During my September Garden Bloggers’ Fling in the Philadelphia area, my favourite small garden was Andrew Bunting’s delightful property in Swarthmore. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given that the owner is the Vice-President of Horticulture with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. Founded in 1827, the PHS is the oldest horticultural society in the U.S., responsible for the annual Philadelphia Flower Show as well as a host of endeavors including 120 community gardens; maintenance of public landscapes in the city and suburbs including museums, the art gallery and public squares; street tree programs; the 28-acre estate garden at Meadowbrook Farm; Landcare, in which vacant city lots are turned from blighted properties to neighbourhood parks; pop-up ephemeral gardens; and a program to train former convicts to be gardeners.
Since buying the house on its one-third acre in 1999, this garden is where Andrew has experimented with an eclectic roster of plants and an evolving approach to design – in fact, five redesigns in his time there. I especially loved seeing his home through the tall, wispy wands of ‘Skyracer’ purple moor grass (Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea), a grass that shines in my own garden in autumn. Beyond is a gravel garden bisected by a broad flagstone walk with a small patch of lawn that creates a nice balance of negative space, as well as lavenders and verbascums and other drought-tolerant plants, many native. A stone trough acts as a birdbath and a terracotta urn features a chartreuse explosion of colocasia (likely ‘Maui Gold’).
Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) with its needle-like leaves is prominent in the front garden; its blue flowers are attractive in spring but its brilliant gold fall color gives it long-season appeal. Barely visible in the foliage is a wooden chair. Originally white, the front door and window shutters were painted gray, picking up the colors of the flagstone.
Behind the amsonia is Hydrangea paniculata ‘Limelight’ and, at left, willow-leaf spicebush (Lindera glauca var. salicifolia), which also has good autumn colour.
The vine around the door and on the house’s front wall is self-clinging Chinese silver-vein creeper (Parthenocissus henryana). I love the mailbox and house numbers.
My colour-tuned eye picked up the echo between the red glasses indoors and the big caladium and chartreuse-and-red coleus in Andrew’s windowbox.
Our time was limited and there was so much to see, but I could have spent hours studying the gravel garden, including many native plants like giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima), below. Andrew’s influences around gravel include Beth Chatto’s garden in England, the Gravel Garden designed by Lisa Roper at Chanticleer (see my latest blog here) and Jeff Epping’s work at Olbrich Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin. The gravel is 1/2 inch granite but Andrew says it’s more like 1/4 inch.
Here is native wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium).
And American beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) with its vibrant violet fruit.
Andrew removed much of the original driveway beside the house which was too narrow for cars and turned it into a shady sideyard garden with a path leading to the old garage – which became a charming summerhouse. Those little purple flowers are Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Butterfly’, a good fall bloomer and, incidentally, a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society 2023 Gold Medal Plant Winner!
Turning the corner at the back of the house, I saw more evidence of a plantsman’s wonderland with assorted tropicals in pots and a potting bench topped by colourful annuals.
Andrew was holding court in the back garden, so I asked him to pose. His own history in horticulture is very deep. Even at a young age, he knew a career in gardening was in his future – and it relates to the name of his own garden. As he has written in an essay about becoming a gardener, “My grandfather farmed in southeastern Nebraska, just outside a little town called Belvidere. I loved those couple of weeks on the farm every summer. Something about that agrarian lifestyle resonated with me then, and still does today. I loved the crops in the field, my grandmother’s vegetable garden, and the smell of hay.” He did internships at the Morton Arboretum, Fairchild Tropical Garden and the Scott Arboretum, where he worked in the late 1980s for three years. In 1990 he visited more than a hundred gardens in England, meeting Rosemary Verey, Beth Chatto, Christopher Lloyd and working for a while at Penelope Hobhouse’s Tintinhull. That autumn, he travelled to New Zealand and worked for a designer for 3 months. Returning to Pennsylvania, he got a part-time position at Chanticleer as it was becoming a public garden, working there for 18 months while starting his own landscape business on the side. In 1993, he became curator of the Scott arboretum at Swarthmore College and stayed there for 22 years, until becoming Assistant Director and Director of Plant Collections at Chicago Botanic Garden in 2015.
I saw Andrew during a garden symposium in Chicago in 2018, below, when he spoke about how he directed the content and curation of CBG’s permanent plant collection. Next, a job offer at the Atlanta Botanic Garden arose and he became Vice-President of Horticulture and Plant Collections at Atlanta Botanic Garden, giving him the chance to grow broad-leaved plants. Then the opportunity at Pennsylvania Horticultural Society opened up and he returned to Swarthmore and the abundance of public gardens that make the Philadelphia area “America’s Garden Capital”.
When Andrew bought the house in 1999 the back yard was filled with a jungle of pokeweed. With the help of his landscape crew and a bobcat, he installed a 35 x 12 foot patio spanning the back of the house. It’s the perfect setting for a lush ‘garden room’ created with pots of banana, canna and palms. These tropicals get carried down to the cool, damp, cellar-like basement for winter through the entrance partially shown at left.
There are potted plants everywhere, many on vintage tables…..
…. and étageres.
Textural foliage combinations caught my eye, like this chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) with Euphorbia x martinii ‘Ascot Rainbow’ euphorbia and a fancy-leaved pelargonium.
There are bromeliads here too, like Portea petropolitana.
Most chairs in the garden were built by Chanticleer’s Dan Benarcik – and can actually be ordered custom online as kits or fully assembled! Note that the granite gravel has been used here, which Andrew says is a less expensive solution than flagstone paving. At right, you can see the entrance to the covered part of the summerhouse, aka the old garage.
So many artful touches here, combining with the rich plant palette to create a beautiful outdoor living space.
Let’s take a peek into the summerhouse, where a comfy leather sofa awaits. As Andrew once said in an online Masterclass chat with Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle, many people in the Philadelphia area go to the New Jersey shore or the Poconos in summer, but he prefers his own garden – “less traffic and more access to gardening”. And I can imagine sitting in here behind the screen doors during a summer thunderstorm, candles lit, perhaps with a little glass of something tasty.
The back of the summerhouse is more open to the elements and features the perfect stage set. I don’t know what the silvery Adonis mannequin was once wearing on his sculpted torso, but I’m willing to bet it was Ralph Lauren, now nicely accented with tillandsias and begonias.
Nearby are more colocasias and blue Salvia guaranitica.
I loved all the seating (still more Dan Benarcik chairs), this time on a shady patio with a dining table.
Sometimes the seating is more about atmosphere and lichen-rich patina than it is about an actual place to sit.
In a shady spot at the back of the garden is a naturalistic pond because… every garden needs a little water.
I was sad not to have time to take a peek behind the back fence into the neighbour’s yard, where there’s an Andrew-designed large, shared quadrangle vegetable garden, but it was late in the season for veggies anyway. Mostly, I was happy that we were able to see this lovely garden in dry weather, since we were soon to find ourselves on the soaking end of Tropical Storm Ophelia.
Having visited and often written about Dutch designer Piet Oudolf’s garden on the High Line in many seasons – May, June, mid-summer and autumn; having blogged about his fabulous Lurie Garden in Chicago; but mostly having photographed and written about the seasons passing in the Oudolf-designed entry border at Toronto Botanical Garden, a few miles from my home, I was beyond excited to finally visit Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth Gallery at Dunslade Farm in Somerset, near Bruton. First we walked through the gallery, one of 21 galleries worldwide founded originally in Zurich in 1992 by Iwan and Manuela Wirth along with Manuela’s mother, art patron and collector Ursula Hauser. The Somerset gallery resulted from the renovation of a collection of old farm buildings and is located near the Wirths’ home. Like all their galleries, it features high-profile modern artists such as Americans Richard Jackson, below…
… and Paul McCarthy, whose silicone White Snow Dwarves, below, from the Ursula Hauser collection was displayed near the exit to the garden.
Leaving the gallery which was designed by Argentine-born architect Luis Laplace, visitors pass through a cloister garden designed by Piet Oudolf and featuring the sculpture Lemur Heads by Franz West. Unlike the meadow beyond, this space contains woodlanders and shade-tolerant species.
The small trees in this garden are paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera) with their fuzzy, globular female flowers.
Martagon lilies were just beginning to show colour.
We began with a talk from head gardener Mark Dumbelton, who spoke about the beginnings of the garden and expanded on some of its challenges, mainly around the soil. Indeed, when we visited England was on its way to enduring the hottest June on record since 1884, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, and watering was being done by hand. Behind Mark, I noticed the white inflorescences of….
Ornithogalum ponticum ‘Sochi’, a Russian native bulb that contrasts well with emerging grasses and makes a good cut flower.
Near the gallery is a naturalistic pond surrounded by pink flowering rush (Butomnus umbellatus).
You can see the pond at the left, below, on Piet’s colourful 2012 plan for the wildflower meadow in the Hauser & Wirth catalogue. Spread out over 1.5 acres are seventeen curved, informal planting beds separated by a central gravel path as well as lawn paths between the beds and surrounded by an existing hedge, beyond which Piet planted trees.
He explained his rationale for Oudolf Field in the video below.
With Mark’s talk finished, we were set loose in the meadow. I viewed it through spires of peach foxtail lily (Eremurus), a lovely perennial for early summer whose….
….. tall inflorescences never fail to attract the attention of visitors – and bees! This one looks like the Dutch cultivar Eremurus x isabellinus ‘Romance’.
I was intrigued by the ten turf circles in the central path through the meadow. The path lets visitors stroll from one end to the other, but the playful circles relieve the tedium of this long expanse of purposeful gravel.
They are so unlike Piet’s characteristic naturalistic style, but in fact they point to his pragmatic design knowledge and site adaptability. (Yes, he designs woodlands and knows shrubs and trees as well as his favourite perennials!)
I was reminded in studying these circles of my own visit to Piet and Anja’s garden in Hummelo, Netherlands in 1999 which was designed in part to reflect one of his early Dutch influences, the great designer Mien Ruys (1904-99), the so-called “mother of modernist gardens”. Both his famous hedges and circle gardens, below, were his interpretation of what has been called “contemporary formalism” by his frequent literary collaborator Noel Kingsbury.
I feel very fortunate to have spoken with Piet then, at the beginning of his international fame. I made a photo of him at their outdoor table with spring-flowering shrubs in flower around us. Anja was in their nursery (gone now) with customers, and their little dog sat in a chair nearby.
Back to Oudolf Field, the overwhelming mood here on June 9th was of soft pastel mauves and blues amidst the emerging green of the grasses and summer perennials. Eastern beebalm (Monarda bradburiana) native to the American southeast was in full flower in front of the blue blossoms of narrowleaf bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii), a south-central American native that turns brilliant chartreuse-gold in autumn. Emerging through the grasses were the big starry globes of star-of-Persia allium (A.cristophii).
I had never seen Monarda bradburiana before spotting it in Piet’s design at the High Line years ago. Like many of the plants he uses – and sometimes introduces to commerce – it has withstood his field testing at Hummelo. This compact species has the good characteristics of the beebalms, including pollinator appeal, without the negative drawbacks, such as powdery mildew.
Early June, following the explosion of spring bulbs and before the summer abundance of flowering perennials is sometimes considered an “in-between” time in the garden. That quiet interlude is helped immensely by the many ornamental onions, and Piet uses them to great advantage in all his gardens, both for their flowers and later seedheads. Below, again, you see Allium cristophii along with the Corten steel edging used to delineate the beds.
After seeing Allium atropurpureum, below, amidst grasses, I came back to Canada and immediately ordered some for my own June garden.
Here is Allium atropurpureum with Amsonia hubrichtii.
… and with Oenothera lindheimeri, i.e. gaura.
Looking back to the gallery through the gardens, including dark-leaved penstemons.
Piet uses various low grasses as matrix plants, including Sporobolus heterolepis, below, and Sesleria autumnalis.
The weather was so warm the day we were there in this record-setting dry June, the assistant gardener was working full-time to water.
While the garden is situated within pre-existing hedges, Piet planted trees on the boundary to contain it further.
The Pavilion, designed by Chilean architect Smiljan Radić and installed in March 2015, sits at the end of Oudolf Field and is intended to “create a dialogue between the gallery complex and pavilion and their relationship with the garden”. Radić says it is “part of a history of small romantic constructions seen in parks or large gardens, the so-called follies.” Built of white, translucent fibreglass with cedar flooring and set atop large quarry stones, visitors can view the garden from within the shell.
Heading into the gallery for lunch, I passed the attractive bar — a work of art in itself.
It was a lunch I would have enjoyed much more if I hadn’t been feeling the beginnings of what turned out to be my first case of Covid in more than 3 years– and the unexpected and sudden end later that night of my wonderful English garden tour. But I was so delighted to have experienced yet another masterpiece in the always-varied oeuvre of Piet Oudolf.
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.
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.
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 …..
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.
In the village of Martock (pop. 4800) in Somerset, UK, is a garden that represents a marital meeting of the minds. Yews Farm, and its beautiful farmhouse…..
…. with its small, north-facing front garden of tidy lawn and narrow shady border….
…. featuring foliage plants in elegant combinations…
… and soft shield fern (Polystichum setiferum)….
… doesn’t really prepare you for what you are about to see when you turn the corner. Here, separated by a tall hedge from the back of the garden, is a gravel courtyard filled with a jungle of plants grown for their bold forms and interesting foliage. Giant fennel (Ferula communis) grows cheek-and-jowl beside …..
…. Chinese rice-paper plant (Tetrapanax papyrifer) ……
….. with little surprises such as dragon lily (Dracunculus vulgaris) peeking out along the path.
Walk through the opening in the hedge to the expansive garden at the rear and you’ve entered a lush, green topiary wonderland with spirals and jelly-moulds sculpted from boxwood (Buxus sempervirens).
Look up and there is a very perky topiary terrier named Toto leading a leafy parade atop a hedge.
And just by chance, at that very moment, crossing Yew Farm’s charming terrace with its attractive tables and chairs and potted pelargoniums is the family’s non-topiary doppelgänger, a perky terrier.
Yews Farm is a 27-year collaboration between Fergus and Louise Dowding. When they acquired the 1-acre property with its farm outbuildings in 1996, it was agreed that they’d each get half the garden in which to do what they loved. For Fergus, that meant food-growing. For Louise, who had trained in landscape design at college and worked two years with the famous garden writer/designer Penelope Hobhouse in her garden at Bettiscombe, it would be her own style of ornamental gardening. Not for her the wavy “hose-pipe” border surrounding a vast lawn favoured by the previous owner. She tore out everything except an old pear tree, divided the garden area into four equal spaces, claimed two for herself and gave two to Fergus. While he promptly began growing Savoy cabbages, broccoli, peas and heritage Martock beans, Louise went for structure. Her borders featured numerous tiny boxwood plants which ultimately became a kind of magical sculpture garden, the topiaries necessitating an intense shearing each June to maintain their shape.
Like an abstract geometric painting, the topiaries form the background to the terrace. This is where Louise’s pelargonium collection and other conservatory plants spend summer, this one on a pretty wirework table….
…. and the heritage variety ‘Appleblossom Rosebud’ on a table nearby.
Introduced in 1870, this beautiful double geranium was beloved by Queen Victoria – or so the story goes. And who could blame her?
Louise’s borders are generally quiet in colour so as not to compete with the topiaries — the blues and purples of cranesbills, clematis and alliums enlivened here by the brilliant bronze hues of autumn fern (Dryopteris erythrosora).
Linaria purpurea ‘Canon Went’ and opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) are allowed to self-seed.
For Fergus, vegetable gardening is the reason to garden yet his spaces are beautiful, too. Since our visit is in the first half of an extraordinarily cool June, the squash and artichokes are still filling out…..
….and peas are still finding their legs on the pretty pea sticks.
An espaliered fruit tree occupies a neighbouring wall, and it’s clear that Louise has sneaked some foxgloves and poppies into this productive space with its topiary snails in the background.
For a North American, “cleft chestnut fencing” sounds like a quaint way to separate the ornamental part of the garden with its peonies and irises from the legacy farmyard beyond it.
The view below is back into the ornamental garden. I love that Yews Farm remains so well-rounded with a thoughtful sense of place that melds the lush urban garden with the hard-working agricultural past.
There’s a wildish meadow in the farmyard with oxeye daisies, potentilla and other self-seeding native wildflowers.
Hens do their bit for ecology, eating the weeds while delivering a bounty of fresh eggs as well.
A pair of pigs makes short work of garden waste while creating raw material for the compost pile.
Fergus is an organic gardener, so the compost bins are well-tended.
The neighbour’s cows sidle up to the farmyard fence to check out the tour group.
Garlic is set out to dry in airy crates.
Circling back towards the ornamental garden, I walk beside more old farm buildings and a charming profusion of self-seeded flowers growing in gravelly soil, including white licorice root (Ligusticum lucidum), yellow wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) and blue love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena). Though this looks naturally carefree, Louise manages the mix rigorously.
The ligusticum is an Ammi majus look-alike, but perennial and much tougher.
As we take our leave of this delightful garden, the newly-acquired ducks work up enough courage to draw close. As Louise wrote in an Instagram post: “Bought three enchanting White Campbell ducks to feast on the slugs and snails. They’ve done more damage than a 1000 Gastropods with their huge feet and bellies as wide as boats but a 1000 times more amusing“.
But the ducks, pigs and hens all find a home here in this charming Somerset landscape along with their owners, who have created an inspirational garden that celebrates all the gifts that nature offers to nourish both body and soul.
