In the past decade, I’ve had the great joy of travelling in the United States — along with dozens of other garden writers and photographers from far and wide — to participate in an event called the Garden Fling. It’s allowed me to see the finest private and public gardens in Washington DC, Austin, Denver and Philadelphia. This year the Fling was centred in Washington State’s Puget Sound region, and was organized by Camille Paulsen, with help from a fine team of volunteers from Tacoma and Seattle and her own husband Dirk. So my first blog honours the gorgeous Paulsen garden in Puyallup, Washington overlooking the Orting Valley and lofty Mount Tahoma/Rainier. Let’s begin at the handsome entrance to the front door……
…… where you can already see Camille’s penchant for textural plant combinations, especially in shade.
The front garden also features a waterfall and tiny stream….
…. leading to a large, naturalistic pond stocked with koi. Dirk Paulsen, an airline captain, has done much of the hardscaping and woodworking in the garden.
Start walking the path through the side-yard to the right of the house and you come to a large, gnarled log that Camille found in her travels nearby and had delivered to the garden. (She uses driftwood, too.) In its hollow end is western maidenhair fern (Adiantum aleuticum).
Moss grows in nooks and crannies along the log and beneath it is are ferns, hostas and other plants – demonstrating Camille’s deft touch with texture.
I love this hollowed-out, hanging birch log planted with orchids and a staghorn fern.
Hardy impatiens (I. omeiana) is one of countless plants chosen for season-long foliage interest, even when out of flower.
I believe this is lovely Japanese maple is A. palmatum ‘Butterfly’.
Further along, keeping company with a rhododendron and ferns, is a variegated dove tree (Davidia involucrata ‘Lady Sunshine’).
Camille has shared online that her garden contains approximately one hundred Japanese maples and an equal number of conifers. That’s serious ‘collector’ level!
This basalt rock fountain is one of many water features in the Paulsen garden.
Rodgersia was bearing rosy-red seedheads.
Another gnarled stump offers a niche for ferns and succulents.
Camille had lots of pressure with two buses full of garden tourists, four days of carefully orchestrated scheduling and her own garden to prepare, but she handled it with aplomb – and a beautiful smile.
Tahoma or Mount Rainier is an active 14,411-foot (4,392 metre) stratovolcano and the highest peak in Washington State. The view from the Paulsen garden is spectacular – especially when Camille captures it on a clear day. (My so-so view was on a very hot day when there was haze above the snowy peak and the nearby Orting Valley). Though its last volcanic activity was in the 19th century, it has been called a “Decade Volcano”, one of 16 worldwide so named because of its potential destructive eruption capacity and its proximity to densely-populated regions. In fact, many of the surrounding communities are built atop old “lahars” from Rainier, i.e. volcanic mudflows triggered by melting of the mountain’s glacial ice. The most famous was the Osceola Mudflow some 5,000 years ago.
The closer view at this point, glimpsed through drifts of Mexican feathergrass and an iron sculpture, is a lower level swimming pool below the ferny, wine-red foliage of Albizia ‘Summer Chocolate’ .
Colourful dahlias in a raised bed light up the area behind the house.
Corten planters behind Camille’s greenhouse hold a mix of culinary herbs and flowers.
More pots feature tropicals and succulents.
It’s not surprising that in the land of renowned, Tacoma-born glass artist Dale Chihuly, colourful blown-glass ornaments play a role in many Puget Sound gardens, including these pendants hanging from a ‘Twisty Baby’ black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia).
Stone stairs lead to the swimming pool level – a journey past more maples, rhododendrons, ferns and shade plants.
I like the chunky bamboo railing leading to the lower level.
As I said, Camille’s garden is one of the finest examples I’ve seen of textural plant combinations, including white-flowered chameleon plant (Houttuynia cordata) and variegated Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum odoratum ‘Variegatum’) with ferns, hostas and tiny succulents.
One of my favourite vignettes features foliage of a variegated ginkgo (G. biloba ‘Variegata’).
The lower level features a naturalistic pond edged with mossy flagstones, overhung by trees with moss-covered branches. Bamboo makes interesting reflections in the water. (Sadly for the photographers but happily for everyone else, the sun shone bright in a blue sky for much of our Puget Sound visit).
Camille has collected delightful windchimes.
With so much water in the garden, engineering the journey over it is important, and this handsome stone slab does a beautiful job of moving people through.
Tucked into a garden on the swimming pool level are touches of blue and purple, including Clematis ‘Rooguchi’ and big-leaf hydrangea (H. macrophylla).
Azure-blue pots and hedging surround the swimming pool….
…. and the iron fence is cleverly disguised by a weeping blue Atlantic cedar (Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’) trained along it.
Even the garden furniture fits a pretty colour palette.
Colocasia and canna bring the tropics poolside, along with a dark-leaved begonia.
Abyssinian banana (Ensete ventricosum ‘Maurelii’) occupies another pot.
The pool fence has a raised planter shelf with pots of succulents.
On the other side of the house, geometric stone flags set into a corten-edged grit path create a sinuous walkway past still more shade-loving plants.
A luminous golden fullmoon maple (Acer shirasawanum ‘Aureum’) lights up the shadows here.
The stone flags give a Mondrian feeling to this path.
A stone face sculpture is nestled between a Fatsia japonica and a dark-leaved persicaria.
Coming back to the front garden, I sit and chat in a pergola with a friend from Maine, but my eye catches another of Camille’s sweet windchimes. It’s a garden I would dearly love to have spent many hours chronicling (without having to dodge a hundred fellow enthusiasts while shooting), but it has been a great delight to be here. Thank you, Camille and Dirk, for sharing it with us.
We’ve now lived in our 1916 Toronto house for more than 40 years, making us one of the old-timers on the block. When we moved in back in 1983, there was a long driveway leading to a ramshackle garage which was too small for modern cars but just right for a family of raccoons who did not take kindly to being evicted. In fact, most of the driveway was too narrow for a car so we decided to create a side garden halfway down it in place of the last 40 feet of asphalt, bisected by a winding path behind a pretty arched gate. That was 1988. At the time, the publisher of Canadian Gardening magazine lived in the house behind me and thought my gate would make a good cover for the very first issue of the magazine, launched in 1990 and published for 25 years, finally closing down in 2015. Apart from writing stories for three of its editors in that quarter-century, they also became very good friends. And as you see, back in 1988 I was growing impatiens in the shade, as were most gardeners.
A few years later, I wrote a story on the gate and garden for Fine Gardening magazine, title page below. In the article, I tallied up the costs: $960 US for the gate and fence panels (the gate incorporated a “see-through” made from an old brass heating grate we found while renovating the house); $500 for the path, including breaking up and removing the asphalt as far as the driveway’s original limestone grit and laying down concrete pavers; and a load of topsoil and plants to bring the total to about $2,000. I cannot imagine doing this today for less than $10,000, likely more. Only 9-1/2 feet separated our house from the neighbour’s fence, so the path took up 3-1/2 feet with 3 feet of garden on either side. To complicate matters, a black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) that had likely been small when our house was built during the First World War was now a hulking 70-footer, its big trunk straddling the property line, the allelopathic juglone secreted by its leaves and roots toxic to certain plants growing underneath it.
As the years passed, the walnut tree needed periodic pruning and cabling. On one occasion, an arborist working in the branches above dropped a heavy branch onto the gate and broke the arch. But even without it, the gate added a certain flair to the house – I even gave it a big Christmas wreath for several years. I had planted the two half-whiskey-barrels flanking the gate with ‘Green Velvet’ boxwood shrubs (a Canadian introduction) around 1990, though I was warned they wouldn’t survive the first winter. Not only did they survive that winter, they lived in the barrels with no care except an occasional summer watering and shearing for more than 30 years! And in the photo below you can see the first tendrils of a bird-seeded Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) beginning to climb the fence panel at right.
In 2010, I designed and had built a screen to hide the recycling and trash containers, staining it to match the gate and house. (You can see the long crack forming in our old driveway here.)
I had designed a driveway utilities screen for a gardening client in the 1990s, so while I had contractors at the house rebuilding our sundeck, I thought it was a good chance to utilize the design myself. Because as much as I approve of recycling, I can’t stand the look of plastic bins.
Meanwhile, the little sideyard garden grew and I learned which plants can tolerate living under a black walnut. Dry shade was a more important consideration, since the area is rarely watered except by rain and the tree sucks up much ground moisture. The shiny groundcover leaves are European ginger (Asarum europaeum); uber-invasive lily-of-the-valley, front right, makes its home there; and native Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum), front left, does very well, too. The tall shrub at left is alternate-leaf dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), my favourite native shrub and a seedling of one I planted in the back garden in the 1990s. The boughs of white cedar (Thuja arborvitae) come from my neighbour’s tree over the fence.
Here is the alternate-leaf dogwood in flower on May 22, 2012.
Move a little further along the path in this 2013 photo and you can see the double iron arch I installed atop 4×4 posts, over which I grew what I purchased as a native bittersweet vine but turned out to be the invasive Asian counterpart. The paver path circles around our lower deck to become a patio adjoining a lily pond in the back garden.
I planted a few bulbs of Corydalis solida in 2011 and they now carpet the sunniest part of the path garden in spring, but die away quickly as the Solomon’s seals send their green spears up.
There are native spring ephemerals in the path too, like mayapple and Hepatica acutiloba, below.
Lily-of-the-valley grows here, often in carpets – as it does in the rest of my garden. It’s always strange for me to see garden centres selling a few pips in a pot for $. I could be a millionaire, I think! Then I remember I’d have to dig them out, which is much easier said than done. But they are lovely in a little vase and they do make a very fun and fragrant garden party hat, as I’ve blogged before.
Here, looking towards the gate from the deck are the Solomon seals in a photo from May 24, 2016. Note the thick trunks of the bittersweet vine coiling up the posts.
Just a little bit on Boston ivy, shown climbing onto the gate in July 2015. Because it adheres via adhesive sticker aerial roots, I’m never keen to let this invasive climb our house and attach to the old mortar. But I thought it might add some interest to the gate, so I’ve let it grow while keeping it trimmed.
Inserting the see-through grate into the gate wasn’t an original idea; I’d seen various versions on garden tours. But knowing it had come from this house made it special – and I liked the fact that it lost its shininess and took on a rusty patina. It framed the garden beyond like a peek into a colourful jewel box.
As the Boston ivy continued its journey across the gate on Oct. 16, 2019, I let its tendrils feel their way. In autumn it turned crimson, trailing across the view through the grate of orange sumac and azure blue monkshood and sumac at the back of the garden.
Here is the long view on that day, showing the path littered with yellow autumn leaves from the black walnut and the garden beyond.
Notice how the juvenile probing leaves of Boston ivy are shaped very differently from the leaves on the older wood in the next photos. They’re almost heart-shaped….
…. compared with the three-lobed (tricuspid) foliage emerging from the older wood in 2020.
Boston ivy is one of the best species to show the effect of summer sunshine on the pigments of the autumn leaves. Where one leaf shades another, the shaded section does not turn red in fall, but reveals the accessory yellow photosynthetic pigments.
As the alien bittersweet vine grew across the iron arches, it framed the view to the garden in an intriguing way, but it also latched on to everything nearby, including the dogwood shrub and the house’s downpipes. I had to use a stepladder to try to thin it out and prune it away from both.
But I did love walking down the shady path in June to see my neighbour’s beauty bush (Linnea amabilis, formerly Kolkwitzia) in full flower over the fence.
Alas, all that weight on the arches and the four old posts holding them up finally took its toll. The vine collapsed onto the path in summer 2021 and everything had to be chopped up, dug up and removed. (And this man was not too thrilled to be doing it.) But bittersweet doesn’t give up easily; every year it sends up shoots (some through the deck boards) from bits of root left behind, reminding us that it would like to return.
And that crack in the driveway? Eventually it opened, cracked more and formed more openings that turned into ankle-turning crevices. So the driveway had to be replaced in 2022. And with the old asphalt went the 1990 half-whiskey-barrels and the 30-year-old boxwoods, since it was impossible to work around them and the barrels had started to fall apart.
Surface roots from the black walnut had been lifting the path’s concrete pavers for years until they became unsafe and I had to warn visitors to watch their step coming into the back garden. I knew the time had come to fix the path.
Black walnut is a tap-rooted tree, so the surface roots can take some cutting back before much damage is done to the canopy…
…. but the Toronto company I hired called “Leveled Ground” said they would not cut surface roots bigger than a “toonie”, about 1-1/2 inches in diameter. This offending root got cut.
In July 2023, a team of guys arrived to lift up all the pavers….
…. stacking them carefully in the new driveway.
With all the pavers removed, they laid down a new layer of limestone grit, atop the layer put down under the old path in 1988, atop the layer from the original First World War driveway.
Now the right side of the garden under the black walnut is a few inches higher than the newly leveled path. After all the grit was laid down, they used a mechanical compactor to compress it, then put the old pavers back, adding sand between the cracks and using the compactor to compress the entire path again before sweeping it clean.
This is what the path looked like 2 weeks after Leveled Ground departed. Sturdy, flat and safe.
I’m not sure how long the old black walnut will last. For that matter, I’m not sure how long we’ll last in the house – many of our friends have opted to move into condominiums as they’ve aged. But I cannot imagine life without a garden, watching birds drinking in the pond, bees nectaring on flowers, leaves changing colour in autumn – and that old gate leading down the curving path to the joys beyond.
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.
