The Dahlia Papers | gardens plants ideas

Time 2020-10-06 07:03:17

Web Name: The Dahlia Papers | gardens plants ideas

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AND COLOUR!Catalogue cover for the Monochrome exhibition at the National Gallery, London.At this mad end-of-term time I do recommend that you sneak down into the bowels of the National Gallery to see the Monochrome exhibition.  Rattling as I am with that double challenge of finding hilarious or ingenious Christmas stocking presents for my three cucumber cool  kids (they are aged 18 21, you can see the difficulty ) and finishing a sleigh load of writing and designing work,  I have managed to visit twice.I was astounded by Ingres Odalisque in Grisaille pictured on the catalogue (above).  The gorgeous silvery calm of of her gaze lures you into the exhibition from posters rigged up high outside the gallery above the touristy razzmatazz of  Trafalgar Square.   I think I must have seen the image before in books or catalogues but had always assumed I was seeing a print perhaps of the luscious, richly coloured Grande Odalisque painting in the Louvre  and was intrigued to learn that the monochrome odalisque was a a completely separate, subtle, simplified version of the subject, painted for Napoleon s sister.  There are no oriental fabrics or props in the black, white and grey version which gives the painting an abstract quality and allows Ingres to focus entirely on form, light and shadow and it is known that he particularly valued what he achieved here.La Grande Odalisque Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, 1814,  Musée du Louvre, Paris.When I visited Scampston Walled Garden in Yorkshire this summer for Country Life (my piece on the garden will be published next year) I learnt that the many horticulture students who spend time working in this early Piet Oudolf are encouraged to take photographs of the borders and convert them to black and white so that they too are concentrated on form, light and shadow and not distracted by colour.Scampston, Perennial Meadow full colour and black and white.It is an interesting exercise.   In the colour photographs of a group of plants from the Perennial Meadow,  the composition feels balanced with the yellow of the Thermopsis caroliniana, the pinky-mauve of the salvia and the blue-mauve of the Geranium Brookside seeming to make an equal contribution.  In the black and white photograph the upright form of the Thermopsis caroliniana stands out without the clarity and dynamism of these vertical strokes the planting might feel much more muddled.  The neat inky heads of Rudbeckia occidentalis (top right) are also much more noticeable in the black and white photograph.  Again these curious flowers, which have a an almost black central cone and negligible green sepals rather than petals, provide an important staccato accent which animates the scene.Back in the National Gallery, there are many beautiful examples of the simplicity of monochrome being used to reflect the sobriety of Lent and to suport the focus on prayer with minimal distraction.  There is a particularly lovely French stained glass Panel with Quarries and a Female Head from 1320-24 made with grisaille glass and silver stain.Part of a Stained Glass Panel with Quarries and a Female Head, Victoria and Albert Museum London, part of the Monochrome exhibition, National Gallery, London.I love the idea that the silver stain turns yellow in the firing process so that the panel moves gently and richly away from monochrome.  I see the same natural, quiet lustre again in the lovely handblown glass from Afghanistan from the brilliant Ishkar, a company set up to import pieces made by craftspeople affected by war.  Definitely my favourite Christmas purchase.Gold and clear hand blown tumblers from Afghanistan from Ishkar.One of my other favourite pieces in the exhibition was a wall hanging from Genoa pale oil paint on the hard wearing indigo cloth developed in the city in the 16th century this is origin of the word jeans . Agony in the Garden 1538, oil on indigo canvas, State Property on deposit in the Museo Diocesano, Genoa.You need to visit for yourself to appreciate the  tactile satisfaction of white on tough navy blue.  A whole set of hangings would be used to clothe a chalky white chapel during Lent. How wonderful it would be to create something simple using white on blue denim to soften an outdoor loggia.Star of the show for me was the  Donne Triptych by Hans Memling.Hans Memling. The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors (The Donne Triptych) about 1478, National Gallery.Again a photograph is a poor substitution for the demure delicacy of the outer panels which are slightly opened to reveal a tantalising slice of rich red and glowing gold of the VIrgin s Gown within.Detail of Hans Memling, The Donne Triptych, Saint Christopher carrying the infant Christ one of the outer doors.Hans Memling the Donne Triptych central panel National Gallery.Applied to a garden context, this is perhaps the most important lesson of the show the powerful effect of an area of calm and restraint adding hugely to our appreciation of colour when we finally reach it.Rationing colour is not always the solution of course. One of my favourite images this summer is of these dancing poppy seed heads against the uplifting cinnamon coloured walls of Culross Palace in Fife, Scotland.          Poppy seed heads against the uplifting cinnamon coloured walls of Culross Palace.Interestingly, because the composition is so strong, depriving the image of colour is a sad loss.The last room of Monochrome is an installation by Olafur Eliasson, Room for one Colour, where the artist uses single frequency sodium yellow tube lighting to suppress every other colouring in the spectrum, transforming everything into monochrome.  This is in fact a rather fascinating and cheerful experience which has even the most staid art lover losing themselves in the world of the selfie for just a moment.My faithful red notebook is monochrome.And so am I.I leave the National Gallery smiling and thoughtful and head to the Victoria and Albert museum s exhibition Into the Woods Trees in Photography . Here, calmed and held back by a world of different shades of grey, I only have eyes for two photographs by Tal Shochat, Pomegranate and Persimmon 1974. Pomegranate and Persimmon, Tal Shochat, 1974, Into the Woods, V A.Shochat takes perfect specimens of trees, dusts and grooms them to perfection and shoots them studio-style against a dark backdrop. Entirely unreal, but deliciously celebratory.A few days later on a rainy early morning walk in Peckham, South London,  I spy a resplendent persimmon tree in a back garden.  The abundance and the glowing orange colour set against a shapely piece of yew topiary has me smiling from ear to ear.  A perfect city tree which is not to be forgotten as I look forward to possible new gardens in 2018.Persimmon Tree and shapely yew topiary through wire fencing, Peckham.Wishing you all a very Happy Christmas, Non.A young- monochrome me on a Christmas trike.Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... The perfect crimson dahlia Doris Day , 2017 dahlia trials, Parham, West SussexI track down Parham Head Gardener, Tom Brown, in his office where he is carefully stowing away a fat pile of seed packets into a battle-worn filing cabinet.   Melon seeds he grins. The seeds have been brought back from Italy by the Barnard family, who live in this beautiful Elizabethan house in West Sussex, and one of the many challenges Tom will be cheerily taking on in the coming months will be to see how successfully he can get these new varieties of melon to grow.Tom has invited me to Parham to see his 2017 Dahlia Trials. I am delighted to be returning to this atmospheric and constantly inventive garden (see my July 2016 post) and I am thrilled to have the chance at last, after four years of writing a blog called The Dahlia Papers, to consider this most uplifting plant.I love pretty much everything about the dahlia. I love the sheer ballroom-dance-competition glee of each fluffier, more neatly sequinned variety:Gorgeous salmon pink and cream dahlia above and Dahlia  Karma Yin Yang below spotted at the Chelsea Flower ShowAnd I love the neat pompom and ball dahlias for the impossible regularity of of their daintily sculpted, rounded heads here in polka dot form at the Great Dixter Autumn Plant Fair  (7th and 8th October go if you can!).  There are single dahlias too, of subtle or dazzling shades, that can lift or add depth to a border over a long period in late summer. Dahlia Poppy Scotland is a particularly clear bright red cultivar available as a rooted cutting from the National Dahlia Collection .                                                                       Dahlia  Poppy Scotland Dahlias have, of course, become fashionable again in recent times. As has my part of London, Peckham, where exquisitely wrapped English dahlias are available alongside equally exquisite flat breads, pears and cheeses at the lovely General Store in Bellenden Road.Exquisitely wrapped English dahlias, General Store, PeckhamNaturally, for the 21st birthday party of our twin sons at the beginning of this month, dahlias were the obvious cheerful choice:Party preparation rainbow candles, bunting and dahlias21st birthday party with dahlias photo by Freddie Reed21st birthday party with dahlias photo by Freddie ReedBut back to Parham where fifty glorious dahlias have been trialled this summer alongside swathes of gladiolus and a huge patchwork square of zinnias.The 2017 dahlia trials at Parham, West SussexThis is the third year of plant trials in the garden. They began as an ingenious solution to the question: how do you get rid of an infestation of bind weed in a tired border and simultaneously offer something for the visitor to look at? As an experiment, Tom Brown asked his team to see if they could come up with 100 varieties of sunflower. The team cleared the bed and covered the ground with plastic membrane to smother the regrowth, but at the same time  planted the sunflower seeds through small holes in the plastic. The result was a fantastic display and of course the chance to really get to know and compare the sunflowers so that future selections could be based on their own close observation and not just the persuasive description in a seed catalogue. This is gold dust research for the record, favourites include Alchemy , the creamy white Vanilla Ice and Munchkin .The Munchkin sunflower has been a particular favourite of the Parham flower ladies who use cut flowers from the garden throughout the spring and summer to create displays for the house. They like the smaller scale of the flower heads and its branching habit is helpful when creating relaxed arrangements. As we pass a particularly exuberant Munchkin plant, Tom admits that he is unable to explain what happened to the supposedly dwarf characteristic on this one:An inexplicably tall   Munchkin sunflowerIn 2016 there was an equally seductive allium trial and for 2017 Tom enlisted the help of dahlia expert Richard Ramsey (of nearby specialist dahlia nursery Withypitts ) to come up with a list of fifty favourite dahlias for the Parham gardeners and visitors alike to get to know better. The dahlias are arranged in long rows, supported with a grid of string, and have been picked continuously so that their vase performance can be tested too.The sumptuous pink Dahlia  Prefet Demange , Parham dahlia trialsEach of the six Parham gardeners has had their say in the ultimate list of top ten favourites and some tubers  will be immediately reordered for use around the garden next year.The perky orange and yellow Charlie Dimmock has made the top ten and will be used in the about-to-be-revamped Gold Border. Again the flower ladies liked its lightly spreading, smaller flowered form when left to its own devices. To get a larger flower on a long straight stem, the trick with a dahlia is to remove the two side buds and leave the terminal bud to develop into a champion flower.Dahlia Charlie Dimmock a long stemmed champion flowerDahlia Charlie Dimmock left to grow as more relaxed spraysThe substantial semi-cactus Dahlia  Black Jack has also confirmed its place as an absolute favourite (I particularly love the energy of Black Jack as a just opening bud).Dahlia  Black Jack open and in budAnd Dahlia  Small World a free flowering crisp white pompom dahlia did not in fact get to the Top Ten (it was pipped tot the post by Snowflake but has been selected by one of the gardeners, Reese, to be used next year as a sort of small mounding shrub at the front of the White Border.Dahlia  Small World There is a gorgeous, waxy salmon pink dahlia Aljo which also made the top ten.Dahlia  Aljo And two of my favourites which are looking particularly good on the day I visit (not such a reliable approach, clearly) are featured below: The cheerful, Dutch Carnival with its super neat circles of red and yellow petals and the delicate, almost transparent Brother Josh .Dahlia Dutch Carnival (above) and Brother Josh (below)The trial bed is buzzing midweek in September with visitors examining and selecting their own preferred blooms.  The next stage, of course if you are not growing dahlias on their own as cut flowers  is to work out how to combine them in the border.Dahlias are always used with exhilarating panache at Great Dixter . Visitors to the Autumn Plant Fair will be able to catch the late autumn garden there in full swing.I love the sugar pink Dahlia  Hillcrest Candy here soaring to the sky with a backdrop of arching miscanthus.Dahlia Hillcrest Candy , Great DixterIn the Barn Garden, the fiery red Dahlia  Wittermans superba is used with brilliant simplicity against a plain green foil of a fan trained fig. Dahlia  Witterman s Superba against the magnificent fan trained fig, Barn Garden, Great DixterAnd here a deep pink dahlia possibly Hillcrest Royal is a rich accent in a celebratory dance of a border with spiky cardoons, the burnt orange Helenium  Sahin s Early Flowerer and the crazily tall Persicaria orientalist  kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate.Dahlia  Hillcrest Royal adds a deep accent to a border, Great DixterOne of my favourite Great Dixter combinations is Dahlia  Mexican Black a single flowered dahlia which is actually a cross with the chocolate scented Cosmos atrosanguineus    used as a covetable bobbing partner for the rhythmic, deep purple Salvia  Amistad .Dahlia  Mexican Black with Salvia  Amistad I cannot leave Parham, of course, without endless other aspects of the garden catching my eye.The Entrance Border is looking spectacularly bruised and moody.Entrance Border, ParhamI am smitten by Dicentra scandens a pale yellow, climbing bleeding heart I have not met before that lightly clambers over and through the bed which Tom assures me can be grown as an annual if planted in June.Dicentra scandens clambering over sedum in the Entrance Border, ParhamI like the subtle combination of both pale pink and coral pink persicaria with feathery calamagrostis:Persicaria amplixicaulis  Rosea and Firetail with feathery calamagrostis, Entrance Border, ParhamThere is a slightly more silvery version of this palette in the Prairie Border. I love the use of pale yellow Bidens heterophylla to lighten the mood and the way the silky tassels of miscanthus and the dull pink of Eupatoreum work so well with the mottled brick of the wall behind them.The Prairie Border, Parham with pale yellow widens lighting up the borderThere are simple, strong effects such as this stand of white Japanese anemone against an open garden gateJapanese anemone against garden gate, ParhamAnd the zinnia trials introduce me to the delicious antique looking   Queen Red Lime (which did indeed make the Parham 2017 top ten):Zinnia elegans Queen Red Lime Of the many exciting projects at Parham, I am particularly intrigued by a new planting of lilac and Iris sibirica .New planting of Syringa vulgaris  Katherine Havemeyer and Iris sibiricaLandscape designer,  Todd Longstaffe-Gowan comes to Parham a couple of times a year to act as an advisor and sounding board. A plan was developed to do away with a tired looking lavender cross and fill the space with romantic and traditional lilac shrubs emerging from pools of slender Iris sibirica. The gorgeous  Katherine Havemeyer was selected for the lilac: Ashridge Trees describes it as is a scented, double flowered lilac with an elusive colour that ranges from lavender pink to mauvey blue depending on the time of day and  the intensity of the light .Syringa vulgaris Katherine Havemeyer 100 each of 12 different cultivars of Iris sibirica were planted, as a sort of fast track on-the-job  trial. ln fact Iris sibirica  Silver edge is already outstripping its neighbours as by far the best blue . This part of the garden is looking young and quiet at the moment and Tom and his team are making sure that the iris are given a couple of years of pampering, removing any competing grass and mulching generously to get them established. I can imagine a visit in late May in a year or two s time when the groups of iris with their fine mauve-blue flowers and slim sword shaped leaves form a wonderful graceful understory to the clouds of lilac in full flower.Iris sibirica  Katherine Havemeyer A quick peak into one of the new glasshouses reveals that Tom has, despite his initial modesty, already succeeded in growing some perfect specimens of melon. The glass house is heady with their scent and I feel very stupid not to have known before that melons are supported in string bags.Melons in the glass house at ParhamMy contribution is to recommend the passionate Amy Goldman s book on melons  (I have written about Amy Goldman in my post A Gardener s Letter to Paris ).As I am leaving Parham a magnificent stone trough catches my eye. Airy rich yellow bidens, scarlet salvia and gorgeous trails of the purple bell vine, Rhodochiton atrosanguineus. The planting is one hundred percent Parham: exuberant, delicate and slightly unexpected. Thank you Tom for another inspiring visit.Stone trough with widens, salvia and purple bell vine, Parham, West SussexShare this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... LOSING MY HEART ON THE LLŶN PENINSULALush woodland path, Plas-yn-Rhiw estateIt has already been a frantic summer with non-stop gatherings and celebratory toasts. It is the end of school for our youngest son (and the end of an era for us),  our twins have turned 21 and there has been the happiest Gloucestershire wedding my sister to the learned doctor who took time out from his gruelling hospital shifts to bake these tiny wedding cakes:Tiny wedding cakes from my sister s wedding to the learned doctorNot surprisingly I am in a somewhat fragile state by the time I find myself on a radiant July evening sitting on a remote grassy slope at the end of the Llŷn Peninsula known by some as Snowdon s Arm in North West Wales.  Accompanied as I am by marvellous and ever patient husband, Nick, I am ready for a little romance myself.Just stopping for a while to take in the quiet and the view of Porth Neigwl (Hell s Mouth), Llŷn PeninsulaThe garden we have come to see, Plas-yn-Rhiw, has closed for the day moments before we arrive. But although this is frustrating, there is something very sweet when you are very tired about converting to a simpler agenda, just raising your face to the evening sunshine and taking in the blue curve of the bay below.The next morning is heavy with an almost tropical grey sky:Almost tropical grey sky with view across Hell s MouthBut I am excited by the lushness of the ferns in the surrounding woodland    I have never seen hart s tongue fern ( Asplenium scolopendrium) with such long, exuberant fingers and, by the house entrance, the crocosmia glows neon orange in the eleven o clock gloom.Lush ferns extra-exuberant hart s tongue ferns belowCrocosmia glow neon-orange in the morning gloomPlas-yn-Rhiw is a small 17th Century stone manor house built onto a hillside ledge with wonderful views of the sea, entirely surrounded and protected by woodland. In 1816  the house was extended and elegantly glamorised. The roof was raised to add an extra floor, french windows leading onto the garden were cut into the sturdy walls and a slim-limbed Regency veranda was constructed along the facade. But having remained in one family for nearly three hundred years, the house was sold in 1874 and then abandoned in 1922 by the son who inherited it and left to decay.The rarity of the house and the exquisite nature of its position was noted by the architect  Clough Williams-Ellis who designed the Italianate coastal village of Portmerion (about 50 miles away) and whose own imaginative and stylish garden at nearby  Plas Brondanw is absolutely worth visiting.Williams-Ellis had tried to get a friend to buy it in the early twenties and wrote passionately about the property as an important example of Welsh rural architecture that needed saving. To those sailing bleakly across Hell s Mouth bound may be for the last hospitality of Aberdaron or northwards around North Wales land s end through Bardsey Sound there is just one spot where the eye may gratefully rest on relative snugness and that is where the wooded policies of Plas-yn-Rhiw meet the sea in a little bay. Here, sheltered by the shoulder of its protecting mountain from the tempestuous west, crouches an ancient manor house its French windows and verandah look out across the wide expanse of Cardigan Bay between its trees and over fuchsias, figs, rhododendrons and azaleas that here flourish so famously that, when I first reconnoitred the (abandoned) place some twenty years ago the house was buried in a blossoming jungle which also obscured all view of the sea as well as most of the sunlight .But, it was in the end three unmarried sisters, Eileen, Lorna and Honora Keating, who, having holidayed on the Llŷn Peninsula since 1919, managed to buy the house and a reduced estate of 58 acres in 1939.Eileen, Lorna and Honora Keating with thanks to the National Trust Plas-Yn-Rhiw websiteThere are stories of the garden being so overgrown that the women had to clamber in through a first floor window to view the house. Once it was theirs, the sisters set about restoring the building (a slow process during wartime especially), creating a wonderfully deft and welcoming garden and caring for the surrounding land.The green and welcoming garden at Plas-yn-RhiwAs time went by they bought up every available parcel until they had restored the estate to about 400 acres so that it could be protected from development and conserved for wildlife.  They donated the land to the National Trust in 1946 and donated the house itself in 1952.  The youngest sister, Lorna, lived in the house until she died in 1981, but the sisters had opened the house to the public long before. During the restoration process they were keen to unveil the original stonework and the house is filled with (covetable!) old Welsh oak furniture. It looks as if the sisters have just popped out  there is a fur jacket hanging behind a door, a bottle of lavender scent on the dressing table and a small but serious office where business was clearly attended to with wisdom and thoroughness.Best of all there are brilliant views and indeed doors out of the rooms to the garden. Seeing the garden through the French windows of the main living rooms feels comfortable and completely modern, but every glimpse is tantalising, not least from this small kitchen window out to the ruined and romantically planted outbuildings:View to ruined outbuildings, Plas-yn-RhiwThe Keating sisters restored some of the early 19th century outbuildings there had been stables, a dairy, a threshing shed, coach house and a stone dog kennel but also, with almost visionary grace, they left many of the buildings as ruins, there to enjoy for the contrast of stone form against living green. There are archways and rough hewn walls brilliantly energised with voluptuous green ferns and the tiny creeping soleirolia soleirolii (the super invasive baby s tears ) becomes a delicious verdant foil for the handsome cobbles of the courtyard floor. The handsome cobbled courtyard and ruined outbuildings energised with greenSoleirolia soleirolii weaving its way between rhythmical courtyard cobblesAs always in this kind of mild, watery, West coast terrain, I love the way that green starfishes of Maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes) dart across the walls.Maidenhair spleenwort  Asplenium trichomanes growing happily on the stone wallsThere is running water mirrored by prostrate rosemary flowing almost endlessly to the ground.Prostrate rosemary flowing down the wall like water, Plas-yn-RhiwAnd there are magical views through glassless window openings:Here the upright forms of Pennywort stand like candles in the window, Plas-yn-RhiwThere is so much luxuriant green. The ferns that line the walls of The Gardener s Cottage (which is in the middle of the garden you can rent it for a holiday from the National Trust see the Plas-yn-Rhiw website) are as big as a medium-sized shrub.The ferns that line the wall of The Gardener s Cottage are shrub sizeGentle corridors of dynamic ferns make way for healthy, bulging corridors of deep green box: Ferns and box line the paths at Plas-yn-RhiwA home-made, age-old sort of layering makes walking through the garden a deeply charming experience:Bulging, layered box hedging surrounds the Kitchen GardenAn apple tree leans into position against cushioning box hedgesThe occasional steely mauve of acanthus, pale pink hydrangea and velvety blue of aconitum sing out against the contented sea of green: Every so often steely mauve acanthus, pale pink hydrangea and rich blue aconitum sing out against the waves of green.At the top of a box-lined path, a former outbuilding has become an inviting chalky white place to sit: An inviting loggia has been created from an empty outbuildingAt the front of the garden, cheerily uneven compartments of box hold fiery red crocosmia, steely acanthus and royal blue agapanthus against the milky grey sky and matching sea. Cheerily uneven compartments of box hold acanthus, crocosmia and agapanthus against the milky sky and matching seaFinally, round to the elegantly groomed front of the house with its veranda and scalloped beds filled with delicate heads of nicotiana and fuchsia:The front of the house with Regency veranda. The Gardener s Cottage is at right-anglesIn a corner a Hydrangea aspera in bud falls elegantly over a stone trough. The acanthus to its left and purple sage at its feet share the same silvery-purple tones. You get a glimpse here too of the towering trees that rise above the lower level planting. I failed to photograph these but there are gorgeous, lushly growing specimens of magnolia and bay amongst other often slightly unlikely species, many donated to the Keating sisters from other National Trust gardens at their request  when they were first renovating the garden and needed anything they could get hold of to fill the space.Hydrangea aspera falls elegantly over a stone trough.  Acanthus mollis and Salvia officinalis     Purpurascens are excellent companionsI am completely smitten by both house and garden at Plas-yn-Rhiw. The chance to sit on an old stone bench and relish the green and the spreading view and the occasional electric dash of orange or palest pink. I love the plump, guiding corridors of box and everywhere the energy of the ferns.An old stone bench, Plas-yn-RhiwThroughout the garden old stone walls are an enticingly rough contrast to jewel coloured fuchsias, bright orange crocosmia and, under the elegant Regency veranda, this deep raspberry abutilon which twines its way along the front of the house.  A hard place to leave.Abutilon against the stone facade of Plas-yn-RhiwShare this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... INTOXICATING SPRING GARDENS FROM STRATFORD-UPON-AVON TO SOUTH LONDON  Anne Hathaway s Cottage Garden a sculptural philadelphus tree , a sweet-scented riot of tulips and new perennial foliageCharles Rutherfoord s headily fragrant South London garden a sculptural laburnum tree, a border of stepover apples and brilliantly coloured tulipsI have badly wanted to visit the houses and gardens of Stratford-upon-Avon since reading Frank Lawley s inspirational book on the making of his exquisite Northumberland garden, Herterton (see my October 2015 blog post).For Frank and his wife Marjorie, the gardens at Anne Hathaway s Cottage  and Mary Arden s Farm triggered an understanding, a recognition even, that a relaxed, abundant style of planting, anchored by architectural trees and shrubs, was just the kind of intimate, uplifting garden they wanted to create. (Anne Hathaway became Shakespeare s wife, and Mary Arden was his mother). Perhaps our greatest discovery was in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was not the river nor the theatre but the entrancing group of places belonging to the  Shakespeare Birthplace Trust . Following signs through the suburban edges of the town, dodging traffic, a long stretch of clipped hawthorn hedge confronted us. Along the pavement beside it, a crocodile of Japanese visitors was approaching this English shrine that is Anne Hathaway s Cottage  the garden planting was unsophisticated: here were the daisies, thrift and pinks we knew.  The house border had clipped yews and ivy and the profuse white rose, Rosa alba.  And three miles away another long old farm, Mary Arden s House, stood closely beside its lane. Just inside its low wall, warmly furnished with red valerian, there was just space for a very organic thin parterre. The box was well cut, but it had long forgotten any concept of horizontal tops and matching vertical sides. It bulged and spread, denying any entry by path. An odd delphinium was trapped inside. The very narrow house border had topiaries shrubs, this time with clouds of the old pink and purple everlasting sweet pea. Herterton House Garden bulging hedges and tousled plantingAt last, dreaming of bulging hedges and tousled native flowers, I head off to Stratford at the end of April. It is a bit of a jolt to arrive at Shakespeare s New Place and be greeted by immaculate stretches of hard landscaping, a glittering Tempest themed galleon, and shiny bronze raised beds with primary coloured pennants representing all thirty-eight of Shakespeare s plays.       The Golden Garden, Shakespeare s New Place, with pennants representing Shakespeare s                                                           thirty-eight playsBut this is just the beginning. I am nearly down with one blow at the sight of the monumental bronze tree bent under the force of Shakespeare s power of imagination , with its tortured branches hovering over a potent looking celestial sphere .The bronze tree bent under the force of Shakespeare s imagination But then I listen more attentively to the historian from the Shakespeare s Birthplace Trust and realise that I have made the same mistake as many visitors. Shakespeare s New Place is the site of the extensive house and grounds Shakespeare bought for his family and lived in from 1597 until his death in 1616, but the house itself no longer exists. The building we take to be Shakespeare s house is in fact Nash s House, the home of Thomas Nash who married Shakespeare s granddaughter. New Place was, rather astoundingly, demolished by a Rev. Francis Gastrell who, on buying the house in 1753, became so infuriated by visitors asking to see the mulberry tree reputed to be planted by the bard that he cut the tree down in 1758 and knocked the house down the following year, much to the fury of locals and worldwide admirers alike.Shakespeare s Birthplace Trust was established in 1847, following a campaign with vigorous support from luminaries such as Charles Dickens, to save Shakespeare s home for the nation and is now custodian of an enormous world class collection and archive. To celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare s death the garden at New Place has been given a substantial and despite my initial sense of surprise deeply thoughtful overhaul. Archeological investigations have established  for the first time the footprint of Shakespeare s house and outbuildings and these are discreetly marked out in elegantly engraved bronze strips. Every element is a tool for story telling to make the past come alive. I loved discovering that the feisty Anne Hathaway ran her own successful malting business from buildings in what is now the Great Garden.Engraved bronze strips embedded in the paving mark the footprint of Shakespeare s house, barns and outbuildingsA circle of pleached English Hornbeam marks the position of the house, offering a fitting structure and the feeling of shelter for a set of magnificent curved oak benches space to sit for some of the 825,000 visitors each year to the Trust s properties. The benches were made with the help of local students by Warwickshire cabinet maker Armando Magnino. A circle of pleached hornbeam offers structure and shelter to a set of magnificent locally made curved oak benchesGlyn Jones whose immaculate pedigree includes working alongside Penelope Hobhouse at the seventeenth century Tintinhull and many years as Head Gardener at Hidcote  has been appointed as Head of Gardens. He has five Stratford Gardens in his care: Shakespeare s Birthplace, New Place, Anne Hathaway s Cottage, Mary Arden s Farm and Hall s Croft, the home of Shakespeare s daughter, Susannah, and her husband Dr John Hall which is to have a newly designed physic garden. He admits that the gardens have become a little too uniform over the years and he has plans to develop their individuality and to encourage creativity and experimentation.Wisteria against the soft red brick walls of Nash HouseDespite the demanding scale of his brief, you cannot fail to have faith in a man who looks with fatherly tenderness at the imposing elegance of the pleached hornbeam and describes his relief that each tree has come happily into leaf this spring as they were seed grown and as such there were  no guarantees . He offers a similar almost wistful concern for the long established mauve wisteria trained in a happy tangle against the soft red brick of Nash s House.   That s Chinese Wisteria,  Wisteria sinensis.  Japanese wisteria (Wisteria floribunda) would have been a better choice it is more fragrant and comes into flower later and so is less likely to be hit by frost .For me, the New Place garden gets really interesting in the next section where a newly renovated Sunken Knot Garden lures the visitor on with its subtle order and soft tapestry of santolina, hyssop, thyme, standard roses and dusky Tulip Queen of Night . The Sunken Knot Garden at Shakespeare s New PlacePaths have been unobtrusively widened for full disability access and the original arched bower which runs down one side a sort of rounded pergola has been lovingly rebuilt in oak and the old crab apples (some 100 years old) carefully repositioned over their new frame.The fine new oak Bower with openings for benches from which to look onto the Knot GardenThe walls and fences on the other three sides of the Knot Garden are clothed, as befits the archetypal knot garden, in productive plants and every detail is beautifully arranged. I love the way the spreading wall-trained fig is lushly underplanted with a simple combination of silvery-blue iris and inky tulips. The Knot Garden wall clothed in a fan trained fig underplanted with iris and tulipsEuonymous japonicus  Green Rocket has been used with great success instead of box to mark out the shapes and edges of the knot garden. It is not as tight as box admits Glyn but it looks very good . Garden designers have become reluctant to specify box for new gardens because of the blight which has ravaged so many European and now New Zealand and US gardens, and long established gardens such as Sissinghurst are growing stocks of this kind of Euonymous as a back up should the worst happen. However, the cheerful neatness of this Green Rocket encourages me to suggest a knot garden or at least formal evergreen edging the next time an opportunity arises.Euonymous japonicus  Green Rocket (with thyme above) providing a smart bright green edging to the Sunken Knot Garden, New PlaceAs I am mulling over elaborate possibilities for creating my own intricate Elizabethan knot garden, I have the rug pulled again from under my feet when I learn that the original Sunken Knot Garden at New Place was only installed in 1922. It is clear that Shakespeare was familiar with knot gardens there is a curious knotted garden in Love s Labours Lost and in Richard II the whole of England is described as a garden in a state of neglect: the whole land/Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up/Her fruit trees all unpruned, /Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs/ Swarming with caterpillars  But it was an eminent Edwardian garden historian, Ernest Law who set about designing a sunken parterre  for New Place, convinced that the addition of a historically accurate garden of the kind  Shakespeare would have known would be an important and illuminating addition. The Trust has in its collection an original copy of Thomas Hill s The Gardener s Labyrinth , regarded as the first English gardening book, which has detailed guidance and templates for the shapes of knot gardens Law could have used. But, as Roy Strong sets out in his 2016 book The Quest for Shakespeare s Garden (which I have to tell you, includes a well observed and very funny chapter on Lucia s  Shakespeare s Garden in E.F. Benson s Mapp and Lucia), Ernest Law was  ambitious for something special.  As well as drawing inspiration for balustrades of Warwickshire elm and a   dwarf wall, of old fashioned bricks hand-made, sun-dried, sand-finished from Thomas Hill s work, he sourced his four knot designs from Mountaine , Gervase Markham s Country Housewife Garden (1613) and William Lawson s New Orchard and Garden (1618). Donations for the Knot Garden included plants from major UK botanic gardens plus four standard roses from different members of the Royal Family to stand at the centre of each square. The garden is notable as the first attempt at recreating a historic garden and opened the door to Garden History as a rich and revelatory subject.An illustration from Thomas Hill s The Gardener s Labyrinth showing a hand pump for wateringRoy Strong s The Quest for Shakespeare s Garden published for the 400th year anniversary of Shakespeare s deathFinally to the Great Garden an acre and a half of lawn, spreading mulberry trees (more stories for another time perhaps) and 295 feet of tremendous bulging yew hedges!Tremendous bulging yew hedges and buttresses at New PlaceUnsurprisingly perhaps, these hedges are another test for the lens through which we view historic gardens. Despite the great age suggested by the uneven, spreading bulk of these glorious stretches of yew, with their substantial buttresses marking out broad beds for herbaceous plants, they were in fact only planted in the 1920 s, and the shape of the borders was developed with advice from the great Edwardian plantswoman Ellen Willmott. The hedges were also crucial in Ernest Law s eyes to hide the formal  Victorian cast iron railings that ran the length of the garden and were doing nothing to help bring a Tudor garden to life. Head of Gardens, Glyn Jones eyes up the hedges and explains that they would have first lost their crisp, ordered shape during the Second World War when the gardeners went off to fight. He wonders for a moment (with a Hidcotian glint in his eye?) if the correct thing to do would be to restore them to their original 1920 s proportions. Horror! For me and clearly for the rest of the group the hedges as they are now are a key pleasure of New Place and help the gardens feel anchored and settled despite the great bustle that goes on all around them.The garden is suddenly flooded by a group of French school children. I smile at the proprietorial way a girl stands before the hedge they call The Elephant to photograph her friends in the cave-like inside. The garden with its fine hedges is robust enough to take it.The garden is suddenly flooded by school childrenTaking a photograph of The ElephantIt is a twenty minute walk from New Place to Anne Hathaway s Cottage at Shottery.  In Shakespeare s time Shottery was a separate hamlet to which the young eighteen year old would head (Macron-style) to woo Anne who was twenty six. But now it is situated just at the edge of town. You follow a path up to the Cottage with a just- seen Shottery Brook on your left screened by a rather beautiful, unashamedly Ophelia-resonant, living willow fence.                                      The living willow fence which screens Shottery BrookIt feels rather surreal to be finally arriving at such an iconic place, not least as I realise again that the thing to grasp is the complex layering of time. What we are about to see is a house that would have stood in Shakespeare s day and a garden that is our 21st Century interpretation of a late Victorian/Edwardian notion of a cottage garden. A more natural look and a celebration of simple native plants had been made popular by the persuasive words of William Robinson in books such as The English Flower Garden  (1883) and so, when drainage improvements were made to Anne Hathaway s Cottage in the early 1920 s, Ellen Willmott was asked to redesign the garden. You are likely to have heard of  Miss Willmott s Ghost the silvery sea holly (Eryngium giganteum) named for the imposing plantswoman s supposed habit of scattering seeds secretly in other peoples gardens. How stories turn into other stories: I was rather taken aback to see the entry for Eryngium giganteum on the Chiltern Seed website with the advice that as it is a ghostly coloured plant   grow it and scare your friends!                                              Eryngium giganticum  Miss Willmott s GhostThe approach to Anne Hathaway s CottageGlyn Jones has many plans afoot to invigorate and further sweeten the garden at Anne Hathaway s Cottage. His first idea is to slow down the visitor s arrival so that instead of seeing the house straight away over the garden hedge, they approach it more slowly  and more romantically through the orchard. He and his team are already hard at work trying to relax the orchard the grass has been over-fertilised and needs to be stripped of nutrients and sown with yellow rattle to achieve the mown-paths-through-long-grass look that is as desirable today as it was a hundred years ago. He is letting the surrounding hedges grow loose for the next three years with a view to laying them properly when there is enough new growth.The Orchard in the grounds of Anne Hathaway s CottageThere is already a successful programme of vegetable growing using varieties that would have been available in Edwardian times. Nestling into the low hawthorn hedges, they help anchor the cottage in a timeless seasonal pattern.Traditional vegetables at Anne Hathaway s CottageWhen our group is finally standing before the perfectly thatched cottage with its three broad borders of jewel-coloured tulips emerging from the luxuriant new foliage of herbaceous perennials,  it has just stopped raining and we are all grinning from ear to ear to be amongst this sea of fresh and fragrant colour. Glyn Jones tells us that his team has been taking cuttings from the now tree-like Philadelphus (mock orange) by Ellen Willmott near the house and how they will be echoing her method of blending the ornamental into the wild. She used to plant ornamental shrubs into the hedgerows, at first one shrub every few yards and, as you got further from the house, perhaps one shrub every twenty yards, so that the transition was barely noticeable.Anne Hathaway s Cottage borders filled with tulips, a tree like Philadelphus now almost as tall as the houseHe explains how the Willmott-designed borders are going to be meticulously cleared and replanted one at a time:The first of three borders lying fallow as it is cleared of weeds before replantingGlyn wraps up by airing his worry about the tulips: surely they are too much of a muddle, not of the period, too garish?  . There is an outcry!The riot of tulips and fresh foliage in one of the borders in front of Anne Hathaway s CottageMy group all love the technicolour buzz of the place and cannot bear the idea of a filter of perfect taste being applied to future plantings.  But caring for this kind of iconic garden, considering what might be historically accurate, respecting the input of other passionate gardeners over the years and leaving room for some contemporary creativity is a demanding balancing act .  I will definitely be back to see the gardens as they are guided into the future by such a fine and thoughtful gardener.The borders at Anne Hathaway s Cottage remind me almost uncannily of the wonderfully intense garden I have just visited in London.Charles Rutherfoord s Garden an exhilarating, scented kaleidoscope of tulips and step-over apple trees.Charles Rutherfoord s and Rupert Tyler s Clapham garden had an almost identical, giddying impact on the 250 or so  NGS visitors on a late April afternoon. In a private garden, of course, a sense of excitement of entering a different world can be created and enjoyed with utter freedom. I love the way that Charles and Rupert just go for it. This is a celebratory garden where thousands of tulips, voluptuous tree peonies and velvety iris blaze away with abandonment at the back of their sleekly elegant house. The peonies alone make you want to hit the Kelways website to order the voluptuous, rich pink Japanese tree peony Cardinal Vaughan as soon as you get home.Paeonia  Cardinal Vaughan amongst tulips and irisesI am riveted to discover that as well as the glowing pink tulip Mariette which Charles has planted for the first time and the dark foil of tulip Queen of Night the red and yellow flamed tulips which light up the display are in fact tulips which have just emerged this way older tulips with a virus. It s so exciting. Last year there were one or two, now the whole space is filled with them .This is a garden that is gardened intuitively by a passionate and knowledgeable plantsman. I only really think about the garden when I am working in it. I move plants around and put them where they feel right. He does not remember consciously arranging the three groups of rich purple iris, but enjoys the fact that they have found perfect places  two clumps flanking the step-over apple border to the tulip bed and a third clump in a slightly different part of the garden, serving as a comfortable echo.Paths to take you round the garden are developed in a similar hands-on, organic way with a section of sun-warmed path made from raised sleepers forming a central axis under the yellow glow of a laburnum tree, a handsome path of stone and brick flanked by the stepover apples and mounds of rosemary and new curving path of reclaimed yellow brick lighting up a shady tunnel under the weeping branches of Acacia pravissima.Hand built paths of railway sleeper, stone and brick paths flanked by apple trees and rosemary  and a curved brick path through a shadier part of the gardenI love the contrast of the painterly feel of the garden with the restrained perfection of the house interior and the way that the garden fills the windows with such generosity.Painterly view from the top floor of the house the sculptural, weeping branches of Acacia pravissima in the foreground. The grey leaved tree behind it is Acacia baileyana  Purpurea The rear of the garden with a delightful tapestry of Cercis canadensis, Cotinus  Grace and more flamed tulipsThe immaculate, elegant interior of Charles Rutherfoord and Robert Tyler s house with views through to the abundant garden. House Garden May 2017 edition, photographs by Michael SinclairEuphorbia mellifera is used wonderfully throughout the garden as a relaxed, deliciously honey-scented architectural plant here with its bronze flowers providing delightful contrast to the ceanothus and borrowed wisteria behind:And here with the canopy of large specimens lifted so that you can walk underneath and enjoy the light shining through:There are mounds of acanthus and huge-leaved rosettes of Echium pininana all over the garden which will provide soaring structure later in the season. And everywhere, there is the refreshing use of yellow!  An inherited laburnum tree has been flat-topped so as not to restrict the view from the house and has become is a sunny, sculptural presence at the heart of the garden.The flat topped Laburnum tree at the heart of the gardenThe laburnum lights up the comparatively austere back of the house  and its flat top provides a cheerful tiered staging effect for the theatrical row of dancing tulips on the balcony above.Laburnum and dancing tulips against the houseMounds of deliciously scented, paler yellow Coranilla valentina subsp. glauca  Citrina flank the sleeper path. This is my new favourite must-have plant (after the tree peonies) for its structure as well as its early colour and fragrance:                       Coranilla valentina subsp. glauca  Citrina flank the sleeper path (with an already surging echium front right)And in delightful, shadier spaces, the curving stems and rich yellow lantern-like bells of Brugmansia suaveolens (Angel s Trumpets) light up the shadows: Brugmansia suaveolens Angels TrumpetsThere is a fine yellow tree peony (Paeonia lutea var. ludlowii ) also just opening in the shade a less showy tree peony to be remembered for its fine architectural leaves and a rare yellow, wonderfully fragrant honeysuckle Lonicera  Anne Fletcher draped over a clever screen made of sleepers which divides the garden and creates a discreet place for a table and chairs:Paeonia lutea var. ludlowiiLonicera  Anne Fletcher The clever screen tall enough to really feel hidden away but light enough to see through made of railway sleepersThe glass table is the first piece of furniture Charles designed.  He has made many pieces of indoor furniture: it would be fantastic if he would consider making outdoor furniture too. I love this curved oak slatted seat and footstool. Next step a bench in the same elegant, rustic/industrial style?Oak seat and foot stool designed by Charles RutherfoordThe garden is full of much loved individual touches. There are exquisite plants Charles has fallen for which intrigue close-up but have a surprisingly easy going presence within the garden as a whole. This finely veined pink camellia for example (which I think is Camellia japonica  Lady Vansittart ) or the white-edged purple lilac Sensation which billows in soft clouds in one corner of the garden.Camellia japonica  Lady Vansittart Lilac Sensation And there are covetable pieces of sculpture, my favourite are a pair of stone finials of shooting flames which Charles has placed to frame the view of the garden from the balcony.  I love the simplicity and strength of the flames and their robust stands they could almost be contemporary but they are Italian Baroque from a church or bishop s palace perhaps.One of a pair of baroque stone finials which frame the view down to the gardenFascinatingly and fitting for a story about gardens which have many layers these finials were used by Cleve West in his 2012 Chelsea Garden and bought by Rupert for the garden when the show garden was dismantled. Cleve West had used them brilliantly at the top of Arts and Crafts influenced gate posts so when the flames arrived in Clapham the bulbous stands were an added bonus.Cleve West s 2012 Chelsea Garden for Brewin DolphinNestled at the end of the tulip border is a rather space age Solardome greenhouse. Inside, on beautiful hardwood shelving (of course), are succulents, pelargoniums and a happy lemon tree with impossibly fat lemons. The centre of the greenhouse is filled with huge containers of dahlias just coming into leaf   purples and oranges, mostly cactus varieties . These will replace the tulips for the summer. There is something magical about looking out onto the exuberant garden through the misty geometric panes. Succulents and a lemon tree in the greenhouse with glimpses of the exuberant garden beyondHow extraordinary to have seen so many centuries of intense English spring garden in the space of just a few days. I could not have done more even with my own time travel machine.Charles Rutherfoord s and Rupert Tyler s Solardome GreenhouseShare this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... ON THE TRAIL OF E A BOWLES  SLOWING DOWN MY THINKING ABOUT CROCUS AND OTHER SPRING BULBSThe silvery outer petals of not-yet-open Crocus tommasinianus, my front garden.Radiant silvery-mauve Crocus tommasinianus displaying their rich orange stamen in the sunshine.My relationship with crocus has, up until now, been a simple one. I have loved the gentle reliability of the silvery-mauve Crocus tommasinianus and as a garden designer I have often used it as the first to flower in a bulb programme for clients gardens. It works well planted generously (they are not expensive) to form an undulating ribbon to quietly light up a border in February. It is also wonderfully effective in grass. In my own front garden I have planted a semi circle around a multi stemmed magnolia tree. I love the way the crocus foliage emerges suddenly each year from the expanse of lawn, at first offering an almost ghostly silvery sweep and then, on the first really sunny day, socking it to the street, an uplifting arc of rich purple which literally stops passers-by in their tracks.The closed crocus form a discreet ordered semi circle.For a week or two the open crocus become an eye-catching swathe of purple.Contrary to popular myth my semi circle was not intended to form a C (the initial of my family surname) but I do have a friend whose husband planted her initial O  in Crocus tommasinianus in the lawn one autumn as a complete surprise for her. If the weather works in your favour the crocus should be in flower on Valentine s Day so a romantic gesture to try perhaps this autumn?Earlier this week I found myself heading, initially rather unpromisingly, to Enfield, North London, to find out more about one of the twentieth century s great gardeners and   Crocus King  E A Bowles (1865-1954).Turkey Street Enfield en route to Myddelton House.It is hard to imagine now what it must have been like to arrive at Bowles home, Myddelton House, in the late 19th and early 20th century, but on March 1st 2017 it was a relief to get away from the network of subways leading from a lonely section of Ginger Line and arrive at the imposing early 19th house where the eminent plantsman spent so many years growing studying, painting and writing about plants. Myddelton HouseIn 1914 Bowles wrote My Garden in Spring based on his personal and passionate observations of the garden around the family home. He gardened here with tireless experimentation despite his frustration at the growing conditions: the climate, soil and trees contrive to make it the driest and hungriest in Great Britain . My Garden in Spring was followed by My Garden in Summer (also published in 1914) and My Garden in Autumn and WInter (1915). These became best sellers, regularly reprinted, and were followed by A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum (1924)  and A Handbook of Narcissus (1934), both leading studies of their day.My 1972 edition of My Garden in Spring .Bowles befriended the great plant hunters of the time  including the legendary Reginald Farrer who wrote a feisty introduction to My Garden in Spring  made hundreds of drawings and painting of plants (many now held at the RHS Lindley Library) and nurtured fine cultivars of a wide range of plants, many of which still bear his name today. These include the richly coloured  and edible Viola Bowles s Black , Carex elata  Aurea or Bowles Golden Sedge a wonderful evergreen grass that lights up the darkest corner and Vinca minor La Grave or Bowles Variety a fantastic ground cover plant, less invasive than Vinca major, smothered in lavender blue flowers from April to September. With typical charm, Vinca Bowles Variety was spotted in a French churchyard en route to a plant hunting trip to the Alps.The richly coloured and edible Viola  Bowles s Black .Carex elata Aurea or Bowles Golden Sedge a wonderful evergreen grass that lights up the darkest corner.Vinca minor  La Grave or Bowles Variety a fantastic ground cover plant, less invasive than Vinca major, smothered in lavender blue flowers in from April to September. My Garden in Spring has a gentle honesty that feels refreshing despite its age. Many find the garden too museumy to please them he sets out frankly near the beginning of the book and there are some spectacularly ponderous diversions such as the following saga on the elusive definition of spring: a large number of people over a certain age would insist that Spring no longer exists, and would probably endeavour to prove this assertion by lengthy reminiscences of halcyon days of yore, which provided early opportunities for picnics and thin raiment. Who has not heard their Great-Aunt Georgina hold forth on the Indian muslins that in bygone Mays were all-sufficient for her comfort But it does not take long for the reader to be caught up in Bowles enthusiasm and enormous attention to detail. Here his description of Crocus balansae gives a taste of the depth of his passion:Crocus olivieri ssp. balansae  Zwanenberg photo courtesy of specialist Alpine nursery Potterton s. Crocus balansae … has three outer segments externally of a deep mahogany colour, and in bud looks nearly black and is very hard to see, but the moment these deep-coloured segments part, the rich orange of the inner segments makes a most conspicuous and beautiful object of the flower … Everyone who sees it for the first time is astonished at its beauty, and can hardly believe it is real, like the little girl at the Zoo, who after gazing at the Anteaters said, But there aren t really such animals as those, are there, Nurse. Bowles can be as furiously dismissive of certain crocus as he is enthusiastic about others. I do not care so much for large clumps of any white form. At the back of the borders they look too cold, and suggest unmelted snow pats or, of Crocus graveolens,  one little yellow crocus has an obnoxious trait in its character and is a little stinking beast, as Dr Johnson defined the stoat . But mostly he just wants to explain why every garden ought to have large clumps of (yellow) crocus to brighten up the bare soil in February or the charms of his favourite Crocus chrysanthus I greatly admire a gourd-shaped crocus; it means that the throat is wide and full, and the segments ample and rounded … so that an unopened blossom has a distance waist about two-thirds of the way down … when fully expanded the segments bend outwards from above this waist, forming a round rather than starry flower. I am beginning to look at the crocus with different eyes. We treat Crocuses au grand sérieux in this garden, giving over two double-light frames to their service in the very sunniest part of the kitchen garden writes Bowles at the beginning of his chapter on the genus. It is these frames, re-introduced to the garden at Myddelton House by the hard-working E A Bowles Society,  that I have come to see with the London group of the conservation charity, Plant Heritage.Walking into the same ordered kitchen garden extensively restored since 2009 with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund and peaking into the steeply slanting Peach House with its immaculately fan-trained peaches pink with blossom, I feel a pang of desire when I arrive at the jewel box National Collection of Crocus, each in its individual pot embedded in sand.The Peach House with fan-trained peaches in full blossom. The fleet of stilted cold frames containing the E A Bowles Society National Collection of Crocus cultivars.Liz MacNicol is the splendidly named Crocus Co-ordinator at Myddelton House  (NB this is a Plant Heritage job title extreme general enthusiasts go under the banner of Croconut ).  A National Collection is defined as a collection of at least 75% of available cultivars and, in the case of the E A Bowles Society collection, cultivars includes all those bred by E A Bowles and still known to be in existence. Infuriatingly the yellow Crocus chyrsanthus E A Bowles seems to have disappeared altogether although there have been hopeful sightings as reported by John Grimshaw in 2010.Painting by E A Bowles of Crocus chysanthus E A Bowles courtesy of John Grimshaw s Garden DiaryThe Myddelton House Crocus Collection is painstakingly monitored at every stage of growth. Watering begins in January and carries on weekly until the leaves have died down. The crocus are fed Phostrogen every fortnight during the same period and deadheaded weekly so that the plants do not set seed (with the obvious danger of cross fertilisation). This year everything was very late because of the cold spell in January. Liz was convinced there would be precious losses as there was no green at all in the second week of January, but in fact the cool but steady early spring that has followed seems to be bringing about a satisfyingly long display. I am surprised and then saddened that the crocus are not labelled and only numbered for security reasons, but perhaps the advantage of no name is that you look even harder at the tiny differences in shade and delicate marking of the pots of crocus on display.Of course there is no harm in a little light guesswork. This gorgeous, singing pink, starry-flowered crocus is probably Crocus tommasinianus Roseus  described by the specialist nursery Potterton s as an outstanding and justifiably popular form with numerous large, bright rose-pink flowers, that are silvery-grey outside .Possibly Crocus tommasinianus  Roseus .And this is possibly Crocus chrysanthus  Snow Bunting which Potterton s Nursery describes as     ivory with a faint purple blush on the outside of the petals. It has a delicate musky scent and bright yellow orangey anthers and has received the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  The wonderfully delicate Snow Bunting is the only crocus bred by E A Bowles still commercially available. It naturalises happily and is absolutely one for my autumn list:Crocus  Snow Bunting photograph © the E A Bowles Society.As I read up about the finely marked, washed lavender Blue Pearl often one of the earliest crocus to emerge and surprisingly tough and long lasting in grass  and the vibrant purple feathering on the pale yellow fragrant Gypsy Girl , I realise that my list of desirable (and happily readily available) crocus is growing longer and longer.Crocus biflorus  Blue Pearl photograph © the E A Bowles Society.Crocus  Gypsy Girl photograph © the E A Bowles Society.Other crocus are extremely rare, surviving only by being nurtured in this careful way and should be enjoyed for the short time they are in flower. The Myddelton House Collection contains such treasures as the slow-to-reproduce and the graceful Crocus  Kittiwake (Bowles named a whole series of crocus after birds, one of his other great interests), and Crocus tommasinianus  Bobbo named to remind me of the sharp-eyed boy who was the first to spot it .Crocus Kittiwake photograph © the E A Bowles Society.Crocus tommasinianus  Bobbo Crocus © the E A Bowles society.Beyond the cold frames at Myddelton House, Bowles encouraged Crocus tommasinianus to form generous uplifting drifts along with snowdrops. He would be constantly on the look out for unusual crocus which he would select and grow on. So now, as well as being able to choose a particular shade  a darker purple or a more rosy hue perhaps there are opportunities to extend the period of colour by planting bulbs which flower in succession.  Huge numbers of Crocus tommasinianus and snowdrops in the Alpine Meadow and Rock Garden at Myddelton House.I find myself turning again to Anna Pavord s wonderful book Bulb (published in 2009, so a mere sprig in horticultural book years) to find out more. Bulb was the result of season after season of growing every kind of bulb and taking the trouble to observe them closely and to appreciate both finer and irritating qualities. It is written in her usual seductive style which is both learned and personal and by the end I am dangerously resolved to grow entire table-fulls of bulbs in pots next year, as well as to attend to the question of succession in my own front garden.BULB by Anna Pavord.A wise sequence of Crocus tommasinianus could well be the mid February flowering Whitewell Purple ( the stigma is brilliant orange, the stamens paler, though you need sun to see the beauty of the inside, when the flower opens flat like a spreadeagled sunbather ), Barr s Purple , named after the great Victorian nurseryman Peter Barr, and finally the late February  Ruby Giant which, as Ms Pavord wryly observes, is neither ruby, nor a giant, it is a beautiful crocus, the three outer petals faintly stippled with paler streaks .Crocus tommasinianus  Whitewell Purple photograph © Broadleigh Bulbs.Crocus  Barr s Purple photograph © Potterton s Nursery.Crocus tommasinianus  Ruby Giant photograph © Potterton s Nursery. Mulling this over how many of each to order to top up my existing Crocus tommasinianus?  I step out of the Kitchen Garden into a series of glass houses. These are furnished with families of colourful exotic plants and have the friendly, storytelling quality of a Henri Rousseau painting. Glass House next to the Kitchen Garden.My favourite is a glass conservatory built onto the house itself. I love the chequered floor tiles, the white painted, curly Victorian ironwork and inside a little world of shocking pink flowers,  skinny, emerald green cactus and a louche flowering Aeonium in an old lead water tank.  Perhaps because of the curiousness of the collection, and the proximity to the house, there is a feeling of pure excitement in the conservatory that brings us a little closer to the great man himself. Conservatory, Myddelton HouseI speed back into town where I am to meet Andrea Brunsendorf, the talented and exacting Head Gardener of the Inner Temple Gardens  the constantly surprising three acres of garden surrounded by Barristers chambers between Temple and Blackfriars stations. I wrote about the gardens in their full September glory in my The Dahlia Papers post SECRET LONDON BENCHES. I have already heard about Andrea s frustration with the damage a group of six or seven pigeons, a mixture of wood and street pigeons, are inflicting year after year on the south facing bank where she has tried everything she can to achieve something even close to a sheet of crocus.  She explains that her lack of success is particularly galling as she trained at Kew which is famous for its huge spreading seas of pale purple and white at this time of year and yet all she has to show on March 1st are these sporadic dark purple clumps of  Ruby Giant (remember Anna Pavord s wise words : Ruby Gian is neither ruby, nor giant ).Crocus tommasinianus  Ruby Giant on the south facing bank The Meadow at Inner Temple Gardens.Beheaded clumps of Crocus tommasinianus Ruby Giant , Inner Temple Gardens.Pigeons are well known for attacking yellow crocus, and some gardeners will avoid yellow ones completely, but Andrea has used only purple and white cultivars, and has done everything by the book: successional planting of different crocuses in an open sunny spot, starting off with several hundred in each section and then adding perhaps 150 new bulbs each year; she has employed fake birds of prey; real hawks ( the hawks came on Wednesdays and the pigeons just came back on the Thursday ); and one year she went for the full allotment style CD s dancing in the wind. We discuss other possible crocuses Sarah Raven s favourite crocus is Crocus chrysanthus  Spring Beauty which she regards as super tough as well as exquisite with deep purple feathering on pale mauve and Dan Pearson had success in his London garden with Crocus tommasinianus  Lilac Beauty one that Andrea has not in fact tried. Andrea notes these down with wistful enthusiasm and then her face lights up with a fanciful idea of sourcing hundreds of yellow windmills the kind children play with at the seaside and planting them in droves amongst the crocus… There have been better years: once we had not cleared the Persicaria orientalis on the borders immediately above the meadow so there was a great alternative food source nearby which seemed to make a difference. But it is an incredibly difficult thing to experiment with scientific precision when you are caring for a garden that has to look good throughout the year.In the end Andrea thinks she will have to look to other plants to accompany the crocus scillas probably (although they are disappointingly pale ), or the rich gold and mahogany coloured Primula  Gold Lace .Primula Goldlace amongst emerging Smirnium perfoliatum elsewhere in the garden.The Inner Temple Garden is open to the public during the week at lunch time. There are rare trees and shrubs, amazing displays of tulips and the herbaceous borders are an extraordinary contrast to the manifestly serious buildings which surround them. It is worth visiting at absolutely any time of year. What is more,  Andrea Brunsendorf s quarterly column on her work in the garden, Garden News, is full of inspiring and generous observations.When I visited a few days ago I was smitten by this gorgeous, weeping Acacia pravissima  a small elegant evergreen tree about to burst into yellow, fragrant flower and by the low mounding cushions of Coronilla valentina subsp. glauca Citrina softening the central stone steps and again on the verge of opening into scented, paler yellow flower: Acacia pravissima Coronilla valentina subsp. Citrina .As we are saying goodbye, Andrea has an idea. Looking across at the Iris unguicularis that are thriving on the same bank, nestling amongst lush mediterranean planting, she suddenly wonders if she could use mounds of this Algerian Iris on the challenging south facing bank. Iris unguicularis is an exquisite plant which flowers over a long period from late winter to early spring and would give exciting height and bulk to the entire slope. Iris unguicularis nestling amongst Mediterranean planting on the Wildflower Bank, Inner Temple Gardens.Extraordinarily, E A Bowles writes in My Garden in Spring Suppose a wicked uncle who wished to check your gardening zeal left you pots of money on condition you grew on one species of plants: what would you choose? I should settle on Iris unguicularis.  Bowles loved the plant for its soft lilac colouring and crystalline texture and for  its scent, fuller than the scent of Primrose, with a promise of honey strong enough to wake any bee (but with a) correcting sharpness in it, like that of lemon with the sugar of a shrove Tuesday pancake . Best of all, even for the Crocus King, it is simply the first flower of spring .Andrea worries for a moment what would happen to the Iris unguicularis when, later in the year, she mows the entire bank. How would Iris unguicularis react to that?   Well, you are not supposed to cut Kniphofia to the ground but I do it and it comes back … . I suspect a wonderful solution has been found.Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... BALLETIC ROSE PRUNING, CRISP STRUCTURAL PLANTING, PREPARING FOR THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF SPRING Immaculately choreographed, pruned stems of Rosa mulliganii against the sky, The White Garden, Sissinghurst. Effervescent also beautifully choreographed, obviously  Burns Night Haggis Dinner in Peckham given by Jake Tilson, Jeff Lee and their daughter Hannah Tlison (above).The Top Courtyard, Sissinghurst Castle, the walls laced with the curving stems of pruned roses.I am standing at the entrance to Sissinghurst Castle barely able to keep myself away from leaping over the box hedge and forensically examining the wall ahead of me. It is almost the last day of January. The glowing end-of-winter Burns night festivities are over and after a freezing couple of weeks down to -7ºC here in Kent the weather has become milder and there is a feeling that things in the garden are beginning to get on their way. I am with Sissinghurst Head Gardener, Troy Scott Smith, who bends down gently to point out the emerging shoots of peonies  for now just tiny dashes of carmine red against velvet brown soil. He is describing how it feels to be in the garden at this time of year There is something nice about a quiet spell.  I think gardens that are open to the public need it. There is something wholesome about that full cycle, the contrast with the extravagance of spring and summer .Troy has generously agreed to show me the garden in winter and knows I am dead keen to start with the roses.                   The entrance to Sissinghurst Castle, Rosa  Alister Stella Gray against the brick wall.To the right of a brick arch there is an eighty year old Golden Rambler , Rosa  Alister Stella Gray . Peter Beales describes it as   a repeat-flowering Noisette rose with cascading clusters of double, shapely flowers, yellow with eggy centres paling to cream and eventually white at the edges. Highly perfumed and producing long, slightly spindly branches ideal for arches and trellises . It is wonderful to see how carefully and cleverly the rose has been pruned for maximum coverage and softly-falling flowering. Long stems are retained and curved to form softly rounded steps and counter-steps against the wall. There are plenty of the horizontal stems (necessary for maximum flowering),  but the whole system is flowing rather than rigid, as so much rose-pruning tends to end up. These gentle shapes will be entirely achievable (I tell myself) if I look hard enough at these images and use them as a guide next time I head out into the garden with my secateurs ….I feel a little pressurised to learn that rose-pruning at Sissinghurst is almost over indeed pruning began on October 15th! The climbing roses against the walls go first for two reasons: first it is cold and windy high up, second we can clear the beds after pruning at the right time of year. Troy uses the classic Nutscene garden twine (in green) and was so frustrated with the flimsiness/garishness of modern vine eyes that he had a mould made of an old one and now a blacksmith keeps the garden supplied with these bespoke chunky vine eyes for the 2mm wires that stretch along the brick. We tend to go twice round the wire and once round the stem of the rose .                                                                  Nutscene garden twine.             Troy Scott Smith s handmade vine eyes based on an old example from the garden.When the roses have been pruned they are given fertiliser (Sissinghurst has its own recipe: 2 parts Sulphate of Potash to 1 part Kieserite), and then a layer of compost compost is an underrated thing sighs Troy is spread at the base of the plant. Once the buds have started to break in mid March, a fortnightly spraying regime begins it takes two gardeners two hours to get round the extensive rose collection. There is a wisdom combined with an experimental curiosity in Troy s approach which I will see again and again over the course of the morning. He will try out different combinations of traditional fungicides and Savona soap solution and regularly sprays with liquid seaweed feed or SB Plant Invigorator (which is new to me and looks impressive) too. We pause for the main flowering period June, July. Last year we did a little bit of an experiment where we didn t spray a number of roses for the last part of the summer . The blackspot and rust came back with vigour but he is happy that he has tried.SB Plant Invigorator.Against the entrance arch the octogenarian Alistair Stella Gray is not as vigorous as it used to be so instead of trying to get it to stretch over the entire arch it has been retreated to one side and a new Alistair Stella Gray planted on the opposite side of the arch so that the two can meet.Ageing plants provide a constant challenge for Troy and his team throughout the garden. In the White Garden there is a famous central arbour smothered in Rosa mulligani .Rosa mulliganii in flower. In fact, to maintain a spectacular display of this fragrant rose (believed to be the biggest of climbing rose available in the UK), there are now three roses, the original one, a second one planted by the previous Sissinghurst Head Gardener, Alexis Datta, and now Troy has added a third rose all trained over the iron arbour designed by Nigel Nicholson, with assistance from rose expert Graham Stuart Thomas, when the original rose was at its most vigorous. The pruning regime of the three roses remains the same with the aim of producing spare, dancing living lace  that stops the heart on this cold winter day and will produce an incredible frothing canopy of white in midsummer. The Rosa muliganii arbour in The White Garden the stems of the rose are pruned into heartstoppingly beautiful  Living Lace .Elsewhere in the garden the same looping pruning discipline prevails against walls, next to a spur-pruned apple tree at the back of the shop, along strong wire to create a stand alone rose fence and, looking particularly handsome on this grey January day, against the white clapboard building next to the café: The Sissinghurst living lace style of rose pruning against walls and fences.In the walled Rose Garden the shrub roses are supposed to be finished by the end of the week.  There is a rhythmic calm as the team (there are six full time gardeners, two part time gardeners and a number of invaluable volunteers) make their way through the space, pruning and clearing as they go, creating a low creeping world of supple crinolines and elegant towers. The crinolines are created by arching the new, flexible stems into semi-circles and training these onto hazel hoops or benders in the ground.           Shrub roses, trained into Louise Bourgoi-like spider shapes, take over the Rose Garden.The South facing Rose Garden walls are dizzy with fabulously tangled figs. It is fascinating to see, again, how crucial curves are to achieve the right sort of comfortable fullness when the figs come into leaf. Pruning the figs is a finely judged matter it takes place as late as possible at Sissinghurst because of the tenderness of the figs. But in a warm spell the leaves break fast so when the moment comes the walls need to be tackled at speed. The fabulously tangled wall trained figs pruning to take place as late as possible.As we watch the steady transformation of the taller shrub roses from stands of impenetrable shagginess to clearly defined towers with neat scalloped frames, Troy explains his plans to reintroduce an avenue of cherry trees into the Rose Garden. Despite extensive research, it is not known which cherries Vita Sackville-West originally planted so he has decided on the winter flowering cherry (Prunus subhirtella autumnalis) which she is known to have liked and which crucially has a reasonably  light  canopy. Obviously the moment you plant trees in a border there will be a knock-on effect on the planting beneath it  … The only problem with the winter flowering cherry is that visitors won t really see it he adds with a slightly anxious laugh (giving me a glimpse for a moment of the incredible number of ingredients that must be juggled for every decision made in this world famous, historic garden), but then he is reassured by the fact that the Rose Garden can be seen from the Tower and glimpsed en route to the the newly open-to-the-public South Cottage, both of which are open throughout the winter. The transformation of a taller shrub rose.The compact boards which are used throughout the borders during pruning to protect the heavy clay soil.As I walk to take in the famous view from the Tower I am reminded that there is one rose in the garden which will not, of course, be pruned until just after it has flowered. The thornless evergreen rambler, Rosa banksiae  Lutea , is one of the earliest roses to flower it has clusters of pale lemon flowers in late spring and at Sissinghurst it forms a delicate screen of foliage in the central arch which beckons you onwards and which will explode into a haze of yellow later in the year. Rosa banksiae  Lutea against the arch that separates the Top Courtyard from the Lower Courtyard.Once at the top of the tower it is a complete pleasure to take in the clean-edged sculptural quality of the yew hedges and the quartet of Irish yews in the garden of South Cottage. If you are ever flagging in your faith in the power of structure in the garden, head to Sissinghurst as early in the year as you can (the entire garden will be open this year from March 11th). The clean lines of yew hedges especially seen from the Tower.Within the garden the hedges play a shifting series of roles. Here, tight clipped yew provides ballast and guides the eye firmly into the distance:                                     Yew hedges guide the eye firmly into the distance.Elsewhere the velvet green planes provide a wonderful back-drop to red winter stems or the pale silvery buds of magnolia  :Red winter stems and silvery magnolia buds against velvety green yew.I love this glimpse of the Herb Garden with pea sticks leaning ready for action against the wooden bench which nestles so comfortably between buttresses of yew. The bleached-out, silvery-mauve aromatic plants remain soft and inviting against the vivid green backdrop.The Herb Garden.Not a hedge obviously but this mown path through the damp grass of the Orchard has a surprisingly powerful presence.The serene Orchard path.There is a considerable amount of important box hedging in the garden which carries the usual worries of box in the 21st century plus particular stylistic concerns for this famous garden.   Troy is tackling the situation in his characteristic surefooted and gently experimental way. In the White Garden he wants to loosen up the low box edging for a more abundant, relaxed feel I think Sissinghurst became too tidy but at the same time has to balance the more fitting, softer aesthetic with the level of irritation the narrower paths might bring forth from demanding visitors. He is relaxed about the way the expanding hedges are looking a bit rough around the edges as they are allowed to grow. If there is an ailing section of hedge he moves box plants from elsewhere in the garden to fill the gap (he would not consider introducing new box into the garden now) and, in case the worse happens I have the sad feeling we will have to take all our box out one day he has just brought in a load of Euonymus japonicus Microphyllus (the box leaved euonymus) to trial.             Box edging in the White Garden beginning to bulge satisfactorily.Elsewhere in the garden the Lion Pond at the base of the old Elizabethan wall is brought alive in winter by the vibrant fresh green of some low box hedging.The fresh green of a section of box hedging near the Lion Pond gives this area energy at the beginning of the year.Yew and pleached lime trees are a vital and anchoring combination both at the front of the Castle and at the approach to the Lime Walk from South Cottage.Yew hedge and pleached limes at the front of Sissinghurst Castle.The four Irish yews in the Cottage Garden are incredibly beautiful at any time of year. In this photograph there is the wonderful extra layering of Irish yew with box drums behind and then a clipped yew hedge directly in front of a section of  pleached lime.              Rich layering of Irish yew, box, yew hedge and pleached lime in the Cottage GardenThe Lime Walk is famous for its immaculate avenue of trained lime trees underplanted with spring bulbs.The Lime Walk.But of course nothing about a garden can stand still and it takes a skilled and subtle gardener to tackle the challenges that the Lime Walk quietly but insistently poses. Troy has changed the pruning regime of the trees themselves bringing the date forward from August to Midsummer s Day. This brings more light into the walk itself during the summer and leads to a haze of wonderful ruby growth.Deep red new growth on the lime trees a result of midsummer pruning.He is fond of this effect, but at the back of his mind is a slight worry that this pruning regime may perhaps be weakening the trees. At the same time the branches are becoming altogether too long and a further experiment is taking place luckily on a shorter stretch of lime trees elsewhere in the garden to reduce the branches considerably .Then there are the bulb beds underneath the trees. I can see hundreds of Crocus tommasinianus shoots, but my enthusiasm is quickly checked as Troy explains that the crocus has become so aggressive and spread so well that it outcompetes some of the finer tulips and fritillaries .  Sections of border are being taken up each year, cleared, sterilised and then the bulbs (which are planted in mixed groups in pots to create as natural an effect as possible as quickly as possible) are sunk into the beds.Hundreds of unwanted Crocus tommasinianus shoots in the beds of the Lime Walk.Then there are questions of opening up the area immediately beyond the Lime Walk so that visitors can stroll down unimpeded to the lake and how best to do this of course and beyond the Lime Walk is the Nuttery where the underplanting is also getting out of balance (Troy remembers a lighter, more dancing tapestry of planting when he was here before in 1992-97 ). Added to this, the mostly yellow azalea border across the path is about to be replaced with a much richer palette of azaleas underplanted with brightly coloured polyanthus (which Vita had until 1973) and glamorous peonies and lilies It might be a bit bold in places but you don t want to be too tasteful muses the Head Gardener with a grin.                                                   Silhouette of pleached lime against the sky.The Nuttery the underplanting is under review so that the epimedium seen here for example does become too dominant.The Azalea Bank left about to undergo a 1970 s polaroid transformation.As well as a host of venerable garden advisors and historians, Dan Pearson comes on a voluntary basis twice a year to act as an advisor and sounding board. I can imagine that these are productive and hugely enjoyable days much appreciated even by the most thoughtful of Head Gardeners..Before I leave the garden I make a note of the straightforward plants which are looking good even at this time of the year. The blue-grey leaved Euphorbia characias is as always looking fresh and strong such a great architectural plant that always helps an area of the garden look well furnished and happy.Euphorbia characias adding fullness to the spare winter border against the Elizabethan Wall.At the entrance to South Cottage Mahonia and Helleborus foetidus look bright and fresh, especially perhaps because they are each given a good amount of space in which to shine.Mahonia and Helleborus foetidus against the entrance to South Cottage.One of my surprise favourites is this fine, spikey pair of Yucca gloriosa which I admit to never having used, but which looks wonderfully at home with box and rosemary at the base of this aged red wall.Yucca glorious anchoring the entrance border.One sneaky inclusion in this list is Rosa Meg which is also growing at the entrance. It is a rose I have not grown and which was obviously not in flower!  but which has, I discover, large, almost single, beautifully waved flowers and a delicate pink-apricot colour, with red-gold stamens. It would look wonderful in a garden with my favourite Rosa mutabilis whose flowers pass through shades of apricot yellow to coppery pink.Rosa Meg .Another new discovery is the rare evergreen shrub Distylium racemosum, or Winter-hazel, which is sunning itself on the left of the central Courtyard archway with some Rosmarinus officinalis Sissinghurst Blue bursting out at its feet. I have tracked it down to the wonderful Bluebell Nursery where it has a rave review a slow growing attractive evergreen tree from Japan… in spring attractive, small, red Hamamelis-like flowers with lurid purple stakes appear on the older branches . One for the shopping list.Distylium racemosum growing to the left of the Courtyard arch.The red witch hazel like flowers of Distylium racemosum. (Photograph courtesy of Bluebell Nursery).The oldest rose in the garden is the Mme Alfred Carrière that covers the front of South Cottage. This was the first thing planted by Vita Sackville West in the entire garden and it is this rose that gets ceremoniously pruned first in the middle of October. I was charmed to discover that Vita had determinedly planted the rose before the couple had actually signed the Title Deeds for the Castle, a sort of guarantee to herself that she was going to make a garden here.It is a move I might employ myself in some lonely country plot in the coming years. Husband, be warned.Rosa  Mme Alfred Carriere against South Cottage the oldest plant in the garden.Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... PLUS WHAT TO DO WITH A BAG OF SPANISH MOSS?Plump citrus yellow Cymbidium flowers just opening at McBean s OrchidsGlamorous, particularly fine Oncidium plants at McBean s OrchidsThe scent is extraordinary vanilla? clove? tuberose? Exotic of course, from far away.  It is outrageously seductive.  I have only just stepped out of an exhilaratingly frosty December day and into the first of a series of milky-paned glasshouses at McBean s Orchids in East Sussex and already I find myself wanting more of the intense perfume, coveting an exquisitely salmon-marbled Oncidium and wondering simply where orchids have been all my life?Just opening claret coloured Cymbidium in the glasshouse at McBean s Orchids, East SussexExquisite salmon-marbled oncidium, Mcbean s Orchids, SussexI love the energy of the Cymbidium leaves:Yellow flowered Cymbidium its leaves stretching upwards and outwards.There are orchids everywhere in a series of greenhouses, stretching away on long wheeled tables.                             wheeled tables stretching away into the distance, McBean s OrchidsThere are junior plants dense in their trays  (it takes four to five years to nurture an orchid until it is ready for sale).                                      Tray upon tray of tiny orchid plants, McBean s OrchidsThere are teenage ones, signposted with delightfully incongruous Scottish names such as Castle of Mey never forget that Mr McBean, who established the nursery in 1879, was a Scot. Originally the business specialised in ferns but Mr McBean was canny enough to spot the potential of the seedling orchids that appeared uninvited on imported fern plants and so the revered orchid nursery began.Young Cymbidium  Castle of Mey And there are champion ones such as Big Tracy , a 40 year old sweet smelling Cymbidium tracyanum with pistachio coloured flowers marked with brown. Every year there is a playful flower-count as the plant grows even bigger.  2016 has been a bumper year with 630 translucent tiger-striped blooms.The enormous 40+ year old Big Tracy  Cymbidium tracyanum  at McBean s OrchidsIt has been a wonderfully crisp and blue-skied early winter here in London and the South East.  There have been freezing nights followed by glittering early mornings which have transformed the spreading leaves of cardoons and the sculpted mounts of Euphorbia characias in my local Ruskin Park into exquisitely shimmering ball gowns:Gorgeous frosted leaves of cardoons and Euphorbia characias Sheets of Cyclamen hederfolium huddled in the grass are frozen solid, the frost lacing the slightly puckered marbled leaves with an icy pompom edging.Frozen Cyclamen hederifoliumStands of Calamagrostis are ablaze in the morning sunshine and the still-hanging-in-there, rich yellow festoons of wisteria foliage make for a slightly decadent party atmosphere.                                     Stands of Calamagrostis ablaze in the morning sunshine                         Festoons of rich yellow wisteria foliage make for a slightly decadent party atmosphereBack at McBean s my spirits rise as I find out more about their speciality Cymbidium and Oncidium orchids and how they could fill my house with colour from December until April just as the garden has gone so quiet. Above the exuberant light-catching foliage there are bursts of speckled pink, an elusive grey-orange, white with dashes of the freshest egg yolk yellow and spotted claret and pink ones ones like slivers of the most expensive Italian marble.Cymbidium December OrangeAn arching stem of yellow CymbidiumCool growing Oncidium (formerly know as Odontoglossum) and modern hybrid Cymbidium hail from subtropical Asia and were hugely popular in Victorian times. But they have been lying quietly beyond the contemporary mindset, our interest dulled by the elegant but supermarket invading moth orchid (Phaelonopsis). Not that McBean s does not sell tempting, strangely speckled or dark wine coloured Phalaenopsis too, but their speciality and comparative rarity lies in their range of gorgeous, exuberant Cymbidium and the more delicate and only slightly more challenging Oncidium.                                            A perfectly poised stem of deep pink Oncidium                                          A prize Oncidium with marble-like markings in claret. They are the ultimate sustainable plant explains the feisty Rose Armstrong as she takes me on an uplifting tour of the nursery which she bought pretty much by accident in 2015.  Rose had been coming to McBeans for years. On a visit to buy an orchid as a present she was distraught to find that the business was on the verge of closing down, and found herself buying the whole set up  (along with her headhunter husband, Stretch) and taking on the task of saving and reviving this longstanding British brand.   McBeans have exhibited at nearly every Chelsea Flower show and have won over 80 gold medals. We are one of only three remaining British orchid nurseries, we have an incredible stock to breed from and unbeatable expertise.  Indeed Head Nurseryman, Jim Durrant has worked at the nursery developing ever more exquisite plants since 1971.McBean s has provided orchids for Royalty famously for Princess Diana s wedding bouquet Mrs Thatcher is said to have insisted on McBean s orchids at No. 10 and there are still a handful of country house chatelaines who order several thousand pounds worth of orchids to decorate the house before a shooting party, but Rose is determined that the McBean orchid  the less well known cymbidiums and oncidiums in particular  are seen as a straightforward and cheerful addition to any contemporary home.Princess Diana s wedding her bouquet contained trailing stems of white orchids from McBean sI think Rose Armstrong has the right ingredients to make this work. She has a great eye and orchids are in her bones: amazingly both her grandmothers used to come to Mcbean s in the autumn to buy orchids for the house.  She is also refreshingly straightforward in her approach to the task ahead. She tells me fondly that her other business is a petrol station with a small, perhaps old-fashioned, but perfectly successful shop that just sells what you need when you ve got a hangover after Saturday night:   Redbull, fags … and sauces for Sunday lunch .Most importantly her approach to caring for orchids dispels the kind of myths that may have built up in your head for years. You may have stored away information gathered from pieces such as Amanda Gutterman s entertaining but worrying feature for Gardensita    The Orchid That Owned Me  in which Ms Gutterman achieves success by watering her orchids with gently melting ice cubes: the ultimate way to water sparingly .      Photograph of the melting ice cube orchid-watering technique  by Amanda Gutterman courtesy of GardenistaBut for Rose Armstrong the advice is much more straight forward.   Rule no 1 is to water with rainwater only just keep a lemonade bottle of rainwater mixed with Orchid feed under the sink and use this every three out of four times you water .Rule 2: Don t water very much (use a wooden stick poked in the potting medium to see if there is still moisture available), and put a layer of gravel under the pot to help drainage and keep the atmosphere around the plant moist. Rule 3: Keep the plant in good light but not direct sunlight away from radiators and draughts.  Rule 4: In the summer (April to October) put the plant outside in dappled shade under the apple tree at the back of the garden . The plant needs a drop in temperature at night to form buds.  You can keep watering and feeding a bit during this time but not in July when the bud formation is taking place.The really exciting thing about orchids of course is that as well as flowering for at least six to eight weeks, they will come back again year after year.  Some people worry that they will get too big but it is easy to split them in two with a hacksaw  with the obvious bonus of creating two plants from one.Mature Cymbidium tracyanum on a trunk at McBean s OrchidsI love the way that even the smaller cymbidiums have the potential to really change a room, the way they offer something of the settled quality of a log fire or a piano. And the bigger plants can be spectacular. At McBean s there is a particularly covetable, heavenly scented Cymbidium tracyanum comfortable on an old trunk at the end of a sloping red-floored passageway in the nursery against an industrial painted glass wall.The red-floored passageway leads to the Exhibition Room. This is an extraordinarily atmospheric stage set of a place with a backdrop of futuristic, silvery-grey corrugated window panes, waterfalls, pools, scented tumbling orchids amongst ferns and tiered stands of velvety green, ear-shaped begonia leaves   the whole hung with ghostly festoons of Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides).  I have only ever seen Spanish Moss before hanging spookily from gnarled trees in the ground of plantation houses outside New Orleans.  Here the Spanish moss is cool and airy and a curiously refreshing foil to the glossy firework exuberance of the tropical plants.The amazing Exhibition Room with pools, waterfalls, scented orchids, begonias, ferns and Spanish moss.Elsewhere in the nursery I am taken by further sturdily voluptuous plants against milky blue glass (am feeling an urgent need to expand my knowledge of a whole new area of plants!)Sturdily voluptuous plants against pale blue glassAnd everywhere there are workbenches with new treasures.   I fall for a wonderful table laden with  gawky, long-limbed shrimp plants (Judicia brandegeeana ), Blue Rabbit s Foot fern (Phlebodum pseudoareum) and more Spanish moss:A potting bench where Shrimp plant cuttings share space with Spanish moss and a Blue Rabbit s Foot fernOn the next table I am introduced to the slim and elegant mahogany flowered Cymbidium  Prince George and his neat, smaller younger sister Princess Charlotte Cymbidium  Prince George and Princess Charlotte Cymbidium Prince George And so I am back in the sales area and in a mild panic about what to buy.                                              The all too tempting sales area at McBeans s OrchidsI go for a starter trio of Cymbidium  December Orange , a soft pink speckled Cymbidium  McBean s Loch Gilp Lewes and an Oncidium with magically suspended delicate pink on white flowers along a curved stem just to raise the stakes.My trio of orchids arrive home.I have a Malaysian friend,  Valentine Willie who deals in contemporary art and has bases throughout Southeast Asia. He is crazy about orchids and I have always assumed that it is all very well for him after all he will goad me with photographs of his jade vine in full bloom in his garden in Ubud, Bali but that orchids are a no go area for me.Valentine s Jade Vine, Ubud BaliI am entertained to discover that where there is no garden at his KL apartment he has turned an entire bathroom into an  orchidarium cum fern house .Valentine Willie s KL bathroom/orchidariaumA week on, my orchids are blooming away.  They are sitting on gravel, the rainwater/orchid fertilizer cocktail is mixed up in its plastic bottle under the sink and I hope I have chosen bright enough places for the plants to be happy.Cymbidium December Orange in terracotta orchid pot designed by Abbie Zabar for Seibert RiceCymbidium  McBean s Loch Gilp Lewis An elegant pink on white OncidiumI didn t quiz Rose for her line on misting the orchids. I feel I may succumb to a plant mister (Haws do a a very tempting nickel plated one which would make an ideal Christmas present for me),  but I am unable to succumb to mixing olive oil, washing up liquid and water and using this to give the foliage a weekly polish.  Once you start reading up on orchids it is not too hard for the fear of impossibility to begin over again Mostly I am excited at the way my new orchids add texture and colour to a room and even more excited by the challenge of keeping them going year after year.There is one more immediate challenge of course (apart form three boys breaking up simultaneously next week from school and university, the whole of Christmas and the arrival of our first ever puppy ) to think of something artistic and festive to do with an entire bag of slivery-grey Spanish moss that Rose kindly gave me as I left.  Something for the weekend.Spanish mossNB If you are in London there is a Pop Up McBean s Orchids now open at 235 Westbourne Grove W11 Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... THE DREAM GARDENS OF LE NÔTRE AND JULIAN  ISABEL BANNERMANView through an old glass pane at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte: forest, box parterres ( broderies ), stone balustrade, moat.I would like to bet that André le Nôtre and also Isabel and Julian Bannerman would enjoy this view through one of the side windows of the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte about an hour south of Paris. The reflection in the old glass gives the image the slightly burnt-out quality of an old photograph. The ordered parkland, the painstakingly curvaceous broderies of clipped box, the restrained, light-catching pallor of the gravel, the perfectly proportioned balustrade of local stone, now blotchy with lichen, and the serried ripples on the shiny blue-green water of the elegant square moat that makes Vaux-le-Vicomte appear to float on water are even more tantalising because they are seen from the inside and make you want to get out and explore the garden for yourself.Vaux-le-Vicomte the approach.I am on the Eurostar to Paris, and onwards to the Château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, checking my facts with a certain amount of trepidation: Vaux-le-Vicomte is the precursor to Versailles, an estate of 1235 acres, 8 miles of surrounding wall, 81 acres of French formal garden, 17 acres of water, 1.86 miles main axis, 26 basins in 1661 of which 20 remain, 12 miles of pipework ….I let the miles go by and allow myself to get lost again in the gloriously enthusiastic new book by Isabel and Julian Bannerman about their ambitious, inventive and heart-on-sleeve approach to garden-making over the last 25 years: Landscape of Dreams.Landscape of Dreams by Isabel  Julian Bannerman.Landscape of Dreams is the finest, most intimate, most generous book about garden-making I have read since Frank Lawley s Herterton House and a New Country Garden .  It is also fundamentally infectious. Isabel Bannerman takes you step by step through the reading and looking and learning that has evolved into the couple s personal, ambitious and dream-filled approach to garden making, and you immediately want to follow. Looking across the shelves here there sit a broad range of heroes: John Aubrey; Inigo Jones; Charles Bridgeman; Thomas Wright; Batty Langley; William Blake; Eric Ravilious; Barbara Jones and Hylton Nel. Books about all the decorative arts as well as architecture and gardening have been pivotal in shaping the way we both think, along with of course observing the real world closely at all times . You are sent off in so many directions, making lists of who next to find out about, and you feel safe in this exciting, brilliantly layered world where nothing you might find out about will ever be wasted.There is a French connection in stories of Julian s childhood. Holidays spent at Tours-sur-Marne staying with the Chauvet family who ran a small champagne house opposite Lauren Perrier (a playful pleasure in all things more glamorous than less glamorous is a constant theme). Here Julian absorbed the cyclical and studied way of living in France but, although his spoken French remained excellent, the impossibility of passing his Maths O Level put paid to his ideas of becoming an architect . But you don t need a Maths O Level to be inspired by everything around you and to put it all to wonderfully good use. Inspiring images, such as American landscape architect Dan Kiley s description of his long driveway in Connecticut where he had planted so many lilac shrubs that when they flowered in May it resembled a puffing steam train , were the sort of romantic inspiration that Julian would store away and never forget.The entrance facade to Vaux-le-Vicomte you can glimpse the main part of the garden through the three central arches.We are crunching along the fine gravel to the entrance of the château itself. Le Nôtre s great idea was that the central axis of the garden should start with the approach, travel through the house and continue without stopping to the main garden on the other side. I look back at the achingly huge entrance courtyard with unfinished almost Egyptian 17th century stone figures, looking dangerously white against the dark forest and stormy sky beyond and I begin to get excited.Entrance Courtyard with unfinished 17th century stone figures at the boundary wall.Suddenly we are in the Grand Salon, built by architect Louis Le Vau and decorated with paintings by Charles Le Brun, looking out on Le Nôtre s garden, the whole commissioned as one integrated work of splendour by Louis XIV s Superintendent of Finances, Nicolas Fouquet.  Key to understanding the significance of this commission is that Fouquet brought the three men together for the first time and invited them to take the empty land stretching before them and work together to create something splendid. Fouquet s rise had been rapid and extraordinary, but his fall was more dramatic still. An extravagant party was held for King Louis XIV on August 17, 1661 a new play by Molière was just a fraction of the delights on offer but weeks later Fouquet was imprisoned, and the King requisitioned the entire contents of the château (except for a pair of extremely heavy marble topped tables you can still see in the dining room) and brought Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nôtre to Versailles to transform his hunting lodge along similar lines. Versailles the TV series with its infamous offer of   sex, violence and intrigue, sometimes simultaneously (The Telegraph)  was filmed mostly at Vaux-le- Vicomte rather than Versailles as there is so much at Vaux that has remained in tact and unchanged.View of the garden from the Grand Salon.Taking my eyes off the view spread out before me for a moment, I am smitten by the glittering candle stands (the château is famous for its magical candlelit evenings every Saturday from May to October when the house and garden are lit by hundreds of candles), the way the black and white stone floor is further chequered by light and shadow from the enormous windows, by glimpses of the garden to the front, back and to both sides, and by the arching sky blue oval ceiling painted with a soaring eagle.One of the handsome tiered candle stands catching the light in the Grand Salon.Shadows and light falling across the black and white stone floor. View through to the garden at one of the sides of the château.View from the Grand Salon back out to the entrance to the château. Windows everywhere framing a tempting view of lawn, topiary, and statuary.The gorgeous domed oval ceiling painted in the 19th century.Before I am let loose in the gardens I explore the house. Although richly decorated on almost every surface my visit coincides with a major restoration programme for many of the painted areas, unusually and imaginatively the restoration is taking place in situ, in full view of the visitors  everything is somehow on a manageable scale. So different to Versailles where to enter the house you have to pass through airport style security and the density of i-phone wielding visitors is overwhelming.The newly restored Games Room is extremely beautiful with every surface painted, and mirrors and gilt to add depth and glamour. There is a charming table with candle stands and an open game of backgammon which you could almost sit down to play: The Games Room with backgammon table and exquisite shutters.More brief snatches of garden  broderies, water, brick wall and stone figures  through a richly textured series of shuttered windows and patterned floors, and then we are out on the roof top looking down. I love the contrast of chalky grey-blue paint and skinny gold edging with the bright blues and greens of the garden beyond, and I love the promise of light and air in a room so dark that even its shiny floor cannot warm things up.Glimpses of garden through a series of windows.So at last the garden and the opportunity to drink in the scale of ambition and let yourself be fooled by the brilliant tricks of perspective designed for the visitor by le Nôtre. I am not often excited by a cool mathematical approach to gardening, but I do marvel at the cunning and sheer effort involved in making the garden seem longer by increasing the size of objects the further they are from the château  the circular pool at the centre of the photograph below may seem the same sort of size as the square pool behind it but the square pool is in fact eight times as big.From the roof top looking down the main garden extending into the distance.You can start to see that the square pool is considerably bigger than the round pool closer in the foreground.The square pool turns out to be designed as a reflecting pool, Le Miroir d Eau, easily and magnificently embracing the reflection of the entire château on a calm day:                                                  The château reflected in the Square Pool, Le Miroir d Eau.And then a third surprise, the pool beyond the Miroir d Eau turns out to be a section of canal that extends substantially to the West and East.                                                        View to the East along the canal.View to the West along the canal.The path around the garden then splits and takes you up through drooping avenues of plane trees towards the statue of Hercules   rather staggeringly  Hercules is nearly 2 miles away from the front entrance to the house.Hercules at the top of the hill at the centre of an avenue of drooping plane trees.Hercules was a 19th century addition by Alfred Sommier who bought Vaux-leVicomte in 1875 and spent his lifetime and much of his fortune restoring house and garden. His descendants, the de Vogüé family, still live in the château buildings and run the place passionately, which explains why Vaux feels warmer and more intimate than its state run rivals. Over the winter of 2017 the bronze Hercules will be gilded once more to add another layer of lure and sparkle to this extraordinary garden.I would love to return and spend more time exploring the garden. On this visit I am invited to whiz around in one of the Vaux-le-vicomte golf buggies and although time is tight (and some nameless people naturally derive a ridiculous amount of pleasure from driving the buggy around the slightly lethal/steep pathways ) I would love to spend another day here, in the Spring with a picnic, and maybe a bike, to do things at an easier pace with time to discover the wilder parts, to appreciate the deft and shifting balance of stone, water, topiary, perhaps even to return to see the fortnightly Water Show when fountains and cascades are switched on for a couple of spectacular hours. I find myself extremely excited by the idea of the whole thing taking place with no electricity, just brilliant engineering and the pull of gravity.Horse Chestnut trees in bloom at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Photograph by Bruno Ehrs from the book A day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte by Alexandre, Ascanio and Jean-Charles de Vogüé.Stone and topiary across water.The moat and outbuildings seen from the top of the château.Lichen on a stone balustrade.I would love to come back too to see the filled urns and flower parterres (to the right of the garden as you look down towards the canal) at their height in summer. Here is a golf-buggy-hazy October impression of the flower parterre:And here is a photograph of the slightly lost and curious-looking pelargoniums in diminutive pots (well diminutive in such an enormous space) could there be another approach, I wonder, to this kind of border planting once the resoration to interior painting and garden statuary is complete?                      Curiously small pots of pelargoniums next to the broderies parterre.But it is Mathieu Lespagnandel s statue personifying the Anquiel River which runs through the estate which brings me back to Juilan and Isabel Bannerman:Mathieu Lespagnandel s statue personifying the Anquiel River, photograph by Bruno Ehrs from the book A day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte by Alexandre, Ascanio and Jean-Charles de Vogüé.The statue transports me powerfully to the image I have just been looking at of the beautiful, muscly Rother God sculpture constructed of bath stone and Whitstable oyster shells by Tom Verity as part of a Bannerman scheme for Simon Sainsbury and Stewart Grimshaw at Woolbeding.  Tom Verity s Rother God (bath stone and oyster shells) for Woolbeding, photograph from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.Isabel and Julian s verdict on the woodland garden there, particularly the area around the painted Gothic pavilion designed by Pip Jebb, was that it lacked mystery and needed lifting . Lightness of touch is an intangible quality, something we all always seek to achieve and can never be sure of finding . The Bannerman proposal was to dramatically cut away the river leading up to the pavilion so that the house would sit on a cliff and for the entrance we lighted upon the idea of a raggedy ruin, a whisper of Northanger Abbey, fragments in the grass, a gothic portal and tracery window . There followed a thatched rustic hut intricately lined with hazel wands and fir cones, an oozing fountain of tufa, a swooping chinese bridge in a rich yellow (to replace the sticky chocolate brown things they had chosen in haste and regretted at leisure ) and an uplifting, contemporary, almost mediterranean garden for National Trust visitors at the house entrance.Images of the Rother God, Pip Jebb Gothic Pavilion, Tufa Fountain and yellow Chinese Bridge at Woolbeding from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.I love Isabel s storytelling about the way the Bannerman approach to gardens and indeed houses has evolved and become an unstoppable way of life. Falling in love with old, derelict, houses has been a long standing addiction. Julian s first major purchase was a 1727 crumbling pile, The Ivy. The great age of the house sparked in Julian and, later me, a crush on the formal gardens of England, Holland and France in the 17th century, the canals and terraces in Kip s birds-eye engravings which were heartlessly, ruthlessly rooted out by Capability Brown . The challenge involved in rescuing such a demanding building appealed to all Julian s natural love of the underdog and glamour and their priorities will always be upside down in the eyes of some. Their great friend, David Vicary, described Julian as impulsive saying it was impetuous for the impecunious to plant two avenues of lime trees when there was barely a flushing lavatory on the premises . It was the same friend who taught that nothing is new, nothing is original and nothing comes wholly formed from the imagination. It is all observed and logged and then drawn on and altered, adapted or amended to a particular situation. Drawing constantly on all they have learnt, their goal is to create quiet settled spaces   we like the kind of dreamy left alone quality that allows the garden and the person in it to be. The Antler Temple at Houghton Hall from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.After the absorption of history comes the need to make and invent. The temples at Highgrove were inspired as much by Ian Hamilton Finlay s Little Sparta as by a souvenir cork model of the Temple of Concord, Agrigento, Sicily which they had bought in the visitor s car park. Scouring for old building materials or the right plant requires a constant eagle eye they spotted the spreading fifty year old mulberry tree for their 1994 Chelsea garden driving back from a Sunday lunch with Julian s parents, their car full of young children. A small but perfect example of their tirelessness and attention to detail is their solution for a 70th birthday present for Paul Getty, for whom they had been ambitiously and painstakingly transforming a garden in the Chilterns.  At a loss for a present we gave him seventy little oak seedlings in a box which we had grown from acorns picked from the veteran oak at Hanham Court, a tree under which James II had dined on venison in an act of reconciliation with the owners following a misunderstanding during the Monmouth Rebellion .And at its best, despite the hard work, they manage to make making gardens tremendous fun. Building Euridge (for Jigsaw founder, John Robinson) was probably the happiest thing we have ever done. It involved many children, dogs, stonemasons, chippies, hippies, builders and project managers, drinking, dancing, fancy dress, head-scratching, problem solving … or at Highgrove The Prince himself would sneak out whenever possible and help, chat, despair of Julian s Coca-Cola drinking and send for tea and sandwiches to be shared by everyone among the roots .Wisteria against the house wall at Hanham Court from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.But the pair s approach to planting, their deeply knowledgeable, tried and tested, passionate understanding of how plants work together to create atmosphere is perhaps the most uplifting element in the book. I remember visiting Hanham Court near Bristol whilst the Bannermans still lived there. It was possibly the only time I have been truly blown away by the scent of wisteria which hit you as you entered the garden through a darkened gateway and stepped into the sunshine under the south facing walls of the house which was completely smothered in the most voluptuous purple flowers. I remember fantastic, simple, but astonishingly effective, combinations of yew mounds, Euphorbia characias, Iris pallida subsp. pallida and Erysimum Bowles Mauve, and elsewhere yew, Iris pallida subsp. pallida, with the silvery Eryngium bourgatii. I remember being introduced to their new passion, the yellow magnolia (I am now completely hooked), I remember the louche, comfortable, faded Riviera feel of the planting and ruined buildings around the swimming pool and, most of all, I remember a deep romantic enthusiasm for a certain kind of enduring English garden plant (NB my copy of the book is already covered in notes).Yew, Iris pallida subsp. pallida, Hanham Court from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.The swimming pool Hanham Court, from Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.There is huge generosity here and so much to learn why Isabel will choose Noisette roses for a house wall because they are long-flowering, tend to be exquisitely scented and have a great garlanded quality forming natural swags of flowers  and  how they might use ferns, ash sapling, ivy, primroses, cowslips, rambling roses, valerian and acanthus to create an ancient feel to a newly built structure. Do not dismiss her throw away description of the outer ring of the Rose Garden at Houghton Hall mixed Sissinghurst-like planting, shrubs and shrub roses underplanted with delights. Just the usual favourites, philadelphus, lilac, old fashioned roses washed about with pinks and aquilegias it is this insistence on plants like philadelphus, lilac and old fashion roses (and plenty of them) to make a garden feel lived in, that can be too often missed in the more calculated contemporary planting plan. Isabel describes visiting Queen of Hellebores, Helen Ballard where they learnt about north-facing borders and the winning combination of snowdrops, hellebores and species peonies. For Houghton Hall they are keen to create a peony border mixed with regale lilies, a pairing we had seen in Vaux-le-Vicomte and vowed to reproduce .And so we are back at Vaux where I feel that the current châtelaine, the ever glamorous Comtesse de Vogüé, has not a little in common with Julian Bannerman and his pleasure in high standards, celebration of the past and the all round delight of living.The Comtesse de Vogüé in the black and white tiled Grand Salon at Vaux-le-Vicomte. Photograph by Bruno Ehrs from the book A day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte by Alexandre, Ascanio and Jean-Charles de Vogüé.The Comtesse de Vogüé s Floating Island with Pink Pralines and Green Tea Custard a family recipe. Photograph by Bruno Ehrs from the book A day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte by Alexandre, Ascanio and Jean-Charles de Vogüé.Julian Bannerman in the Smoking Garden with black and white tiled floor and shell fountain they designed for private members establishment , 5 Hertford Street. From Landscape of Dreams by Isabel and Julian Bannerman.My second bet is that this splendidly outrageous scene from the Bond movie Moonraker, with the elegant Vaux-le-Vicomte as a backdrop, has all the theatrical, fun, immaculately executed ingredients to please Julian and Isabel Bannerman immensely.Scene from Moonraker, shot at Vaux in 1978 with Roger Moore playing James Bond,  Photograph from the book A day at Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte by Alexandre, Ascanio and Jean-Charles de Vogüé.Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... AND A SHORTLIST OF THINGS I WISH I COULD HAVE STOLEN FROM HER DUBLIN GARDEN                              Stone sculpture of a woman against ivy, Helen Dillon s garden.I am perched at Helen Dillon s kitchen table in Ranelagh, a spreading residential area of Dublin. It is a grey August lunchtime and I am being plied with a high-energy volley of slightly startling pronouncements on the state of garden writing as well as a welcome glass of sweet elderflower and a cheese and tomato sandwich by the legendary gardener, trying not to get too distracted by how very beautiful a woman can be in her late 70 s.Much to the surprise of the gardening world and no doubt to the delight of the Dublin real estate market this elegant Georgian house has been sold. The much visited and photographed garden, described by Robin Lane Fox in the Financial TImes as the best walled town garden one can hope to see , will finally close to the public at the end of September 2016. A steady stream of star-struck visitors mostly civilised looking women of a certain age arrive tentatively at the front door (you visit the garden via the elegant Georgian hallway and antique filled drawing room and hand over your five Euro note discreetly as you arrive). In the last few weeks there have been at least 200 admirers a day.Helen Dillon s house, 45 Sandford Terrace, Dublin.45 Sandford Terrace is a place of legend. Mick Jagger once rented the house for a month whilst he was recording in Dublin and when Helen Dillon suddenly replaced the carefully manicured lawn with a contemporary reflecting pool after a visit to the Alhambra, her husband Val famously retorted that he was fine with the change as grass is an ass . The twinkly eyed chatelaine has always enjoyed delivering a little light shock to her visitors her desire for intense colour and a certain restlessness was finally satisfied when she developed a pragmatic version of successional planting which involved plonking plastic containers of dahlias, lilies and brugmansia directly into the bed (i.e. not planting them) wherever there was a lull in the eye-popping herbaceous borders. If a bit of black plastic can be seen, so be it, feast your eyes on something else.Yolk yellow brugmansia with Verbena bonariensis, Helen Dillon s garden.Purple salvia and electric red crocosmia, Helen Dillon s garden.One of the long borders at Helen Dillon s garden, Lythrum salicaria (probably) Feuerkerze and Agapanthus  Purple Cloud .The reason for her success is a tireless, passionate, no-nonsense approach to plants and to gardening she has endlessly tried out new things, has been speedy to get rid of things which are not working, is a famous champion of other fine gardeners and has always been determined to seek out the best forms of the plants she is using. I did not have time to check the name of the bright pink loosestrife pictured above, but I am pretty sure it is Feuerkerze which is a brilliant pink and a world apart from the cooler mauve-pink of other loosetrifes.A couple of weeks after my visit Helen wrote a wonderfully frank piece for the Guardian Weekend magazine in which she bared all about the plants she will be taking with her to her new, almost definitely smaller, town garden and the plants she is pleased to leave behind.  She is brutal about the presence of honey fungus, vine weevil and other problems which have inevitably affected her old town garden, scathing about the handsome but incontinent  (i.e. impossible to get rid of) self-seeding onion Nectaroscordum siculum and brilliantly honest about the Cestrum parqui she has grown for its famously romantic midnight perfume confessing that it does indeed have a horrid daytime smell and that she has only once been up late enough to smell it .But the real gold dust is her list of plants she will not fail to grow in her next garden.  Although it is an avid self seeder she cannot get enough of the lovely white willow herb Chamerion angustifolium Album , and her list includes  Erigeron karvinskianus, the charming coloniser of cracks and paving which I too love for the way it softens the brick paths in my own town garden  Pulmonaria  Blue Ensign (with flowers of a particularly rich purple-blue, and the lovely pale blue agapanthus Eggesford Sky .  She writes: I find after collecting agapanthus for 30 years or so that the pale blue cultivars show up better from a distance than some of (the very desirable) dark colours .  I am excited that Helen Dillon is so keen on pale blue agapanthus. I have three huge pots of Agapanthus  Blue Ice which is towering and only faintly blue  I love the way that a clear, pale blue can read almost as a gentle white in a palette of soft colours.An elegant umbrella of  Hagenia abyssinica, with brugmansia and Tibouchina urvilleana,, Helen Dillon s garden.Another plant that features in the precious Guardian list is Hagenia abyssinica  from the forests of Ethiopia, a superb tree for growing in a large pot (kept under glass for winter) . This is a plant I would have been delighted to cart off in the back of my rented Skoda. I have a slight fear that we may need to head off to Ethiopia ourselves to track down a hagenia for our own gardens but they are definitely covetable. In the Dillon garden there are four pots of these elegant umbrella-like trees on the terrace next to the pool, their bright green leaves are a wonderful foil to the gorgeous salmon brugmansia trumpets (which will incidentally become heavily fragrant at a more sociable time of the evening than the Cestrum parqui) and to the velvety purple of Tibouchina urvilleana, the glory bush. Pale salmon brugmansia.Hagenia abyssinica elegantly exotic against the more demure Georgian brickwork of the house.Helen Dillon would also take with her the  superb large fern  Woodwardia unigemmata. This is a wonderful new discovery for me with new fronds a gorgeous brick red and goes firmly on my list of ideas to steal.                               Woodwardia unigemmata the new fronds are a gorgeous brick red.The woodwardia was nestling comfortably in the shady woodland corner of the garden populated by another desirable and exotic tree, Aralia echinocaulis, grown from seed brought back by Jimi Blake, whose inspiring Hunting Brook Gardens is only about 30 miles south of Dublin. NB, Jimi and his sister June Blake  whose equally seductive garden is next door sometimes have seedlings of these for sale.A skinny woodland of Aralia echinocaulis, Helen Dillon s garden.Aralia echinocaulis foliage. Helen Dillon s garden.I love this celebration of filtered light and the power of different greens in this part of the garden. This beautiful sculpture of a young girl has the perfect, timeless backdrop of light-catching ivy even with the nearby chatter of respectful visitors the combination has an aura of stories and secrets not yet told:Stone sculpture against ivy, Helen Dillon s garden.More magical still is this wonderful fuchsia, Fuchsia magellanica var. molinae, which has formed a delicate bower over the pretty iron seat laden with dart-like palest pink flowers.          Iron seat in a bower of Fuchsia magellanica var. molinae.In the conservatory a loose-limbed palm-leaved begonia, Begonia luxuriant, looks rakish but charming against the painted brick. So keen am I to acquire a Begonia luxuriant of my own that I have tracked it down to the nursery at Great Dixter where I discover that they bed it out for the summer. Somehow the note on the nursery catalogue that it is too fragile to dispatch makes the journey to East Sussex event more tempting.Begonia luxurians in the Conservatory, Helen Dillon s garden.Elsewhere in the garden I am a little less certain about the metal framed tunnel with views through to the reflecting pool and to an urn at the other end but the framing works pretty well, maybe I am just hitting a quieter moment in the year, maybe if it was my own garden and I was about to leave it I too would be entitled to a patch or two where the garden was in a lower gear?  I like the lower view best with the fennel filling and softening the frame, and the stretch of water settling and adding weight to the image.Metal arch with view to urn  …and through to the reflecting pool.There are of course still plenty of high octane pockets of plants apart from the colourful parade of the Long Borders. Raised beds for fruit and vegetables are jumbled up with phlox and dahlias in the happiest of ways.Colourful vegetable beds, Helen Dillon s garden.A rather dull wall is completely ignored by a stand of radiant carmine Lobelia tupaLobelia tupa, Helen Dillon s garden.There are several very beautiful arching indigofera shrubs I think this is Indigofera amblyantha which is a brilliant plant for lighting up the garden in late summer with very pretty slender racemes of pink pea like flowers.Indigofera amblyantha, Helen Dillon s garden.And there is a brilliant clump of racy greenish white flower heads of Veratrum album which has even more covetable leaves like huge pleated hosta leaves at its base:Veratrum albumA really excellent combination of plants to create a lush, overspilling feel either side of a pathway is this group of Romneya coulteri (the California Tree Poppy), the evergreen shrub Bupleurum fruticosum (which has glowing clusters of lime green flowers) and a deep pink Japanese anemone. The bupleurum is one of those plants that you meet again and again, admire and never do anything about which is stupid as it is such an easy and handsome thing. I  have long wanted Romneya coulteri, however, and planted one this spring in my Camberwell garden. I can t quite work out yet if it likes me or not, it is notoriously picky and then if it does like you it is well known for being a bit unstoppable, but who could resist its abundance of huge papery flowers with yellow centres?Romneya coulteri, Bupleurum fruticosum and deep pink Japanese anemone flank a path in Helen Dillon s garden.In this group of plants the fading rusty flower heads of Rodgersia pinnata  Perthshire Bronze are given a new energy by the coral red tapers of Persicaria amplexicaulis (possibly Firetail ) and the rich pinks of the voluptuous lily.Rodegersia pinnata  Perthshire Bronze , Persicaria amplexicaulis and a voluptuous pink lily, Helen Dillon s garden.As I leave the fascinatingly neat flower heads, the shifting mauves and pinks and waxy green leaves of Hydrangea  Ayesha catch my eye. The hydrangea is in a pot and almost too good to be true. Naturally it goes immediately onto The List.Hydrangea  Ayesha , Helen Dillon s garden.The front garden has been reorganised and replanted much more recently with a sandstone terrace and gently screening slim silver birch.Helen Dillon s house viewed from the street.I am usually slightly allergic to silver birch as a solution tree for a contemporary look but I think it is a great choice here not least as Helen Dillon has made sure to add texture and surprises in her effortlessly elegant way.  I love the choice of the evergreen Itea ilicifolia over a side building: the shrub has glossy holly-like leaves and in late summer glamorous racemes of whitish-green, honey-scented flowers. The combination with a statuesque stand of Acanthus mollis and some crisp white Japanese anemone Honorine Jobert is a handsome one.Itea ilicifolia, Acanthus mollis and Anemone x hybrida  Honorine Jobert in the front garden.There is a lovely tumbling lightness to this group of Euphorbia characias, sea holly and some choice spiky leaves against the pale trunks of the birch (top photo) and below a huge stand of pink phlox is the plant that delightfully breaks the restrained palette of greens and white (below).When I was eating my sandwich with Helen Dillon she was almost cross that there was such an intense outpouring of interest in her garden the moment she was leaving it. But I hope she has been enjoying the interest too and I for one am thrilled that it galvanised me to paying the garden a long-delayed visit. I think Helen Dillon has made a very astute move, leaving now rather than slaving away, keeping a famous garden as perfect as it has always been in the magazines and lecture theatres. She says she is indeed very excited about the chance to start again. I thank her for wonderful enthusiasm, and for her brilliantly blunt, always entertaining writing that has taught so many of us so much. I have no doubt she will make another wonderful garden.The one thing I could not have fitted into that miniature Skoda if I had tried is the fantastic oak bench that nestles against the silver birch trees in the front garden. I am smitten by the simplicity and stillness of the bench and the heavy, splayed triangle blocks that support it:Simple, elegant (covetable) bench, Helen Dillon s front garden.Share this:TwitterFacebookEmailLike this:Like Loading... 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