Summer Break
16 August 2010

I missed the moment the garden relaxed; when the tension of water-stress eased under proper penetrating rain. We were away for a week on a Solent salt marsh, in a garden under a different sort of stress - always. It is totally exposed to wind and salt sea-air; nothing but the grasses, gorse, brambles and goat willows can take the punishment.

I said 'garden' because it is the setting for a house and in summer the scene of endless entertaining; ball-games, races, dinghies on chocks, picnics, trampoline, barbecues. Oh, and golf croquet, where the rabbits make interesting bunkers in the sandy turf.

Suspended animation
2 August 2010

We all know the joke about the man who dug up a plant to see how it was doing. But have you, seriously, never been tempted? Something you have planted with all proper precaution inexplicably malingers. You water and feed, examine its leaves, its buds, its neighbours. You watch and wait: it doesn’t budge.

I'm thinking about a vine I planted 18 months ago on the front of the house to replace a 50 year old one that died (Aha! Clue! Cause of death?)

It is Furmint , the excellent Hungarian variety that gives the fiery spirit to Tokay. It came home with me in a pot; a bonny plant with splendid roots. I planted

Signs of struggle
31 July 2010

What a garden like mine needs, I often think, is a sympathetic commentator, preferably a noted authority, to explain that my relationship with bindweed and creeping thistle is creative rather than despairing, and that the shredded branches marking the visits of muntjac are an assertion of my oneness with creation.

What prompts this thought? An article by Stephen Lacey on Waltham Place, the Oppenheimers' garden inspired by the late Henk Gerritsen. 'We tried to grow bindweed up a tripod', Mrs Oppenhheimer is quoted as saying, 'but it wasn't having it'. So they yank it up to keep it down. Good. There's something I'm doing right.

Order/disorder. It is the central paradox of gardening in the British manner. In its inherent tension lies half the appeal of garden visiting, and most of the judgement call of the County Organizer.

The dry sky
26 July 2010

It begins to grind you down when gardening is reduced to one question: where to carry the can or lug the hose to next. We've had the best of the weather here, alright, in the infuriating phrase the forecasters use, for the past four months. The rainfall figures are: April, 7millimetres, May, 28, June, 17, July (with five days to go),7. Total 70 millimetres, or nearly three inches. The same period last year, reckoned dry at the time, gave us 140.

It is cold comfort to know that Cambridge had a downpour. Week after week the promises are broken. Up the road, perhaps a shower. Down the road, a nice little soak. Across the valley, rain last night. Here, on this sand-coloured grass, zilch.

There has been no question of planting anything since April; no new plant has a

Magic meadows
14 July 2010

To supper on a June evening with Tom and Sue Stuart-Smith in their garden near St Albans. We were talking about garden eye-catchers; objects that represent conclusion or resolution in the same way as a predictable final chord. I can’t resist them. But am I, as it were, talking down to my visitors, saying ‘look over here', rather than trusting them to see things in their own way?

This seems to be pretty much what Tom thinks. His garden makes theatrical use of tall beech hedges pierced with openings, some of them surprisingly narrow, that inevitably engage your curiosity. You are bound to go and see what lies beyond. Some lead your eye on to another opening, some to a rich patch of planting, some to relative vacancy:
a plain boxed-in lawn you can mentally furnish as you wish.

The main axis from the terrace leads invitingly on through such hedge-gaps, repeated several times, to more green space beyond. It’s hard to tell how far beyond because the end is left blank: the distance is just green. It would be fun to

Chelsea Report
5 July 2010

It’s a bit late, I know, but Trad’s annual Chelsea medal has not yet been awarded. Exhibitors’ finger nails must be down to the quick. So here goes. I approve the People’s Choice. The Trad Award goes to Roger Platt, whose garden (the corner one on the left as you turned into Show Garden Row) was apparently voted most popular – but not of course among the judges.

Someone (was it Jill Billington?) said that the Green Movement is the dominant force in gardens today. ‘Puritanical control and the eco-movement’ is the precise quote whose origin I’ve mislaid. One is certainly not surprised to see it in the headlines, but does
this mean it forms a basis of garden design? I didn’t even detect a symbolic clump of nettles in Roger Platt’s garden. Nor a plastic water-recycling butt. He didn’t see the need for PC gestures; nor did the voting public; nor do I. What he did recycle were many of the well-tried tricks that give gardeners so much pleasure, in a confident pattern of paths, arbour, pool and pergolas in natural and traditional materials that many people

The house is a 'thirties bungalow with iron windows and a big verandah overlooking a creek endlessly washed by the tide. The colourful clutter of boats at their moorings is almost at eye level one moment, only, when you look again, to have sunk below the seawall.

A gardener's urge, of course, is to stick in a few plants that will survive, or even profit by, the unusual conditions. Escallonias, have been tried at some time, but just look tatty. Hydrangeas are the default decoration for the summer holidays. Their muddle of pale colours, like washing left too long on the line, expresses the time and place better, perhaps, than any other plant. Someone once planted a birch in the waving brown grass: the wind has made it aerodynamic; a vegetable slipstream as it were. (Willows, curiously, seem to grow upright despite the wind). We have planted two or three Scots pines, to join, or succeed, the couple that have become gnarled in the line of duty, but the wind and the rabbits will always prevent a gardener from doing anything so foolish as to garden here.

it with some ceremony, between the Wrotham Pinot (aka Pinot Meunier or Dusty Miller) and the Chasselas .

(Come to think of it why Wrotham? What is the connection between one of the Champagne grapes and the North Downs - apart from chalk? Was there once a vineyard there? (Wrotham has the remains of a Bishop's Palace). Now Google has put a stop to such airy speculations. It was Edward Hyams, whose pioneer vineyard at Oxted was the ancestor of the English wine industry, now so flourishing, who identified an old vine with dusty leaves as peculiar to Wrotham. Others, bolder in their speculation, have claimed it as a relic of the Romans who paused, as we all do, to admire the view of the Weald from Wrotham Hill.)

My Furmint has six leaves. Last year it had seven. They are green and healthy, rather small, and show no sign of growing. There are no swelling buds or incipient tendrils.

If I don't dig it up how will I ever know what's wrong?

Read Tony Woodward, whose bizarre ambition to get his incipient Welsh mountain garden into the Yellow Book is the pretext for The Garden in the Clouds, his bid to become the Peter Mayle of Wales. He has just moved into what sounds like a routinely scruffy farmhouse. The challenge: to persuade Mrs Kerr of the N.G.S. that his dry pond and collection of rusty machinery has an aesthetic integrity (or what you will); that it is, in fact, a garden. More specifically, as far as the N.G.S. is concerned, that it is worth £3.50 and forty five minutes of anyone's time.

Which is surely the point, and brings us back to the inherent question of art.

If the answer is obvious: that you don't have a clue, weeds are in control and you are growing clichés incompetently, there is no deal. Ditto if you can clip straight hedges and mow lawns, plant tulips and prune roses - but that's it. People (a few) will applaud your industry, but the essential rapport will not be there.

To rattle the honesty box and fill 45 minutes you need a story: a touch of drama or at least some sign of a struggle. It is why we grow climbers up trees, let plants overlap paths, coat walls with leafage. What is hard needs softening, what is confused, simplifying. Yin needs yang.

hope of putting roots beyond the circumference of its pot. Most plants, in fact, have simply stopped. They must be transpiring, in emergency mode, and their root hairs finding moisture somewhere in the dust, but new growth, or anything but a tiny travesty of a flowerhead, is simply put on hold. What surprises me is how few plants are obviously losing turgidity in their veins and wilting.

I am taking a can to this year's new trees (luckily there are only half a dozen) daily. I might as well be pouring it into a hole in the ground: it all disappears as fast as I can pour it. I mentally map the rootscape underground: the soil must be full of tiny roots from big trees competing for moisture. What happens when they meet? Does the big horse chestnut challenge the cedar of Lebanon for the last remaining drops? Are some roothairs bigger bullies? Miraculously they seem to get by without destroying each other.

There is one clue, though, to what is going on out of sight. With the grass merely ticking over the deeper-rooted lawn weeds come into their own. And trees prone to suckering send up a forest of sprouts. We haven't had to mow for weeks; instead I hand-pick the succulent shoots of acacias, cherries, the wingnut and above all the prolific cedrela, Toona sinensis, before it obliterates the grass under a groovy toona grove.

put an urn there, or a gate or an obelisk or any of the conventional conclusions. Tom would rather leave you wondering.

In June the generous blocks of herbaceous planting (‘borders’ gives the wrong idea) were like magic meadows – as though Hertfordshire had an endless flora of tall, short, feathery, gesticulating, creeping, aspiring, pale, dark, transparent or solid herbs in generally complementary colours. More than anything I was reminded of Beth Chatto’s celebrated stands at Chelsea in the 1970s. The unusual (her term) plants she put together always spoke quietly to one another. It was an intelligent conversation among flowers that had no need to show off. She was making you look at what till then you had passed over: the ingredients of a hay field, a stream bed or the early flowers of a coppice that disappears in summer in drought and shade. Her lessons gave many of us a permanent distaste for the cosmetics of the nursery business. This is Tom’s taste too, I fancy – with significant exceptions when a perfect peony, shall we say, is called for.

Beth Chatto had a quiet celebration, an open day for friends, on June 28th; 50 years to the day since she opened Unusual Plants at Elmstead Market, near Colchester. I have watched nearly forty years of its evolution, from an unremarkable stream under some senior oaks to a landscape emulated wherever people garden. Beth’s dry garden, never watered, come what may, is an extraordinary one-step lesson in ecology. Her bog gardens around shining ponds are the same. Perhaps in her writing I discern most love of all in her description of the woodland she developed later and the plants that flourish before oaks cast them into shade.

Eye-catchers? I think I know what Beth would say about a statue. ‘What a waste of money’.

can afford. And arrange good plants in relatively realistic ways.

The official winner was Andy Sturgeon. What the judges must have liked about his creation were the row of rusty rectangles, the bold straight concrete edges and the eclectic planting (one of this, one of that) allowing you to see the essential earth. If there was a green theme it was well-concealed (at least from me).

Tom Stuart Smith is unmistakable for his evocative simplicity. Somehow his quiet dark rectangular pool among mounds of box created the sense of a real place – even a place with memories of emotions. I suppose his copper box of a summerhouse made sense – but someone will have to explain it to me.