Lilliputian Gardening

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bedding plants, Crocus plant nursery, garden centres, Nigel Dunnett, Sarah Raven

I’ve had some frustrating experiences in garden centres recently and I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned with them as places to spend my cash. We’re bombarded with the word choice whether it’s where to have an operation, which school you send your children to or the seemingly infinite number of breakfast cereals on offer. And yet you wouldn’t think so if you visited a selection of garden centres.

My attention has been somewhat diverted this spring and summer with all my seed sowing and plant nurturing energies focussed on the plants needed for my book rather than my garden. Once the plants were all happily growing away at the plot I noticed that my garden needed a bit of a lift. Gaps had appeared where bulbs had died down and I didn’t have any plants lurking around to fill these spaces. I didn’t want any perennials, just something that would provide lots of flowers over a long period of time. I didn’t think it would be a problem to find something and paid a few visits to my local garden centres. How wrong could I be.

Meadow style planting on a roundabout courtesy of Newport City Council

I have never been a fan of bedding plants. It seems like gardening for Lilliputians. So many lovely plants that have been bred to be small, which end up losing any charm, and often in the process any pollen and nectar too. I appreciate that some of them have a place in hanging baskets and possibly certain municipal planting schemes. Although I’d much prefer it if councils used more of the meadow-style planting ideas championed by Sarah Raven and Nigel Dunnett. Garden centres and nurseries across the country though are stuffed with bedding plants from April through to June. If you want anything remotely different, something with a bit of height to sway in the breeze or something which provides food for pollinating insects so that the garden is buzzing with life then there’s very little choice in terms of annuals at all. There’s tray upon tray of begonias which I hate with a passion and insipid looking lobelias and alyssum. These tiny, tight, compact plants make me think of a character from Dickens, their face all wizened and screwed up and unhappy with the world.

Cosmos ‘Candy Stripe’

Plants like Cosmos ‘Candy Stripe’ on the other hand, now there’s a plant to love. Frothy, feathery foliage, stems at a height that you can see the flower without having to crouch down and put your back out and lots of pollen for passing bees, hoverflies and butterflies. What about cornflowers, ammi, daucus and rudbeckia? These are all great plants. Now I know what you’re thinking, annuals are so easy to grow from seed and cheap you’d be crazy to buy them as plants from the garden centre. The thing is not everyone has the space, knowledge or inclination to grow these plants from seeds. Even if you do slugs often scupper your plans and sometimes it’s too late to resow and start again. There are times when I’m willing to pay for the quick fix, the plant that someone else has grown and has got it to the stage that I just need to plant it in my sunny garden and within weeks it’ll be flowering. And what about biennials? So many people forget to sow them in June and July probably because they are recovering from the frantic April and May seed sowing and pricking out bonanza. But, come September the only biennials for sale seem to be wallflowers and bedding ones at that. It’s a real pity as there are so many great plants that garden centres and nurseries could sell but they don’t.

Disappointed by the lack of imagination on the annual plant front I turned to dahlias thinking there would at least be a good selection of those. There were a few at the first garden centre but none that really appealed so I thought I’d give some other places a try. With each visit to another garden centre I saw exactly the same dahlia varieties on offer. It was the same with other plants too. So much for choice. Availability and choice for the garden centres themselves is clearly driven by what the wholesale nurseries are offering and, unfortunately for us the consumers, this means less choice rather than more. It feels as if the garden centre industry has succumbed to a sort of supermarketification. I have never really liked the diversification into sickly smelling candles, dubious fashion and travel sweets that so many garden centres have followed in recent years, but I accept that a seasonal business needs to look at other avenues for income. My real gripe is when they don’t get the core element of the business, the reason they are there in the first place, right. I see no point in having 5 independent nurseries within a 30 mile radius when they all sell exactly the same stock.

The online nursery Crocus offers a couple of plants that I see as the new wave of ‘bedding’, taller plants, loved by insects such as Ammi majus and Orlaya grandiflora but mail order isn’t always what you’re looking for on a Saturday afternoon when the time allows for a spot of gardening and inspiration takes over. This is when the local garden centre should come into its own but for me it so rarely does.

Specialist nurseries can be great. Knowledgeable owners and well looked after plants and the specialism means a much wider variety of plants to choose from. But I’ve yet to find one that has tackled the traditional bedding plant market and tried to offer something different. If you know of somewhere I’d love to hear about it. Wildlife friendly gardening is one of the biggest trends at the moment and annuals are some of the best plants for attracting insects and yet the garden centres, or certainly the ones around me, have yet to catch on. I wonder whether it’s because trays of small plants such as marigolds and petunias are so much easier to stack in racks and transport. I can appreciate the logistics but if this is what plant selling has become about, a pile it high sell it quick approach, lacking in inspiration and imagination then it’s sad. I leave you with what must be the world’s smallest dahlia. Need I say any more.

A teeny tiny dahlia

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A Garden for Show

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Chris Beardshaw, Nigel Dunnett, RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Roger Plats

Roger Platts’ stunning garden

It tends to be the show gardens that attract the most attention at Chelsea. Large sponsorship budgets and top garden designers combine with the intention of creating the wow factor. Show gardens can take a year to 18 months in the planning and 3 weeks to build. Then, on the first Monday of Chelsea the designers step back as the world’s press enter Main Avenue and the criticism and plaudits begin. A hush descends on a garden as the RHS judges enter and the designer looks on nervously. Gardens are awarded medals – gold, silver-gilt, silver and bronze on how well the garden meets the brief that was initially submitted, overall impressions and the quality of plants and the build. There is no quota for each medal so, technically, every garden could win a gold medal. Designs are also judged purely on their own merit and not compared to other gardens in the show. The results of the judging are then announced early on Tuesday morning.

Judging on the East Village Garden

Of course, everyone has their own opinion and it was interesting to be there on press day as the judging was taking place and hear the thoughts and predictions as to which gardens people liked the most. If the comments on twitter were anything to go by I wasn’t the only one to be surprised that 10 out of the 15 show gardens won gold. For me it wasn’t that gardens were badly designed or unattractive but some of them just didn’t do it for me. Whilst the judges might assess the gardens individually I would say that most people including myself tend to compare each garden.

The show gardens are quite an odd concept. Appreciating a garden fully only really happens when you can immerse yourself in it, wander through it, touch and smell the plants. Show gardens however provide a two-dimensional experience. Judges and some members of the media can get access to the show gardens but the rest of us have to view from a distance. Of course it would never be feasible to allow the numbers that visit these flower shows full access to the gardens but it might be one explanation as to why the opinions of the judges and the public so often differ. Then there is creating a garden that will look perfect for the third week in May. For most of us the challenge is a garden that will look good throughout the year. Plants need to be placed much closer together than you would ever do in reality to create that feeling of abundance and impact. And what about the practicalities of such a designs in the real world. I looked at the beautiful polished golden York stone path on Roger Platts’ garden having muddy footprints wiped off it before some filming was about to take place. It’s honeyed tones were stunning but it did strike me as being the horticultural equivalent of the white-painted lounge and a toddler with a chocolate bar.

Trailfinders Australian Garden – ‘Best in Show’

Criticisms of the show gardens often focus on the lack of originality. Occasionally there’ll be a Diarmuid Gavin design which stands out or there was the plasticine garden created by James May. These gardens gain a huge amount of publicity which I get the feeling annoys the ‘serious’ designers. Whether you think such gardens should be allowed into Chelsea or not they do offer something different. I’m not suggesting the gardening equivalent of a theme park but a little more variety would be nice. Perhaps it isn’t so simple though. A show garden comes with constraints and limitations before the actual design process has even started. The size and shape of each garden is restricted by the needs of the show-ground access to the site, and services such as underground cables and pipes. Then there’s the need to allow visitors to see as much of the gardens as possible without creating bottlenecks or possible damage to the gardens.

Often there is a story behind a design. Sometimes this can be quite obvious, for instance Nigel Dunnett’s rooftop garden with the idea of showing how with increasing pressure on urban land we should be looking at the potential of our roof space for planting and creating new habitats. For me Jinny Blom’s garden was harder to ‘understand’. I loved elements of the planting but was left a bit cold by the areas of hard landscaping and the stone structure at the back. It was only later that evening when I saw her explaining a bit about the garden on TV that the design made more sense. Inspired by the landscape of Lesotho she had wanted to capture the rocky terrain and buildings that reminded her of the country. Unfortunately this rather passed me by on the day.

Jinny Blom’s Sentebale Garden

It didn’t take long on Monday for me to spot the theme of naturalistic planting which was a feature in so many designs. It has been popular at Chelsea for several years now and is the kind of planting that really appeals to me. I love grasses, poppies and umbel flowers and use that kind of planting in my own garden but you can have too much of a good thing. Just as Dianthus carthusianorum was everywhere last year at Hampton Court, it is the turn of cow parsley to be the ubiquitous plant of Chelsea 2013. This was probably one of the reasons why Robert Myers’ garden disappointed me, by the time I got to it I’d had my fill of wafty, floaty planting.

Another trend in recent years has been the use of greenery and minimalist planting. It was visible again this year although I’m not sure it was so intentional this time around with the weather playing its part. The concept of minimalist planting is an anathema to me. For me the dilemma is there are so many plants I want to grow and just not enough space. There is something a little strange about having a garden and then choosing to restrict the plants and colours in it.

Verbascum ‘Violetta’

One of the reasons for such differing opinions between judges, designers and the public is that we tend to want different things. Judges are looking for adherence to the brief, designers the opportunity to express themselves and the public simply want something they like to look at, something they would want in their own garden. This is perhaps why Chris Beardshaw’s garden and his vibrant planting proved so popular with those I spoke to on Monday.

In many ways, as visitors and viewers on TV, we need to suspend our disbelief and see the show gardens for what they are, a showcase. Big budget sponsors and top class designers are always going to want to create high-end gardens which most of us struggle to relate to but would we want to go to Chelsea and find something we could see in our own village or town? Probably not. Chelsea is about polished floors and walls made from copper, frame-less glass cubes and sunken seating areas. Every year there will be gardens that divide opinion and a garden that the public loves. But enough with the floaty planting, for one year at least.