Category Archives: Public Gardens

Chanticleer Garden in Early Autumn – Part 2

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When I paused my tour in my last blog, Part 1, we were leaving the Ruin Garden. Let’s take a moment to explore a little section of Minder Woods, nearby. This entrance moves through a planting of white wood aster (Eurybia divaricata) and ostrich ferns on the left and Begonia grandis var. evansiana ‘Alba’ on the right.

Further down the path are ‘Pamina’ Japanese anemones (Anemone hupehensis var. japonica) with ostrich ferns.

I loved this artful bench, just one of numerous handsome places to sit in Chanticleer’s gardens.

This tea viburnum (V. setigerum) is known for its dependable autumn display of berries.

Japanese toad lily season had begun; the one below is Tricyrtis hirta ‘Miyazaki’.

Though I grow a few species of snakeroot, I had never seen this compact one: Actaea japonica var. acerina.

Touring the Gravel Garden, below, is a little like walking into a drought-tolerant plant treasure box. Situated on a sunny, south-facing slope, it is packed with plants thriving in gritty soil that has also been top-dressed with gravel. Plants might be native drylanders, Mediterranean species, succulents or cacti. Below, a big beaked yucca (Y. rostrata) adds exclamation marks to one bed. Though this yucca is cold-hardy, any tender plants used here are moved by cart to heated greenhouses for the winter.

I had to work to find the name of the yellow-flowered plant in the trough on the right; it’s Bigelowia nuttallii, Nuttall’s rayless goldenrod.

Look at this beautiful Agave attenuata in its trough. Alongside is an interesting prickly-pear cactus that I think might be Opuntia cochenillifera ‘Variegated’.

Lisa Roper, the Gravel Garden horticulturist (and my friend) likes to combine different plant textures, for example the big century plant (Agave americana) below with fine-textured plants like lavender and santolina. Oh, and that lovely little purple-flowered plant?

I’m so glad you asked! I asked Joe Henderson and he supplied the name. It’s Eryngium leavenworthii or Leavenworth’s eryngo, an annual native to dry, rocky prairies and waste places in the central U.S.

The gravel garden occupies niches and stone steps up a gently-sloped hill. In fact, each step has its own little collection in Chanticleer’s plant list which is updated yearly. Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima) is allowed to self-seed around, but all self-seeders are carefully edited — a chore in rich gravel.

Seedheads offer a clue to what was blooming here in summer, like the wand-like Liatris microcephala and the Seseli gummiferum with its umbel inflorescence, below.

Lisa incorporates lots of interesting gladiolus species in the garden, including the beauty below, which I believe to be G. oppositiflorus.

Of the fine-textured carexes and grasses, this seep muhly grass stands out, Muhlenbergia reverchonii.

I had to ask my friends on Facebook’s Plant Idents page to help me out with an i.d. for the plant below. We finally came up with the genus Pseudognaphalium.… and then I was able to refer to the online plant list to give us the species P. obtusifolium, better known as sweet everlasting, or rabbit tobacco. It has a rich ethnobotanical history.

I could have stayed in the Gravel Garden all night, but our 4-hour stay meant I had to keep moving, so down I went to explore the sweeping beds between the Gravel Garden and the great lawn below the main house. These beds are considered part of Minder Woods. They’re always inspiring and often seem to have a purple-and-orange theme, including big purple alliums and orange kniphofia I photographed one spring. This time of year, asters (Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Bluebird’), Russian sage (Salvia yangii/Perovskia atriplicifolia) and tender sages like Salvia ‘Amistad’ and Salvia leucantha form the purple/blue palette while the orange is supplied by Zinnia ‘Queen Lime Orange’, tall ‘Garland Orange’ marigolds (Tagetes erecta), Cosmos sulphureus ‘Sunset Orange’, Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia) and dahlias ‘Sonic Boom’, ‘Kabloom’, ‘Honeymoon’ and ‘David Howard’, among others.

The orange flowers below include zinnia, cosmos and marigold. In these photos you can also see the first year rosettes of the biennial verbascums that will tower in these beds next year.

What would our late summer-autumn gardens be without asters? Chanticleer uses a combination in its gardens, but the taller lavender-lilac ones seem to be Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Bluebird’.

Well-grown annuals add so much to the late summer garden. Below is the fabulous, tall zinnia, ‘Queen Lime Orange’. On the right is tender Mexican sage, Salvia leucantha ‘Santa Barbara’. The hydrangea is H. paniculata ‘Limelight’.

Adding a screen-like grass in front of plants turns plant design into a bewitching form of stagecraft. That’s purple love grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), below……

…. and look how it serves as a mysterious scrim curtain in front of the brilliant zinnias. Isn’t it magical?

The Elevated Walk was built in 2015 to access the main house from the ponds and the great lawn below, and its plant roster has matured beautifully now. Here is that white-flowered sweet everlasting again, along with the compact Russian sage ‘Little Spire’ and rattlesnake master. The wine-coloured seedheads are Angelica gigas. The walkway itself is composed of porous materials.

The areas beneath the Elevated Walk are also planted with trees, shrubs and perennials, like the Aspen Grove, below. That means they’re at eye level with visitors on the walkway, a little like a treetop walk in other gardens.

With its persistent seed heads, rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium) adds seasons of interest to a border. And those oblong, dark seedheads belong to Rudbeckia maxima.

The Apple House occupies a place of honor on the walkway. Go inside and you’re treated to fabulous, colourful murals – but no apples these days.

A few of my fellow garden bloggers stopped on the Elevated Walk to admire the fall-changing foliage of this beautiful Japanese maple (Acer palmatum subsp. amoenum). And look at that stunning railing

The prize at the top of the walkway is Chanticleer House, once home to Adolph Rosengarten Sr. and his wife, and also the setting for several colourful flower beds, like the one in the Overlook below, punctuated by spears of the succulent Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta‘. The variegated plant at right is Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’.

I grew angelonia (purple plant below) for the first time this summer, and though it lasted in flower for months, I didn’t see one bee or butterfly on it. Too bad – otherwise the perfect bedding annual. Blue-flowered Salvia farinacea, on the other hand, is a great pollinator plant. The nodding, white and pink flowers are South African foxglove (Ceratotheca triloba).

The fluffy white flowers below belong to Euphorbia hypericifiolia Breathless Blush.

The house terrace always features an array of chartreuse-leaved plants. I’m not exactly sure what the chartreuse plant below is, but it might be Salix sachalinensis ‘Golden Sunshine’. 

This border was tropical-looking, with its spiky golden bromeliads (Aechmea blanchetiana Hawaii). The phormum at right is ‘Pink Panther’.

I love the little gloriosa daisy at front, R. hirta ‘Zahara’. The twirly, brown foliage plant at the rear is Acalypha wilkesiana ‘Ceylon’.

Dozens of pots were arrayed in front of Chanticleer House, and those with dark leaves played nicely with the dark shutters.

And here is a charming gesture that sets Chanticleer apart from so many gardens. There is always a basin filled with colourful floating flowers and leaves plucked from the gardens. This one even contains the green fruit colloquially known as, yes, “hairy balls”, but is more properly called Gomphocarpus physocarpus. A tender shrub related to milkweeds, it also provides food for monarch butterfly caterpillars.

A few of my fellow garden bloggers were relaxing on the sun porch. Originally glassed-in, it was a favourite lookout for Adolph Rosengarten Sr’s wife, Christine Penrose Rosengarten.

The porch featured one of the many beautiful floral arrangements crafted from the garden’s flowers. (And there is that spectacular ‘Harvey Koop’ dahlia from the Cutting Garden in Part One!)

As a confirmed ‘meadow gardener’, one of the reasons I was overjoyed to be visiting Chanticleer in late summer was the chance to see the Flowery Lawn. Originally a rectangle of manicured turfgrass between the house and swimming pool, the decision to let it become a tended meadow was such a good one. In spring, it’s all daffodils, but on this day it featured several types of anise hyssop (Agastache) including ‘Blue Fortune’, ‘Blue Boa’, ‘Little Adder’, ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Serpentine’. Though native butterfly milkweed was out of bloom, tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) added flashes of orange. The tall plant with yellow flowers is a daylily, Hemerocallis ‘September Sol’.

The dark-blue salvia with the anise hyssop is ‘Big Blue’ — and it looks to me like pale-mauve calamint (Calamintha nepeta) is in this garden too.

A lonely monarch butterfly was nectaring on the asclepias before the big migration south. In our region, it was a very poor summer for monarchs – I only saw 2 at our cottage, and no eggs on all my milkweed.

A big carpenter bee was foraging on the anise hyssop.

The bloggers were treated to a delicious Middle Eastern meal in the Chanticleer House garden, which gave me time to sit and enjoy yet another bouquet. I love the way the crimson amaranth cascades so nicely. Those tiny orange fruits, by the way, come from Talinum grandiflorum, aka “jewels of Opar”.

The swimming pool always look so inviting. (Way back in the day, a few decades ago, I did have a dip in that pool – invited, of course!)

The Old French literary word for rooster was chantecler and there are many carved versions at Chanticleer.

Who wouldn’t want to roost in this lovely garden, amongst silvery euphorbias and crambes?

The East Bed forms the boundary to the house garden, and is filled with lush tropicals, like the bananas, ‘Hilo Beauty’ caladium, ‘King Tut’ dwarf cyperus, and more.

I’m always drawn to inspiring colour combinations, and this tropical duo in the East Bed rang my bell. The taro is Colocasia ‘Distant Memory’; the red-leaved Mexican native shrub is Euphorbia cotinifolia, sometimes called smoketree spurge.

Aiming for one last visit to the Teacup Garden, I walked out of the main house garden towards Emily’s house, i.e. the offices and visitor’s centre, where this massive oak tree was carpeted with Symphyotrichum ericoides ‘Snow Flurry’, a compact heath aster used extensively in many of the gardens.

How much fun is this? Tropical lianas getting the balcony treatment.

I circled around the front of Emily’s house, where of course there were more spectacular plant designs.

This luscious arrangement of tropicals was my last plant photo, including strap-leaved Alcantarea imperialis, pink-leaved caladiums, canna lily, begonias and other delicious plants. And, of course, a bench for enjoyment.

And as if these precious hours at Chanticleer weren’t enough, along with food and drinks there was a great band.

We danced! Even those of us with aching knees from walking up and down the garden’s hills danced. It was another visit we won’t soon forget. Thank you Bill Thomas and the entire Chanticleer team. You are simply the best.

Chanticleer Garden in Early Autumn – Part 1

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To visit my favourite garden in the entire world is always a special gift, so when I heard that my gang of garden bloggers had chosen Philadelphia to be the centre of our annual Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the last week of September, I was ecstatic.  Even if Chanticleer had been the only garden we saw, it would have been enough, in my view. But of course it wasn’t; we saw many beautiful gardens. But let’s start here with a map, to familiarize you with the various theme gardens on the 35-acre property.

The thing about Chanticleer is that you can visit at different times of the year and see a very different garden; there is never enough time. After visiting in June 2014, I wrote a 2-part blog filled with poppies, foxgloves, sages and alliums. In May 2022, I used my blog to trace the history of the Rosengarten family, who in 1913 made their summer home here on Philadelphia’s Main Line in the town of Wayne; a decade later it became their full-time residence.  There were peonies, columbine, wisteria and tuliptree in flower on that enchanting spring visit.  But no matter which season, I always begin in the Teacup Garden, named for its distinctive overflowing fountain.  This is like a tiny, perfect stage set filled each year with a new cast of characters, always with its own colour scheme.  Sometimes it’s a dry garden, often tropicals mix with annuals. This year, if asked to name it, and considering the silvery Senecio vira-vira and olive trees, I might offer “pewter perfection”.

The basin in front of the garden is resplendent with a day-blooming tropical waterlily.

The fountain originated with the Rosengarten family….

…..and is believed to have been purchased by them in Florence, Italy in the 1920s.  The pretty building adjacent to the Teacup Garden houses Chanticleer’s administrative offices. It was originally the home of Alfred Rosengarten’s daughter Emily, built for her on her wedding in 1935.  The Rosengarten family home itself is called Chanticleer House and has its own gardens.

The Teacup Garden features a number of urns and pots, like this glazed, teal-blue urn filled with a stunning, chartreuse jasmine called Fiona Sunrise (Jasminum officinale)….  

… and this one, draped with Pilea glauca ‘Aquamarine’.

This triangular container grouping contains several types of lavender and a tall marigold, Tagetes ‘Garland Orange’, among other plants.

Attention to detail is a hallmark of Chanticleer, as evidenced by the small, elegant touches like bouquets placed here and there, including in the Ladies’ Room adjacent to the Teacup Garden.

I took a quick look in the Upper Border characterized by its white flower palette and noted a handsome Texas Star hibiscus (H. coccineus ‘Albus’).  But there wasn’t enough time to tarry here, and having visited Chanticleer before, I knew how to budget the few hours I had.

So off I went to the Tennis Court Garden below, named for the Rosengarten era but now converted into a garden of sweeping borders with a viewing arbor to take it all in.  That yew on the left is Taxus ‘Beanpole’ – an apt name – and on the right, elegant ‘Honorine Jobert’ Japanese anemones.  The echinacea is ‘Green Jewel’.

The stairs to the garden are one of my favourite design touches, with their built in planters. This year they contain gorgeous white Symphyotrichum ericoides ‘Snow Flurry’, dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), Lantana camara ‘Samantha’ and Sedum rupestre ‘Angelina’.

Who would ever think about punctuating a linear planter with tiny dawn redwoods?   Or, put another way, why not use your nursery plants as decorative flourishes?

The old tennis court is planted with lush, curved borders.

Despite reading praises about this late-flowering perennial, I had never before seen it. Meet Letterman’s ironweed, Vernonia lettermanii ‘Iron Butterfly’.  The edging is Heuchera ‘Caramel’.

I loved this combination of lilac aster (not on the master list but likely Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Bluebird’) with Succisella inflexa ‘Frosted Pearls’, aka devil’s bit.

The bumble bees were enjoying the knautia-like heads of the flowers.

The nearby Cutting Garden is a place of chaotic loveliness in late September. Its central path covered with pinestraw leads to the fenced Vegetable Garden.

There are annuals, perennials, tender bulbs and even the odd staked cherry tomato in the Cutting Garden. Plus, of course, all the flowers used in Chanticleer’s season-long floral arrangements.  That dark-headed grass is Pennisetum glaucum ‘Jade Princess’.

The dark red plant near the cosmos and ageratum is cranberry hibiscus (Hibiscus acetosella). It makes a luscious foliage filler in floral arrangements.

That towering yellow daisy in the back is willowleaf sunflower (Helianthus salicifolius).

Have you ever seen a more beautiful dahlia?  It’s called ‘Harvey Koop’, and I spotted it later in a bouquet. 

One could spend hours in Bell’s Run exploring the woodland jewels, then strolling through the Creek Garden with its moisture-loving plants, but I wanted to focus on the flowering jewels of late summer, so after a quick walk along the lovely creek….

…. I came back to the light in the Ruin Garden’s sporobolus meadow (S. heterolepis) with its flanking hydrangeas (H. paniculata).   

On the way to the ponds, I stopped in at the Arbor and took a moment to appreciate gardener Dan Benarcik’s distinctive “Chanticleer chairs” and the lime-green Carex oshimensis ‘Evercolor Everillo’ in the pots.

Then I walked past the Silver Garden with its yellow Sternbergia lutea, one of the finest autumn-flowering bulbs backed by a white aster.

The ponds are always a favourite destination before climbing back up the hill at Chanticleer. This one features a ledge waterfall.  I believe the gold shrub is Chamaecyparis pisifera ‘Filifera Aurea Nana’.

This pond hosts the white water lily Nymphaea ‘Pöstlingberg’.

Marginal aquatic plants enjoy the edges of the ponds. The white-flowered plant below is Echinodorus bracteatus ‘Lantau Lady’, aka Amazon sword.

The big koi always look a little hungry, though they are certainly well-fed!  But a little begging can’t hurt, right?

But look what surprise awaited me at one of the ponds! This handsome great blue heron might have dreamt of koi but the most he managed to catch was a frog, or so I learned later.  And did you know there’s an aquatic version of rattlesnake master?  It’s marsh rattlesnake master Eryngium aquaticum, an American native whose habitat includes bogs, swamps and marshes. Another name is bitter snakeroot, reflecting its use by Native Americans to treat snakebites.  Its spiky inflorescences start out blue, then fade to whitish-gray.

The heron seemed relatively unafraid of the visitors and moved around the pond while posing nicely, so I gave it a little more than its 15 photographic minutes of fame.

The waterlily in the heron pond is Nymphaea ‘Texas Dawn’.

I climbed the hill toward the other gardens past the Rock Ledge – a garden that shines in late spring but looked relaxed and lovely in late summer. The Japanese maple is Acer palmatum ‘Osakazuki’.

My eye caught movement in the sumptuous, blue closed bottle gentians (Gentiana andrewsii) and I stopped to watch bumble bees working feverishly to access the nectar inside.

I was delighted to find Joe Henderson, the horticulturist in charge of Chanticleer’s ponds.  He’s a 25-year veteran of the garden, something so vital for continuity and creativity.  And I realized, while chatting with him, that I’d actually visited his personal garden on a tour long ago.  Since Chanticleer had rolled out the welcome mat for the Garden Bloggers Fling, with food stations, cocktails and even a musical tent with a great band, we were fortunate to meet many of the gardeners, who were there to greet us…..

…. sometimes even acting as bartenders, like Andrew Wiley, below, who benefited this year from The Chanticleer USA Christopher Lloyd Scholarship, an exchange conceived in order to provide a gardener from the United States with a year-long, practical education in the traditional style of ornamental gardening as practised at two of the world’s most respected gardens, Great Dixter in East Sussex, England, and Chanticleer. I visited Great Dixter in early June and blogged about that fabulous garden, but missed seeing Andrew.

I’m going to leave the Gravel Garden, my friend Lisa Roper’s horticultural hillside domain, until Part 2 of this blog, but let’s take a peek into the Ruin Garden at the top of hill beyond some of Lisa’s treasures. This intriguing garden was built on the foundation of Minder House (1925), originally next door to Chanticleer but acquired by Adolph Rosengarten, Sr. as a 1933 wedding gift for his son Adolph Rosengarten, Jr and his wife Janet.  Nine years after the death of Adolph Jr. in 1990, Minder House was razed and under Chanticleer’s former director, Chris Woods, it was rebuilt as an evocative ruin of three-stone-walled ‘rooms’ that capture its spirit.  The wall below is the entrance to the “library”.  

Moving around the corner of the Ruin, we see the lemon-yellow Mohr’s rosinweed (Silphium mohrii), a native that’s become very popular recently since it does not have the aggressive tendencies of its cousins.

Let’s go into the Pool Room – with its interesting pool and fountain.

Draw a little closer and you see California sculptor Marcia Donahue’s intriguing, floating faces and the pool’s stone wall decked with beautiful Parthenocissus henryana.

Then there’s the “pool table”….

…..its surface bearing just enough water to perfectly reflect the….

….five varieties of Tillandsia in the mantle arrangement.   

And with that, I will pause our tour until Part 2, featuring the Gravel Garden, Minder Woods and Chanticleer House with its flowery lawn. Stay tuned.

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More Chanticleer blogs:

Touring Chanticleer – June 2014 – Part 1 and Part 2

May at Chanticleer – May 2022 – Part 1 and Part 2

A Visit to Longwood Gardens

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Last week, for four days – including the weekend that Tropical Storm Ophelia decided to make her wet and windy appearance – I visited “America’s Garden Capital”, gardens of the Philadelphia region, along with almost 100 fellow garden bloggers. We call this annual adventure the Garden Bloggers’ Fling and it is all that: tours, fun, friendship (and no classes). It began with a visit to fabulous Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA, and a rare behind-the-scenes tour of the high-tech production facility, courtesy of Longwood’s Conservatory Manager – and the one-man organizing committee for this Fling – Karl Gercens III.  He shepherded us around a large greenhouse…..

….. showing us what seemed to be acres of chrysanthemums being readied for Longwood’s annual Chrysanthemum Festival, Sept. 30-Nov. 12 this year. Some of the rare cultivars originated in Japan 45 years ago and are propagated to keep them available for use each autumn.

Karl told us about the pruning and training techniques that prepare the mums for show-time….

…. and we watched a gardener patiently training mums into Christmas tree shapes.

These looked like octopuses to me, but I believe they’re called mum cascades and are ultimately suspended from above in the Conservatory. This greenhouse featured blinds that enable the gardeners to control the light/dark balance needed for the plants’ physiological photoperiod, in order to have them all bloom on time.

Michelle demonstrated the high-tech overhead trolley line that moves hanging baskets around the greenhouse to facilitate watering, fertilizing and correct light exposure.

Pierre du Pont was very fond of citrus trees and grew them in the Conservatory in a section then called the Orangery. So espaliered citrus trees have become part of Longwood’s tradition.

Then it was outside to a talk by the gardener of the aquatic plants occupying temporary pools while major construction takes place around their regular pools.  Prominent was Victoria amazonica with its platter-shaped leaves, the largest floating leaves in the plant kingdom, famous for supporting small children in Victorian-era conservatory photos. 

Native to the Amazon Basin, their vascular architecture creates a stiffness that enables the big leaves to float in large networks, maximizing photosynthesis. The spines deter hungry herbivores.

 Waterlilies had been assembled in pretty aquatic arrangements.

Then it was into the Visitor Center for a presentation on “Longwood Reimagined: A New Garden Experience”. It began with the garden’s mission statement….

…..the legacy of Pierre Samuel du Pont (1870-1954), great-great-grandson of the founder of the chemical company DuPont, who purchased what was then a 202-acre arboretum and farm from the Peirce family in 1906.  Today, Longwood ranges over 1,077 acres (436 hectares) and welcomes 1.6 million visitors yearly.

We saw artist renderings of the new football-field-sized greenhouse taking shape near the Conservatory. Opening in fall 2024, the $245 million 17-acre Reimagining project features, in Longwood’s words: “Stunning new buildings, wondrous new indoor and outdoor gardens, surprising new guest experiences, and much more await. We’re expanding our grounds, connecting them from east to west in a beautiful, unified journey of lush, formal gardens to open meadows to winding paths to breathtaking Brandywine Valley vistas.”

Next up was a visit to the beautiful Flower Garden, beginning with this lovely mauve-and-plum container design on a patio designed in the 1970s by the renowned California landscape architect Thomas Church.

The 600-foot-long Flower Garden walk is gorgeous in September, with annuals at their peak. It was Longwood’s very first garden, designed by Pierre S. du Pont who described it as “the old-fashioned plan of straight walks and box borders at the edge of the flower beds”, using colourful plants chosen with the help of his wife Alice, now memorialized in Mandevilla ‘Alice du Pont’.

Combinations are fine-tuned to hit just the right colour note, like this Persian shield (Strobilanthes dyerianus) surrounded by globe amaranath (Gomphrena globosa ‘Ping Pong Purple‘).

The fuzzy, pink flowers of Bolivian sage (Salvia oxyphora) were attracting lots of bees.

I loved this soft combination of peach zinnias and bronze carex grass.

Stairs led down to Pierre du Pont’s “Compartment Gardens”, including the 1908 Square Fountain surrounded by luscious coleus and begonia plants, among others.  The stunning chartreuse coleus is Flame Thrower™ Salsa Verde.

Though the peony garden was out-of-season, there were a few pretty combinations for late summer, like the pink Japanese anemone with Ageratum houstonianum, below.

Handsome aquamarine urns punctuated this long foliage border, backed by a tall arborvitae hedge.

I hurried up from the Flower Garden past the Peirce-DuPont House (1730) towards the Meadow, but stopped under a native franklinia tree (F. alatamaha) to admire the few remaining blossoms.  Many of Longwood’s towering trees are part of a rich arboretum, established in the late 18th century by the sons of William Peirce, who acquired 402 acres in 1700 from agents of William Penn (1644-1718). Penn was an English-born Quaker who made treaties with the region’s Lenape Native Americans in order to develop the property he acquired from King Charles II, eventually naming it Pennsylvania. In 1682, the first Pennsylvania General Assembly was held.  Penn would later found Philadelphia. As for franklinia, it was discovered growing on the Alatamaha River in 1765 by John and William Bartram; the latter collected seed a decade later and named the tree for his father’s friend, Benjamin Franklin.

Then it was down the gently curving boardwalk through Peirce’s Woods….

…. to the native plant meadow featuring late summer goldenrod, white snakeroot (Ageratina altissima), and asters, as well as the seedheads of wild beebalm and Joe Pye weed.  (I turned on my Merlin app here to identify the gray catbirds calling in the trees nearby).

In the shade, orange touch-me-not (Impatiens capensis) was attracting bumble bees.

Now it was time to visit the 4.5 acre (1.8 hectare) Conservatory (1919), with its fine collection of 4,600 tropicals, orchids, desert and Mediterranean plants and trees, featured in 17 theme gardens, many containing fountains or pools.  

I loved these Siam tulips (Curcuma alismatifolia)….

….. and this striking combination of Caladium ‘Carolyn Whorton’ with orange Bouvardia ternifolia.

Pink anthuriums (‘Anthewuch’) and variegated sansevierias were growing amongst cycads.

This pool featured a waterfall.

And this one had fountains seemingly emerging from ferns.

Potted tree ferns (Cyathea cooperi) occupy handsome Versailles tubs in the Fern Floor hall, all reflected in the shallow water. However, when events are held in this hall the water is drained.

Windowboxes containing Aechmea fasciata flank the Fern Floor.

The Acacia Passage, below, is such a perfect setting, I had to wait for a professional photographer to finish a shoot with an engaged couple. The trees forming the lacy arch are cinnamon wattle (Acacia leprosa).

A vast expanse of emerald-green lawn stretches across a large hall in the Conservatory.

Early-blooming cultivars of chrysanthemum were celebrating the onset of autumn here.

It’s always fun to find a handsome-looking bird-of-paradise (Strelitzia reginae) to photograph.

In the West Conservatory Complex, in what was originally a space to grow fruit trees and in the 1950s the Geographic Garden, California landscape architect Isabelle Greene created the Silver Garden in 1987, featuring plants from Mediterranean and desert climates. Its sinuous, curving lines were a departure from the formal, geometric style of the rest of the conservatory.

How soft and restful this garden is, and how evocative of a natural landscape.

Several Agave victoriae-reginae, the Queen Victoria agave, punctuate a silvery carpet.

Of all the agaves, Agave parryi is my favourite photo subject.

Karl said that this is not the best time of year for orchids, but the Orchid House was resplendent nonetheless.

Laeliocattleya Roitelet-‘Paradis’ is a 1949 introduction from the French orchid nursery Vacherot and Lecoufle. Isn’t she stunning?

Gombrassiltonia Mervyn Grant ‘Talisman Cove’ is a three-way cross between Gomesa x Brassia x Miltonia. Orchid hybrid names are a world unto themselves!

Our Longwood visit culminated with a spectacular Illuminated Fountain show.

Because it is very special to watch the fountains dance – as indeed it is very special to visit Longwood itself – I will leave you with this taste of the music of Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ from my YouTube channel.

Sissinghurst in Vita’s ‘Sweet June’

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Of all the gardens I’ve visited that merit the phrase ‘world-class’, Sissinghurst is near the top, along with neighbouring Great Dixter which I wrote about in my last blog post.  It’s not vast in scope, like Philadelphia’s Chanticleer (which I’ve written about a few times), nor does it have the artistic allure of Monet’s garden at Giverny (my spring visit is here), but it has the cult of personality of its founders, the enigmatic author Vita Sackville-West, seen below in a 1918 painting by William Strang, and her diplomat husband Harold Nicolson.  In what has been called “an unconventional but harmonious marriage” during which they wrote a combined 70 books, they each had a series of same-sex affairs including Vita with fellow Bloomsbury Group writer Virginia Woolf, who in 1928 wrote Orlando: A Biography, inspired by her lover:  a time-travel, gender-bending novel that has been adapted as a film and stage play .

Harold and Vita were also parents of two sons, Nigel and Ben, though Nigel remembered his mother for her frequent abandonments to be with her lovers. In 1973, he would publish ‘Portrait of a Marriage’, incorporating a memoir he found after his mother’s death exploring what she called her “duality” and her relationships with women, along with his own observations of his parents’ loving marriage. But together, Vita and Harold were deeply committed to the garden they designed on the large, run-down property they purchased in 1930. Vita was the romantic plantswoman; Harold was in charge of structure. He created formal rooms hedged in yew; she filled them with old French roses, peonies, irises and spring bulbs.  Beyond her novels and books containing her epic poems ‘The Land’ (1926) and ‘The Garden’ (1946), she also penned a weekly  column titled In Your Garden in The Observer from 1946 to 1957, later published as a 4-book anthology, below, and still available online.    

Sissinghurst was the reason for my early June stay in Kent, courtesy of my London-based son Doug and his partner Tommy.  Since we arrived early from our lovely Airbnb in nearby Biddenden and the garden only opens at 11 am, we had lots of time to cool our heels, walking from the parking lot on a path between the timber fence where native red campion (Silene dioica) competed with stinging nettles (Urtica dioica).

We passed the plant shop, where visitors could buy roses….

…. or any number of perennials, below.

We took a moment to gaze across the green fields of Sissinghurst’s 460 acres on the Weald of Kent, of which 5 are intensively gardened and 180 acres are woodland.  Here, visitors can walk their dogs, bird-watch and hike to their heart’s content.  And thanks to writer Adam Nicolson, Vita and Harold’s grandson (and the husband of British garden maven Sarah Raven), we have a beautifully-written recollection of the farm fields that enlivened Sissinghurst and gave it real purpose when he was a boy – and his own quest to return the working farm to the estate. This is from the excerpted first chapter of his lyrical book Sissinghurst – A Castle’s Unfinished History (2010).

“Remembering what had been here, I came to realize what had gone: the sense that the landscape around the house and garden was itself a rich and living organism. By 2004, all that had been rubbed away. An efficiently driven tourist business, with an exquisite garden at its center, was now set in the frame of a rather toughened and empty landscape. It sometimes seemed as if Sissinghurst had become something like a Titian in a car park.”

We settled into the restaurant until opening time. One of the charms of Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which is run by the National Trust but relies heavily on volunteers, is that there are small touches like the pretty bouquets of flowers from the cutting garden.  This one features biennial dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) with annual cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus), golden alexanders (Smyrnium perfoliatum) and corn cockle (Agrostemma githago).

This posy featured many of the purples, blues and pinks that Vita adored.

There was a display of blue glass in one of the café windows, presumably part of Vita’s collection of coloured glass.

Attached to the Granary Restaurant are the oasthouse and rondels.  Built around 1880, they were still in use to dry and store hops for beer-brewing in 1966, a vital part of the hop-farming industry of Kent which continues to this day. Author George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm) picked hops in the region in the summer of 1931.  

Sissinghurst’s garden rooms are shown on the map below:

A – Priest’s House & White Garden; B – Delos; C – Top Courtyard, West Range and Purple Border; D – Entrance; E – Tower and Lower Courtyard; F – Yew Walk; G – Orchard; H – Rose Garden; I – South Cottage and Cottage Garden; J – Moat Walk and Azaleas; K – Nuttery; L – Herb Garden; M – Lime Walk 

I was first in line when the gates opened at 11 am, and as someone who has made “colour in the garden” a focus of my work, I wasted no time heading into one of the gardening world’s best-known meccas, the White Garden. Wrote Vita Sackville-West:  “I am trying to make a grey, green, and white garden. This is an experiment which I ardently hope may be successful, though I doubt it … All the same, I cannot help hoping that the great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden, next summer, in the twilight — the pale garden that I am now planting under the first flakes of snow. ”

June is the perfect time to see a White Garden, as I would also discover in the beautiful version designed by Mat Reese at Malverleys later in the week.  There are numerous white-flowered perennials, such as the bearded iris (possibly ‘White City’) and peony (likely ‘Festiva Maxima’), below…..

…. and lupines, softened by white-flowered umbellifers such as cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) and annual Ammi majus.  

A statue stood in the shadow of a weeping silver pear tree (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula).  Alas, a sunny June day in England and Sissinghurst’s late opening time meant bright contrast for photography, but we garden tourists take what we can get.

Minoan lace flower (Orlaya grandiflora) has become increasingly popular as a self-seeding annual in gardens.  White foxgloves and the white-flowered form of red valerian (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’) add to the display, along with silvery artemisia.

Centaurea montana ‘Amethyst in Snow’ was introduced by my Facebook friend John Grimshaw of the Yorkshire Arboretum in 2000 and is now sold around the world, sometimes as ‘Purple Heart’. 

When I was walking out of the White Garden past the Priest’s House to head into the new Delos Garden, I spied this bellflower growing on the wall.  It is Dalmatian bellflower (Campanula portenschlagiana); perhaps unsurprisingly, it was once called C. muralis from the Latin ‘of walls’

Delos was a surprise. When we visited Sissinghurst for the first time more than 30 years ago, this part of the garden – originally inspired by a 1935 trip Vita and Harold made to the monument-rich Greek island – was not on view, or certainly unmemorable.  In 2018, Sissinghurst head gardener Troy Scott-Smith asked landscape designer Dan Pearson to re-invent the space. Dan wrote a beautiful essay for his newsletter Dig Delve about the process, including a childhood recollection by Adam Nicolson.   

An enthusiastic volunteer was on hand in the Delos Garden to help visitors with plant identification.

Wherever I went in England in June – including a visit to Dan Pearson’s garden the following week which I blogged about – I saw giant fennel. In Delos, Dan chose to use Ferula communis subsp. glauca.  As he wrote in an essay in Dig Delve, “This is the most elegant of all, in my opinion, for its slender limbs and burnished dark green leaf. I have planted it amongst the rockscape of the re-imagined Delos Garden I recently designed at Sissinghurst.”

Like all giant fennels, it has a bright, yellow inflorescence.

In the garden stand three Greek marble altars originally brought from Delos in the 1820s, as Adam Nicolson recounted in Dig Delve.  “There is one element that reaches further back into history than the dreams of the 1930s: three cylindrical Greek marble altars, originally carved in the 3rd or 4th century BC decorated around their waists with swags of grape, pomegranate and myrtle suspended between garlanded bull-heads – boukrania – which now stand at key intervals along the central street of the garden.”

Of their provenance, Adam wrote:  “Harold Nicolson’s great-grandfather was Commodore William Gawen Rowan Hamilton, a naval commander in the first years of the nineteenth century, a heroic and romantic figure and passionate Philhellene, who spent the years from 1820 onwards in the eastern Mediterranean, winning the title of ‘Liberator of Greece’ by protecting the Greek rebels against the Turks  From time to time during his cruises attacking pirates and fending off the Turk, he would land on an island or a piece of the Turkish-occupied mainland and quietly liberate an antiquity or two, sending them back to his liberal father-in-law in Ireland, Major-General Sir George Cockburn, a flamboyant antiquary who had made a collection of Greek statuary at Shanganagh, his castle outside Dublin.”  It was when the Irish castle was sold in 1936 that Harold Nicholson purchased the Delian altars and brought them to Sissinghurst.

As an aside, these days Delos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its monuments safe from pirates of all stripes.  When I visited in October 2011, below, it made me long to return in spring when the wildflowers were blooming.

Other Mediterranean flowers in the Delos garden include asphodels (Asphodeline lutea)….

…. pinks (Dianthus spp.)……

….. rock roses (Cistus) with happy hoverflies….

….. and the flamboyant red Paeonia perigrina with a visiting bumble bee.

Then it was out of the Delos Garden and off through the 16th century Tudor Tower that once held Vita’s writing room. Sissinghurst was owned by the Baker family from 1490. The first buildings were constructed around 1535 by Sir John Baker, Henry VIII’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Sir John’s daughter Cicely married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset – thus a connection to Vita Sackville-West four centuries later. The tower, octagonal turret and a large courtyard house were built by Sir John’s son Richard Baker between 1560-1574; Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed a stay here at that time.  The Baker family fortunes declined and two centuries later, the house and tower were requisitioned by the state to house 3,000 French prisoners-of-war during the Seven Years War 1756 -1763.  There is still graffiti in French from those prisoners on the walls of the tower. Later it became a parish poorhouse and farm, including hop-growing. Around 1800, the main house was demolished by its new owner. When Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930, she refurbished the three-storey tower, adding a fireplace to the ground floor room and creating a writing space and library for herself upstairs. It has recently been renovated, complete with her pink walls. During World War II, the tower was used as an observation post since the English Channel was effectively controlled by the Germans whose shelling of the Kent coastline and its towns, according to the BBC, led to the county being called “hellfire corner” and “bomb alley”.  (Sissinghurst has a long history nicely encapsulated here by the National Trust who took over the property in 1967, five years after Vita’s death.)

I found this photo in a Heritage Records document for Sissinghurst.

Clambering up the back of the Tower was Lady Banks rose (Rosa banksiae ‘Lutea’) …..

….. with its clusters of pale yellow roses.

The courtyard adjacent to the Tower contains Vita’s Purple Border. When I visited, it was filled with Gladiolus byzantinus subsp. byzantinus, below, also beloved by Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett for the meadows at Great Dixter which I blogged about recently.   

I loved the way the purple centres of Allium basalticum ‘Silver Spring’ echoed the colour of the gladioli.

There were so many lovely vignettes here, including the opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) with dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), but time was a-marching.

Then it was into the Rose Garden, with its lush profusion of roses surrounded by early June flowers such as blue Italian alkanet (Anchusa azurea) with magenta foxgloves and euphorbia, below.

It was utterly magnificent – and a little heartbreaking for a photographer hoping for just one cloud to float by above to soften the shadows.

Vita loved her roses. This is ‘Fantin-Latour’, a Centifolia named for the Impressionist painter and introduced into the UK in 1945.  Pruning and training of roses is taken very seriously at Sissinghurst. According to Sarah Raven, wife of Vita’s grandson Adam Nicolson, “The big leggy shrubs, which put out great, pliable, triffid arms that are easy to tie down and train, are bent on to hazel hoops arranged around the skirts of the plant. Roses with this lax habit include ‘Constance Spry’, ‘Fantin-Latour’, ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’, ‘Madame Isaac Pereire’…”

Irises play a starring role in the Rose Garden in June. This is the bearded iris ‘Shannopin’, a 1940 American introduction grown by Vita that looked utterly lovely with the alliums just going over.

Siberian iris (Iris sibirica) grow in the mix in the Rose Garden, here with dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis) and red campion (Silene dioica).

Annual honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) with its sensuous blue bracts is used extensively at Sissinghurst, here with ranunculus.

Yellow lupines make an appearance in the Rose Garden as well.  (I’ve read the odd comment that yellow is discordant in this garden, but when you already have a Purple Border filled with purple, mauve, blue and pink flowers, it seems to me that the odd splash of yellow is perfectly fine.)

Moving out of the Rose Garden, I found the Lime Walk: an allée of pleached linden trees (Tilia platyphyllos ‘Rubra’). Unlike the rest of the gardens at Sissinghurst, this was all Harold Nicolson’s creation, not Vita’s – he called it “my life’s work”.  It is underplanted with masses of spring bulbs, making overplanting difficult, thus it looked a little bare in early June.

The statue at its terminus is a Bacchante commissioned by the National Trust from sculptor Simon Smith who carved it using Carrara marble from the Cava di Michelangelo and installed it in 2016.  On his page, the artist says: “The sculpture depicts a dancing girl, slightly drunk, who has suddenly noticed something in the distance”.   What could it be?

If he were a little closer, she might have noticed the young man below, standing in a shade-dappled carpet of ferns in The Nuttery.  In the spring of 1930, when Harold and Vita were considering whether to buy Sissinghurst with its ruined buildings, Harold wrote: ‘We come suddenly upon a nut walk and that settles it…’  The garden features 56 coppiced hazels (Corylus avellana) and a variety of woodland plants.

The Moat Walk features Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’ espaliered on a brick wall facing an azalea bank across the lawn.

After the cool green of the Lime Walk and Nuttery, the South Cottage Garden — my final stop — was a burst of June sunshine with its warm palette of yellow, chartreuse, orange and red. I would have stayed here a long time if we hadn’t had to find lunch before visiting Great Dixter in the afternoon.

You can see a little of the South Cottage behind the geums and irises….

…. and the wallflowers. When Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930, the cottage was a fragment of the ruins of the original 1570 house. They restored and extended it that decade and it became the intimate place where each had a bedroom and Harold had his office overlooking the garden.

The colours here seem to glow, including the lacy yellow fumitory (Corydalis lutea), hakonechloa grass and golden iris….

…. and the night-scented flowers of the unusual evening primrose Oenothera stricta ‘Sulphurea’.   

Corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were sprinkled about….

…. and it was a thrill, in my final moments at Sissinghurst, to glimpse the last of all tulips to flower, the tall, blazing-red Tulipa sprengeri.   What a joy this sunny June garden was, as were the pale flowers in the White Garden and the abundance of the Rose Garden.

I will leave the last words to Vita Sackville-West, from her poem The Garden (1945)

Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring,
Of adolescence or of middle-age?
A girl first marvelling at touch of lovers
Or else a woman growing ripely sage?
Between the two she delicately hovers,
Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature.
She’s not a matron yet, not fully sure;
Neither too sober nor elaborate;
Not come to her fat state.
She has the leap of youth, she has the wild
Surprising outburst of an earnest child.
Sweet June, dear month, while yet delay
Wistful reminders of a dearer May;
June, poised between, and not yet satiate.

BOLDLY GO: June Glory at Great Dixter

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My early June visit to Great Dixter, the renowned English garden of the late Christopher “Christo” Lloyd (1921-2006), now artfully and creatively managed by his dear friend, fellow iconoclast and head gardener Fergus Garrett, wasn’t on my original itinerary when my London-based eldest son Doug and his partner Tommy treated me to a weekend in Kent. Months earlier, I had asked them if it would be possible to visit Sissinghurst prior to my joining Portland-based Carex Tours the following week to visit gardens such as Dan Pearson’s Hillside, Malverleys, Yews Farm (you can click on the links to see my blogs on those lovely places), Oudolf Field and others.  We stayed in a lovely Airbnb in the pastoral countryside near Biddenden, enjoyed a wine-tasting of Kent’s sparkling white wines at Balfour Winery and zipped around the narrow, hedge-lined byways in our rental car. But on our Sissinghurst morning, I realized how close we’d be to Dixter (just 11 miles into neighbouring East Sussex) and asked if there might be time to squeeze in a late afternoon visit between lunch and our dinner reservation.  I had last visited Great Dixter 31 years earlier when Doug was studying at Cambridge but much had changed in that time.

So that is how on June 4th – without benefit of the highly recommended garden map, below…..

….or prior research, or even physical orientation on a frightfully sunny afternoon (the photographer’s curse, apologies in advance) – I found myself walking into the colourful profusion of the Barn Garden (the red arrow on the map above shows my entrance), with the 500-year old Great Barn directly ahead.  Restored in 2012, it is now used for ‘green’ woodworking, rural crafts, and to house the boiler that heats the manor house.  What I didn’t realize upon entering was that my view across to the Great Barn was actually over a lower central pool terrace with its own planting, called the Sunk Garden.  But up here, the effect was of a classic English cottage garden, all tumble and charm, yet very carefully managed and edited throughout the season.

As I turned right, I walked towards the White Barn (you can see the juxtaposition of the two barns on the map above) with its espaliered fig tree on the wall. Flanking the path and cascading over it were white cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), mauve sweet rocket (Hesperis matronalis), magenta Byzantine gladiolus (G. communis subsp. byzantinus), buttercups, daisies, lupines, foxgloves, alliums and poppies. 

In the garden alongside the barn, I was treated to an eye-popping display of spring-blooming yellow alexanders (Smyrnium perfoliatum) punctuated with Byzantine gladiolus.  Yellow alexanders has become popular in recent years as a brilliant foil to late tulips and early summer perennials and bulbs; a monocarpic plant, it takes two or three years to flower, then dies.  At Dixter, its black seeds are carefully harvested as the finished plants are removed to be grown on as seedlings for the garden or to the nursery shop.

Further on, the scarlet ladybird poppies (Papaver commutatum) held their own nicely against the acid-chartreuse of the yellow alexanders.

This lovely poppy with its prominent black blotches seems to have more presence than its cousin, the corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas).  I have photographed it paired beautifully with Orlaya grandiflora in the Gravel Garden at Chanticleer.

Giant fennel (Ferula communis) grows in the Barn Garden, its towering scapes a blast of Mediterranean sunshine.  Fergus Garrett gifted some of his plants to Dan Pearson, whose Somerset garden Hillside I blogged about recently.

Mixed in are late spring garden favourites like peony.

I circled the Barn Garden until I was looking across the Sunk Garden at the White Barn through Ladybird poppies and yellow Baptisia. Here you can clearly see the arrangement of the garden, as well as the espaliered ‘Brunswick’ fig (Ficus carica) on the White Barn wall.  Wrote Christopher Lloyd: “The fig trees against the far barn wall were a Lutyens touch which you meet on other properties where he worked. They are there for foliage effect and he used the many-fingered Brunswick fig as being one of the most decorative.” Sir Edwin Luytens, of course, was the renowned architect who renovated Great Dixter and designed some of the gardens for Christopher’s father and mother Nathaniel and Daisy Lloyd when they purchased the property in 1910.

The Sunk Garden was originally a lawn; during the First World War, it was turned into a vegetable garden. After the war, this octagonal pool was created…..

… in which grew a pretty combination of Siberian iris (Iris sibirica) and calla lily (Zantedeschia aethiopica).

The stone ledges in the Sunk Garden, featuring tiny Mexican daisy (Erigeron karvinskianus), were as artfully wild as the plantings above.

Leaving the Barn Garden I entered the Wall Garden.  Here, hot oranges, golds and reds played off the colour of the bricks in the wall.

One of the horticultural legacies of Christopher Lloyd’s career is the introduction of a popular spurge called Euphorbia griffithii ‘Dixter’.  I’m not sure if this is that cultivar, but it’s a good orange touch.

It’s not all blazing colour in the gardens; there are wonderful, small vignettes in shade that offer a little visual stillness, like this one featuring striped lily-of-the-valley (Convallaria majalis ‘Albostriata’).

And some perennials stand aloof from the crowd, like Thalictrum aquilegolium.

As I left the Wall Garden, I got a little lost. The scene below with its pretty white partners – Allium stipitatum ‘Mount Everest’, Orlaya grandiflora and oxeye daisy – might have been in the Peacock Garden; then again, perhaps the Blue Garden.  With such a short time to visit, I just kept moving.

Here you see native cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) rising above all. It was in bloom wherever we drove throughout the Kent and Sussex countryside and Fergus Garrett uses it judiciously in the gardens for its airy effect, being careful to pull it before it goes to seed.

Biennial dyer’s woad (Isatis tinctoria) — a plant Fergus Garrett calls “much underestimated” — is also used for its great cloud of sulphur-yellow flowers in late spring. Here it partners with blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) and oxeye daisies.

Finally I arrived at Great Dixter’s crown jewel, the Long Border. One of the original gardens conceived by Christopher Lloyd’s mother Daisy and maintained by her staff of 9 gardeners …..

…. there is a photo of her standing beside it in 1917 with her dog, below, four years before Christo’s birth, the youngest of her six children.  

Photo courtesy of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust

Fergus Garrett has described gardening at Dixter as “high octane”, and nowhere is that term more apt than in this border, which stretches 330 feet long (100 metres) and 15 feet deep (4.5 metres).  Here are many of the plants seen elsewhere in the garden, but somehow exhibiting a more formal presence when arrayed in front of the clipped hedges. Like all the gardens here, the Long Border uses succession planting, taking advantage of the students and international ‘scholars’ who launch their careers here, to lift plants that are past their season and replace them with annuals and biennials.  Or, as Fergus has said of this process, “high input, high output”.  Self-seeding is encouraged, but monitored closely.  

“Boldly go”. I borrowed this blog’s title from Star Trek but it applies equally to the colours at Great Dixter. Christopher Lloyd loved the bold and brash and was dismissive of the “good taste club”; I like that unafraid, idiosyncratic approach to gardening.   

He wrote about the ladybird poppy, Papaver commutatum, in his book “Color for Adventurous Gardeners”, which is on my bookshelf, recommending it be planted under the white burnet Sanguisorba tenuifolia ‘Alba’. I think he would be just as thrilled to see it consorting boldly with yellow alexanders, below.

The foxgloves, below, are Digitalis purpurea ‘Sutton’s Apricot’.  Seeds of this biennial are sold in glassine packages in Great Dixter’s shop.

I found a bit of shade in the Long Border and you can see how much better the plants look without the harsh contrast of full afternoon sun.

Yellow Jerusalem sage (Phlomis fruticosa) is used extensively in the Long Border, and plants are sold in the shop.  The white allium is A. nigrum.

There were textural bits of shade in the Long Border that caught my eye, like the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis) and euphorbia, below.

I love these green vignettes, with little pinpricks of colour.

Then there are the meadows.  There is a striking contrast between the Arts and Crafts formality of the sculpted yews in the Topiary Lawn – once used as a practice golf-putting range by Nathaniel Lloyd – and the orchid-rich meadow in which they stand.   As noted in the book Meadows at Great Dixter and Beyond by Christopher Lloyd, re-issued in 2016 with an introduction by Fergus Garrett, the Topiary lawn is one of “a dozen different meadow habitats” at Dixter, providing a high degree of biodiversity.

It was Daisy Lloyd who introduced the first meadows to Great Dixter and to her youngest son Christopher, below, the only one of her six children who shared her passion for gardening.  He was a boy when the Lloyds took him to Munstead Wood to visit Gertrude Jekyll, who wrote later to say she hoped he’d grow up to be a great gardener. He was just 12 when his father died in 1933, at which time Daisy assumed management of the estate, in time helped by Christopher.  She died in 1972 at age 91.

Photo courtesy of the Great Dixter Charitable Trust

When I was in the Topiary Lawn in early June, there were oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare); buttercups (Ranunculus repens); clover; a yellow, dandelion-like composite (possibly Hypochaeris radicata); mauve-pink common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsia); and yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor).  Earlier in spring, the meadows feature various species narcissus, snakeshead fritillary and camassia.  Meadow-cutting is done in August and September, and the seed-rich hay is made available to locals to encourage them to reduce their lawns and embrace the great biodiversity of meadow gardening.  Fergus Garrett also gives lectures to help gardeners in the meadow-making process.and his good friend, designer and writer Dan Pearson has been gifted meadow sweepings in exchange for lecturing at Dixter in the hope of introducing orchids to the meadows at Hillside, his Somerset garden.

Common spotted orchid is one of four orchid species to thrive at Great Dixter.  The others are early purple (Orchis mascula), green-winged (Anacamptis morio) and twayblade (Neottia ovata).

Annual yellow rattle, aka hay rattle, is semi-parasitic to grasses, reducing their competition and enabling the orchids and other wildflowers to gain a stronger foothold.

Much has been written about the great biodiversity at Great Dixter.  As Fergus Garrett writes in this Gardens Illustrated article, “Archaeologists, naturalists, ecologists, botanists and entomologists were commissioned to carry out the survey dividing the Great Dixter Estate into different zones such as the woodlands, pasture and meadows, formal ornamental gardens, ponds, and the Plant Fair Field. Each zone was surveyed and the findings fed to one principal ecologist who analysed and pulled the information together in a report. The results were astonishing. As expected, the wider estate with its ancient woodlands, pastures and meadows, and ponds was extremely rich. But, surprisingly the richest part of all was the ornamental garden.”

In longer grass, meadow cranesbill (Geranium pretense) and Byzantine gladiolus (G. communis subsp. byzantinus) thrive.

Christopher Lloyd was very fond of this rich-magenta gladiolus (which is sadly often sold as the paler, shorter G. italicus) and wrote in his book Garden Flowers (2000): “The gladiolus which most endears itself to me is the prolific G. communis subsp. byzantinus, long known as G. byzantinus… It tucks into many border positions where it will not get in the way after flowering, for example up against a group of border phloxes . . . . Another use of it I fancy is in a meadow community, where it holds its own well.” 

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And that brings me to Christopher Lloyd. Gardens are about people, of course, and Great Dixter, like nearby Sissinghurst, is known for its larger-than-life founding personality. Though I was never introduced to Christo, I did sit beside him in October 1989 at the Third Great Gardening Conference at the Civic Garden Centre in Toronto (now the Toronto Botanical Garden). He was due to speak at the conference, along with his dear friend Beth Chatto, but jet lag being what it is he nodded off a few times and I gazed fondly at the top of his silvery head bent beside me.  Below is the advertisement for that event.  Three years later, I visited Great Dixter but he was away on that May 1992 day.

You get a good sense of his crusty personality in this lovely memorial video by Allan Titchmarsh, produced in 2006:

It was during a 2001 lecture tour to North America marking his 80th birthday that Christopher and Fergus were hosted in Toronto by my friends, Geoffrey and Susan Dyer, both passionate gardeners. At the time, Geoffrey was on the board of the Civic Garden Centre, soon to be the Toronto Botanical Garden, and it was in their home that the seed of a possible future for Great Dixter was sown. As Geoffrey recalls: “We were having a drink in the evening and I just asked them quite casually, what’s going to happen (to Dixter)? I didn’t know the particulars of the ownership arrangement… but I knew he didn’t have a spouse and he didn’t have heirs… and the consequence of inheritance tax in the UK and that kind of thing is something people have to plan for.” When Cristopher replied that his accountant had been pressing him about future plans, Geoffrey said: “I’m not qualified in the UK but I’ve worked around that area fairly extensively in my law practice, so if there’s anything I can try to help with, I’d be happy to do it.” In fact, Geoffrey’s Toronto-based law practice specializes in estate and taxation law so he was the perfect person to pose questions to his guests about succession. That summer, the Dyers were invited to stay at Great Dixter where the first meetings to establish the Great Dixter Charitable Trust (GDCT) took place.  Twenty-two years after that drink with Christopher Lloyd and Fergus Garrett, Geoffrey Dyer remains the Chairman of the GDCT, and writes the charity’s annual Review of the Year.

I last saw Fergus Garrett at an April 2018 lecture he gave to a packed house at the Toronto Botanical Garden, below.  Says Geoffrey Dyer: “The Christopher Lloyd legacy is alive and well, but Fergus is Dixter today. His energy, his charisma, his intelligence, his vision – it’s absolutely huge.” 

It was a pleasure to visit Great Dixter, to enjoy its bold plantings, and to reacquaint myself with the story of the people that have made it the great garden it remains today.