The Barn House Garden

Tags

Anne Wareham, Kew Gardens, NGS, Noel Kingsbury, ornamental grasses, Piet Oudolf, Roger Grounds, The Barn House Garden, Wye Valley

The Barn House Garden ©Ian Curley

One of the most lovely and unexpected results of writing The Cut Flower Patch has been the people I have met as a result. I had no idea when I started out on the whole process of creating a book that people would take the time and trouble to send me lovely emails once they had read it. Last September one such email came from a lady saying she loved growing grasses too and would I like to visit her garden. It turned out that Kate didn’t live too far away from me, in the stunning Wye Valley, so a few days later Wellyman and I found ourselves discovering the most fabulous garden, tucked away in the lush countryside of Gloucestershire. We arrived and found a note on the door telling us to find her in the back garden, along with a map and sheet of paper describing the garden. We found Kate, trowel in hand, weeding. I felt a little guilty when we left three hours later that we’d taken up valuable gardening time, but Kate was a delight to talk to – passionate, knowledgeable and generous with her time. Now I’m partial to including grasses in my garden and quite a few pop up on the cut flower patch too, but I’m the first to admit my small number of grasses don’t really do the plants justice. For true drama grasses need some space and to be planted in quantity and this is what Kate has done at the Barn House Garden where a variety of grasses have been planted en masse to create a bold and dramatic impact.

The Barn House ©Ian Curley

I love grasses despite the fact that I’m allergic to their pollen. As Kate says, ‘isn’t a love of wild grasses/cornfields innate? To me, grasses sing of woodland margins and meadows.’ I’m very much with her on this. Her first experiences of growing grasses on an ornamental scale came when she lived near Kew Gardens where she was fascinated by their grassery and watched the Bamboo Grove being renovated. ‘These were lessons on how to tame the biggest grasses of all’, she says. Kate’s love of grasses grew when she spent time in the Far East. ‘The best thing about Taiwan is the hilly walking country and the miscanthus grasses. Then there’s the miscanthus which lines the rail-side of the bullet train in Tokyo and the bamboos colonising hillsides in Thailand. We grew bamboo on balcony gardens in Bangkok (several) and then London (hundreds!), to screen out unsightly views, noise, pollution’, Kate explains. After years on the move and then tending a small London plot. Kate and her husband Hitesh settled in the Wye Valley. ‘Never mind the nice house, we were looking for the right garden’, she says. They moved to the Barn House nine years ago and the house and garden have been transformed in that time. It’s been an epic undertaking. It took over five years to complete the landscaping of the main parts of the garden. Storm drainage has been installed, and to create level planting areas over 100 tonnes of red sandstone were removed. It’s incredible to think that what now looks like such an established garden is one where much of the planting is only three years old. This was one of the reasons behind Kate’s choice of grasses to create the structure and interest in the planting scheme – grasses tend to be quick to produce a mature look to a garden.

The Barn House Garden ©Ian Curley

The back garden – an area which wraps around one side of the house – was tackled first. This gave Kate the chance to work out what they wanted from the rest of the garden. It’s a space which has an exotic feel to it, inspired by Kate and her husband’s time in the Far East. Towering bamboo and lush planting thrive with shots of vibrant colour from plants such as crocosmia and cannas. I love this sort of planting which envelops you and transports you to another place.

The Barn House Garden ©Ian Curley

One of my favourite spots was the terracing which leads down to the main aspect of the house and a seating area. Using local red sandstone terraced beds were created allowing Kate to plant in what had previously been a rocky part of land with little soil depth. The grass Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ looks fabulous. Planted in clumps along the terrace beds they look like rockets or fireworks shooting up towards the sky. Kate has also used Miscanthus sinensis ‘Malepartus’ as a dramatic 70 metre long hedge and the smaller Miscanthus sinensis ‘Starlight’ to screen a seating area.

The Barn House Garden (image courtesy of Kate Patel)

Kate uses grasses in the way many of us use shrubs as a foil to other plants, most notably herbaceous perennials like rudbeckias, persicarias and veronicastrums. Most of us imagine a garden planted with grasses only has a short season of interest and that a garden based around grasses would be at its peak in September but these photos show how stunning Kate’s garden looked for her midsummer NGS open day last weekend.

The Barn House Garden (image courtesy of Kate Patel)

The Barn House Garden (image courtesy of Kate Patel)

Kate has discovered that there are grasses which come into their own early in the year and has cleverly planted bulbs, evergreen grasses, multi-coloured cornus and beautiful specimen trees to provide year-round interest.

The Barn House Garden in winter (image courtesy of Kate Patel)

It’s not a surprise to discover Piet Oudolf has inspired Kate. Noel Kingsbury, Anne Wareham’s garden Veddw, just down the valley and Roger Grounds, an early pioneer of using ornamental grasses, have influenced Kate’s ideas too. One of the joys of growing grasses is discovering how easy they are to propagate. Kate grows many of her own plants from seed. And her next project – a stylised meadow – has been planted with home-grown deschampsia and molinia interplanted with perennial flowers. I can’t wait to see this come to fruition. If you’d like to see Kate’s garden the Barn House Garden is open by appointment from June to September with money from the openings going to the NGS. There’s no minimum group size and teas and plants are available to buy. It’s a stunning part of Britain if you fancy combining a visit with a weekend away. (I’m not on commission from the tourist board!! I just feel very lucky to live in this beautiful, somewhat undiscovered part of the world.) For more details you can visit Kate’s website. I can heartily recommend a visit to her website anyway as Kate is writing an online journal about growing and the changes to the garden, which makes a fascinating read and there are some gorgeous photos to drool over. Her next post, I’m reliably informed, is to be about the bamboos she saw growing alongside the Thai – Burma railway’s notorious Hellfire Pass & the incredible Australian Museum. And whilst you’re on her site have a look at the page about the history of the Barn House to discover more about this intriguing place.  

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Scent in the garden, British Flowers Week and a flowery giveaway

Tags

Bare Blooms, British Flowers Week, Lancaster and Cornish, Scent in the Garden, The Cut Flower Patch

Home grown cut flowers – sweet Williams and pinks

First of all, my apologies for the lack of a May ‘Scent in the Garden’ post. Chelsea Flower Show, work, Wellyman’s final exam and then a week in Dorset have intervened and meant May has disappeared in a blur.

It just so happens that this month’s scented post coincides with British Flowers Week. This is the third year this week-long celebration of British grown blooms has taken place. Britain used to be self-sufficient in cut flowers before the advent of cheap/subsidised fuel meant it was cheaper to import flowers from across the world. In recent years a greater awareness of the environmental costs of imported flowers and a growing interest in seasonality have meant there has been a resurgence in British grown blooms. Thanks largely to a growing band of incredibly hard-working and talented small-scale flower growers across the country it’s now possible to buy super fresh, seasonal flowers with a local provenance.

Scent is one of the features so often lacking in imported blooms. Cut flowers have often been bred for other qualities – longer stems, shelf-life, ability to withstand cold stores – and scent is lost in the process. Chilled storage which keeps flowers fresh as they are transported also impacts on scent. Just think about those strawberries you pick at the allotment and how you can smell them, all warmed by the sun, now think about those from the supermarket kept chilled; the contrast is quite amazing. Growing your own flowers for cutting or seeking out British grown flowers with scent is the way to bring scent indoors. And even if you’re reluctant to pick your own flowers – I know how hard it can be when you have a small garden to take a pair of flower snips to your favourite blooms – there are so many fabulous plants that will fill your garden with scent all summer long.

For me June is a fabulous month for scented plants. Sweet Williams have started to bloom on the cut flower patch. There’s an air of the old-fashioned about them, conjuring up thatch cottages and gardens festooned with honeysuckle-clad arbours. I find them tricky in the garden though as they are quite stocky plants, they don’t tend to mingle like other plants, hence me devoting space to them on the allotment. They are biennials, so sow some now for flowers next year, but don’t feel you must dig them out after they have finished flowering in late summer, I have a clump from last year which is healthy and flowering once again. They will tend to get woody over time though so sow some every year to have young plants at the ready.

Carnation ‘Memories’ ©Ian Curley

Sweet rocket is another deliciously scented biennial with the purest white flowers or dusky-pink blooms. It’s a great plant for attracting moths to your garden as its scent is much stronger on an evening. Pinks have to be one of my favourite flowers. They don’t really like my soil – it’s a tad on the acid side for their liking – but I tend to get a few years from plants before they need to be replaced with new ones. I have ‘Gran’s Favourite’ and ‘Fragrant village Pinks’ in flower at the moment, lining a bed on the cut flower patch. The white-flowered ‘Memories’ is in a container – one way around not having the chalky soil they prefer. Garden worthy plants, they also make fabulous cut flowers which I’m picking in huge bunches at the moment.

Philadelphus is a plant I remember from childhood. There was one by my parents’ gate and I used to love standing there and sniffing the flowers. It’s blooms are fleeting compared to other plants, but I wouldn’t be without the mass of white, orange blossom-scented flowers taking over a corner of my front garden at the moment, the scent drifting in through an open window into my lounge.

Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’

Roses are perhaps the classic scented flower – as long as you don’t buy the imported cut flowers which never have any perfume. Currently in bloom in my garden are ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, ‘Geoff Hamilton’ and ‘A Shropshire Lad’. If you’re thinking of growing roses, now is a great time to seek out a specialist rose garden (the National Trust has some of the best rose gardens). June is their flowering peak and you can take notes of those that please your nose the most.

Red Valerian (Centranthus ruber) ©Ian Curley

Red valerian (Centranthus ruber) is an underrated plant, in my opinion. It’s incredibly easy to grow. Why do underrated and easy to grow seem to go hand in hand? OK, it does have a tendency to self-seed, but it will tolerate most soil types. If you keep on deadheading it over the summer you will curb its tendency to pop up all over the garden and encourage it to flower right through into autumn. It might not be high on lists of scented plants but it does have one. Maybe not as sweet as a rose, but lovely nonetheless, and as it’s another where the scent is strongest in the evening, it’s great for moths. There’s honeysuckle too clothing the fence in the front garden and this little beauty, Tiarella ‘Creeping Cascade’. I bought it mainly for its foliage but have discovered that its pretty flower spikes are also sweetly scented.

Tiarella ‘Creeping Cascade’  © Ian Curley

All this scent means it’s a veritable feast for my nostrils. And they all make great vase material. If you’re a reluctant flower picker I urge you this week to celebrate British flowers, to take your flower snips into the garden and to just pick a few stems. Even if you simply plonk them in an old jam jar and put them on the kitchen windowsill I can guarantee they’ll make you smile.

In honour of British Flowers Week I’ve joined forces with two lovely ladies to offer 3 fantastic gifts. Chloe Plester of Bare Blooms and the British Flower Collective grows beautiful flowers in the garden of her home in North Oxfordshire and is offering one of her gorgeous bouquets. Sian Cornish of the online haberdashery Lancaster and Cornish uses flowers and foliage from the countryside around her Cornish home to hand-dye bamboo silk ribbons. They’re perfect for tying a bouquet, decorating a vase or embellishing a gift and she’s giving away 3 ribbons. Alongside these will be a signed copy of my book The Cut Flower Patch.

For more details on how to enter (UK entries only, sorry!) take a look at the following links.

The British Flower Collective

Bare Blooms

Lancaster and Cornish

or take a look at my Instagram page. Good luck!

Gone to Pot

Tags

container growing, flea markets, Mabel and Rose, The Foodie Bugle, The Posh Shed Company, Toby Buckland Garden Festival, vintage garden pots

A Posh Planter from The Posh Shed Company

For seven years or so I gardened pretty much solely in containers. Renting meant we couldn’t do a great deal to any of the gardens that came with each new house other than mow lawns and trim hedges. In other words, the boring bits. Container growing was the only way to get my growing fix. Our pots mainly consisted of edibles. We had good crops of courgettes, French beans, tomatoes, spuds and salad leaves. To be honest though by the time we had our own patch of soil my interest in pots had rather waned. Growing in the ground was a bit of a revelation. For about 5 years I had hardly any pots and I think I found it quite liberating. Pots, particularly small ones are demanding on time with all that watering and feeding.

However, over the last few years my love of containers has been rekindled. It has taken a while, but pots have slowly started to creep back into the garden, partly because I’m running out of soil and partly because I’m learning to appreciate them all over again. There are pots by the front door, pots with succulents, and planters with herbs. But what to use as a container?

I was lucky enough the other day to receive a wooden planter for a project I’m working on. Made in Herefordshire by The Posh Shed Company it’s rather lovely – good and solid, and in a very fetching shade of blue (they’re available in a selection of other delicious colours too). You could plant directly into the planter if you lined the slatted wooden base line with an old compost bag or some plastic sheeting with holes punctured into it. I rummaged in the shed for a pot that fitted snugly inside instead. It was as I was planting this wooden container that I caught myself thinking about how the choice of pot can make such a difference to a particular display and your garden as a whole.

In the past I was rather limited in my choice of pots. Moving constantly meant I didn’t want anything too heavy and my gardening budget was quite small. If I’m honest though it was more my imagination as to what to use as a pot that was the limiting factor. Plastic was my first choice. It was cheap, practical and lightweight, but let’s face it plastic pots aren’t particularly attractive. However, as they tended to be home to courgettes and potatoes I wasn’t too bothered at the time.

Terracotta is probably the most widely used material for containers. Most of my pots were clay but I’m less fond of it now. For me, the colour seems to jar in my garden and I’m not sure it’s the best foil for many plants. I find the orange tones don’t work with pastels which dominate my planting. It’s all a bit fake tan-like for me. I still have a collection but it dwindles every year as I lose some pots to frost. I do like the older-style terracotta which tends to be less orange – more of a pale, creamy colour, and most of my succulents are at home in these terracotta pots picked up from flea markets and second-hand shops. They’re easy enough to find and generally inexpensive. I’ll often find them hidden under a table in a box covered in cobwebs and the fragile skeletons of spiders. Larger terracotta pots, especially the older ones are pricey, and one of the lessons I have learnt is that if you are growing in pots the larger the better. One of the biggest mistakes I made as a rookie gardener was to buy small pots which a plant would fill all too quickly. Often I hadn’t given much thought to proportions either. By the time the plant had reached maturity it would more often than not look like it had out grown it’s home, rather like the teenager who has had a growth spurt and is sporting half-mast trousers.

Zinc planter

Gradually I’m moving away from terracotta in favour of other materials. Vintage finds are some of my favourites. Zinc baths are fabulous. If you’re after a large planter they can be excellent value for money. Flea markets and shops are the best places to find them and the cheapest. You can also find them online and in shops which specialise in gardenalia. This rectangular metal box was £10 from Malvern Flea Market. A trader had bought a job lot of them from an old garage which had closed down. They were a bit on the greasy side when we got them home but nothing a good clean couldn’t shift, and they’ve looked beautiful this spring planted up with tulips.

French enamel pots

I’m a bit obsessed by vintage enamel. I’m a bit like a bloodhound who has the scent when I go to one of my favourite flea markets. These were great value – £15 for the 3 from Toby Buckland’s Garden Festival.

Bonsai pot – a home for succulents

I discovered this bonsai pot on a recent shed clear out and thought it would be perfect for a few succulents.

Rusty urn

Then there is this vintage urn – it’s part of a pair. Crikey, they’re heavy – hence me moving only one out of the shed for this picture – but they look amazing. Sadly they aren’t mine, I’m just looking after them until I can deliver them to a friend.

The problem with vintage stuff is that if you’re not careful your garden can start to resemble a scrap yard or flea market and that’s generally not the look you’re trying to achieve. Balancing out the use of vintage pots with other containers is one way around this.

Wood makes an excellent material for containers. Old wooden fruit crates are one of my favourites. I line them with old compost bags to stop any compost falling out and it also helps the wood to last as long as possible. They’re a particular good depth for tomato plants with some basil planted around them. Then there are the more substantial wooden planters like the one from the Posh Shed Company. Containers like this make a statement in a garden and can be a focal point in themselves. Choosing containers in colours that blend with your garden and planting scheme is another way of tying a garden together. You don’t need to spend a small fortune on having a garden specially designed. Simply using containers in complimentary colours to your house, garden and planting combinations will give your garden a harmonious feel.

For more details about wooden planters from The Posh Shed Company.

Some of my favourite places for vintage finds – Shepton Mallett and Malvern Flea Markets, Toby Buckland’s Garden Festivals, The Foodie Bugle, Mabel and Rose.