Happy Mother's Day: Spring at Parham

It is Mother’s Day in America, and I haven’t left the estate where I live and work since mid-March. Mom, I’m sorry I didn’t want to risk coronavirus to buy an air-mail stamp for your Mother’s Day card. So instead I am giving you this blog post of something pretty.

One of the worst parts of this pandemic is that my parents, who were planning to visit us at our new home in West Sussex this spring, are obviously not traveling anywhere. And who knows when we will be able to safely fly to America when we can’t yet even walk to our local pub?

My parents visited us last spring and it was wonderful to take them to Sissinghurst, where my husband was working, and to show them other places we love like Great Dixter and Kew Gardens in London. So, Mom, because you can’t visit England this spring I will share what I would have shown you.

I’ve been sheltering in and sheltered by Parham, the garden I am now care-taking and that is taking care of my husband and me. In this anxious spring watching its beauty unfold before my eyes and under my hands while making plans for its future has been a salvation. And if it weren’t for the love and support of my Mom—and Dad too—I would never have found my way into this beautiful life. I have much for which to be grateful.

Happy Mother’s Day, Madre. Thank you for getting me here, even though it is too far from you.

Not a bad backyard

After the sunniest April on record, we finished the month with much-needed rain and some gorgeous wild weather. Hail, thunder, and lightning danced around us as frequent showers blew across the Downs. In between those showers the light was particularly intense and rainbow-birthing, and the newly leafed countryside glowed.

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Special thanks to my love, who ran out of our house to bail me out with his phone so I could take these shots after my own phone battery died. If there’s any way to my heart it’s handing me a working camera when the light is achingly perfect but just seconds from fading.

Things fall apart

I’ve been indulging my Dutch Master fantasies this year with parrot tulips grown at work and and at home. Did you know that tulips keep growing after they’re cut? I find they always stretch themselves into more beautiful positions than any I could contrive. The perfect moment in any tulip arrangement is just as the blooms begin to shatter and the petals start to fall.



Kiftsgate Court Garden

After visiting Hidcote last June we drove just across the road to another famous garden: Kiftsgate Court. Heather Muir began Kiftsgate around the same time as Hidcote, with advice from her neighbor Lawrence Johnston. Two more generations of women, Diany Binny and Anne Chambers, continued to develop the garden. Now 100 years old, the garden is still led by Anne, who writes a very informative blog on the Kiftsgate Web site.

It was my first visit to Kiftsgate, and there was much about it to enjoy. The roses, including the famously huge white ‘Kiftsgate,’ were incredible. I especially enjoyed some of the container plantings. In general, I found Kiftsgate to be a romantic plantsman’s garden and one I should like to visit again.

The ‘Kiftsgate’ rose, too large to make it into one photo, climbs the trees.

Hidcote

We have definitely reached that point in winter when no amount of snowdrops can make up for the irrationally crushing feeling that spring will never come. The incessant rain, which started in September and never really stopped, and dark, sunless days have left me craving color and bloom. So let’s take a little trip back to summer…

In late June last year my husband and I drove up to Gloucestershire to stay with my friend Simon and his fiancé Teresa. Not only do they live in one of my favorite British villages, they are also lucky enough to be just a few minute’s drive from some world-class gardens. My husband used his National Trust connections to get us into one of them, Hidcote, before it opened to the public.

Hidcote is similar to Sissinghurst in its fame—and the hordes of visitors it attracts—so it was a special treat to see it empty and quiet as I imagine it would have been when it was when originally created by Lawrence Johnston in 1910. Also like Sissinghurst, Hidcote comprises a series of ‘garden rooms’ that interconnect various planting areas. This was my second visit to the garden—the first was in 2015 while on an early spring study tour with my class from the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. I admit I liked the garden better this time around, probably because in late June it was fuller and more floriferous, with roses really stealing the show.

There’s a lot to take in at Hidcote, and so many compelling views and plant combinations. Some that particularly caught my eye are below.

In the half light

This past weekend my husband and I flew to Scotland for a quick trip to see friends and family. It was the first time we’d been back in the country since moving to southeast England more than two and a half years ago. When I stepped off the plane in Edinburgh I was hit with the strongest feeling of ‘home’ I have ever felt. It makes no sense at all—I didn’t grow up in Edinburgh and have no family of my own there. I hate grey and rainy weather and don’t like being cold. But for some inexplicable reason Scotland got under my skin, and it’s there to stay.

The only sun we saw on our entire trip was a peek under the clouds while the plane was landing. After a great night out with friends Friday, listening to live Scottish folk music in a small Edinburgh pub, we headed toward Perthshire in the waning afternoon light. We crossed the stunning new Queensferry Bridge, which we’d watched being built but hadn’t yet driven, beneath flashing road signs warning of heavy rains.

It was dark when we arrived at our country hotel, where we met my husband’s family for a party. Inside was perfection: cozy fires, good food, lovely folks, and a delightful selection of single malts behind the bar. Outside the rain came down and the air smelled sweet and nurturing.

The next morning, after a full Scottish with black pudding and tattie scones, we drove off through the Perthshire hills following empty winding roads along lochs and peat-black burns. A mizzle scrim hung in the air and the almost-solstice light had an underwater, half-lit feel.

We stopped in a few little towns we know, soaking in the Scottish friendliness of the people we met in shops and pubs. We couldn’t drink enough of the water, which tasted pure and nourishing and such a change from what comes out of the tap in southeast England. Back on the road we pulled over frequently, stumbling into bracken and moss-filled woods, remembering all the plants we first learned to call by Latin name.

The never-quite-light day felt like a dream. It ended Sunday night with a late flight back to England and an after-midnight crash into bed in Sussex. The next morning I wondered if it had even been real. Then I opened my refrigerator to souvenirs: a mountain of our favorite black pudding and a pile of tattie scones, ready to freeze for when we need a taste of home.

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Xylella fastidiosa in Southern Italy

In early September, in between moving and starting a new job, I flew to southern Italy to spend a few days celebrating my birthday. My husband and I rented a car and drove from the airport in Bari south down Apulia (the heel of Italy’s “boot) and explored the Salento region at the very southern tip. The highlights of the trip were white stone cities surrounded by beautiful beaches with turquoise water, being able to swim in both the warm Ionian and Adriatic Seas, charmingly authentic villages, seafood and pasta, and the blissful absence of too many English tourists. We didn’t visit any gardens on our trip, but there was a horticultural phenomenon that cast a giant shadow over our trip and is too important to ignore: Xylella fastidiosa.

The ancient olive groves of Apulia, and the lives of the farmers who tend them, have been devastated by the bacterial plant disease Xylella fastidiosa, or ‘xylella’ as it is commonly known in horticulture. Spittlebugs are the vector for the disease. They pass bacteria into the trees as they feed and also carry the disease from one tree to the next. Then the bacteria reproduces in the tree’s xylem, which is the plant’s water-transport system, and essentially stops the flow of water through it, dehydrating the trees to death. Some trees die all at once and others die in bits, slowly browning out all over. In addition to olives, xylella can also affect other plants such as lavender, rosemary, and cherries. There is no known cure.

Olive oil is the economic engine of this historically poor area of Italy, and in the past year production has fallen 65% in Apulia. The economic damage is estimated at 1.2billion euros. And it is a double-edged sword in that tourism in this area of Italy had been increasing, adding to the area’s growth. But driving past miles and miles of dead olive trees really did blight the formerly beautiful landscape and, as much as I hate to admit it, did cast a pall over our vacation. The scale of the dead trees is just so large that it really was all we saw as we drove the entire Salento region, and it made both my husband and I sad that these beautiful and characterful productive trees—some of which are hundreds if not thousands of years old—have met such an untimely end. The effects on the families who have tended these trees, some for many generations, is unimaginable.

It is not just the groves that are affected. These olives grown as street trees in the beautiful little town where we stayed were also dying.

It is interesting to note that there was a very clear line of demarcation between the most hard-hit areas of the Salento and further north, toward Bari, where the olives are still alive. This is what I imagine the olive groves must have looked like throughout the south-most areas before xylella:

I don’t speak Italian, but I was really struck by how little information we saw publicized about this crisis while we were in Italy. I noticed no billboards or public signs about it as we made our way through many towns and cities in the area. It wasn’t until we were getting our passports checked to return to England that I saw this small sign in the airport. There are apparently buffer zones in place that are carefully monitored to help contain the spread of the disease.

Xylella is not yet in the U.K., but I am really surprised by how relatively little it has made the news in the British horticulture world, even though many plants grown in the U.K. are susceptible to the disease and I’ve seen spittlebugs here. The trade publication Horticulture Week does talk about it, but there have been very few mentions of it in mass-market media. I do seem to remember a small segment on Gardener’s World last year urging U.K. travelers to not bring plant material back with them from their holidays. But that segment didn’t show the effects of the disease abroad, and I believe that if it had it would have been much more effective. More publicity may be on the way: Dame Helen Mirren, who owns an olive grove in Apulia, did a recent campaign with the RHS to raise awareness.

For more information on xylella, and the heartbreaking emotional as well as economic toll it is taking on Apulia, National Geographic published a good piece here. And in the meantime, no matter how tempting it may be to bring plant material home from your vacations abroad, please think of the pictures I have published here and leave it behind for the sake of protecting our British plants from this devastating disease.

First pelargonium from seed!

I am beyond excited that the first pelargonium I grew from seed, Pelargonium quinquelobatum, flowered this week. I have been obsessed by this species pelargonium since seeing it last summer at Derry Watkin’s nursery, Special Plants, near Bath. Its quixotic color stopped me short: I had never seen a flower so unusual.

One of my first jobs while studying photography at university was working in a photo processing store where I sat at a machine that developed customers’ photos—back when we all still used film, ha! Part of my job was evaluating the images and making color corrections to remove incorrect balances in cyan, magenta, and yellow. I developed an excellent eye for seeing unusual color casts at that job, and when I look at the flower of Pelargonium quinquelobatum I immediately see a strange muddle of cyan and magenta in its petals that resembles a poorly balanced photograph. This color in a flower absolutely fascinates me, but the maddening thing is that I’ve found it impossible to capture in a photograph, despite trying different cameras, lenses and light conditions. Though the flowers in my images here look like a generic rose, they are far from that color in real life.

I originally tried to grow Pelargonium quinquelobatum (named for its five-lobed leaves) last summer. I had no luck with germination, I suspect because the extreme heat made it challenging to control the temperature in my glasshouse. This year I sowed reserved seeds on March 12, and they sat for months doing nothing, until I about gave up. And then one precious seedling poked its head above the soil, and the only way I could tell it was a pelargonium and not a wind-blown weed was from the distinctive smell of its leaves.

I coddled this young plant, and it is the one you see in these pictures. The irony is that when I potted it on a couple of weeks ago and stuck it outside with the rest of my collection, two of its kind germinated right at its base, no doubt from seeds that hitched a ride into their new container! It always humbles me that though we work so hard to nurture plants sometimes all they need is to be left alone to get on with their lives in their own good time.

In other unusually colored pelargonium news, I’ve achieved my first flower on Pelargonium gibbosum. It’s a stunning lime-green, another color not often seen in flowers. I bought this young plant last month at Fibrex Nurseries, home of the national pelargonium collection. That trip was a pilgrimage for me, and will no doubt the the subject of a blog post some day soon.

Orchid hunting, part 3: Park Gate Down

We left Yocklett’s Bank and the Fly Orchids and cruised through the countryside, which was fluffy and white with cow parsley and new lambs. Our destination, Park Gate Down, lay deep in the North Downs of Kent, accessed by single-track roads so narrow our small car passed through with centimeters to spare.

Park Gate Down is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (or ‘TripleSI’ as I learned to call them at the Botanics). It is mostly chalk grassland and is famous among botanists for being home to 14 British native orchid species. We parked the car and walked into a beautiful valley, hazy in the spring sunshine.

We’d come to Park Gate Down seeking the Monkey Orchid (Ochis simia). This site is one of only three in the U.K. where this truly rare orchid grows.

As we passed through a series of fields there were lots of cowslips (Primula veris) but no Monkey Orchids to be seen. We did, however, see the lovely native columbine, Aquilegia vulgaris, our first sighting of this plant in the wild. There were a few fellow orchid-spotters about, and we passed a man leaving the valley with a large camera swung over his shoulder. We asked him if he’d had any luck finding Monkeys and he said they were just coming into bloom. He’d found one but it was a real challenge given the size of the site.

As we continued up the valley we did see some orchids, including Fly Orchids, an unopened Butterfly Orchid, below, and lots of Early Purple Orchids which are challenging to differentiate from Monkeys at a glance. We were in a series of three huge fields, and our hopes at locating a flower of just a few centimeters tall amongst the grass and hillocks were growing dim.

And then as we were heading out of the valley I stepped over a tussock of grass and almost landed on our prize: a Monkey Orchid right at my feet! I shouted to my husband who came bounding over, ecstatic. And there it was, this little plant no taller than a cowslip, our first Monkey Orchid.

You can see how the Monkey Orchid gets its name, with its “tail” hanging between its “legs.” It was just starting to come into bloom.

We spent a long time lying on the grass admiring our Monkey and marveling at our luck to have found it in such a huge space. It was truly a thrill of discovery that I can only imagine we’ve shared with centuries of plant hunters throughout time. Of course, the plant hunters of old would have picked or dug up their finds for transport back to their sponsors, but all we wanted to do was tread lightly on the earth and admire.

Our day of orchid hunting in the North Downs was the best day we’ve had living in southeast England and one we will not forget. Next year we look forward to discovering some of the later-flowering orchids and exploring the botany of a new area of the country.

Orchid hunting, part 2: Yockletts Bank

We reluctantly left Denge Wood and drove a few miles to Yockletts Bank. We turned up a lane that was, to me, the most perfect representation of a British woodland in spring. Bear’s garlic, Allium ursinum, carpeted the forest floor. Also known as ramsons, this was the plant we’d enjoyed with nettles a few weeks earlier in a spring tonic soup.

We headed into the woodland and met a nice stand of lady orchids, Orchis purpurea, in a clearing. But what we were after was much more subtle and hard to spot: the fly orchid, Ophrys insectifera.

And find it we did. There’s an orchid in the photo below. Can you spot it? This photo gives you an idea of just how small and challenging these particular orchids can be to see.

Elated with our discovery we continued on through the woods to find these intriguing trees. I dubbed them ‘resurrection ashes’ because new trees had grown vertically from where an old tree had fallen. If there ever is an actual incarnation of immortality, these trees may be it.

Further down the path we noticed a few tell-tale twigs just to the side of the path. We had both read Leif Bersweden’s recent book, The Orchid Hunter, and remembered that people will often use twigs to subtly mark/protect orchids. These twigs were guarding another small population of fly orchids.

We headed out of the wood and back to the car, enjoying the wonderful natural plant combinations growing on the verge. This mix of Allium ursinum; cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, the fern, Asplenium scolopendirum; and the delicate grass, Melica uniflora, was a study in perfect plant combinations. I went to the Chelsea Flower Show a few days later and saw few plant combinations to rival what nature created right here on Yockletts Bank.

Up next, our final stop on our day of orchid hunting, and an excellent stop it was.

Tipping it down

It’s raining, it’s pouring. Finally, and not a moment too soon. I cannot remember the last time I left my house in the morning rain to have it still raining when I returned ten hours later. 2018? And—cherry on top—we just got a few good cracks of lightning and some blessed rolls of thunder. Summer thunder and lightning, so rare in Britain, are two things I really miss from home.

After last summer’s drought, we had a pretty dry winter, a very dry spring, and just last week the whispers of the dreaded hosepipe ban gained volume. The plants—both those I tend and those growing wild—had a drawn-in and dusty look I associate with conservation of their most precious resource. When the plants feel stressed the gardener feels stressed, no two ways about it. No amount of hosepipe watering, an emergency measure at best, can make up for a good long soaking rain like we’ve had today. Tonight, I can physically feel the plants relaxing, stretching and unfurling as their leaves grow turgid again. Now, if they could only pick themselves up from where they’ve fallen face-down in the mud…

I never dreamed when I moved to England that I’d go through two summers in a row anxiously watching the live radar, willing the little green blobs to move over my garden. I suspect this unease is new to many gardeners in Britain, some of whom may have taken rainfall for granted. I come from a place where hot, dry summers are more typical than not, and where browned out grass in August is the norm. So I’ve lived it, but that doesn’t mean I like it, especially now that I live in a country where the high quality of horticulture has traditionally been possible because of naturally copious rain.

Today we’ve gotten a bit of a reprieve, and I’ll turn the central heating back on and pour myself a wee whisky to celebrate. It’s not your typical summer tipple, but as temperatures head back into the 40s tonight (single digits in Celsius), it seems appropriate. Thank goodness for this rain.

A few from Sissinghurst, late spring

I’ll take a short break from orchid hunting to share these photos of Sissinghurst, taken May 26. The garden has definitely tipped into its summer chaos, with so many plants blooming together it is hard to take it all in. I’ve realized little and often is the best way for me to experience Sissinghurst in the high season.

On this visit the stars of the show were the German bearded iris, especially those blooming in a long row in the cutting garden. Sissinghurst has quite a collection of historic cultivars, including many of the Benton irises bred by the painter Sir Cedric Morris. Many of them are subtle, with tea-stained coloring that I find intriguing. Dan Pearson has a few good images here, and I was absolutely inspired by his latest image of his Bentons. If anyone could make a bang-up-to-date planting combining a concrete wall and vintage irises, it would have to be Dan. The Sissinghurst irises, below, are identified on hover if the cultivar is known.

Iris ‘Benton Susan’

Iris ‘Beottie’ with Erysimum 'Chelsea Jacket'

Iris ‘Lula Marguerite’

Iris ‘Benton Caramel’

The last of the late-flowering tulips are going over. This is a pretty combination of ‘James Last,’ which I trialled and liked at home this year, and the shorter ‘Blue Parrot.’

The newly replanted purple border is starting to knit together, with Lupin ‘Masterpiece’ stealing the show.

A new planting in the top courtyard is filling in nicely. Lots of good texture here with different leaf forms.

Orchid hunting, part 1: Denge Wood and Bonsai Bank

Southeast England, and in particular Kent, is known to have strong orchid populations including some species that are rare in Britain. And so it was in the spirit of great plant hunters’ past that my husband and I set out for a day of orchid hunting on May 18. Unlike the collectors who walked before us, our aim was to only botanize and take a few photos, not entire plants. The practice of plant collection can, and historically has, massively damaged native plant populations and their ability to reproduce and survive. As conservation-minded and responsible horticulturists uprooting or picking plants would be the last thing we would do. It is enough to just see these beautiful plants growing wild.

Our first stop was Denge Wood, an ancient semi-natural woodland on the North Downs. We began our walk through a stunning beech forest that was doing just what makes me love beech woodlands so much, creating a dynamic interplay of light and shadow on fresh, new spring leaves. Nothing else approaches the feeling of being in a living cathedral like a beech woodland. The bluebells were just going over but I could tell they had been a stunning carpet below the green canopy.

As we continued walking the forest opened up to include other tree species, including conifers and birch, and more grassland. It was then that we found what we were after: our first Lady Orchid, Orchis purpurea, growing tucked up right next to a yew. It was huge, with a raceme that was about eight inches long. You can see how the orchid gets its name—look for the lady in her dark bonnet and fluffy skirts.

As we continued along the track we met an older man walking the unlikely combination of an Afghan hound and a miniature poodle. We stopped to chat and as he’d visited the site for years he filled us in on all the orchids in the area and what we could expect to see. Once he learned we were botanists he fed us all sorts of intel about orchiding in Kent. Then he motioned us toward Bonsai Bank, where our horticultural lives changed forever.

The open forest/scrubland was full of Lady Orchids as far as the eye could see. In addition to Lady Orchids we saw many Common Twayblades, Neottia ovata, which are easily overlooked because they are the exact color of the surrounding grass. Once you “get your eye in,” they are easy to spot by their relatively large and rounded leaves.

While I was photographing the orchids I heard a rustling nearby and just caught this grass snake navigating under a thick layer of moss. In the almost five years I have lived in Britain I have seen only two snakes, both tiny and inconspicuous, as well as one slow worm (a legless lizard). Coming from a land where snakes are usually much larger, sometimes venomous, and have a penchant for living around human dwellings I admit the relatively smaller size and harmlessness of British snakes is one of the things I love about living here.

We continued on walking amongst the orchids, enjoying a display that had us both in awe. I really enjoyed seeing the variation in the Lady Orchids. Some were almost white and others deep purple. They were so thick it was hard to photograph them for fear of treading on others, or the later-flowering species yet to come.

There were a few other orchid enthusiasts on the bank, mostly men with great big camera gear, but it was quiet enough that we could easily be alone with the orchids. A very common plant in this area is a native British dogwood, Cornus sanguinea, growing at the base of the Lady Orchid below.

The man we met on the path had told us that a White Helleborine, Cephalanthera damasonium, had been spotted in this general area but was hard to find. And wouldn’t you know it, I found two while wandering alone down a path. They were growing right next to a Lady Orchid and a Common Twayblade, with other, later orchid species waiting to flower. Three orchid species in one photo is a pretty great find. Can you spot the White Helleborine and Common Twayblade, below?

We brought along a text we spent a lot of time with while studying botany at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh: The Wild Flower Key by Francis Rose. It takes a bit of practice to learn to use a floral key, as well as a good understanding of plant anatomy in order to differentiate your sepals from your stipules. But with time it is an excellent way to correctly identify specimens. Here we’re working on IDing this yet-unflowered orchid.

We had a few more stops planned on our great orchid-hunting day, so with reluctance we left Bonsai Bank and hiked back out through the magical beech woodland.

In Part 2, we continue our day of orchid hunting in Kent with some new discoveries and a woodland so beautiful it put everything at Chelsea to shame.

Orchid season begins

A few days into May my husband and I took one of our usual evening walks around the fields and woodlands near our home. We were headed to check a sunny bank that last year had a nice population of early purple orchids, Orchis mascula.

Well, the usual site had a good few flower spikes, but when we ventured off our track a bit we found the motherlode:

It is hard to put into words our excitement at this scene. Wild British orchid have always captivated me with their strange and complex beauty, ephemeral nature, choosiness of their growing sites, and in some cases, their rarity. I am not alone in my admiration—in the last few years several popular books have been written about the quest to see British orchids growing in the wild.

This particular site, photographed on May 3, is a west-facing grassy bank growing between an old coppice woodland and a newly planted woodland site. The bluebells were just wrapping up their show, and could still be seen among the orchids. The dogs mercury, Mercurialis perennis, along with the orchids, told me the site had been undisturbed for some time. Also growing with the orchids were brambles and foxgloves.

We spent a long time sitting amongst the orchids, just enjoying their beauty as the sun set. I wanted to wait until the sun popped below a thick bank of clouds, hoping it would illuminate the orchids for a sunny shot. Thankfully I married a patient man who loves few things more than spending the evening with me in a field of beautiful and unusual native plants. Orchid season has begun.

What happens to a garden when the spotlight goes off?

Last weekend my husband and I made the long trek out to east London to visit the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. When the park was built to host the 2012 Olympic Games, much of the horticultural world’s attention fixated on the project’s ambitious gardens. They helped make Sarah Price a household name amongst working garden designers, and brought even more attention to the work that the University of Sheffield’s James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett do with plant communities, meadows, and naturalistic plantings. The resulting gardens, which focused on plants from various regions around the world, looked stunning and won deserved praise at the time.

I didn’t visit the garden when it was at its peak, but I have always enjoyed the pictures of the display. And although the past seven years have seen a fair bit of press lamenting the garden’s decline, I still wanted to see it for myself. So a cold and overcast April day found me wandering what turned out to be an almost empty, post-apocalyptic site, combing the weed-infested banks for any sign of the gardens they once held. Here and there I could discern what once would have been the meadows, planned to very high spec by two leading researchers in ecological planting design.

But now most of the intended plantings were smothered in weeds such as Galium aparine.

The “2012 Gardens,” each designed around a different area of the world, fared a bit better than the meadows. I could at least tell that they had been “gardens” at one point, though it was clear that certain plants had begun to take over where others had died out, such as in the European garden where the euphorbia and phlomis appeared to be running the show. For images of this garden when it was created, visit Nigel Dunnett’s Web site here. Sarah Price also has a lot of nice images on her site here.

There was a lot of bare ground, and though it is still early in the season I had a hard time imagining how so much empty space would elegantly fill in with anything other than the weeds which were again rampant.

Sadly, the boxwood (Buxus sempervirens) that carried the evergreen structure of the gardens had been badly damaged by box blight. Its strangely chamfered top also seemed out of character with the intended style of the plantings and didn’t match the photos of the gardens when they were new.

I’m not sure why the gardens have reached their current state, though I suspect that once the spotlight of the Olympics shut off it probably became hard to justify the maintenance of these extensive plantings. It is possible that the plantings were just too complicated for the gardeners to maintain. The meadows especially would have required a highly trained horticulturist to differentiate between desired self-seeded seedlings and unwanted weeds in order to maintain the design’s balance. A lot has been written about the park and how the dreams that it would revitalize a “wasteland” area of London have failed to come to pass. For more, read here and here.

Though the overall impression of the 2012 Gardens was of a space that’s been neglected and lost its way, there were a few spots that still held potential, or if not potential at least its ghost. Certain sections seemed better tended and like they had enough robust plants to fill in and provide adequate ground cover to smother weed seedlings. I know it is early spring, and it is possible that some areas could knit together into passable designs come autumn.

I was also impressed by the interpretation boards that accompanied each region’s garden. They were meaty enough for a plantsperson like me, yet still accessible to a park visitor with no horticultural background.

My visit to the park left me with more questions than answers, and was a good learning experience. It’s easy to photograph and write about beautifully designed, pristinely maintained gardens, but those images often disguise the money, hard graft, and professional commitment by trained horticulturists that it takes to really keep a garden looking its best. It’s good to see, and to show others, just what can happen when a garden that starts out with all the advantages — a stimulating site, healthy budget, world-class talent and well-grown plants — declines. It sparks a lot of questions about why we garden, and what the ultimate goal is of our work.

The plantsperson in me is pained to see a garden fall to ruin, and not only because of the huge waste of money, labor, and time. I know the mental, physical, and emotional energy that goes into creating a garden, not only on the part of the garden designer but also the scores of supporting acts who actually source, grow, transport, install, and provide aftercare to the plants. Might there be an unspoken contract that creators of artificial nature, which gardens most definitely are, are obliged to carry on caring for their creations?

And yet the artist in me can easily see how gardens could be viewed as installation art, as large and living set pieces that are never intended to exist beyond their time in the spotlight. Then is decline the final act in the performance?

And the ecologist in me is frankly fascinated by succession. What happens when you throw a bunch of plants together and walk away, leaving a free-for-all where stronger competitors can run rampant and any bit of bare soil becomes the site of a life-or-death land grab?

These are all important questions that will continue to take my lifetime to tease apart.

Sissinghurst, start of spring

On the last day of March I crept around Sissinghurst as the sun went down. The garden was just coming online, with structure in the pruned roses and bare tree branches providing a moment of calm before the leaves and flowers fill in to create the voluptuous abundance for which the garden is known. I love Sissinghurst best in spring, before the summer excess creates a visual chaos that I sometimes find hard to process. In spring I can really take my time to notice and appreciate each plant both on its own and in carefully considered combinations.

As always, the beautiful red brick walls make Sissinghurst for me, creating negative spaces around the plants that are sometimes more engaging than the flowers. The architecture is as important as the plantings, and I believe it is their symbiosis that gives the garden its sense of romantic envelopment. The brick of Sissinghurst is like candlelight: in it everyone looks good.

More early spring at Sissinghurst here, and here.

Spring in a British woodland

Spring in Britain has a slow, sweet delicacy that I find so different from spring in Virginia, where I used to live. Spring in Virginia is stunning, with blooming redbuds and dogwood harmonizing with blue mountains and the first green leaves. But despite its beauty, spring never seems to last very long and most years you can feel summer breathing down its neck with a heat that causes the earliest blossoms to prematurely surrender.

Not so in Britain, where spring takes its sweet time, stretching out with weeks of flowers that follow in well-paced succession. The snowdrops kick things off, along with the first few buds of blackthorn. Then come the lesser celandine, dog’s mercury, and wood anemone, right around the time the primroses light up the forest floors. Then cowslips take up the torch from the fading primroses. Lady’s smock, wild garlic, and the dog violet cover the ground while the wild cherries and sloes haze the the fields with white. Ancient pears and apples come online in abandoned orchards. Then bloom bluebells and the first orchids, just before the hawthorns and cow parsley froth the countryside into a white wonderland. The whole process lasts a good few months and is so stunning that when the last of the cow parsley fades I always feel a major let down.

There is an old coppice near the farm where I live in Kent, and I frequently walk through it on my evening rambles. The other week I was stunned to find the entire forest floor carpeted with yellow wild primroses, Primula vulgaris. I had never seen so many in my life, and the effect in the low evening sun was fascinating. Tucked amongst them were dog violets (Viola riviniana), early bluebells, and even a tiny barren strawberry, Potentilla sterilis.

Primroses do particularly well in old coppices and woodlands, which allow light in during spring. This increases the amount of seed produced and also encourages seeds to germinate. But then as the trees leaf out and the canopy closes, it creates a moist and shady environment that woodland plants need to thrive. With the decline in coppicing, there has been a decline in the spread of wild primroses.

I found a secret population of wild early purple orchids (Orchis mascula) last year, and was happy to find that this year they seem to have spread. This is just one clump on a bank full of orchids, which will begin blooming next month.

The first of the bluebells are just starting to bloom. I even found a white bluebell, which, if it is actually a native bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) and not a hybrid or introduced garden-escapee Spanish bluebell (Hyacinthoides hispanica), is rare indeed.

Wood anemone, Anemone nemorosa, flowering along a streambank, surrounded by wild garlic, Allium ursinum. I’ve already enjoyed a spring tonic of wild garden and nettle soup this year.

One of my favorite British wildflowers, lady’s smock or cuckooflower, Cardamine pratensis, growing with the first feathery leaves of cow parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris.

Although I have devoted my life to gardening and had the opportunity to visit some of the finest gardens in the world, it is remarkable to me that the British woodland in spring is about as perfect a garden as one will ever see. Elegant in its simplicity, engaging in how plants naturally find their own “right place,” and long-blooming with perfectly timed succession, it provides a template for what gardens can and should be.