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.  

Squashwatch

Tags

BBC's Autumnwatch, NGS, Noel Kingsbury, red onion squash, Uchiki kuri

Uchiki kuri squash

Not as enthralling as Autumnwatch and it won’t give you nightmares like Crimewatch, Squashwatch is now under way on my plot. I love squash, apart from looking great and storing well, they are particularly versatile, tasting great in soups, casseroles and even in salads. This spring I decided to give some a go. They do take up lots of space though so I chose one of the smaller varieties, Uchiki kuri, also known as red onion squash, and decided to grow a few plants up a teepee made from some sturdy coppiced hazel poles. Back in March my levels of excitement, enthusiasm and hope for the growing season ahead were at their peak. Of course, as this ‘summer’ has progressed the rain has literally put a damper on this.

It looked like this year was going to be a disaster in terms of my squashes. I ended up with three plants after two were eaten by slugs but that was fine, three plants would be plenty in my first year. They were good-sized plants, nurtured on my kitchen window sill and in a cold frame before I planted them out. But June, July and August were so wet and cool and dull that I swear they didn’t grow at all for a good two months. At the start of August, I was convinced that nothing would come of them. They were the scrawniest, weediest looking things, embarrassingly so. A couple of flowers appeared, there were even the beginnings of a tiny fruit but it rotted and fell off. One day a lady came to interview me about my plot and take some photos for her PhD. I had considered pulling them out, they looked so dreadful but I didn’t get round to it. Luckily, because by early August they suddenly started to grow, sending out long stems and tendrils. They finally seemed happy clambering over the wooden structure I’d provided for them.

I love the flowers on my squash

Then one day I discovered a fruit. It was slightly bigger than a golf ball and I was over the moon, although I did wonder whether it would have enough time to swell further and ripen before any frosts. And then, on a visit to Noel Kingsbury’s garden as part of the NGS, I spotted his squashes. Envy is not an attractive feeling but there I was staring at his multitudinous fruits, all of course much bigger than mine, wondering where I’d gone wrong.

Being a newbie to squash growing, I didn’t realise though just how quickly they can grow once they get going. I suppose I shouldn’t be so surprised, being a member of the Cucurbitaceae family, they are related to courgettes and we all know how quickly they can go from being a small and tasty courgette to a watery, flavourless monster of a marrow.

Climbing Uchiki kuri squash

There are two other fruits but these are much smaller so my hopes lie with ‘No.1 Fruit’, as it has become known. It’s now about the size of a baby’s head, the size of squashes I’ve bought from the supermarket before. Apparently, I now need to wait for the skin to go from being shiny to dull and the colour should change from the yellow it currently is to a beautiful orange. I’ve also read that if you pinch out the growing tip this makes the plant concentrate on swelling the fruit rather than continuing to grow. Maybe if I do this, No.2 and No.3 fruits will reach a decent size, too.

For the fruit to ripen they need to get as much sun as possible so when I’m next at the plot I’ll remove any leaves that are covering the fruits. Fortunately, because I’m growing them up a teepee, No.1 fruit, in particular, is dangling away in the sun all day.

If you have lots of squashes and want to store them over winter it’s important for the skins to harden, to provide a protective coat for the flesh inside. The best way to do this is remove them from the plant in October, as the nights get cooler but you need to leave quite a bit of the stalk as this will protect the top of the squash and stop it rotting in storage. Then place them somewhere, like a sunny window sill or greenhouse, for a week or so for the skin to ‘cure’. Bearing in mind I’m not exactly going to be inundated with squashes, this curing process is less important to me this year. I’m pretty sure once the squashes are ready they won’t last long once they reach the kitchen.

So, I’ll be checking my squashes every day, giving them a seaweed feed and watering in any dry spells. Now there’s a phrase I haven’t used much this year. I never thought I could get so excited by a baby pumpkin.

Tea, Cake and Someone Else’s Garden

Tags

Country Life Magazine, Crocus, Kentchurch Court, national gardens scheme, NGS, Noel Kingsbury, Piet Oudolf, Tom Stuart-Smith, University of Sheffield Landscape Department

I love my tea; I’m quite partial to a slice of cake now and again and I have to admit I do like a nosey around other people’s gardens. Combine them all and I’m like a pig in the proverbial. So, whenever possible, I try to visit an NGS garden where I can indulge in all three and, even better, the money I spend goes to charity.

The National Gardens Scheme (NGS) started in 1927 as an idea to raise money for the Queen’s Nursing Institute. Private gardens would open for the charge of a ‘shilling a head’ and the public would get the opportunity to visit gardens that would otherwise be out of bounds. In the first year 609 gardens opened and by 1931 it was proving so popular that Country Life magazine published a guide-book to the gardens that would open. The ‘Yellow Book’ as it became known, after its colourful cover, now contains over 3700 gardens that open, raising over £2.5 million for selected charities every year.

Persicaria – a classic naturalistic plant

The joy of the NGS is the wide and varied choice of gardens on offer. There are larger gardens which are often already open to the public which donate the admission fee on these days to charity, there are gardens created by renowned garden designers, the personal gardens of these renowned garden designers, creekside cottage gardens in Cornwall, gardens famous for their snowdrops, gardens created by alpine lovers, and gardens high up in the Pennines.

We have visited a few gardens locally to us over the years. There was Meadow Cottage in the Forest of Dean which was a third of an acre and packed with beautiful plants. Kentchurch Court on the Herefordshire/Monmouthshire border has been lived in continuously for more than a thousand years by the Scudamore family and is surrounded by 25 acres of beautiful gardens and woodland. Brockhampton Cottage, the garden of Peter Clay, the co- founder of Crocus, was designed by Tom Stuart Smith the multi-gold medal winner from RHS Chelsea. Then, a couple of weekends ago, we made a trip to the garden of Noel Kingsbury in Herefordshire. Noel is a garden writer, designer and lecturer best known for his ideas on naturalistic planting approaches to garden design. He is a lecturer at the University of Sheffield in the Landscape Department which is building quite a reputation for innovative approaches to our urban spaces. Noel has also collaborated with the designer Piet Oudolf on two books. I’m a big fan of Oudolf’s planting ideas and the opportunity to visit a garden which was similar in ethos was too good to miss.

Noel Kingsbury’s Garden

So often gardens open to the public are not gardens of an individual and are managed by a team of people, the great thing about the NGS is it gives us the opportunity to experience personal gardens and the idiosyncracies in them. Noel’s garden was packed with spirit and personality. He’s obviously a keen traveller which was evident with the yurt, Balinese flags and statues dotted about the garden. There were pots and tables decorated with broken pots and china and small woven willow decorations placed throughout the herbaceous borders and meadow. The garden had a real sense of place sitting comfortably in the local landscape. Noel likes to experiment with the blending and blurring of the line between garden and nature. The more cultivated area of the top part of the garden was planted with persicarias, grasses and sanguisorba, amongst others, taking its influence from nature. Paths meandered down to two ponds and then to a meadow area where the garden and surrounding countryside seemed to merge. Teeming with bees and butterflies the garden appeared to be a haven for wildlife. There were bee hives, a small orchard, chickens and a veg growing area and it felt like a garden of someone with a strong connection to the land.

The Pavillion

I loved his ‘Pavillion’ with its green roof which is used as accommodation for B&B guests but would also make the most amazing place to write. Although, whether you’d actually get much done whilst staring out, onto the garden, is another matter. The slope below the pavillion smelt wonderful with the lavender emitting its essential oils into the muggy air. There was a particularly impressive patch of hollyhocks, towering above me, and swaying in the light breeze; they were like a plant version of his Balinese flags. Not exactly in keeping with the naturalistic planting of other parts of the garden, I liked how, although he obviously has strong ideas about design and planting, there are plants which find their way into the garden even if they don’t necessarily fit.

Hollyhocks

There was squash envy, as I compared my own pathetic plants and my two  measly squashes to his abundance of them.

Squash Envy

I love naturalistic planting but for me elements of Noel’s garden were a little too loose. I personally would like a bit more structure from trees and shrubs. However, that is the joy of visiting other people’s gardens it gives us the chance to see how others use and see the space they have in front of them.

It might be the end of August but there are still plenty of opportunities over the next couple of months to visit some fascinating gardens and of course eat lots of cake. This Sunday, for instance, blogger Victoria’s Backyard opens up her garden in London, on September 2nd Peter Clay, co-founder of Crocus will invite visitors to Brockhampton Cottage and on the same day it’s possible to visit the Pretoria Road allotments in Bristol. The NGS have a great website so it’s really easy to find a garden to visit. I’d love to hear about any NGS favourites of your own.