CHAPTER FIVE Rooting
And so to plants, the subject that makes bosoms heave and hearts swell. All the months of machinery, mud and noise melt away into soft colours and birdsong in scented evening air. Yet ornamental planting is nature at her most mercurial. Understanding her tricks and seductions is essential for a happy garden. Hard work, trial and constant error and discussions with fellow gardeners is how good plant knowledge evolves. That knowledge is then constantly tested, as making plants combine well requires patience, skill and serendipity.
I wanted this border to be exuberant. It gets taller and wilder as the season progresses, tamed by the clipped forms of the Quercus ilex and illuminated for months with Rosa x odorata âMutabilisâ.
The gardener is the garden
There is no avoiding the fact. Plants are all about hard physical work. The majority of activities relating to plants and planting involve constant and sometimes back-breaking effort. If you want to be seduced by the subject, then just look at the pictures and stop reading! Gardeners, those of us who love gardening, are normally to be found face down presenting their posteriors to the world as they rummage around muttering into a border. We fall easily into intense coded conversations with others of our ilk that leave non-gardeners bewildered. One of the chicest women I know, Americaâs great landscape architect Andrea Cochran, says she spends days on end at home in her vegetable garden, her battered trousers held up by bailer twine and not a thought for what she looks like. There is no absorption as profound as gardening. It is a form of transcendentalism. Garden admirers, on the other hand, are to be found genteelly dressed strolling slowly and admiringly through the afore-mentioned sumptuous borders.
I work like a carthorse in the garden. Born in the Chinese year of the ox, I expect I have no choice. I remember when I started out as a garden designer the terrifying figure of Mary Keen swept down upon me at the Chelsea Flower Show. She grabbed my hands hard by the wrists and examined them wordlessly. She flung them down. âGood,â she said, âyou actually garden. Youâre all right.â We have liked each other ever since. Unless you garden it is quite difficult to make reliable gardens for others. It is essential to be able to understand the man-hours it will take to manage and maintain things. Temple Guiting, with its eighteen garden rooms, fourteen acres of garden and two sizeable vegetable gardens, is gardened part-time by Marion Jones, an impressive young Welsh woman. She has help with mowing and topiary clipping but everything else she does herself. I designed the garden to be self-managing and that doesnât mean no work at all â it just means it is focused, intelligent and cognizant of the person who will garden it. The gardener must be considered as integral to the design. My dear, departed friend Ian Kirby always said, âThe gardener is the gardenâ and it is the truth.
This little garden bakes in south-facing heat, amplified by the enclosure, and the plants need to accommodate this. Vitis coignetiae is very much at home on the walls and blends well with the lavenders and Elaeagnus âQuicksilverâ.
I loved making these long walk borders. The yew columns march down as far as the barn and the Quercus ilex, where the tempo changes and the planting loosens. Viburnums, roses and philadelphus bolster the Campanula lactiflora âLoddon Annaâ and tumbling herbaceous plants all in shades of blue and white.
This is the tumultuous conclusion to the long walk seen here, where it relaxes and spreads out, blurring with the natural surroundings. Rosa californica âPlenaâ in the background supports waves of fennels, lavender, irises and salvias. The dry ground tempers the unruly behaviour of the valerian, with Rosa x odorata âPallidaâ (syn.âOld Blushâ) playing to the crowd in front.
Soil
Mulch is magic
Letâs get stuck in! This is the good bit. Finally, the building work is done and the planting can begin. Only, hold your horses, we arenât planting anything until the soil is sorted out.
Good soil has been my Holy Grail for as many years as I can remember. I have been gardening London clay for so long I almost lost my faith. It is enough to test the commitment of any gardener, as clay is so horrible to work. It seemed it was in workable condition for only a few miraculous weeks a year when it wasnât either baked to rock hardness with inch-wide cracks or a sullen stolid immoveable mass of damp misery. Tens of yearsâ worth of manure and grit were swallowed up by it and it remained unyielding. London clay is a law unto itself. Inevitably the plants I most admire enjoy chalk or lovely dry friable limy soil. Irises detest the morosely clammy clay with its legions of slugs. Persistently I grew them and persistently the slugs would chomp through the neck of the stem be...
