Tea, Cake and Someone Else’s Garden

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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.

A Question of Taste

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Chris Beardshaw, Jekka McVicar, Piet Oudolf, RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Tom Stuart-Smith

Walking past the trade stands of any of the large flower shows this year it’s clear to see that taste, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and that money doesn’t necessarily buy it. How is it that crazy paving and rock gardens were once so fashionable and yet, now, are design no-nos? Why are gnomes banned from Chelsea and who thought a plastic meerkat skiing would make a great garden ornament? I am fascinated by what appeals to one person can repulse another but I am in no way setting myself up as an arbiter of taste.

Several years ago, I mentioned to a fellow student on a horticulture course I was doing, that my garden was looking like an homage to Barbara Cartland, as I had planted quite a lot of plants with pink flowers. Her reaction, as she visibly recoiled, surprised and amused me in equal measure. Apparently, the colour pink would never be seen in her garden; she didn’t ‘do’ yellow either. I later got to see her garden which was beautiful, tasteful and with no pink or yellow to be seen but I’m sure it could have been equally as lovely with some sunflowers or phlox mingling with the other plants.

What’s wrong with pink?

Gnomes are often derided, seen as the pinnacle of bad taste within a garden. First introduced to Britain in the 1860s from Germany by Sir Charles Isham. He was so enamoured with them he built a rockery in his garden at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire and filled it with gnomes. I can feel the colour draining from the faces of many a garden designer at the thought of rockeries and gnomes. Since 1990, gnomes have been banned from the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, although in 2009, multi-award winning herb grower Jekka McVicar did sneak in her ‘lucky’ gnome, Borage.

I quite like a gnome, his cheeky, cherry little face peering from behind some foliage. I’m less keen on them en masse and even less of a fan when their paint has flaked off and they’ve been repainted using whatever leftover paints were lurking around in the back of the garage. I came home from school once to find repainted gnomes that had developed shocking dress sense, looked a little flushed and one of them appeared to have 2 black eyes. Mum, what were you thinking?

In fact, there is much from the decades of my childhood, the seventies and eighties, that wouldn’t stand the taste test now. Rockeries, conifer gardens, shrubberies and the centrifugal garden with the lawn in the centre and everything else flung out into narrow borders around the edge; it all seems so incredibly dated. Then the nineties and the era of the TV makeover garden brought with it instant gardens, coloured wood stain and the phrase ‘water feature’. One of my own bugbears is the identikit garden assembled entirely from a DIY store or garden centre. There is a street nearby, where there are 3 gardens that all look the same, with their spiky cordylines, large blue ceramic egg-shaped things and metallic planters. For me, personality and individuality are so important in a garden.

Often, it is the scale or number of items that you use in your garden that can tip something from the quirky to the tasteless. I love vintage and recycled bits and pieces. I have 2 zinc baths planted up with herbs and an enamel baking dish full of succulents but I’m well aware that I should limit these items, otherwise ‘rustic chic’ could quite easily become ‘scruffy scrapyard’. For me its plants that are the stars in my garden and everything else should enhance them not detract from them.

One of the biggest puzzles for me is the desire to adorn gardens with a variety of plastic animals. The oversize and podgy blue tit, is possibly the most disturbing creature on display at my local garden centre. There must be a demand for such products though, since a veritable menagerie is on offer.

Piet Oudolf designed garden at Pensthorpe in Norfolk

According to the Horticulture Trades Association, the garden retail market was worth £2.6 billion in 2010. Gardening has become like the fashion industry with the media telling us what plants are in, how we should be using our gardens and companies selling us the latest, must-have products. Plants used in show gardens will spring up in gardens across the country. Garden designers have the power to change our ideas about planting and the whole feel and style of our gardens. In the last decade or so, the Dutch designer, Piet Oudolf, was at the vanguard of introducing us to plants such as echinacea and heleniums and showing us how to use grasses in herbaceous borders, all of which are now considered the height of taste. This more naturalistic planting and meadows and wildflowers are the gardening zeitgeist.

Furzey Gardens, designed by Chris Beardshaw. RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2012 (photo courtesy of picselect)

More traditional plants such as rhododendrons and azaleas have fallen out of favour, so much so, that when garden designer, Chris Beardshaw, used them in his Chelsea show garden this year, he was worried the garden would prove less popular because of his retro style plants. They certainly didn’t stop him winning gold and, much as I love the fluffy, natural style of planting that has proved so popular at Chelsea in recent years, I personally found his garden a refreshing change.  So, does that mean that there will be a shift in what is considered tasteful, planting wise? Will we now want to start growing some of the plants popular 30 or 40 years ago? I’m not so sure but I’d love to see a Chelsea designer try to make conifers cool once again.

Personal taste also has the ability to change with time. I’ve noticed in recent years that I’m seeing plants that I have disliked ever since I can remember in a new light. Irises, for instance, really never did it for me at all but last year I bought the first ones for the garden with plans for more purchases. Sometimes it’s about widening your plant knowledge. I don’t like big, blousy pelargoniums but I’ve discovered the more delicately flowered scented leaf varieties, and the exquisite species, both of which I love.

So, ultimately, we all have our own likes and dislikes, what we consider tasteful, that’s what makes life interesting, after all. If every garden you ever visited looked like a Tom Stuart Smith creation you’d soon get bored and would crave something else and this means accepting all manner of personal tastes   . . . well, maybe not the plastic skiing meerkat.