The Newt

Posted on January 12, 2024 by Janet

Before I get to Somerset, a memory. On a trip to South Africa almost a decade ago, I enjoyed all the gardens our tour guide Donna Dawson had organized, but my very favourite was Babylonstoren in the Franschhoek wine district outside Cape Town. “Bedazzled by Babylonstoren” is the blog I wrote on my autumn 2014 visit. It combined all the best features of a truly great garden: a stunning design by Italian-French architect Patrice Taravella; diverse and beautiful ornamental and edible plantings, all organic; a vineyard that stretched for miles; a gift shop and charming farm-to-table restaurant; and an elegant spa hotel whose cottages nestled along the edge of the gardens. All that in a picturesque setting overlooked by the craggy peaks of Simonsberg.

So when Babylonstoren’s owners, telecom billionaire Koos Bekker and his wife Karen Roos, the former editor of Elle Decoration South Africa, came to England looking for a farm in the country, it made perfect sense that they would choose an historic 17^th century estate in leafy Somerset. That rumor has it they had to outbid actor Johnny Depp to make their successful £12 million purchase only added to the cachet. Then they spent 6 years developing the property, working again with Patrice Taravella to create a second unique, complex organic garden and farm while transforming the house into an exclusve hotel & spa. The map below is available as a detailed pdf online.

Somehow, as we drew into The Newt’s parking lot on my June 2023 visit with Carex Tours, I knew most of the details about our upcoming visit and fondly remembered visiting Babylonstoren, but I hadn’t yet learned the actual name of the historic house that became the hotel. When our guide said “Hadspen” my heart leapt, for this had been the home of the renowned garden writer, designer and colourist, Penelope Hobhouse, who later leased it to the Canadian gardeners Nori and Sandra Pope, who went on to create what became an iconic walled garden focused on colour. Noel Kingsbury wrote an affectionate essay on the Popes, the Hobhouse estate and the drama associated with its direction. As many of my readers likely know, I’ve long had an interest in colour in the garden, focusing on it in my blog and in my photography. But 25 years ago, I also wrote a book review, below, for my column in Toronto Life Gardens on Nori and Sandra Pope’s book ‘Color by Design, so I was very familiar with the colour ethos of Hadspen House. Would I find it today? Stay tuned.

We entered The Newt via a gatehouse and a long, sinuous boardwalk through rich woodland.

Stacks of cut wood were placed along the pathway like mossy, natural works of art that double as habitat.

I walked through the entrance courtyard past the threshing barn, cyder bar and gift shop and made my way quickly to the Cottage Garden below. Beyond that was the Fragrance Garden and Cascades. (Though hotel guests have access to the gardens, Hadspen House itself is off-limits to garden visitors – I tried.)

There were familiar pairings of lavender and lambs’ ears…

…. and Jerusalem sage (Phlomis russelliana) with pale yellow-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium striatum)…

… and in the Cascades, moisture-loving Rodgersia pinnata ‘Superba’ with primulas and royal ferns.

The Cascades features a waterfall emptying into a rectilinear pool planted with waterlilies.

Next, I came to my favourite part of The Newt, the Colour Garden. It is actually a series of wattle-walled, colour-themed gardens bisected by a stone path, and you can view what’s ahead through oval windows in the wall of each garden.

Alongside, there was a touching dedication to Sandra and the late Nori Pope.

It pleased me that the new owners understood how well-loved the Popes had been, and how many people missed their creativity, including Vancouver landscape architect Ron Rule, who captured Sandra in the garden long ago.

*Photo courtesy of Ron Rule Consultants Ltd., West Vancouver, B.C.*

The Newt’s version of the Colour Garden begins with a Green Garden with lots of ornamental grasses and green-flowered plants like tall Angelica archangelica…

….. and euphorbias, too.

Then comes the spectacular little Red Garden….

…. with dancing corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) and swishing Mexican feather grass (Nassella tenuissima). I noticed angelica in that garden as well – such a great plant for pollinators.

In early June, the Red Garden stretched the colour palette into hot pinks and magenta with Carthusian pink (Dianthus carthusianorum) and masterwort (Astrantia major).

A bumble bee was foraging on the geum.

It was a terribly sunny day (how could that happen for so many days in a row in England?) so my photos of The Blue Garden in particular were difficult.

Amsonia and cornflowers took centre stage. but there were campanulas and delphiniums sprinkled in as well.

Navy-blue honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) was a feature in many of the gardens I visited in England.

The White Garden is the final colour garden….

…. and the predominant plants in bloom in early June were the Hybrid Musk rose ‘Kew Gardens’ (which I had photographed earlier that week at RBG Kew in London) and the white form of red valerian or Jupiter’s beard, Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’.

On leaving the Colour Garden, I took a stroll down the Long Walk which moves down a gentle slope flanked by a stone wall overhung with white Jupiter’s beard (Centranthus ruber ‘Albus’). In the background is the hotel.

The Long Walk has its own water features like this pool at the top….

…. and a square waterlily pool fed by a rill, beyond which is another pool. In the distance are two screened houses in the produce garden.

Then it was into the Parabola Garden. In the language of mathematics, a parabola is a U- or D-shaped curve that features a vertex and symmetrical axis – like a rainbow, for instance. The Newt’s version occupies a walled garden that was originally designed as a kitchen garden by Henry Hobhouse II. Two centuries later, it was framed by Sandra and Nori Pope’s iconic colour border, below.

Today, the Parabola Garden is designed as a maze and home to a collection of 267 cultivars of apple trees representing each apple-growing county of England. They grow in cordons, fan-espaliers and various other space-conserving methods. (The Cyder Bar near the garden’s entrance also pays homage to apples and features tastings.) That stone wall at the top of the photo below surrounds the garden and….

…. features the names of the apple-growing counties. Each year in the 3^rd week of October, the Newt hosts a celebration called Apple Day featuring juice pressing, apple games and recipes.

Although England is famous for its hen parties, the Parabola Garden features the real thing. This pair obviously wandered up from the henhouse below.

Yet another water feature forms a central focal point in The Parabola.

Then it was under the Caterpillar Tunnel weaving through meadows towards the Produce Garden.

The base of the tunnel is planted with tromboncino, bottleneck and other varieties of squash which create a leafy canopy by late summer.

I loved the shadow play along the path.

Chives, herbs and vegetable seedlings were newly planted in mulched beds separated by pretty wattle screens. More than 350 varieties of edibles are planted here.

Coldframes held plants too tender to be planted out just yet.

And an oak-timbered fruit cage, one of a pair, protected berry bushes from hungry birds and critters.

I heard there were living newts in the produce garden’s raised, naturalistic pond, but I looked in vain. However, I did spy a handsome, green-eyed emperor dragonfly (Anax imperator).

Sadly, it was time to make my way back to the bus via a quick stop for a delicious al fresco lunch. Afterwards, I had just a few minutes to take a walk through the Winter Garden, kept at 20-25C all year long and filled with ferns, orchids, succulents, tropical fruits and tender beauties from far away…..

….. like the South American firecracker plant (Dicliptera suberecta).

And how did The Newt compare to Babylonstoren? I think they were as different from each other as Somerset apples are to Franschhoek wine grapes, yet they share the same elegant rusticity and exquisite attention to detail. And though The Newt pays homage to its English garden roots, to the Hobhouse and Pope eras, it is very much its own lovely creature, still young and growing, but looking to the future, not the past.

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The Newt is open to visitors by annual membership only and includes many benefits, including free garden tours, special events and an impressive list of seasonal workshops. It also includes entrance to partner gardens including Kew, Wakehurst, Blenheim, Great Dixter, Lost Gardens of Heligan, Tresco, Chatworth and others. Clearly, amidst all the comings-and-goings of a working farm and an award-winning boutique hotel, it is aiming for a level of exclusivity and community.

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Here are my blogs on a few of the other English gardens I visited in 2023:

Sissinghurst in Vita’s Sweet June

Boldly Go: June Glory at Great Dixter

Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth

Hillside: Dan Pearson & Huw Morgan in Somerset

Oudolf Field at Hauser & Wirth

Posted on November 12, 2023 by Janet

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 9^th 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.

I saw tall Carthusian pinks(Dianthus carthusianorum) in almost every garden I visited in June, including Sissinghurst and Hillside, the garden of Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan.

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.

Yews Farm – A Brilliant Marriage…. of Boxwood and Beans

Posted on July 18, 2023 by Janet

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.

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I visited Yews Farm in June 2023 with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours ‘New Gardens of England – Gardens of Resilience and Beauty’. You might also enjoy my blogs on Malverleys Garden and Dan Pearson’s wonderful Hillside.

Hillside: Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan in Somerset

Posted on June 20, 2023 by Janet

It is somewhat daunting to write about a garden whose owners are a world-renowned designer with a lyrical, thoughtful writing style and a photographer-writer who chronicles their garden’s finest moments (and his own delicious recipes) in mouth-watering images for their beautiful online magazine Dig Delve. But to visit Hillside is to be enchanted – by its story, its scope, its exquisite melding of the garden to the land, and the land to the garden, and what came long before. So I will attempt to capture a little of the great joy of my short time there in early June.

We start in the outdoor kitchen where our gracious and hospitable hosts, Dan Pearson, left, and Huw Morgan, right, serve us a refreshing elderflower concoction in pretty pottery cups. Here we hear a little history before wandering the 20-acre smallholding near Bath, which they purchased in 2010 from the estate of the previous owner, Raymond Lewis, an elderly farmer born on the property who had grazed his cattle to the very edges of the rolling limestone pastures and milked the cows in an old tin barn. Upon his death, friends living across the stream at the bottom of the valley below told Dan and Huw that the property was available. After walking the fields with the farmer’s brother, visiting the old orchard and inspecting the house that had last been decorated when the brothers’ mother was alive, Dan wrote later in The Guardian: “There were no ifs, buts or maybes. No doubt. It was where we wanted to be.” It would take three trips from London eight months later, the car boot jammed with favourite plants from their long, narrow Peckham garden, to begin to put their minds to this vast empty canvas.

They went slowly, doing little for the first years. As Dan wrote in Dig Delve, “It took that long to know what to do with the place and what has felt right here.” In autumn 2012, they installed a pair of 18^th century granite troughs used originally for tanning leather, now intended to gather rainwater. Once the steep land grade was levelled on this upper spine, the troughs would connect the house with the barns and form the gateway to what would become the new kitchen garden beyond.

The horizontal line of the troughs, in the background below, also echoes the horizontal line of 52 ancient beech trees on Freezing Hill in the far distance, which occupies a Bronze Age landform between Somerset and the Cotswolds.

In gravelly rubble between the house and the troughs, Dan grows favourite clumping plants such as eryngium and calamint along with a host of self-seeders: cephalaria, corn cockle, silvery ballota, poppies, blue flax and a white California poppy (Eschscholzia californica ‘Ivory Castle’).

To understand the initial challenges posed by the steep lie of the land, it’s helpful to read Dan’s essay The Kitchen Garden tracking the 4-year progress from the trough installation to the first harvest. As he wrote, “When we arrived here the flat ground was literally no more than a strip in front of the outbuildings. We perched a table and chairs there to make the most of not being on the angle”. Gardening on the steep hillside was a challenge: “Sowing, thinning, weeding and harvesting on a slope were all that much harder with one leg shorter than the other and tools and buckets balanced.” In time the ground near the barns was leveled and a breeze-block wall built to hold back the sloping fields above, to reflect heat and the fragrance of perfumed plants……

…. and to give fruits such as cordon-espaliered pears, below, a warm surface on which to ripen. A fig in this area is a cutting of ‘White Marseilles’ from Dan’s project at Lambeth Palace, the parent plant “brought from Rome by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1556.”

In the early years, trees were planted: several in a new orchard; some in a ‘blossom wood’ of native species; hazels and alders down by the stream; memorial trees to honour missed friends; and a katsura grove in the valley with its exquisite autumn perfume to evoke Dan’s long project at Tokachi Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Trial beds held David Austin roses for cutting, 56 varieties of dahlia and a rainbow of tulips. Signature plants appeared, including different species of towering giant fennel (Ferula spp.), a Mediterranean plant I saw first in the ruins of Troy many years ago, so it always makes me think of Homer to see it now. Dan has used Ferula communis subsp. glauca in his design for the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst. (More on that later.)

Rusticity and a sense of place is preserved in the tin walls of the barn, a backdrop to feverfew, bronze fennel and the unusual lilac-purple valerian, Centranthus lecoqii.

English gardeners seem to grow more umbellifers than I’ve counted anywhere in my North American travels, and I had to ask Dan twice the name of the lovely one below. It’s Athamanta turbith, a cold-hardy native of the Balkans.

Another plant used by Dan in Delos at Sissinghurst also appears in this upper garden: tall pink Dianthus carthusianorum, shown here (in terrible sunlight, sorry) with Achillea ‘Moonlight’.

Constructed in spring 2014, the kitchen garden comprises a double row of steel-edged, rectangular beds with a broad walk in-between.

The soil where the vegetables grow is rich and productive. According to an elderly neighbour, in the 1960s the former owner’s parents grew vegetables in a market garden on the slopes, and berried boughs from holly trees still standing were harvested for Christmas wreaths for the market.

Creative trellising allows vertical growing of cucumbers and summer squash. Other crops include courgettes, French and runner beans, peppers, salad greens, carrots, turnips, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes (in a poly house).

Berries and currants are grown in beds with frames that can be netted later against birds.

Three varieties of rhubarb are grown at Hillside, providing the ingredients for Huw’s delectable rhubarb galette.

Time is fleeting and Dan leads us down a path through the meadows towards the brook. When I look up the hill through a bouquet of massive Gunnera manicata leaves….

….. that I literally held above my head as I passed under them a moment earlier, illustrating the deceptive scale, I see the cluster of buildings at the top. Closest is the milking barn, now the studio office where Dan and Huw carry out their design work. To its right is the main ornamental garden, which we’ll visit in a few minutes.

On the way to the pond, Dan pauses in the meadow surrounded by oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare), buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and black knapweed (Centaurea nigra). He is in the process of overseeding the meadows with yellow rattle and native orchids, including gift seeds harvested by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, to improve the biodiversity here.

The pond is just two years old, the marginal plants still finding their feet. But water has always been important to Dan in a garden – and this pond might host two-legged swimmers, as well as aquatic flora.

I am fond of meadows, having grown one or two myself, so I take note of the red campion (Silene dioica)……

….. and blue-flowered Caucasian comfrey (Symphytum caucasicum).

Water runs in a ditch through parts of the low meadows and after planting the banks with marsh marigolds and snowdrops, Dan sought to add small bridges. Apart from a pair made of stone, he riffed on Japanese landscape design with his own timber zig-zag bridge.

In the damp ground alongside the bridge grows Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’.

Despite watching my legs and hands as I navigate the paths, the stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) seem to recognize a feckless Canadian and soon I am rubbing my wrist with a dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius) proffered by Dan. (It helps with the sting but I have impressive raised welts the next day that cause me to reflect on the traditional medicinal value of this common European plant which, I suppose, would cause you to forget about your chronic arthritis while your skin deals with the acute inflammation.)

Back at the top, we are now let loose in Hillside’s ornamental garden, which occupies several large, irregularly-shaped beds on the upper slope. Planted in Spring 2017 and finished in Autumn 2017, it was the result of five years of waiting and planning. There is so much to see here, but not nearly enough time to study it carefully.

Burgundy Knautia macedonica is stealing the show, with yellow Euphorbia wallichii in the rear. The profusion of summer perennials and ornamental grasses is still to come, which we can glimpse thanks to Dig Delve’s back issues.

A dark opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the progeny of gifted seed from plants Dan saw when cycling to work in his early 20s. It is the only variety he grows, careful not to let it hybridize with the mauve and pink ones his neighbours grow.

The ornamental garden is a keen plantsman’s lair and it is such fun for us to learn the names of new plants. This is Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ a large-flowered hybrid of N. yunnanensis and N. nervosa.

Greek native yellow-banded iris (Iris orientalis) partners with a caramel-colored baptisia in one place…

…. while perfumed sweet peas twine pea sticks in another.

Sulfur clover (Trifolium ocroleuchon) has many of us clicking shutters.

Though it would be lovely to stay another week, there’s just enough time to see the latest chapter at Hillside. This spring, after contemplating the site for a few years and planting it first with a green manure, then a pastel mix of Nigel Dunnett’s ‘Pictorial Meadows’ seeds, a new garden has taken shape. It’s a Mediterranean garden inspired partly by Dan’s work recreating the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst, where he’s been a consultant for almost a decade.

The new garden features a 6-inch mulch of sharp sand, following principles established by Swedish designer Peter Korn. It features drought-tolerant plants such as lilac Phlomis italica, below, verbascums and N. American desert perennials like Sphaeralcea ambigua.

I was fortunate to have visited Sissinghurst the previous weekend and saw the Delos Garden….

….. richly planted with asphodelines and sages, among other Mediterranean plants.

Its stone altars were brought in the 1820s from the Greek island by Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicholson’s seafaring great grandfather and acquired at auction by Harold when the family house in Ireland was sold in 1936. I have a special fondness for the sacred island of Delos….

…. having visited myself in autumn more than a decade ago when the grasses and wildflowers had gone to seed and were blowing in the hot wind, below. It was my fervent desire to return one day in spring when the flowers are in bloom, but seeing Dan’s garden at Sissinghurst in early June might be the closest I come.

As we head back to the open kitchen, I pass a handsome shrub that Dan tells me is his friend Dan Hinkley’s introduction Hydrangea serrata ‘Plum Passion’.

And in a sheltered spot near the house are pots of perfumed dianthus and society garlic (Tulbaghia ‘Moshoeshoe’).

As our visit is coming to an end, we are invited to sit and enjoy the lovely English garden tour custom of “tea and cake”. Huw Morgan has worked his magic on blackcurrants, garnished lavishly with rose petals…..

….. and quite possibly the best lemon pound cake I’ve ever tasted, garnished with tiny elderflowers and lemon slices.

And after the last crumb is finished and it’s time to head into Bath nearby, Dan and Huw insist on posing with us for a group photo – the perfect hosts with the perfect garden at the end of a perfect visit in Somerset.

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If you like naturalistic meadow gardening, you might wish to read my blog on Piet Oudolf’s entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden, published as:

Piet Oudolf – Meadow Maker Part One and Part Two.

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Dan Pearson’s website

I travelled with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours .

Touring Historic Vergelegen

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Janet

It’s the 11th day of our South African garden tour and we head out from Cape Town to a historic wine estate that is located not in the traditional South African wine regions of Stellenbosch or Franschhoek, but in the valley below the Hottentots Holland mountains just 6 kilometres from the shores of False Bay. Yes, we’re going to visit Vergelegen.

If you try to say what I’ve just written – and you’re not Dutch or Afrikaans – I guarantee, you’ll mangle it a little, for the soft g is a “fricative” in linguistics and you should say it (according to Wiki), by making a sound as if you were gargling. So, with that in mind, try gargling “Vair-hech-lech-en” – which is Dutch for “remotely situated”. Indeed this lovely estate would have been a 3-day ox-wagon journey from the Cape Colony when it was founded in 1700 by Willem Adriaan van der Stel, who succeeded his father Simon van der Stel as second governor of the Cape. In doing so, he claimed a 30,000 hectare (74,000 acre) allotment and spent the next six years planting half-a-million grape vines (blue and white muscadels, “steendruif” or chenin blanc, and frontignan), camphor and English oak trees, fruit orchards and orange groves, while developing cattle and sheep pasturage and reservoirs and irrigation canals. His interest in horticulture saw him publish one of the first gardening almanacs in South Africa, and he sent native Cape aloes to the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam.

But Willem van der Stel’s luxurious tastes and autocratic manner saw him recalled from the Cape Colony by the Dutch government in 1707 and made to answer unfair competition charges levelled by the free burghers (independent Colonial farmers) who claimed he had restricted the sale of their produce and curtailed their free rights to fishing while carrying on extensive farming operations at Vergelegen at the expense of the profits (and using the head gardener and slaves) of the Dutch East India Company (VOC or Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie). After van der Stel’s recall, the Dutch overseers of the VOC determined that none of its employees could own land in the Cape Colony, and Vergelegen was divided into four farms. The early garden plan of Vergelegen, below, showing the octagonal walled garden and homestead that still exist on the property was included in the appendices of Contra Deductie, a 320-page document published in Holland in 1712 which details the case against van der Stel. The drawing is copied in the notes to an 1882 publication titled Chronicles of Cape Commanders: Or, An Abstract of Original Manuscripts in the Archives of the Cape Colony by Canadian-born historian George McCall Theal, who emigrated to South Africa as a young man.

Amazingly, that Cape Dutch homestead built by Willem van der Stel in 1700 is still here today, though it was ordered demolished (because it had been built with “ostentation and pomp”) when Vergelegen was partitioned into four separate properties in 1709. Despite part of that order being fulfilled, Vergelegen’s new owner Barend Guildenhuys could not bear to tear the entire house down, removing only the back portion. What is left today (with front gables added on around 1780 and various other additions coming later) is a lovely heritage building that has been part of Vergelegen through numerous owners since its founding. The estate gardens were dilapidated when Vergelegen was purchased in 1917 by mining “randlord” (that’s the South African version of a robber baron) Sir Lionel Philips as a gift to his wife Lady Florence (1863-1940). She worked on the gardens for more than twenty years, turning the walled octagonal garden into a beautiful English garden that has been restored by the current owners, the Anglo American Company, which acquired Vergelegen in 1987. Founded in 1917 by Ernest Oppenheimer, Anglo American now holds an 85% interest in de Beers Diamonds, as well as numerous other large mining interests throughout Africa and the world.

But those five massive camphor trees overhanging the homestead cottage in the photo above, and in the one below, were planted around 1700 by Willem van der Stel..They were declared national monuments in 1942.

Speaking of monumental trees, this English oak (Quercus robur) was also planted around 1700 by Willem van der Stel, and has survived with its hollowed-out trunk to be the oldest oak in South Africa.

A closer look at the homestead with its pretty windows and gables. The traditional thatched roof is fashioned from grasses of the family Restionaceae.

It was Lady Florence Philips who acquired the pair of bronze deer flanking the homestead’s door. They are replicas of the deer found in the ashes of the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius.

Before I learn that no photos are permitted in the house, I have…… whoops… taken a few photos in the house. (Sorry, Vergelegen). But if I hadn’t done so, I would not have had a chance to explain to you what occurred in the lovely dining room below on April 29^th 1990, a fact of Vergelegen’s history that impressed me more than anything else. For it was here, privately, quietly and under the aegis of Anglo-American, that members of the ANC – men such as Nelson Mandela, Cyril Ramaphosa, Thabo Mbeki, Aziz Pahad and Trevor Manuel (some of whom had just returned from exile in Zambia the previous day) – had their preparatory meeting to negotiate their ascendant party’s terms with President F.W.de Klerk and his government. What a thrilling day that must have been, and what a moment in history for this Cape Dutch house, whose farms, vineyards and pleasure gardens were once worked by slaves in the pay of the Dutch East India Company.

Here’s a lovely arrangement of indigenous flowers in the house. Of Vergelegen’s 3000 hectares (7413 acres), much is taken up by wilderness, and Anglo American has hired an ecological conservationist to help restore the indigenous fynbos, with the goal of enhancing and preserving 2240 hectares (5535 acres) to be a “pristine example of the Cape’s natural flora and fauna”. In particular, our guide tells us, they are removing the blue gums (Eucalyptus globulus complex) and stone pines (Pinus pinea) to relieve the demands those invasive exotic trees place on Vergelegen’s water table.

This is the rear of the homestead, with its quiet reflection pools.

We are given a walking tour of the many new garden areas. This is the herb garden with its masses of scented lavender and other traditional herbs.

I love the sundial in the midst of all these straight-edged parterres.

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I always keep my eye open for life in the garden, like this cape honey bee (Apis mellifera capensis) nectaring on the Limonium prezii, and birds too, like this white-bellied sunbird (Cinnyris talatala)sipping from the Leonitis leonurus or “dagga” as it’s known in S. Africa.

Here is is the new oak arboretum, with fifteen Quercus varieties planted and more to come – all part of a quest to play a part in conservation of oak species suited for the mild South African climate.

We don’t have time to get up into all the vineyards but the grapes aren’t in season yet, since it’s just mid-spring. It’s lovely, however, to see the flowers that will yield the succulent fruit in a few months.

Having completed the grand garden tour, here we are appropriately in the wine tasting room, below. Isn’t it beautiful?

I must say, the South African wine tasting experience is rather elegant, compared to Canada, but it’s exactly what you’d expect from a vineyard designed carefully by Anglo-American to match the ambiance of the entire estate.

A little background first. In the mid-1880s, phylloxera ravaged the vines of the Cape vineyards, as it had done earlier in France, the result of importation of American vines (the phylloxera aphid is native to North America) by English botanists. It devastated Vergelegen’s vines, which were ultimately removed and the land left fallow. It wasn’t until after 1966, under the ownership of the Barlow family, that grapes were planted again on the estate in a small-scale way. When Anglo-American acquired Vergelegen, they cleared invasive vegetation and worked to rehabilitate the land before replanting vines. Their new multi-level, sunken hilltop winery was built and opened by Baron Eric de Rothschild of Château Lafite in Bordeaux, and their wines and the vineyard itself have won top honours in international tasting and tourism competitions. And to add to the vineyard’s cachet, Vergelegen regularly features entertainers like Celine Dion, Josh Groban and Elton John to perform on the estate. And the wine? It’s delicious.

I love these lights in the tasting room. Note the octagonal V logo, a motif borrowed from the octagonal garden dating back to the Willem van der Stel days.

Finally, we sit down to enjoy a lovely lunch at Stables Restaurant. With its beautiful decor, it’s fun to gaze around while waiting for the food to arrive…..

….especially since the walls are graced with beautiful textile art by indigenous artists depicting some of the unique plants of the Cape, like this…..

… and this….

…and this.

And on that charming floral note, it’s time to head back to the bus and settle in for the short trip to Franschhoek and a very quirky and artful private garden whose owner is opening his gate especially for us. See you there!

Janet Davis Explores Colour

In the garden & the world

Tag Archives: Somerset

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Yews Farm – A Brilliant Marriage…. of Boxwood and Beans

Hillside: Dan Pearson and Huw Morgan in Somerset

Touring Historic Vergelegen

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