"The Passionate Gardener" Tour May 22-31, 2016

For the last five years, I have been an assistant tour guide on "The Best of English Gardens" tour for my friend Michael Induni's company, Discover Europe. "The Best of English Gardens" is a wonderful tour, but it isn't exclusively a tour of gardens. The itinerary also includes Stonehenge, the city of Bath and two nights in Salisbury to see the local sites including the Magna Carta. I have been working with Michael to create a tour for the more discriminating gardener. I researched gardens from London to the Cotswolds. I wanted to visit classic and historic gardens, but I also tried to include contemporary gardens that illustrate the latest in horticulture and design. I thought spending a longer time in less locations would be a more relaxing way to see gardens, so we removed two nights in Salisbury and added time in the Cotswolds.

I came across a December, 2012 article that Penelope Hobhouse wrote for Gardens Illustrated called "25 of the best English gardens to visit throughout England" and cross-referenced that with Tim Richardson's 2013 book The New English Garden and created a new tour called "The Passionate Gardener" Tour. One garden I had been dying to see was Gina Price's private garden, Pettifers. So I scouted Pettifers and Rousham House last year and loved them both. Pettifers has deservedly gotten a lot of press (the cover of The New English Garden) in the last several years. It is a plants-person's garden with a clean modern design. The grouping of four "flask-shaped yew topiaries" have become nearly as iconic as the former yew waves in Piet Oudolf's garden, Hummelo. Her gardener, Polly, is both delightful and knowledgeable. In landscape garden department, I looked to the Hobhouse article and substituted  Rousham House, a privately owned, intimate garden designed by William Kent for Stourhead, a National Trust Garden with hundreds of visitors. As difficult as it was to exclude Stourhead, the intimacy of Rousham House, with about a dozen visitors when I was there, was hard to beat.

I will lead the tour May 22-31, 2016 which will also include the annual Gardens Illustrated Talk at the Royal Geographic Society in London. In the next several months, I will profile the gardens in more detail but below is a list of the gardens in chronological order of the tour:

The New English Garden by Tim Richardson NEG: Pettifers, Great Dixter, High Grove

  

"25 of the best English gardens to visit throughout England" by garden designer and historian Penelope Hobhouse. GI/PH: Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Hidcote Manor, Iford Manor, Rousham House

"Best of English Gardens" Tour BEG : Great Dixter, Sissinghurst, Hidcote Manor,

Iford Manor, Barnsley House, Kiftsgate Garden, Chelsea Flower Show, Vann

 

Great Dixter NEG, GI/PH, BEG

Sissinghurst: GI/PH, BEG

Chelsea Flower Show: BEG

RHS Wisley: BEG

Iford Manor: GI/PH, BEG 

Rousham House: GI/PH

Pettifers Garden: NEG

Kiftsgate: BEG

Barnsley House: BEG

Vann: BEG

Garden Talk: Succession Planting for New Englanders

Today I will giving a talk to the Garden Club of Amherst, Massachusetts called Succession Planting for New Englanders. I am particularly pleased to be speaking in Amherst because several of the members of this garden club were on The Best of English Gardens Tour in 2014, so I will be having a reunion of sorts.

 

I first learned about succession planting from an article Fergus Garrett wrote in the now defunct White Flower Farm periodical called The Gardener.  The article, written in 2002, was titled "Making a Mixed Border" and was the nucleus of Christopher Lloyd's 2005 book called Succession Planting for Year-Round Pleasure. Garrett's article had perfect timing because I read it just as I was designing the Boccelli Garden in Peterborough. The article had plant lists and a map of the garden Garrett and Lloyd were designing for a new Zone 5 garden at White Flower farm in Connecticut. 

I carefully studied the article making notes in the margins on plants I wanted to include in the Boccelli Garden. The next step was to procure these plants which I did from a variety of local and mail-order nurseries. Sadly, my three main sources of plants, Blue Meadow Farm in Montague, MA, Heronswood Nursery in Kingston, Washington, and Conway's Nursery in  Little Compton, Rhode Island are all now closed. Fortunately, I was able to get my hands on some top notch components of a mixed border: trees, shrubs, perennials, biennials, annuals and bulbs from these nurseries. My talk today will be about my successes and failures in trying to adapt a watered down and simplified version of the planting style at Great Dixter in the cold soil of New Hampshire.

Chesea Then and New

Marcus Barnett's design for The Telegraph used a successful formula for design that it reminiscent of many recent Chelsea gardens: a modern patio with a clean stone/hedge backdrop, clipped blocks of yew and beech, elegantly limbed up trees and the ubiquitous low wildish herbaceous planting mixing flowers and grasses. In another year, it could have easily won Best in Show but this year, Dan Pearson offered something completely different.

Dan Pearson's design sponsored by Laurent-Perrier was very wild and intricately planted. It was inspired by the Trout Stream at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. In fact, soapstone boulders from the estate were transported to Chelsea to form the hardscape of the garden. The complexity and details of the planting boggled the mind.  My main criticism of the garden was that it was a three-sided island garden which made photography difficult without having spectators and/or buldings in the backround. It also made the fantasy that transports one to another place and time impossible. That said, the triangular shape allowed veiwing the complexity of the plantings easier. The edges of the garden which were inches away looked as if they had been there for hundreds of years.

Great Dixter 2015

Pictures Speak Louder than Words; Especially at Great Dixter

Rousham House and Gardens

Before visiting Pettifers Garden, I stopped to see Rousham House and Gardens in Oxfordshire. I am also hoping to include Rousham in next year’s tour. Rousham Gardens’ reputation preceded my visit. It is arguably one of the finest gardens in England. Rousham remains a private garden and was surprisingly quiet, especially as compared to another landscape garden we visit, Stourhead, which is owned and operated by the National Trust and had hundreds of visitors when we were there last week. I saw perhaps 10 visitors at Rousham and felt as if I had the garden to myself for the morning.

Rousham is an excellent example of an Augustan age (early 18th century when British artists emulated the original Augustan age in Rome 27 BC-14AD) landscape garden and was designed by William Kent (1685-1748). It is recommended to follow the circuit walk, drawn up prior to 1738 by the head gardener, John MacClary. My photographs follow the circuit which takes the visitor around the perimeter of the garden through a series of water features, statues and follies.

Rousham House and Gardens is still owned by the same family that created it and remains precisely as Kent envisioned. The brochure for Rousham says it all: “Rousham is uncommercial and unspoilt with no tea room and no shop. Bring a picnic, wear comfortable shoes and it is yours for the day.”

Rousham House from the Bowling Green

The view from the house with central statue made in 1740.

The Lion and the Horse by P. Scheemaker

The Octagon Pond

The Upper Cascade with a statue of Venus

The Watery Walk

The serpentine rill in the Watery Walk is elegant and feels contemporary even today

The octagonal Cold Bath

Temple of Echo by Kent and Townsend

 Paladian Doorway

View of the house; the ha-ha can barely be discerned

Statue of Apollo

Heyford Bridge 1255

The reverse view of Apollo through The Long Walk

The Lower Cascade with the Upper Cascade above

The Arcade

The ancient hedges that separate the Bowling Green from the Walled Garden

The Walled Garden predates the work of William Kent

The formal Pigeon House Garden