (or five) is putting on a new display. There are just so many plants, so many different plants. It’s hard to overstate. And if they don’t have it now, they’ve probably tried it. We’d go off to gardens or nurseries on the weekends and bring back plants we were excited about and Fergus would invariably have grown it before (and actually, it was growing right now, this very second, in the Vietnam stock bed!). It was overwhelming and thrilling. There’s nothing better than seeing plants you’ve only read about come to life in front of you. Well, except, digging it up, dividing it and potting it on?

Gardening practice at Dixter is idiosyncratic, as one would expect at a garden created by intense individuals living in the middle of nowhere, England. Four months in the garden has infused me with a new confidence in plants. There are so many forces acting against them – clay soil and poor drainage, clumsy students, neglect, badgers, competitive neighbors and rampant self-sowers, etc., that some days we joked about how they have to really want to live to make it at Dixter.

Sometimes, the jumble of plants at Dixter is oppressive. The garden drives home the maxim ‘less is more,’ and a light hand when editing a bed full of self-sowers manifests over a period of weeks as plants fight it out. My eye would tire while staring down the Long Border or parsing the combinations in Vietnam. It would tire, and it was only winter/early spring, nothing like the chaos of high summer or the bounty of fall… It’s not that I didn’t know what I was getting into, but experiencing it in person is something else. Walking endless loops failed to inure me to some garden moments. My catchphrase was ‘burn it’.

 

And yet, I catch myself looking at our plantings at home differently now – contemplating how another layer of planting might be worked in, or why it might not be totally offensive to have those lime Aquilegia ‘Mellow Yellow’ close to some purple cotinus (perpetually dwarfed by our climate).

Just kidding. I still think it’s offensive. I suggested Geum ‘Mai Tai’ instead of the aquilegia.

It’s difficult to separate out the garden, the garden walks, from my emotional attachment to the place. I made an effort to look at the garden, but I also lived, worked and socialized in the garden. The beautifully worn York paving stones that define the garden, are also the same ones I’ve spent days weeding; the walled garden is full of the work of decades and an ancient Cistus, but also hundreds of larkspur and nigella that Aideen and I planted; the weird trial strip by the fruit cage is ugly and dedicated to stock but it’s where Susan and I had a fun day working with volunteers, where I spent a few quiet days with Lewis and Aaron when I most needed them, where I watched the tulips succumb in days to fire blight, where I managed to get some cell signal… I have a fondness for it, despite its overabundance of bergenia.

It’s hardly fair to talk about Dixter without disclaiming my gratitude towards the people there. They gave me months where I had no imperative except to show up to work on time, take in as many gardens as possible, and be with people who love gardens. At Dixter, the world of gardening expanded before me.

But I also reveled in the smallness of it all. I walked the garden in hopes that I might somehow come to know it intimately, bounded as it is by hedges, fences and property lines, and hundreds of sheep. In spring, their baa-ing was incessant. But like any garden, it grows and changes, even before my eyes I watched beds swallow newly planted seedlings never to see them re-emerge, or a magnolia appear at the back of the long border like a mirage, with a few white flowers faintly outlining it, how had I never noticed it before? And of course I can never know the weight of history, the layers of imprinted knowledge of warm spots and cool, frost pockets, where the wind does particular damage, those are beyond the reach of my casual observances in a short time. But there’s still something to the containment, a satisfaction that each day you are getting better, that you could one day know the paving stones and trees at least, even if the plantings are ever changing or the shrubs sometimes pruned into dramatically different shapes. Even the topiary lawn took a butchering while I was there.

It’s almost better to think of it as an extended pilgrimage – enlightenment through pacing and futile weeding of the topiaries in the midst of the meadow. What’s done today will need to be done again tomorrow, or maybe in two weeks, or maybe two years, but it’s rarely the last time something needs to be done. The garden is decades of memories of planting, pruning, weeding, staking, soil amendment and the like.

As Robert Macfarlane so aptly says: “The journeys told here take their bearings from the distant past, but also from the debris and phenomena of the present, for this is often a double insistence of old landscapes: that they be read in the then but felt in the now.” I came to Dixter for its history and plants, and felt Christopher Lloyd’s presence every day through stories, reading, a well-chosen tree, but my day-to-day experiences are superimposed on it, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. There’s no objectivity to my understanding of the garden. I respect it for what it is, and hope that it respected my efforts (and wild enthusiasm) in turn. The pilgrimage complete.

Did I say I hated forget-me-nots?

The Solar Garden at Great Dixter

If you’ve read some Rosemary Verey or Christopher Lloyd, I suppose the tulip/forget-me-not combination isn’t that surprising. It’s a “classic” for a reason – the forget-me-nots have a rangy habit and form an airy mat below the tulips, the blue lending the tulips a fresh and springy energy (although it fails to redeem the godforsaken Tulip ‘Malaika’). Both flowers tend to finish at roughly the same time, making bed turn over an easy decision as well.  And once you have forget-me-nots you will rarely be without them, so you can prepare for next year’s display by simply letting a few plants go to seed (as a bonus the clumps of seedlings will choke out other emerging weeds through autumn) and then transplanting as necessary (they’re exceptionally hardy so feel free to dig them up, leave them in a bag in the shed for a few weeks, and then lovingly chip them into frozen soil – not that I’ve done that).

It’s possible, that while transplanting the 3000th forget-me-not in late March, I swore I would burn every one in my garden when I got home. It’s also possible that I scoffed at the Solar Garden bed when the bubblegum pink tulips emerged over those perfect baby blues in a display worthy of Disneyland. What is certain, is that within 3 days of being home I transplanted roughly 100 forget-me-nots as a “joke” and then watched the compliments roll in. Classic. CLASSIC.

Our Edmonton version of tulips and forget-me-nots

Forget-me-nots with ‘Shirley’ in the Peacock Garden at Great Dixter

With ‘Queen of the Night’ in the Peacock Garden

With ‘West Point’ and hellebores in one of the Orchard Stock Beds

Tulip ‘Red Shine’ (?) with Euphorbia wulfenii and Acanthus mollis Hollard’s Gold behind

With Tulipa bakeri in the Peacock Garden

Fancy or folly?

Occasionally, while everyone was sitting around in the gardeners’ mess room, the topic of garden criticism, and specifically written garden criticism, would come up. Each time, it would be harshly denounced as unnecessary – ‘Would we tell artists they’re using the wrong colours?’ ‘How can we cast judgment on something as personal as a garden?’ – and the conversation would peter out. Frankly, I found it surprising that the same people who engaged in discussions on other gardens and planting styles, plants, etc., would then turn around and be so defensive regarding written commentary.

Maybe it’s a protective instinct or maybe it’s born from an appreciation of the difficulties of gardening. After all, so much in gardening is outside of our control, and when the garden is open to the public, all you can do is try your best to overcome climactic, pest and soil issues, not to mention human error, so that on most days the garden is looking good (or at least part of it is). But I also think that much of ornamental gardening is about casting judgment and making decisions based on taste, interest and expression – it’s a visual art form. And when the public is invited in to view a garden, and pays for the privilege, why should we not engage in criticism and reflect on how the garden works or doesn’t work. I know, I’m being reductive on this criticism argument (one could read for days on the purpose and merit of art criticism if they so chose), I just happen to believe that criticism of a garden has the potential to be insightful and thought provoking. Reading it and engaging in it myself has certainly changed the way I view a garden and sharpens my eye and mind.

Perhaps I should have prefaced this by saying that in the past 5 months, I’ve visited dozens of gardens with others, while also working in a pretty interesting one, Great Dixter. We visited gardens for many reasons, I suppose, but mainly because we like to see how people solve design problems and use plants. We’re always looking and talking about how the gardeners are growing, pruning and maintaining their material. On the ideal garden trip we get the full tour of tool sheds, compost heaps and glass houses, a discussion of their plant propagation and sourcing, and their design methodologies. Basically, we’re insatiably curious.

In England, there’s always another garden to visit. Many of the historic properties (of which there are hundreds) have some sort of garden or landscape park which is maintained to varying degrees. There are botanic gardens attached to universities and colleges, national collections of plants, nursery show gardens, and so on, not to mention the thousands of private gardens full of treasures and personality. As a Canadian, I found the sheer volume of gardens astounding. What was less surprising was how rare it was to find an excellent garden.

What does make a good garden and how much of our impressions are dictated by the circumstances of our visit? It’s such a broad question and one that better writers than I have lingered over for chapters. But over the next few weeks, as I sift through all the winter and spring pictures I took and post some, maybe some threads will become clear.

Or perhaps it will be a case of the less you know, the better… that pure enjoyment of gardens as beautiful spectacles, the passing glimpses through the hedge transporting the imagination, the instant gratification of a change in atmosphere, a sense of enveloping shelter, how when one is left alone in them they might imagine all the things they might do if they too had endless resources and a modicum of good sense.

First few weeks at Great Dixter

The High Garden at Great Dixter

I’ve been a student at Great Dixter for 3 weeks now. It’s kind of like going to gardening summer camp – we’re in the middle of nowhere, our internet access is questionable (hence the poor blogging), accommodations are dated, and we spend most of our time together, whether working or going on garden expeditions or group grocery shopping excursions. The outside world seems far away and I don’t bother reading the news anymore – just gardening books. Perhaps the greatest part has been meeting other young people who are equally, if not more so, obsessed with gardening and plants. It’s a revelation.

An avenue of yew at Sissinghurst

In the past week or so we’ve gotten toured around Sissinghurst, Elizabeth Strangman’s garden (renowned for her hellebore breeding), Nymans and Gravetye Manor. It’s been a fantastic opportunity to see gardens of different scales and learn from gardeners who have been at it for years and years. Even comparing tool sheds has been fascinating.

As to what we’re doing in the garden these days… well today it was raining so we potted up hundreds of seedlings and lined them out in the cold frames (while singing Mary Poppins). In the past week I have also weeded the paving stones and under hedges, potted up divisions of perennials from the stock beds for the nursery and for the garden, cleaned up and dug over large portions of stock beds (including lifting perennials and dividing them), planted new areas of the stock bed, and cut back grasses, ferns and various perennials. We also split and stripped wood for a new support for an espaliered pear using traditional methods (I say we but I mostly just watched). The list of gardening chores is endless, I’ve discovered. And if nothing else, one can always sweep the paths.

My current favourite plant in the garden (after the hellebores and snowdrops) is Chrysoplenium macrophyllum, which is a beautiful, bergenia-like ground cover, that I will have to get a good picture of. It’s at the back of the border so I need to use something other than my phone!

Sissinghurst. Classic.

The back of Great Dixter as the sun rises

Teasel in the Peacock Garden at Dixter

Hellebores from Elizabeth Strangman

Snowdrops in the Peacock Garden

Gravetye Manor (originally William Robinson’s garden and now a hotel)

Spring, summer, whatever

I’m trying not to get teary eyed at the early loss of my beautiful ‘Dream Touch’ (pictured above) or ‘Brown Sugar’ tulips. It’s been a classic Alberta spring – snow one week, plus 25 the next. I can’t say I missed it. The only thing I did miss was the smell of Mayday trees which perfume the air.

Over the past few days I’ve been putting in dozens of seedlings and the dahlias that I pre-sprouted. Still dozens and dozens left to go. The perennial border is definitely filling in now, although it is increasingly haphazard. I figure I’ll give the seedlings a few years and then I can do a big move if necessary.

Many of the perennials that went in 2 years ago are looking quite good right now (of course the heucheras never came back last year – that was my second try with them and still a total fail). The thalictrums, epimediums, aruncus and ‘Splish Splash’ geranium are starting to really dominate their spaces. Of course am I learning from this lesson and planting my seedling perennials far apart? No.

Snowdrops!

Spring is progressing here in Edmonton, albeit incredibly slowly. I’ve been heartened by the early flowers of scilla, crocuses and my beloved snowdrops (who are apparently so desperate they sprout bud first from the ground). Today I even found some violets blooming in the window well! Meanwhile inside I’ve started sowing trays of different flowers and gotten the dahlia tubers sprouting. Fast running out of room though. I’m hoping to plant out some of the sweet pea seedlings in the next two weeks which should help. May be too early but such is life.

In random perennial seed news I put everything that hasn’t germinated outside in a semi-shady spot in their plastic bags. Violets and aconitum have rewarded me with germination so far. We’ll see about the others… I’m also starting to face reality – I need to figure out where all these seedlings are going. Tomorrow’s project is potting up the garden auriculas and hellebores. Hopefully they will grow enough over the summer to be safely tucked into the garden in early fall. Although if you have any alternate growing suggestions I’m open to them!

I’m planting only Cream Beauty from now on

 

Garden musings

Sorry for the radio silence, I’ve been in Toronto and New York for the last two weeks drinking endless bubble teas and pounding the pavement. It snowed a few times and the wind was brutal, any dreams I had of magnolia were crushed. Instead, I made do with snowdrops, hamamelis, aconite and crocuses, along with afternoons spent in the Avery Library at Columbia reading through their garden design collection and two lectures by Peter Wirtz and Robert Mallet.

Sometimes I worry that after four years of mainly engaging with gardens as visitor or a reader, that any legitimacy I might have had to call myself a gardener will be lost. But the more I listen to other great gardeners whom I admire, the more I realize how important it is to have a good eye and that developing that eye takes time and experience – so just looking and studying is never a waste of time. Frank Cabot’s ‘The Greater Perfection’ is an excellent lesson in this – he has exquisite taste and pulls from great gardens he has seen, as well as his skills as a plantsman, but he also relies on the eyes and skills of artisans to bring his vision to life.

Garden books seem to fall into two main categories – intensely personal memoirs of a garden such as ‘The Greater Perfection,’ or Dan Pearson’s ‘Home Ground,’ and general manuals on growing plants. Right now I find myself craving something a bit more – Russell Page’s ‘Education of a Gardener’ or perhaps Gerritson’s ‘Essay on Gardening.’ It’s not to say that these two are not also intensely personal, with art it seems most things are, but they also lead to broader conversations on the purpose to gardening and human intervention in the landscape.

When I first started gardening as a child, I just wanted more flowers and weird plants – I quickly learned I had to make some compromises due to climate and sunlight, but I never wanted to spend my money on more than one of each kind of plant because where’s the fun in that?! Having visited enough gardens now, I am beginning to understand the beauty in restraint. Even as I get more excited about plants every day, my eye is drawn again and again to more restful landscaping that feature layered hedging or the repetition of plant communities such as one finds in a meadow (Giubbilei’s Chelsea Garden 2009 is perfection in my mind).  In a small space especially it’s easy to overwhelm with ideas and plants.

All this is to say that while I feel my eye has improved, my thoughts about meaning in the garden don’t seem to have progressed. Does a garden always have to have meaning beyond simply beautiful plants? Is it enough to hope to evoke peace or to match the architecture? I just want to look at certain plants together. It’s funny, after reading Page and Gerritson, Giubbilei’s book along with Wirtz’s talk both seemed so straightforward: clear design voice and clean plant pallette. I strive for that simplicity, but hope at some point to have conversations on a broader scale. Especially as the way we garden shifts to keep up with changing climates and depleted resources.

 

New York Botanical Garden – Late Spring

Geum ‘Mai-Tai’ – loved these!

Native aquilegia with Amsonia tabernaemontana

‘Gauguin’

 

 

 

Chanticleer in spring

Chanticleer must be one of the best gardens on the east coast in April/May, not that I’ve seen that many, but a second visit did nothing to disabuse me of the notion. It’s got spectacle, art, and enough rare plants that surely any visitor would be impressed. I was so happy to share it with family from Alberta – we share a similar shock to anything remotely spring-like and when confronted with Chanticleer I think we kind of shut down (some oaths were muttered is all I’m saying). Enjoy the photos Albertans (and Saskatchewanians) cause our “spring” ain’t never going to look like this.

 

Love the waves of fritillaria, lettuce, and tulips. Playful and sophisticated.

Uncle D liked this planter combo with anemones and helleborus foetidus

Don’t talk to me about this epimedium

My dream: a grassy lawn of fritillaria (and leucojeum)

Loved this combination of Muscari and Convallaria majalis ‘Striata’ (plus some aquilegia)