I need to start by exploring just what a garden like Rosemoor means to me. I’ve spent a long time trying to make sense of my responses to gardens like this, which do, after all, seem to be the very peak of model star gardens to most of the gardening public. But they do tend to leave me a little cold, even in a heatwave.

Here’s a clue, from The History of RHS Garden Rosemoor:

“Filled with an astounding collection of plants including rhododendrons, camellias, roses, and champion trees, a series of garden areas leads visitors from one joyous area to the next.”

This garden is unashamedly a plant collection. And that becomes clear as you arrive.

Though visitors should be warned that labelling is always totally problematic in a garden and you need to check carefully before purchasing something you fell in love with. I found many misleading labels due to the season or perhaps sudden deaths. Hopefully AI will kill these eyesores one day, but I don’t expect it soon.

Sometimes it’s just a bit funny:

It’s intended to be educational:

And although it was once a person’s (a plant collector..) own garden, it has been expanded far beyond that original site. (See history) Rather like that other famous garden, Wildside, it has been dramatically shaped with earth moving machines:

“More than 13,000 tonnes of soil were removed from the new entrance area and car park, and redistributed in the Formal Garden area to level off the site.”

So it cannot be thought of as a response to its site or to a sense of place. I don’t think it aims to be beautiful or exciting. Which is what I look for in a garden, along with seats.

But I believe it is offering what the majority of garden visitors expect and enjoy, and that probably applies to readers of this post too.

Here’s the Plan:

It’s big. Happily it does have lots of seats. And two cafes. Good cream teas.

We started, after odd pauses and sits =

at the Queen Mother’s Rose Garden, with lots of labelled roses - good if you’re wanting to see roses in the flesh. I think there’s another rose garden too, for shrub roses - this may be that one.

Then there are Model Gardens, which I confess we didn’t seem able to make much sense of.

Let’s consider a garden we did like. Charles especially:

Charles enjoyed the use of water and the plant selection. The paths are wheelchair wide, but none the worse for it.

Outside that garden there’s lots of this kind of thing:

There’s a Hot Garden looking not so hot. I guess if you make gardens with bulldozers you then have to invent notions about what you install on the site. And it’s good if everyone’s heard of ‘Hot Gardens,’ ‘Cottage Gardens’ and the like.

I think this is from the inevitable Cottage Garden:

There’s a meadow, looking very tidy, flat and new and not a bit like the older version at Veddw: (reassuring if you want to make a new one yourself. Maybe it takes a few lifetimes to look really rough) Rosemoor has some great orchids.

Labelling at its worst:

Can we perhaps be happy with one good plant in a pot?

OK - what about the things we liked??!! (About time) I must have liked some things because Charles caught me smiling:

So, pleasures: here, a delight by the cafe:

Three beautiful ferns, grouped together. Lovely. Dryopteris erythorosa Brilliance, I think. Worth eating a cream tea in order to enjoy that sight.

Some pillars. I think I like them. Or are they just a bit pointless?

But the place we both loved was the Rock Gully, by the Underpass:

Cool, soothing, and beautifully planted.

And nearby a tremendous plant:

I think we enjoyed our visit. If you want to discover labelled plants you will be happier here than in a nursery, as you can see them planted in ideal conditions and often in full growth rather than in pots. There are seats and cream teas: what’s not to love?

Though - should you wish to critique Veddw Garden, we are open on Sunday afternoon 7th June. https://veddw.com/ (Many seats, sadly no cream teas)

It worked 100 % - apart from the bit I missed when I set it up:

I think you can see the precise line, demonstrating for us what all those plants in pots would have looked like had the watering (or Dave and Siân) failed us. The system, mechanical not smart (smart would have been an anxiety too far! We get power cuts!) is the Rainpoint Water Timer. I promise you I don’t make a penny from recommending this thing. It just made a holiday in a heatwave possible and might do the same for one of you.

It’s easy to set up. It’s easy to over ride when you want to do an extra wetting. It’s chunky, affordable, and seems totally reliable. After having practised it a lot before we went, watering me and various bits of furniture in the process, I felt reasonably confident in leaving the plants in its care. My great anxiety was actually the watering end - the thing we call the waft waft. (see below) Those things are notorious for failing - by blowing off (we have good water pressure) or suddenly watering in a stuck direction. I think this one looks suspicious, for example - is that a leak coming from the end of it?

So my holiday was saved from mega anxiety by friendly neighbour reports on the continued watering success.

So, amongst many other good things, these just potted up calibrachoa were like this on our return.

PHEW!!!

What about the rest of the garden? It’s so strange, seeing it so familiar and yet quite oddly different, just from a week away. And despite the drought and heat, everything seemed to have boomed into massive growth. The few plants which had not long been planted were covered with fleece and attached with clothes pegs, thanks to Ben’s advice and all seem to have survived. The garden is full of the scent of roses, philadelphus, clematis montana, heliotrope and night scented stock. The heat has dropped and all is well. Here’s some of the best bits of Veddw, and soon I will report back on our visit to RHS garden, Rosemoor.

Maybe I’ll dare to take another holiday someday……

Charles and Angus have just rebuilt much of the nursery - being mostly wood, it had mostly rotted. And I’ve begun clearing and tidying the greenhouse. I now look at the accumulation of plants - all outdoors in the nursery now - with great pleasure. Shortly we’ll be opening the garden to visitors, and then I shut the gate to the nursery to clearly indicate that I’m not selling plants. (Sorry)

I was remembering the other day that some open gardens also open their greenhouses to paying visitors. Maybe not their nurseries, as those do speak loudly of Sales! to most garden lovers. Now, I’ve never really understood this greenhouse opening. On occasion I’ve wandered down a narrow passage looking at collections of plants and wondered why I’m doing that. Greenhouses are mostly for working in and sheltering plants from the weather, aren’t they?

And I’m a freaky garden person: I don’t relish just looking at plants for their own sake - I like to see them contributing to a beautiful or exciting garden scene. So this looking at plants in pots doesn’t do much for me.

Though, there I am, looking at my renovated nursery, full of plants waiting their turn for display or planting, thinking, that looks good. Not good enough to show anyone, but good enough to make me think that gardeners could make more of nurseries and greenhouses. A plant collection could be arranged to work as a dramatic display. There are models for this amongst the nurseries displaying their plants at garden shows, like Chelsea.

And it’s true that I continuously attempt to have the plants in our conservatory display well.

But it’s definitely part of our home:

We don’t ‘open’ the conservatory when we open the garden, but we do let people who express an interest in it to look - the door is kept open. It’s a sort of after thought and it’s notable that when we’ve had the garden photographed for publication the conservatory (and the greenhouse and nursery) get left out. All these places seem to me to have a sort of ambiguous status - but then maybe the gardens which open to the public do have an ambiguous status anyway? Have you ever visited a neighbour’s garden, open for the NGS, just to have a nose around?

So, I wonder, are there places which specialise in beautiful displays in these ambiguous spaces. That may be worth a trip for their own sake? That is what the Eden Project is, I suppose. Though, if I remember rightly, that did feel more like visiting a gallery or museum than a garden. (or home) And I find the glasshouses at Kew the most boring bit.

Do people visit a greenhouse or someone’s conservatory as a kind of peek into a private space, so that if they just have a random assortment of plants sitting around in them that really doesn’t matter?

Basically: are greenhouses and other people’s random plant places interesting?

_________________________________________________________________________

And here are my thoughts last year at this time:

Here’s an anxiety:

I do love this sea of Euphorbia griffithii - Fireglow, I think. But a couple of years ago I added some Allium Purple Sensation, and although there was a rather modest amount of allium, I did think it was a sensation.

So last autumn I asked Angus to plant some more. And this year all the euphorbia are flowering their hearts out - a month before I can expect the allium. Who said they could do that!???? Will the whole drama turn into a damp squib? Sigh.

I also wince every year when a pale pink clematis heaves into the background, making a rather unpleasant colour combination.

And a job needing attention? Well, I love seeing new fresh ferns:

But hmm.. this year there’s still a little tidying up required before there’s much pleasure: (we should have cut down all our ferns a little earlier than this)

And then something has been chomping my hostas, big time!

Snails? Or maybe a crow! Charles got an outside camera for Christmas, so he set it up to have a look. Though perhaps snails move too slowly to set it off. However:

DAMMIT! Who knew?

But here’s good. We grow hundreds of erythroniums. Pagoda, White Beauty and Revolutum, all bouncy and doing well.

But we’ve repeatedly failed to get any more different ones to grow for us. We have usually purchased them singly, at considerable expense, planted them carefully and then - they just vanish forever. However, we’ve just got one ! Here’s Joanna!

Phew! (But next year??)

Then there’s the Big Hunt.

And this goes on for weeks. The desperate search for plants which I dote on but which have not yet shown any sign of life. I cannot show you my Thalictrum Splendide emerging into the daylight, because it hasn’t, despite my looking every day. It’s not new; it’s about six years old, and this has been a very mild winter. Very wet though.. Not a single green shoot. I’ll keep looking, and hoping....

How can the ground be so empty? In summer I can’t squeeze a new plant in anywhere.

And what about some newly planted Geranium Patricia. ? Intended to create another drama, in a bed with Geum Totally Tangerine. Could be fabulous. However, the geum have zoomed up and look about to flower. The geranium did pop up a single leaf per plant. Then the very next day they had all disappeared. Every one. Not a shred left. Now, about ten days later, there’s this:

Should I be hoping???? Price of a wet winter = snails?? Crows??

Meanwhile, of course, things like ground elder are happily romping around.

Last year I worried daily whether the cowslips were alright.

They come into bloom gradually, several at a time, it seems. I noticed, last year, that they did all arrive in the end. So this year it has been Charles’s job to worry about them, while I have looked on complacently.

Replacements?

I do attempt to console myself for the absence of favourite and very important plants by investigating replacements. Only to discover they cost twice as much, or more, than I expect. The only affordable possibility now seems to be bare root plants. I used to buy bare root plants in the autumn - big, healthy specimens. It’s still the way to buy trees and roses and perhaps many other things I have lots of. But these bare root plants are something else.

That is a replacement for one of my missing geraniums. (Bought here) Will it grow with care and attention? Well, it’s certainly getting that. I am out there every morning hoping for a sign of life. (And yes, dear reader, I did put it in a pot and water it.)

However, here’s good.

The real spring work here is repairing and painting - woodwork, metal work, anything that can rust or rot and will rust and rot. This is Charles’s major effort and without his efforts the place would disintegrate. And we certainty wouldn’t get to sit in the garden, as our seats - and we have many - rot. We replaced one though, in a fit of extravagance, as the one we bought was said to be rot proof. Embarrassed to say it’s plastic, but it looks good.

The about to rot wooden one which it replaced was then in need of a new site. We found a place in the woods. The reason this is worth mentioning is that we were delighted and surprised to find that it gave us two new things. The first was the view of the seat, which provided a focus in an otherwise sort of anonymous space.

And secondly, more obviously, it gave us a new view. We hadn’t sat in that spot before.

It was good for sitting, in the evening sun. Not so good for a photo - sorry! I wonder how often a seat could be transforming, in a garden? Especially if you then sit in it a lot. And that is always a good thing.

And here’s that video, in case you missed it. So you can sit, and watch.

“It had been a busy day, for first of all there was a great clatter in the household, because something crumpled appeared on a pillow, which I was told was a new brother….. I protested at being led away.

‘He is noisy and very ugly, ‘ I said. The nurse was horrified. ‘Not nearly as ugly as you are, she answered and for all the shortness of my six years, the idea that I was as ugly as that caused me exceeding discomfort. I went into the nursery, seized a little sister, who was pretty, and cut off her eyelashes, with a view to levelling things up; after a painful interval the mutilated beauty and I were sent to visit grandpa, who lived in the same village in a lovely house near a famous trout stream.“

Let’s not pretend she actually wished to change sex in the current sense. Rather: “Ridiculous and pathetic the picture of the girl child nourishing her infantile spite at being crossed; and yet on my pedestal of obstinacy, hatred and revolt, I stood, had I only known it, for all my sex; for the very spirit of my generation; and the bicycle forbidden and beckoning stood for the freedom women were long denied, and had been denied so long - so age-long.

Altogether well said.

Recently I read someone asking where and why the American love of sweetness began. I haven’t yet found an answer, but it dates back to Marion Cran’s time at least, it seems. In the first World War there an American serviceman was billeted in their household. And at some point some honeycomb ‘’appeared, refreshing as rain in a drought, upon the jamless, sugarless, war-breakfast table, to the extreme delight of the Californian. Like most Americans, refused all alcohol..., preferring his system to manufacture its own by supplying it with large quantities of sugar; and the shortage of ‘candy’ hit hard at his comfort.“

And so there had to be bees and bee hives - “One might as well have tried to cage Niagara in a bucket as stem the torrent of that man’s devastating energy” which, having started on bee hives then turned the man into a carpenter.

But, yes, all right, we must have some gardening. As in a defence of deciduous trees and shrubs in a winter garden: an acknowledgement of “another remoter, subtler beauty, which only the stripped hour of winter discloses in the lyric confusion of its psalmody of twigs.”

Or the wonder of bulbs: “There are some things I never get used to. One is the sight of an aeroplane in flight, and another a parcel of bulbs.”... “Funny little fellows, bulbs! Their small ivory bodies so clear and firm, tight swaddled in fine brown silk, still make me catch my breath ...this little thing, small and silky, the pointed end of nothingness....“

Then there’s roots. I’m currently reading ‘A World Appears, a journey into consciousness’ by Michael Pollan, with amazement. Among many amazing things he tells us that science is now begining to support the idea of roots being sentient, perhaps intelligent organisms. By means principally of their roots:

“Plants can predict changes in their environment and take appropriate steps: Given a choice of soils in which to invest root growth, pea plants will pick one in which nutrient levels are increasing rather than one offering more immediate nutrients, suggesting that they can predict future conditions and prepare for them.”

What has this to do with Marion Cran? Well, she says:

“Scrambling away from every tree I saw myriads of tiny mouths, each making with absolute surety for the direction where food is to be found.....I was mesmerised, with a vision of the communal life of this world of roots.....and then there are the thousands of tiny annual radiculae, fibrous rootlets, ....... intelligent little travellers who wander far and wide from their first anchorage in search for means of support for the rollicking bon viveur above”

She’s not wrong. Intuitive? Or perhaps she had been reading Darwin, who had similar insights.

She offers an idea about rambler roses which I have never come across before. Disillusioned, unsurprisingly, with growing them over arches, so that they flower away out of reach at the top:

“One day I conceived of the idea of cutting the wire arches down, and edging the big path on the lawn with them. The result was a sort of scalloped effect, an avenue of wire festoons which became in time well draped with the rambling roses, and exceedingly pretty....Everyone who walks down the garden path now, can look down on sheets of bloom, and admire the undulating decoration of half circles outlined in roses. One of the advantages of this half-arch scheme is that the wire is so completely covered...... To anyone who has a sentiment for passing under rose arches the idea will be anathema, because the only way of passing to and fro beneath my variety would be on all fours.”

There’s no picture, so I’ll leave you imagining crawling around under your roses......

But here’s a picture of Marion Cran. Anything like you imagined?

And here’s something completely different: a programme about Veddw Garden. In Welsh, with English subtitles.

I decided we’d look at The Garden of Ignorance this time, since we can all identify with that and it takes us back to her beginnings. Including, horrors, her name at that time.

It used to be common for women to adopt (which sounds voluntary but hardly) their husband’s Christian name. Apparently it was part of the concept of “coverture,” where a woman’s legal identity was considered merged into her husband’s. Good to see this has changed on her later books. Mind you, my mother in law never forgave me for not adopting Charles’s surname.

I love to see who has owned this book before me, and especially when:

After some thoughts about why some people must have a garden and why some don’t care, we get to:

“There came a magic day when the Master rented three acres of shaggy ground in Surrey and I entered into paradise.“

Though it took a while before the garden possibilities actually dawned on her -

“A guest: ‘ What a paradise this will be after you’ve worked on it two or three years.” The idea that a garden was a canvas on which to paint a picture in flowers and trees and winding paths never occurred to me until that moment; and from that moment it has never left me. A landscape gardener was created with a sentence.’”

And what follows are her experiences in discovering the how to. What wonderful innocence. Today she would have, instead, to contemplate making an ideological and ecological wilderness designed to provide for every possible predator and prey - and to protect her mental health. Well, it was over a hundred years ago.

Then “Now that I am declining on middle age I begin to perceive that I am not really so very stupid and with this pleasing idea is born the courage to say what I think. And I think most garden books are dull. Frightfully dull.“ Well, some things don’t change so much.

“So I am going to write of gardening as I would have liked to read of it“ - which no doubt contributed to how she can remain readable and popular over a hundred years later.

Here she creates a delectable picture, encompassing what was a totally new to me and perhaps a potentially useful object: a brasero: apparently a heater once used in Spain. It was placed under a table which was covered with a cloth extending to the floor, to provide heat for people sitting at the table. We will shortly all need one. And her use of it? For primroses -

“They look indescribably fair among the oak and brass and copper of the cottage when gathered and arranged, with their leaves among them, in a big shallow brass bowl. A finely polished Spanish brassero, or an old refectory bowl, filled flush with newly plucked primroses, set in a dim corner of a cottage room on the glossy surface of an oaken gate-legged table, gives an effect of pure flame, a spot of glowing pallor, which does no other flower that I know of; the perfume of primroses is one of the sweetest, freshest things in the world.”

She objects to daffodils grown in rows or circles - now which of us ever sees that now? But she continues “Used with sympathetic intelligence they are the most decorative of flowers; used stupidly, they are incredibly boresome.“ That’s a great word!

There is a chapter on colour schemes, where she acknowledges the contribution of Gertrude Jekyll: “Surely never was such a gardener as she is, so patient, so sincerely alive to colour, so gentle in expression of opinion, (rather unlike Marion Cran. And myself. ed.), and every scheme she offers has been through the mill of her personal experience.“ And she declares: “To get colour effect it is essential to plant in masses; many people have one of everything in their gardens and so in the sum total get nothing.” Nothing changes, you think?

There are difficulties for us as fans of Marion Cran, besides her odd lapses into sentimentality. Many of the plants she mentions will no longer be available. And her notion of the size of a garden is perhaps somewhat different from ours:

“Of all the gardens in an garden devoted to roses, surely mine is the smallest, and none in the world can give such exquisite joy as mine to me. It has twelve beds only, a row of pillar roses, and a tiny flagged centre circle with four tiled paths radiating away from it.” But I love her acknowledgement: “I must confess I have never really mastered the art of pruning. It is an extremely complicated science.“

She is entertaining on the subject of Kniphofia :

“One plant made a horrid mistake last year, and sent up a splendid spike in early June. I shall never forget the astonished expression of that lorn pioneer towering among the columbines and Canterbury bells, nor the obstinate courage with which it bloomed stolidly from base to tip through weeks of comment and criticism..”

She was well geared up for our fashion for dahlias: “Sometimes I dream of great groups of dahlias in every variety against the green background of imagined distant trees; little pom poms, tight and prim, and flaunting cactus or paeony types. I can see them cunningly arranged to colour, white deepening to cream, cream to flame, flame to terracotta and that again to dark purplish-brown.” However, she is discouraged, hearing how they can be devastated by frost, by fellow feeling:

She continues fashionable, with an enthusiasm for keeping bees, sleeping outdoors, (or am I imagining we should have such a fashion?), keeping cats and dogs (and a raven), and providing a chapter on children’s gardens.

And spending winter absorbed by plant catalogues. So that: - “I come out of the imagined garden as I have lived in it with the help of catalogues, and face reality as if it were a strange land.....So the garden becomes, like Bottom the Weaver to Titania, a peg to hang dreams on.”

Isn’t that still the case for us all?

Do you want some of her next book too??? Soonish??

OK - next time The Garden Of Experience! What has she learned. If anything??

But this one though isn’t an adder or a grass snake or even a slow worm. It’s a handrail. (Great name for a snake!)

How timely! Just as I get a sudden unexpected acute need for support in the garden, we get one. It was actually prompted by our feeling bad about seeing our visitors struggling to get down our steps to come and pay us or visit the loo.

And, I had for some time been thinking about how we could offer support in difficult places without getting to look institutional. It’s an ongoing challenge but the snake is our second solution. Here’s the first, in a rough track down a steep slope in the Coppice:

They look wonky but they are secure. And - not institutional, I think? I love them. They are wooden. Needing regular repainting - shame about that. Perfection is elusive.

The steps to the lawn had us puzzling over the problem for a long time. They don’t look bad from below, but they are rough and uneven,

Then someone, and it may have been Charles, had an inspiration. Well, two critical things: have a rail down the middle. We’d always been looking at the sides and that never seemed right. But yes, have something down the middle.

And then - a snake!! Who wouldn’t love to hang on to a snake to steady them down the steps? (No need to answer that - we loved the idea)

Charles searched for a local innovative and imaginative blacksmith and found Daniel. Who came to see just what we wanted. And we started working it out:

All looked possible, so Daniel went off to make it. And I sent him a snake’s head I happened to have, to help:

After a while, Daniel sent us a picture and asked if he was getting it right.

It looked very promising. And then the day came for the installation.

There it is!

And the work started, involving a huge drill, which produced these:

Daniel acquired a useful helper:

And the snake arrived:

It rained and Daniel kept going….

Until:

Wouldn’t you love a little help from such a snake?

I’m very grateful.

Anyone out there have other ideas for people supports? I’d love to hear about them.

More Marion Cran next time! Promise.

And here’s help for your garden visiting plans:

and

She had quite some life, for her time - here’s her story, written and illustrated.

Days out in our beginnings at Veddw often became focused on efforts to find her books in secondhand bookshops. I bought ‘The Story of My Ruin’, written 102 years ago, for 75p. Here’s how it begins:

Opening the book again after many years I’m drawn in all over again. It’s a great read for a romantically inclined garden maker. And what it is, to share so many concerns, so intimately, with someone so long gone. Someone with no experience of AI or the internet, but absolutely relatable: a garden maker. Maybe the first Influencer. That part is embarrassing, as you can imagine.

Let me share some of the book. You can still get a copy if you search the web and get there before all the other eager readers who’ll have read this post.

So, having been ditched by her last husband and needing a new home, she finds her ruin. And after despairing of a place so decrepit: “a sodden, tottering ruin”, she goes on searching but not forgetting it, and then treks back again by public transport. And - you’ve guessed it! Decides to have it. This is it - it still exists! -

Somehow it all happens and the work begins:

It goes on for so long (you see - lots of things don’t change) that she gives up her rented rooms in the local village and moves into the house with no windows or running water, while the builders go on.

She goes into fascinating detail about what making a kitchen involved then - her hatred of contemporary British stoves, the necessity of knife cleaning, and the joy of an ‘Easiwork cabinet’. (I had something similar in an early rented place).

She contemplates the garden: “Indeed it is no light matter to start a garden from the raw! If there is much happiness there is generally also a premonitory sense of fatigue in starting a great task all over again.” But there are many interesting digressions on the way. I love the digressions - it’s a casual, human style which I think Substack has recently re-introduced into garden writing.

This is one which fascinated me when I first read of it. She passes through a village one day: “where every garden grew Madonna lilies - many of them in large quantities….. That whole village loved lilies - either because they grew particularly well in its soil, or because some artist in landscape gardening lived there and taught people how to plant in broad effects”.

She persuades her own new (to her) village of Benenden to grow daffodils and roses. And she dreams of villages everywhere doing the same, to “settle on a flower to grow for a communal picture, so that in time people will speak of this one as the village of lupins, that, the village of roses, another the village of irises and so on…..that every single garden should grow at least one of the chosen flower, and then those who love it very much…will make a fine display of it…”

I fell in love with this idea when I first read this book. Discussing it though, I only got scorn. People want many different plants, not a specialism. Don’t they? It’s still a wonderful idea - I would dream that the drama of it might possibly shake the plant potpourri obsession.

It is good, I find, to read a book which is not telling us how to do things except incidentally, and which is passionate in opinions without being preachy. She has a great turn of phrase and excellent opinions.

About hedges:

“The top of this perfect hedge is rounded so exquisitely by the man who planted it and who loves it, that you feel you could rub your hand along it with the smooth pleasure one feels in running a billiard ball through the hands…. I do not exaggerate. Every time I pass the village green I look upon that hedge and marvel, but do not covet it. Its awful tidiness terrifies me; it is without reproach.” She continues with a description of a nearby hedge of Rosa rugosa: “There is something satisfying to my heart, though not always to my colour taste, in that rugosa hedge. It is free to express itself, which is more than can be said of its smug and faultless neighbour.”

And her visit to a garden, loved and praised relentlessly by a friend, makes me feel less alone in the world.

“So, the mood of of journeying was all it should be for a garden’s journey’s end; kind and happy, receptive and sympathetic.” But - the garden was, as gardens often are, horrid:

“I was so staggered that I utterly lost courage to explain how I felt to the mortified dear soul by my side. I could only admit that O’rthewell was not to my liking and leave it at that. You can’t express yourself in clear and critical manner when your teeth are on edge and you want to get away and forget the thing that did it.”…….”I had to re-adjust many values, realising how far she must move out of herself to seek me and my simple ways and how little after all I could give to her. It was a most soul searching day”.

The book is full of my markers. I think that with a little encouragement I will continue this in another post - and this is just one of her many books. I will end this post though with another digression:

Marion refers to a fruit seller in Tottenham Court Road, (see above and the link!!) that she passed one day when she was pregnant:

“I walked past his shop at the close of a day’s work, long, long ago on a hot August afternoon… There were baskets of grapes displayed - large grapes, green and velvety. My eye caught their bloomy coolth; I stayed and asked their price. I could not afford them and went on.

When I had gone some way, the man who told me the price ran after me, panting, and put a bag in my hand.

‘Take these. It’s all right. I have too many of this kind.’

Speechlessly shy, I took his gift. That exquisite act of humanity out of the dust of Tottenham Court Road has dwelt in my heart and refreshed it ever since….Just as the cool, delicious muscats refreshed my tired blood that evening.”

If this interested you, you may like this (if you missed it) -

First useful tip: taking painkillers continuously is apparently more effective than random ouch, help, gimme some dosing. So I have been dosing even in the middle of the night.

You may think, like the medic did, that I’m being awkward refusing Co-codamol. But my mother in law got addicted to that stuff and it played hell with her err, functioning. I hate the idea of taking a cure then taking remedies for the effects of the cure. (I know - sometimes unavoidable)

So what’s wrong with you, I hear you cry??!! And the answer is: I don’t know. I’m waiting, my GP is waiting, we’re all waiting, for the results of an x-ray. Meanwhile ChatGPT thinks it’s possibly a lumbar spinal stenosis–type flare. Who knows? What the hell is that!? Meanwhile when I stand or walk I have acute lightning strike type pain in my hip and thigh which then just sort of goes on and on hurting. Boring.

Incapacitating. This is where a good fantastic partner comes in. Charles has proved saintly and our meals have improved no end with him doing all the cooking instead of just over half. And he’s put my socks on, half carried me round small parts of the garden, fed the birds, shopped, sympathised, made fires, brought in wood, fed fires, and done endless fetching and carrying chores. Only (so far) complaining once when I asked for something when he had just sat down.

So - I torment myself - how can I keep him onside and happy when I have become so demanding?? I get terrified if he is a little unwell, in case I end up having to do all the chores and cooking. I have even been known to get bad tempered, which is very horrible of me. And I’ve even been bad tempered with this Thing. And I don’t like Charles being bad tempered.

But mostly I think, as a patient, it behoves me to try to be good. As in:

1. Put my own knickers on. That is a game of considerable skill and patience, but possible.

2. Be appreciative, even when you go without socks all day. Accidentally. He can’t remember everything.

3. Use anything that might help. A Zimmer frame folks. Unbelievably humiliating. One of the worst worst things besides the pain is humiliation!! It is not cool to be old and a Zimmer ages you fifty years just by being in the same house. Use it only when invisible to any judging, ageist eyes. And that means mine, his, and yours.

4. Find it funny. What can I say? That’s a challenge. But when you start by staggering across the bathroom, grabbing a shelf and bringing it and all its contents down on top of you then bursting into tears and yelling - well, you owe him a joke. He had the shelf back up before the end of the day, that man.

5. Try not to fall downstairs. I did fall upstairs. I tried hands and knees. (Remember what I said about humiliation?) My leg gave way and I collapsed.

6. Be bloody determined. I needed to get upstairs, so I revived a bit and had another go. And fell over upstairs in a similar fashion. Note - carry your phone at all times if it may help you summon help.

7. And, maybe, don’t be bloody determined if what you’re doing is reckless.

8. Wash yourself if humanly possible.

9. Gird up your loins and other bits, ill as you may feel, and do those good things you still can do. Do the menus for the week, order the groceries, find good telly. Order your own Zimmer frame. Remember what I was taught as a kid in Yorkshire: there’s always someone worse off than yourself.

10. Get yourself a fabulous partner. Remember my rules of a happy marriage: get a kind, caring partner. Then do your best to be one.

    Any other suggestions welcome - have you got good tips about how to do incapacitated well? Please don’t shame me by telling me how you did it/do it all alone. How are such things even possible????????

Charles’s response

I think this is very brave of you to write this. I kinda wish that I’d taken a pic of you with the Zimmer frame for this; it was quite shocking. I hope that sometime soon you’ll be able to put it away. My additional chores have not felt onerous, though I have experienced a mild panic about the garden, prompting me to book Angus weekly in April just as a reassurance that I wont be alone. It is a scary time though and I hope that whatever it is does get sorted or we are fucked.

Only those who don’t have brain rot from too many videos and doom scrolling will be able to read and take it in. Consider your self a true winner if you can, and even better if you can also manage a comment. One, two three: GO!

Marianne Willburn:

This post is a culmination of growing concerns that voices gentler and more knowledgeable than mine have articulated for some time; but that nevertheless continue to be ignored or reframed. The issue is complex, and it deserves meaningful discussion. I hope we can have it. -MW

_____________________________________

On its face, ecological gardening is a marriage and a movement made in heaven – the joining together of ecology and horticulture to inform the creation of gardens bursting with life and beauty. But when one spouse is always the loudest at the dinner table, and aggressively subverts the aspirations and perspective of the other, a marriage suffers.

While many gardeners, including myself, have been eager to embrace a deeper understanding of the complex systems that underpin our artistic endeavors in horticulture; we are deeply concerned that this sea change, for all of its positive overtones (or perhaps because of them), is having a net-negative effect on responsible gardeners and gardeners-to-be who increasingly view gardening not as a joyful pastime, but as a never-ending performance review — a moral obligation by which they will be judged and found wanting.

We are slowly losing our voice at the table as gardener-artists. Do we have the courage to stand up and reclaim it?

The Bully Pulpit.

If you’ve been to a horticultural conference or attended a webinar in North America in the last five years, picked up a magazine, sat quietly in the back during a Master Gardener meeting, or witnessed the social media evisceration of someone who dared challenge the new hive mind, you too may be:

• Feeling as if there are more rules than ever before in your gardening life;

• Self-censoring for fear of being judged;

• Puzzled by conflicting studies fuelling viral memes;

• Exhausted by the buzzwords;

• Amused by the corporate opportunists using the exhausting buzzwords;

• Annoyed by experts redefining subjective concepts like ‘beauty’;

• Suspicious of exclusive biodiversity & dogmatic nativism in a post-Darwin world;

• Wondering why human beings are treated like alien visitors;

• Confused because you thought that uptight gardening and pearl clutching went out with the last millennia; and,

• Genuinely wondering if there’s space for you anymore…

If so, you are not definitely not alone – though it may seem like you are. Welcome to what fellow GardenRanter Susan Harris terms the “Just Stop Gardening” Movement. A new space where the gardener’s perspective is subjugated to favor the ecologist’s perspective; and which saddles everyman gardeners (whether they wished to grow Hemerocallis or fill a raised bed with herbs) with the burdens of past and present ecological damage to our planet, the saving of species from extinction, and the reversal of climate change.

That’s a heavy lift.

A beautiful begining.

Horticulture and Ecology

Let’s travel back a decade or two and define two related terms as we used to understand them:

• A horticulturalist practices the art and science of gardening – cultivating and managing plants for ornamental, edible, or medicinal reasons.

• An ecologist is a scientist concerned with the complex web of relationships of organisms to their environment.

Leaving everyman gardeners out of the equation for a moment, formally trained horticulturists & ecologists are called to their disciplines for different reasons. And they see gardens differently.

• Whereas an ecologist can find a garden beautiful, they are much more likely to find it fascinating – an object of deep study where the aesthetic desires and practical needs of the human gardener who tends it are secondary to the creatures that inhabit it.

• And whereas a horticulturist can find the complex systems of organisms within their garden fascinating and helpful, their interest is weighted more heavily toward the practical and aesthetic manifestation of the garden serving their lives and the lives of those in their families and community.

Gardening is fundamentally subjective just as ecology should be fundamentally objective.

You can visualize this as a Venn diagram of sorts. Two sets of people drawn to Nature for different reasons. And where they overlap, characteristics that are common to both sets fueling a synergistic exchange of ideas.

Professor Nigel Dunnett of The University of Sheffield (of The Barbican and The Tower of London SuperBloom fame) beautifully expresses the synthesis of these two perspectives as an opportunity to “capture people’s imagination” in a conversation with Gardens Illustrated editor Stephanie Mahon:

“…being in a natural place where you feel that you’re part of something bigger…to me, that’s the power of what a garden can be. It can create this world that’s separate from everyday life. And I think it liberates childlike feelings of joy and just kind of, well, ‘liberation’ is the word. It just takes away the constraints of everyday life.”

In the beginning, gardeners like myself recognized this exchange and welcomed more of it, naively confident that the priorities of each discipline would be respected – not redefined.

Now it feels more like the diagram below – the gardener’s voice subsumed by the ecologist’s. Except the aggressively emotional portrayal of complex systems, anti-human rhetoric, and strident native plant dogma from dominant voices in the ecological gardening movement have sadly called into question the objectivity of the new “objective observer.”

The Before Times

Not too long ago we understood the difference between a gloriously wild or post-wild space – province of the ecologist and naturalist; and a cultivated garden – province of the gardener; and we loved both in equal measure — differently.

Smart gardeners who worked with the complex web of life in their gardens and who studied their plants’ ecotypes had a leg up in creating a breathtaking garden rich with life and energy – whether formal or wild.

Smart ecologists who opened the garden gate and studied the adaptations of native organisms to a gardener’s more exotic palette in a changing climate could similarly have their minds opened to research that mattered when dealing with public lands and restoration projects.

Those of us who gardened, unapologetically gardened – especially as expectations of perfection, and pesticide-heavy guidelines relaxed as we neared the end of the 20^th century. And we had media heroes to guide us and commiserate with us – the Henry Mitchells and Allen Lacys, the Anna Pavords and Beth Chattos.

One of my beloved garden heroes — the late Pam Harper. (photo credit Daniel Weil)

A Welcome Synergy

Many engaged gardeners were fascinated by the organisms that inhabited our gardens, but we were not ruled by them. We were allowed to dislike the sawfly larvae that defoliated our dogwoods; or delight in our mother’s joy at her Buddleia covered in swallowtails, as we walked barefoot on the mown grasses and weeds she happily called lawn.

The more curious amongst us looked to the native lands of the plants we loved, studied their communities, and attempted to match them where we could. And at the same time, this was not a period without difficulty. We had little in common with consumer-gardeners who sprayed first and asked questions later; and the real effects of a changing climate on our gardens made our jobs more challenging.

But a lot of us put our heads down and navigated a new era with flexibility, adaptation, curiosity, commiseration, and a certain amount of positivity.

That was – wait for it – okay.

A subtle shift:

Plus ça change

The mainstreaming of a more ecological approach to gardening accelerated around 2007 with Dr. Doug Tallamy’s Bringing Nature Home, which linked the use of native plants to the support of insect and bird populations.

Tallamy was a respected entomologist and professor at the University of Delaware, but his name quickly became shorthand for a massive gardening movement. The fact that I can mention him by last name only to a group of inexperienced gardeners, and see instant recognition in their eyes; but need to explain who Dan Hinkley or Fergus Garrett is, tells me a great deal.

The fact that they can invoke his name to end a discussion tells me more.

Tallamy had many good things to say that made a great deal of sense. Here’s one from his third book and New York Times bestseller, Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard (2019):

“Gardening is like cooking. It is tempting to cook only with the goal of achieving great taste, with no thought of healthy eating, but that often results in tasty concoctions so full of fat, sugar, and salt that they are deadly in the long run. Similarly it is tempting to garden only for beauty, without regard to the many ecological roles our landscapes must perform.”

I’d swap out ‘could’ for ‘must,’ but the analogy was a good one, and the lesson, clear: Be responsible. Many gardeners shared his concern for the steep declines in bird and insect life — including me. I was a GenX kid who remembers windshields gruesomely splattered with bugs before the expansion of no-till herbicides and Roundup-ready corn in the 1990s transformed American agriculture.

But although Tallamy lamented dead fields and development, the overall message of remediation and responsibility was instead directed at gardeners to use primarily native plants in their landscapes to “save Nature.” And “to set an example, maybe even proselytize a bit” to convince their neighbors to work within the concept that “life begins with natives (and ends with aliens).” (from Bringing Nature Home)

“What if each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to productive native plant communities?” he proposed in Nature’s Best Hope.

Tallamy’s wish was beyond aspirational. Most engaged gardeners would be dancing in the streets if 20% of their neighbors stopped treating their lawns with chemicals and planted a small non-native tree — much less replaced the lawn with a native plant community that required skill to implement successfully.

Some of us carefully read Tallamy’s imperative- and pejorative-laden books (curiously at odds with his gentle demeanor), and justifiably wondered what would happen if gardeners continued to be guided to use chemicals sparingly; and the indignation, research, and activism was instead directed at bigger fish.

Specifically — the corporate agricultural practices that chemically deaden tens of millions of acres of green, buzzing life in spring; genetically modify the subsequent crops and their pollen; and finish with yet more chemicals in autumn to desiccate cereal crops.

What if we stopped focusing on old Mrs. Taylor’s desire to plant an exquisite Wisteria floribunda ‘Alba’, or use a teaspoon of glyphosate to paint a resprouting stump because she couldn’t afford the help to dig it; and instead focused on the 200-gallon vats of glyphosate, Dicamba, and 2,4-D killing everything on the farm next door?

Tallamy assured us that, if the task of converting our gardens was beyond us, we could simply hire someone who was an expert.

“There is a multibillion-dollar landscaping industry ready to do whatever we ask to our properties if we are not interested in puttering ourselves.” he wrote.

Poor Mrs. Taylor.

Who Would You Rather Persuade?

Compassionate gardeners are a much easier target than BigAg when building a big, new, movement. (FYI Tallamy’s latest book is How Can I Help? Saving Nature with Your Yard.)

For one, there is that multibillion-dollar landscaping industry that Tallamy mentions and Mrs. Taylor can’t afford, just waiting to push the next trend on those who can afford it. And another multi-million-dollar herbicide industry is very happy to paradoxically pivot, and provide ecological gardeners and policy makers with righteous vats of the stuff for the invasives Tallamy confidently terms “ecological tumors.”

But it’s more than that. Not only are gardeners intrigued by the natural world and navigating a changing climate in real time, their individual voices are much smaller than Monsanto’s.

Old Mrs. Taylor is easier to influence; and probably content to do less gardening and more observing anyway. Her 35-year-old granddaughter who loves birds and butterflies and never liked topiary is excited to be part of a good cause. Gardeners in general are anxious to do the “right thing.”

And what is the “right thing?” Good question. In Nature’s Best Hope, we found out.

New Math for Gardeners

Building on broader ideas generated from his work with graduate students in the Mid-Atlantic, Tallamy shared a study conducted by one of his students researching one species of chickadee in 159 nest boxes placed during the nesting season in the Washington DC metropolitan area. The three-year observational study utilized data collected by technicians and volunteers and concluded that the Carolina chickadee achieved replacement rate in gardens with less than 30 percent introduced plants.

The study hasn’t been replicated, and several confounding variables that could bias the results existed, but that did not prevent an energized audience specifically tasked with proselytizing from creating a new math assignment for gardeners.

From that point a 70/30 natives to non-natives guideline (Epic Gardening gushingly calls it a ‘rule’), began to surface at every Master Gardener meeting from Oakland to Philadelphia. Never mind the fact that, even at a broader Level II perspective, California gardened in four ecoregions as close to Washington DC’s Southeastern USA Plains, as Chile was to Belgium.

Gardeners were now tasked with creating a minimum of approximately 70% native plant biomass (by cover or composition) in their suburban, urban and rural landscapes to sustain breeding bird populations as a whole, prevent the sixth mass extinction, and prevent censure from their peers.

Raise your hand and question the new math as an experienced gardener with a buzzing, but inclusively biodiverse landscape that featured many non-natives, and you were assured (often with a big smile), that it represented great compromise. After all, if life ended with aliens, you should be happy you had 30% to play with.

“I’ve heard somewhere that there’s a 70-30 rule. You know where that 70% figure came from? My lab. So yes, I agree, there’s room for compromise. No compromise on invasives, they’re ecological tumors. But you can have your ginkgo tree, just don’t let it dominate your landscape.” – Dr. Doug Tallamy in conversation with Zane Irwin of GRID.

How gracious. Later, in 2023, in the Growing Greener Podcast with author and Ranter Emeritus Thomas Christopher, Tallamy would back up a little, discuss keystone species research, and admit that it might not be as simple as a reductive ratio:

“…we have found that it’s not just native versus non-native, it’s particular natives versus everything else. I could build a 100% native landscape that supports very few insects because there are a lot of natives that just don’t support a lot…86% of our [native] plants are not driving that food web.”

But the horse was very much out of the barn by that point.

Plant This! Not That!

With the new 70/30 super formula, an onerous and moralistic goal was laid in front of any gardener who had the temerity to plant something non-native that excited them – only to find that, not only was it not recommended, it was frowned upon. Gardening became a homework assignment, and there was no shortage of catastrophizing instructors with red pens in hand.

If you were determined to plant it, “you should consider” planting two times as much of something else that you had no interest in growing in order to offset the ecological harm you were obviously causing to the entire planet.

And again, ladies and gentlemen, please avert your eyes from the browning field across the road.

Garden columnist and podcaster Margaret Roach unintentionally illustrates the gardener’s new burden in her bio for the New York Times.

“As our climate evolves, and with it our environmental awareness, the art and practice of gardening are evolving, too. Once a subject that emphasized the ornamental, gardening now increasingly pursues ecological goals, requiring plant and management choices that are not merely aesthetic.”

It should be noted that Roach does not specify “ecological gardening”, but “gardening.” That’s an important omission. And ‘requiring’ is a powerful word.

Wait….what just happened?

Then social media got involved, and nuance went out the window.

Further guidelines spread virally in easy-to-share memes from big organizations — messages such as ‘Leave the leaves!’ and ‘Leave the stems!’ And while both were compassionate ecological statements fully justified in post-wild spaces, and with merit in garden situations (particularly for those with bigger properties), they were not universally applicable.

They were also less workable than it first appeared. Recent observational research has suggested that you may need to leave stems a lot longer than you thought, and that there is no magic moment when everything evacuates the leaves smothering your lavender. That’s not a problem for the ecologist, but another source of guilt for the gardener.

All of this of course makes it impossible for gardeners seeking a quiet life and a butterfly bush to argue against new rules for maintenance, new authoritative policies, new definitions of beauty, and new motivations for gardening that have ever-so-slowly edged the actual gardener/artist out of his or her own painting — even if that painting happily included native brushstrokes and organic methods.

To garden for oneself and one’s family is to be obviously selfish, irresponsible, ignorant, uptight, out-of-touch, and, most recently, privileged – with all the subtle and not so subtle implications therein. Who has the stomach to go toe to toe with that?

A troubling narrative

Condemnation is good for clicks

Over-exaggeration? Here are just a few quotes from New York Times writer Margaret Renkl’s 2021 piece “What you may not know about those April flowers.”

“The typical suburban yard is actually worse than a wasteland. It’s a deathtrap.”

“In the American South…any tree or shrub that is greening up or blooming [in March] almost certainly doesn’t belong.”

“It’s not too late for you to do the same [plant native trees/shrubs] in your yards and in your towns.”

Or Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, from his 2023 article “I’m no genius with genuses, but your garden is killing the Earth.” (No really, that’s the title.)

“I did almost everything wrong.”

“I am part of the problem.”

“I am sorry to say that if you have a typical urban or suburban landscape, your lawn and garden are also dooming the Earth.”

Renkl goes on in her piece to angst over all the plants given to her by her late mother that once gave her joy but which must now be destroyed when she can work up enough righteousness to overcome pointless sentimentality.

Milbank spends 1000+ words in a struggle session worthy of Mao, and follows up later with another extraordinary article “To save the birds, I’m killing my farm” where he directs a drone flying at 30 feet to deliver a dose of poison to those “ecological tumors” and every other living creature within range of the nozzle.

Including — amusingly — himself.

Mary McAllister documents the evolution of this political writer gone native plant ideologue and proselytist much better than I have done here on the website Conservation Sense and Nonsense. I urge you to read her summation, his article(s), and more importantly, all the comments — many of which betray a deeply disturbing religiosity that I and others have commented on in the past.

But wait! There’s more…

That’s just legacy media. In new media, we’re in for more focused self-flagellation (presumably using whips made of native species such as Salix nigra or Cornus sericea).

Author Benjamin Vogt from his piece “On Daffodils, Climate Change, and Colonization” on his former blog Monarch Gardens:

“We need a deep, deep rethink and daffodils, at least in the hort world, often become that flashpoint as we reckon with how hort is a part of our privilege, and how our identities are so wrapped up in it we feel we need to defend that privilege because we assume we’re being personally attacked when larger systems are being critiqued”

Question the new orthodoxy and it proves your complicity. Guilt awaits no matter how you answer. Brilliant. Though Vogt’s piece assures us that the daffodil police aren’t coming to arrest us, he gives us the distinct impression that if it were up to him, they would.

Or writer and “ecologically obsessed horticulturist” Rebecca McMackin, who provides her readers with plenty of pejoratives and politics, right along with horticultural information, in her Grow Like Wild Substack newsletter; and adds a trigger warning for the Rutgers University link that helps gardeners find pollinator-attractive plants. “Be warned.” she tsks, “The database also contains exotic plants.”

A need for transparency in research

Shockingly, Rutgers meant all of the pollinator-attractive plants, regardless of origin.

Or at least it does for now, until enough pressure is applied from loud, ‘concerned’ ecological gardening voices within and without academia.

Then it might go the way of Penn State’s “Center for Pollinator Research”, which has evidently scrubbed the idea of objectively studying non-native and native plants as part that research, or making it transparently clear that this is what they are doing.

Their extensive “What to Plant” materials for gardeners makes no mention of this fact, and provides only native plant species without divulging this key (and usually lucrative) variable. Hmmmm. From the website:

“The Center for Pollinator Research has created taxa-specific plant guides for gardeners that want to support pollinators. Plants were selected for a high degree of attraction in most temperate North American landscapes, using data from entomologist Charles Robertson (1887-1916). Each guide includes herbaceous perennials, shrubs, and deciduous trees. Planting a variety of flowering plants will support a diversity of pollinators.”

Objectivity and trust goes out the window when you create and study a subset, then package data as if you aren’t. They need a rebrand – may I suggest “The Center for Native Plant Pollinator Research?”

A joyful rebalancing.

What does the responsible gardener/artist do?

If they’re not naturally cynical, gardeners subjected to this unrelenting message begin to feel that perhaps they should spend the rest of their gardening lives:

• Eradicating non-natives and invasives;

• Planting natives. Any natives;

• Encouraging all wildlife (such as white deer, rabbits, gophers, tics, & sawfly);

• Redefining their deeply flawed perception of beauty; and, most critically,

• Making others around them do the same.

How’s that working for you?

And I suppose, if most were truly happy in this strident place, it might make sense to lose one’s voice, trade in one’s heroes, and join them. But it is patently obvious that this is not the case.

Instead there is a preponderance of negative emotion suffusing the literature, the memes, the forums, the newsletters, the comments, the lectures, the podcasts, the books, and the webinars – anxiety and unease draped in a thin veil of professed joy. Much like a stressed employee smiles through clenched teeth.

If you specifically question the joyful despair online or across a table as I have, you’ll likely encounter another circular argument –

“Of course I’m despairing, not enough people are following the rules…”

“Maybe you’ve made too many rules…?”

“Because our very existence is on the line, and people need to follow the rules!” etc. ad nauseam

Meanwhile, many of the laudable pioneers and often moderate, truly joyful, voices in the native plant, organic lawn, and ecological gardening movement lose out – because there’s no traction in moderation. Their important message of stewardship and synergy is tarnished by the bad data, bad journalism, and catastrophizing of others.

And it makes it that much harder for them to reach once-curious gardeners who feel as if they have been backed into a corner; and who have no desire to practice or preach the “existential multitasking” now required of them — regardless of the speaking fees it commands.

Stand up. Speak up.

There is another way.

When we choose to garden with optimism, curiosity, and resilience, we don’t have to pretend to be joyful. We just are.

We can welcome the valuable perspective, observations, and research of an ecologist, and create something truly special in that synergistic space. But we can also reject absolutes and political labelling, study adaptation, call out bias, question inconsistencies, and refuse to engage with botanical xenophobia – moving toward a more balanced ecological gardening movement that many of us were happy to sign up for in the first place, and which still has gentle, knowledgeable, leaders.

When you speak up, you’ll find that it breaks the internal, uncomfortable, tension between what you want to question and what you feel you cannot question – allowing you to find more nuanced answers, no matter where they lead. Don’t let others redefine that uncomfortable tension as evidence of your inherent selfishness. Or treat your questions with condescension or contempt.

The gardener’s voice matters. It celebrates the artist, just as it champions the steward; and it deserves respect in a world that is increasingly artificial, anti-human, and littered with distractions. If we do not defend it, we will lose it. And we run a great risk of turning off gardeners who were once turned on. I entreat you to speak up with courage in your gardening circles – your voice empowers others who do not know how to reclaim their own.

This post originally appeared on Garden Rant and is reproduced here by kind permission of Marianne Willburn.

And this was the bloke I chose, all those years ago. (So good that it wasn’t the 14th!)

Isn’t that great? Those berries! What a feast for the eyes and the birds.

It was such a fertile droughty year that the birds didn’t scoff them overnight as they usually do.

Hm. And two months later?

The observant amongst you will have noticed that the ivy has all vanished. However, this holly standard’s ivy was already dead, and I showed your this one, out of the three, for dramatic effect. The other two are also dying, apart, so far, from their ivy. They have holly blight.

Interesting. Were all those berries (they all berried madly) a desperate attempt to reproduce themselves? We do know that plants will do that if they know they are dying.

Or was it the weather that produced the fecundity? Followed by the rapid demise. We had great crops of apples and of other berries. Including this holly, which is still in berry right now and so far, unblighted:

Whatever it was, it was no doubt our fault. It always is, isn’t it? And it is very sad, because they really have to go, and Charles grew them from tiny.

We all know how healthy and happy making gardening is, don’t we? It would be worse if we weren’t also preoccupied by our rotting roof.

That was the UGLY.

The good? Scent. Lots of scented shrubs. No doubt currently urgently ringing the Samaritans with suicide in mind. But while they are still with us they are a great pleasure.

Here’s one:

Mahonia japonica. I planted it many years ago. Robin Lane Fox, who was (and is) an influencer before such things existed and corrupted the concept, says “It grows anywhere, but if you treat it well, its leaves wear a finer bloom. I think it likes to be damp and shaded from the direct noon sun”. Ours is, of course, unshaded but currently well damp.

And it has two downsides. You can’t easily pick a nicely scented bit and bring it indoors. You have to cut a whole big prickly piece. Or not bother.

But downside two - it won’t stop raining and you get soaked having a sniff.

Here’s another scented shrub, currently having a flower.

I’ll be honest here - I pinched that photo from a nursery site, offering lonicera fragrantissima for sale. This is mine:

And this:

No doubt my fault. You can’t be a lazy gardener and pay no price at all. That’s the Bad.

However, I have several of these and they are wonderful!

Sarcococcas. Ask Ben {https://substack.com/@penandtrowel?utm_source=top-search} which ones they are. They give, almost always, a waft of scent as you pass. And they are dead easy to cut and bring indoors, for those of us who can take a whopping great cloud of scent: (some people, eg Ben, find it overwhelming)

Truth to tell, there are other good things, which I will show you if you’re not on email and about to be cut off:

Scilla mischtschenkoana 'Tubergeniana'

Sweet?

Snowdrops in a pot:

These are a treat. Dug up and stuck in a pot last winter. Left in the nursery all summer to grow weeds and moss. Cleaned up as they came into flower - and joy! Snowdrops at eye level. By the front door, to enjoy as we come and go. Dug up from here:

Cyclamen:

Also by the front door and have been flowering for many many weeks.

Whereas these, planted out, are just begining: Cyclamen coum.

One day they will spread as much as they are supposed to. Though I may not be around to see it.

There’s a hellebore, nameless and pure:

How would you make that leafless, should you feel the need?

These - usually out on the day of our anniversary, 15th February, but this year they were three weeks early:

And, of course, daffodils. A joy.

Sometimes it stops raining and frosts instead:

And sometimes, even, the sun comes out:

But those two photographs were not taken this year!

Here’s a post from last year, in case you’d like more:

Lonicera fragrantissima

Tim Richardson:

Now come on. Let’s have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Who is it that tells us the truth about gardens? Gardens, that is, we haven’t yet got round to visiting, or have only just heard about – because of course if we have visited the garden in question, we already know the truth about it. Right?

First up, I was on my way to Clacton-on-Sea for a tub of cockles (as you do) when I thought, ‘I know, I’ll drop in on Beth Chatto’s garden’, which 1 had never visited before. A shameful omission. Anyway, Beth Chatto’s garden was never going to be ‘my thing’, exactly, but I found it all rather underwhelming. The gravel garden was fun and brilliantly planted, but it was rather squashed up in terms of design. And I was positively aghast at the 1970s/80s-style island-bed layout of the main garden. Maybe I am not enough of a plantsman to see the virtues, or maybe I’m just a jaded design freak, but I found it all a bit dated.

The second ‘garden’ was Duisburg Nord near Dusseldorf, Peter Latz’s transformation of a disused steelworks into a public park, achieved with the lightest of touches. This was an absolutely extraordinary experience, with gargantuan rusted structures sprouting all kinds of decorous vegetation but again I was completely unprepared for the reality of it, despite having seen a lecture on the place given by Latz Junior at this year’s SGD spring conference. Why the disjunction?

First, it is about images. Photographers are not employed to tell us the truth. They arrive at gardens and landscapes with a singular mission: to make the place look good in photographs. That is why photographers are always so much more popular with owners than writers are. Designers are not going to tell you the truth (obviously), not least because a good number of them buy into their own hype about being a lone genius brought up in some kind of cultural vacuum. (‘Influences? Me? How dare you!’) Owners? Too much personal baggage. Television? Oh, pur…lease. Radio has its possibilities but has been under explored so far.

Which leaves us with writers. Bloggers can be fun but tend to be over-fussy about their own plots (do I really care about your broad beans, or your trusty Felco secateurs you ‘couldn’t do without’?) or else nurture strange predilections about television personalities.

So we are left with ‘real’ authors, journalists and historians – are they telling us the truth about gardens? Er… no. But in addition to describing a garden, they can at least try to communicate what they personally felt about the place, and perhaps even venture a guess as to where it stands in the overall context of gardens. In the end one learns to trust certain writers, or else just enjoy their way of putting things. Good garden writing can whet the appetite, or make us think differently, or even make us laugh.

Why would we want anyone to tell us the truth anyway? If that could be done, there would be no point in discovering gardens for ourselves. On NGS days, it would also curtail the opportunity to partake of tea with cakes, jam and cream – which is, you have to admit, the whole point of being involved with gardens in the first place.

Tim Richardson writer – independent garden and landscape critic. Creator of Chelsea Fringe. And author: his books - here.

What happens when you read this? Do you get a vivid picture of the garden described or do you just tune out?

I never expected to discover something entirely new about myself at my age, but I did, last week. As a tuner outer I’m an aphantasic.

Forgive the AI but it helps here:

“An aphantasic (or aphant for short) is someone who has aphantasia — a condition where a person cannot voluntarily form mental images. Here’s lots more detail about it.

In simple terms:

• If you ask most people to picture a red apple, they can “see” it in their mind.

• An aphantasic doesn’t see an image at all — just darkness or nothing visual.”

That’s me – I’m not down to total darkness. I’ve struggled since learning about this to discover just what I do actually ‘see’ in my mind. It’s like fishing amongst ghosts. Glimpses, vague and fleeting.

I suddenly understand lots of things. I understand why when people describe something as ‘beautiful writing’ it’s a cue for me to skip that text. It’s no good going on and on in absorbing detail about a garden or a landscape for someone who can’t picture it. About 90% of most articles about gardens are wasted on me, because I have no idea really what is being described. So, often, like a preliterate child, I just look at the pictures. I used to ask people if they really liked reading garden descriptions and truly, I didn’t really believe them when they said they did. It was bewildering.

I think I’ve always known that if you asked me to describe the pictures on the wall of my bedroom, which I look at quite often, I’d be in difficulty. Just felt as if I was lazy, somehow, or not paying attention. (That sounds daft, now I’ve said it)

And now I wonder how on earth I managed to design and create the garden at Veddw without being able to picture anything I was intending to create. Especially in the days before photographs were easy and quick to take and look at.

I think I have some sense of form or space in my head. Somehow I was spot on, I believe, with scale and relationships between things. But I would often ‘imagine’ some part of the garden, then go out and look at it and find it wasn’t at all as I thought. It must have helped that I live in the garden I’m creating. I can repeatedly go and look. And these days I can take thousands of photographs to tell me what it looks like. I also depend on information. I look at a part of the garden, seeing what it lacks or needs, then research that plant or structure or whatever it may be.

I couldn’t design someone else’s garden very well, could I? What do you think? It must be why I struggle with cognitive shuffling as a way to get to sleep, because I think it helps with that if you can imagine the things you’re naming to yourself.

I’m still stuck trying to work out the implications of all this. Other people see pictures in their heads? Worse - some people are plagued by seeing images in their heads. It’s called hyperphantasia. Someone on Substack told me about that and said: “It's basically like watching a TV, but whatever you want to see is shown…” He describes it as endlessly distracting and that I am the one who is best off in this. Who knew????

You may be amused to know that I couldn’t think of a way to illustrate this post.

Is this sufficient explanation for the fact that our gardens seem to be resolutely old fashioned?

I was part of a garden lover’s discussion recently about garden things. Gnomes crept in. There’s a common assumption that gnomes are ironic, but that assumption and accompanying ghastly ornaments definitely date back to the 20^th century.

And most of our garden thoughts seem to inhabit the same era. When Christopher Lloyd popped up in that discussion, along with a rogue mention of Sissinghurst, I realised we were lost in another time.

Which had me wondering why we are always looking over our shoulders when we make our gardens? Why do replicas of Greek and Roman statues, denuded, sadly, of their gaudy colours, appear in new 21^st century gardens? (as you may remember from my earlier post ?)

Though sometimes they do make you giggle:

Too often they look dreadfully twee:

We were not immune from this at all at the Veddw. Perhaps was because most of the gardens we visited were old, (do gardens actually hang around too long?) so I sort of absorbed images and an aesthetic which informed our choices. We couldn’t originally afford much by way of ornament (that very word and notion has an antiquated feel?) so I got into the habit of making our own. But my model was, inevitably, antiquity. This was the kind of thing we were encountering:

So I created this, on plywood:

And when we could buy, we bought in the same mode:

We have been struggling our way out of these banalities and clichés since that time. Most of those ideas about ornament vanished in a puff of wow when I realised that a garden could be so much more than decorative.

Part of the hanging on to the past in the UK is definitely nostalgia for a non existent world of our supposed past. People are still asking designers for a ‘cottage garden’, by which they do not mean a miserable patch where parsnips and mangelwurzels grow.

Perhaps we lack enough exciting 21st century models of contemporary gardens? If you see a list of gardens to visit in Britain it far too often consists of gardens made by dead people. There are some wonderful examples of modern planting (not so much, perhaps, design?) like Piet Oudolf’s High Line in New York, but these tend to be public projects, not readily adapted to the smaller domestic garden.

There are some interesting places in this book: Gardens of Illusion.

And it seemed for a while as if the Conceptual Garden would have us all planting plastic doughnuts and Tim Richardson wrote a book bouncing us all into this exciting future:

But these days Tim seems to be back to writing about gardens of the past and the Conceptual Garden has joined the history of garden design. New perennials are discussed a lot but as Noel Kingsbury says ‘we have the new perennials but where are the perennial gardens?’ Well, plants aren’t gardens.

We may well ask – in 2026, do gardens actually have a future, or simply a past?

Many thanks for subscribing and keeping me doing the thing I love: writing about the garden and garden making.

From Anne and Charles at Veddw.

Last week we went to a concert in Hereford Cathedral. We are great fans of small choirs who sing Renaissance, Baroque and modern choral music: in this case it was Ex Cathedra. And part of the beauty of the experience is the places these choirs perform in, which are usually cathedrals. So, there is a combination of architectural delight, statues, memorials, history and glorious music. A saturation of pleasure and interest.

I’m afraid that I was a little distracted that night, thinking about the things this experience shares with a garden which is open to the public.

A Unique Occasion.

The music was performed in this way, by these particular people, with their own individual interpretations of the pieces, just for this occasion. It was fleeting, just as flowers are in a garden. The cathedral provided a magnificent historic setting for this small moment, just as the garden provides the setting for plants and flowers.

People will insist on saying that gardens can’t be art, and one reason they give is because they are constantly changing. Well, indeed, so is music. Last night we heard unfamiliar arrangements of pieces we were very familiar with and this is quite usual. The performers and the conductor themselves also bring changes, different people will sing the same song, differently. This is why people will pay great sums of money and travel miles to hear particular singers and musicians. The performance we heard will never be heard again.

I am a very ignorant concert goer. I recently heard one of the conductors of such a choir discussing the music – the composer, the setting, the particular performance and the place these pieces had in the development of the religious choral tradition. And then – just why the pieces work so well.

I was confronted by my absolute ignorance and I knew just how much more pleasure I could get if I learnt more and, indeed, listened more. But I still get great pleasure from my ignorant listening.

Music – and Gardens?

One of the joys of both music and a garden may be, then, that they can both be appreciated by someone who knows nothing about them. And no doubt appreciated infinitely more by someone who has learned about them in depth. And perhaps both are worth learning about in depth?

But one thing is dramatically different between music and gardens.

I don’t think many people think that only musicians can enjoy and appreciate music. I think it’s generally believed that everyone can enjoy music.

However, people seem to believe that no-one but a gardener can enjoy and appreciate a garden. Our visitors are 98% gardeners, and the remaining 2% are usually a reluctant spouse or child. I find this extraordinary.

British gardens were once seen as one of the major art forms, worthy of anyone’s attention. What on earth happened?

And it’s worse than this.

Gardeners are full of preoccupations which bluntly have very little to do with what we are aiming to achieve in the garden. They may be interested in weeds, and whether we use weed killer; they want to know about how we cut the hedges; they sometimes like horrible neat lawn edging and general neat and tidiness. They look down perhaps more than up. They are very good at plant spotting and are often devastated that we don’t do teas.

When visitors come politely to thank us for their visit they will usually say ‘lovely garden, what’s that plant?’ Perhaps people would visit an art gallery to discover just what was that blue paint that Monet was using?

However, sometimes there is a ray of light.

Carolyn Mullet published ‘Adventures in Eden’ and in her introduction she says ‘..I believe that gardens are cultural expressions worthy of attention just like painting, sculpture, theatre and music..’

But does that mean we will ever have painters, sculptors, actors and musicians visit the garden? Will any of them read Carolyn’s book? Maybe even those people who believe they aren’t interested in gardens might read or visit? Unlikely.

What would it take for them to visit a garden or read such a book?

The Welsh Historic Gardens Trust gave us just that. And the talk was given by Stephanie Mahon, the editor of Gardens Illustrated about their new book Gardens Illustrated: The New Beautiful: Inspiring gardens for a resilient future.

Being difficult, as usual, when we were invited to put questions quite early on, I asked why Stephanie thought Gardens Illustrated had gone from a magazine originally for amateur gardeners to the current focus on garden designers. See Gardens Illustrated illustrating the demise of the amateur garden maker.

Stephanie invited me to discuss the subject afterwards, which I did. But from then on it seemed impossible to ignore that each garden photograph we were shown from the new book seemed to be credited to a garden designer. (But not a photographer)

When I discussed this with Stephanie she suggested that most people who are very keen on their gardens go on to train (or retrain) as garden designers. That there are a remarkable number of people adopting garden design as a second career.

This is interesting.

At a time when we are said to be in an economic crisis is there really work for more garden designers than there were 30 years ago? Fifteen years ago Tim Richardson wrote an article about his perception that many British gardeners despised garden design - so that must have changed? They have gone from nowhere to become our super stars? Even maybe a necessity?

So many questions arise:

Did you employ a garden designer in your own garden?

Do you wish you had or could?

Do you think you have the skills to bring your garden up to ‘designer’ standard?

Do you think your garden would be better off with a designer?

Would you like to train as a garden designer? (before you do maybe, read this?)

Are you intimidated by garden designers?

Are you a garden designer?

Is a garden made by an amateur more likely to be interesting?

Do you think garden designers should have a qualification? (A formal qualification is not necessary in the UK)

I find myself confused.

I do know that most gardens in Gardens Illustrated seem to have been professionally designed (except, curiously, a recently featured couple on the Welsh Border). But are those the most exciting gardens in the UK? What do people think?

Well, I went through the gardens in the new RHS garden book,

- assuming that we could accept these choices as a good selection. And I just looked at the UK, (excluding Ireland) since it was a very tedious bit of research and that reduced the numbers a bit.

I focused on gardens from the past hundred years. The further back you go the harder it is to designate a ‘garden designer’ with any confidence, since there don’t seem to have been such qualifications then. So there are a few wobbles. Iford Manor will just squeeze in, and the owner, Harold Peto, was qualified as an architect and self taught as a garden designer. He may be considered a garden designer, though. Dixter is a muddle - Edwin Lutyens was an architect, and I’m not sure how we’d designate subsequent contributors. Would Vita Sackville West, with Harold Nicolson count? Definitely amateurs I think.

So how does it go?

There are 24 gardens I would confidently call amateur.*

And 8 I would identify as professional designer made - for example, one Dan Pearson, one Piet Oudolf, three Tom Stuart-Smith.** One of these is RHS Bridgewater - I didn’t include the other RHS gardens as they are a slight confusion, along with some others, like Broughton Grange, where a new garden has been added to an old one, or the old one much amended. So there’s some fuzzy round the edges, but it look to me as if amateur garden makers have contributed a lot more to our contemporary British gardens than garden designers.

Unless they’re hiding?? Maybe people who employ designers don’t open their gardens, except to Gardens Illustrated?

And which are all those professionally designed gardens which fill the Gardens Illustrated’s book? Alas, I cannot afford a copy plus the necessary lectern, but if you have one and know what they are, and how many are home made, please let me know?

You do know, of course, that I have skin in this game, being one of the amateur garden makers whose garden made the RHS book. Fair enough - but I do think that the very best gardens could be those made by someone who is there all year, observing, changing, enhancing, finding some money under the sofa and adding embellishing plants - and gardening. Blood, sweat and, apologies for the cliché, tears. Critiquing all the time and inviting criticism from others. Idiosyncratic and often pushing the boundaries of accepted practice and design, these should be our star gardens and we should cherish them.

All theories and objections welcome.

*Gardens by amateur garden makers:

Breezy Knees Colin Parker and his wife, Marylen Parker,

York Gate Robin Spencer,

East Ruston Alan Gray and Graham Robeson

Stockton Bury Raymond Treasure, and his partner Gordon Fenn,

Stone House Cottage Louisa and James Arbuthnott

Thenford Michael and Anne Heseltine

Bressingham Alan Bloom and his son, Adrian Bloom

Beth Chatto - Beth Chatto

Waterperry Gardens Bernard Saunders and Mary Spiller

Prospect Cottage Derek Jarman

Sissinghurst Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Sussex Prairies (with added wild) Paul and Pauline McBride.

Knoll Gardens Neil Lucas

Garden House Lionel and Katharine Fortescue,

Wildside Keith Wiley and Ros Wiley

Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens Dr. Neil Armstrong,

Veddw House Garden Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes

Dyffryn Fernant Christina Shand and David Allum

Lip Na Cloiche C A Lucy Mackenzie

Attadale C A Ewen and his wife Nicky Macpherson

Backhouse Rossie C A Caroline Thomson

Shepherd House C A Sir Charles and Lady Ann Fraser.

Broadwoodside C A Robert and Anna Dalrymple

Glenwhans C A Tessa Knott Sinclair

(The number of pairs is interesting)

** Professionally Garden designed:

Alnwick Jacques and Peter Wirtz.

Lowther Dan Pearson

RHS Bridgewater Tom Stuart-Smith

Broughton Grange Thomas Stuart-Smith

Jellicoe Tom Stuart-Smith

Denmans Joyce Robinson and John Brookes

Hauser and Wirth Piet Oudolf

Plas Brondanw Clough Williams-Ellis

Autumn may be the most wonderful time to enjoy the effects of light in the garden. The sun is lower and softer, and the result can be amazing.

We have anything but a flat garden. It does give visitors a good initial overview, and we are sheltered from the worst winds by virtue of a huge ridge behind us – to the south.

So my photographer husband complains about it every year. Photographers like flat gardens. They may be boring (flat gardens) but any available light will be there, and light is what photographers need and enjoy. It’s why they get out of bed at unbelievable times when the rest of us are still asleep. Anyway, having a huge ridge above us to the south means that in winter, when the sun is low, we can lose all sunshine for two weeks or more. And for quite a while it is filtered through trees on the horizon.

You need that sunshine if you’re going to enjoy the best of any snow or frost. Snow without sun is rather flat, and like flat gardens… boring. And it’s not only for photographs that that matters. It’s rather dull and disappointing for a spectator or snowman too. (sorry, ‘snow person’?)

You can see some of that effect here, where the sun has got into the woods:

So, it’s a bit of a shame in a way that a light lover like me has this dead time in winter. But in autumn and spring the sun reaches over that horizon and lights up the garden in a glory that summer never quite manages. Summer sun is rather too harsh.

When we open the garden we watch the weather forecast anxiously, dreading rain most of all. Rain is a bit of a killer to garden delight. But really so is  bright sunshine, which can make it hard to really see and appreciate a garden. Never mind that at too high a temperature garden visiting can be exhausting. I hate heat.

Our openings are basically dictated by the times when people expect to visit a garden. In the UK that’s mostly Sunday afternoon. Mornings and afternoons during the week are close followers for groups – except at Veddw, where we charge extra to any party which tries to get us out of bed early. Yet, apart maybe from dawn, which I have no experience of, the evening is the time when the light is most likely to be glorious. It is evening light which gives us these amazing reflections:

And autumn, when we’re also closed, may be the very best time, the time when adding sun to autumn colour can truly take your breath away.

And look what sunlight can do to ornamental grasses in their late season colour:

But its not always about those glowing oranges and reds. It’s light which does this for us too:

Light is our greatest partner of all in the garden. No matter what we do, however well we employ our resources and create scenes of splendour and delight, it is light that will transform it all into beauty. The world is rather dull in our country until someone turns the light on. Then suddenly there is joy and beauty.

It’s quite hard to know what to do with all this when you have it. It can be quite overwhelming. I can look up from my desk and see  sun pointing out the glow of a tree, as demanding as any teacher requiring an instant response. Or Pampas Grass suddenly illuminated:

It makes me want to wave my arms about, jump up and down or rush around mindlessly. I even take pictures from the car (as a passenger only..)

Soon these beeches will go orange…!!

And would I have taken this picture of that bloke pruning a holly unless the light in the trees had set me alight?

I can love light in winter (even with no sun in the garden):

and I love those ominous skies with light breaking through brooding cloud in spring:

A storm may be on the way?

And when the sun shines behind a flower you suddenly see it quite differently:

And in the meadow, the globes capture all the light in the sky, so that they even glow in moonlight. I haven’t taken photographs in moonlight though.

BUT  the sun can be dangerous, even in Wales. So sadly this is a picture I daren’t replicate, having caused smouldering with a crystal ball once:

Is autumn maybe the absolute best?? Sorry, visitors – you’d have to book a special to see ours. But you probably have plenty of your own. Some countries and climates do much better than we do. What a treat.

The downside is that that low autumn sun makes the windows look filthy

In praise of Kaffe Fassett.

By Anne Wareham

As I’m still ̶o̶n̶ ̶h̶o̶l̶i̶d̶a̶y̶ catching up on household stuff which got neglected all summer (dusting?) I thought I’d at least offer an old post which some newer subscribers may not have seen. Apologies to anyone who has seen it and if that’s because you scrolled through my posts, eagerly consuming my brilliant thoughts and amazing prose, then consider yourself a real star and my very favourite person.

Kaffe Fasset:

Well, how do we feel about him? A knitter, embroiderer, patchwork maker, teacher and writer. Famous in the UK, travelled here from California. For many years such craft workers have been predominantly women, (though, small nudge of pride, my father was an embroiderer). Yet Kaffe Fassett is a man who managed to get knitting taken seriously, from a hobby or ‘pastime,’ (that word gives me the horrors) to a craft worthy of a show in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. He was an outsider who transformed a whole world.

I’ve been thinking about how Kaffe Fassett not only transformed my knitting, but also my garden perceptions. He made me see the beauty of the British countryside and gardens in winter. I queued up for one of his lectures and came away enlightened.

The Insight

Kaffe told us how he came here, from California, and became enamoured of our winter colours: the browns, greens, greys, beiges and pale yellows which play with each other in our countryside.  A good word for it is perhaps, enlightened – ‘archaic: shed light on’ – because sunlight also adds magic to these colours. He used the colours in his jumpers. And I have never since stopped appreciating our subtle, drab and beautiful winter colours.

The browns are actually extraordinarily rich.

Grasses are a beautiful buff.

The inevitable tradition in the UK media in winter is socking it to us with ‘winter gardens’ full of garish cornus stems. I can love these colours too and I celebrate them in my garden in summer but I’m into subtlety right now: it’s my season for it. I think there’s a time and place for something sombre and subtle.

When you start looking……

Learning to See

Kaffe is brilliant at helping us to see. I can’t quote him on winter colours, as that was in a lecture, but here he is on bricks. He initially saw London’s brickwork as ‘a dismal non colour, especially drab and sad in the grey light’, then he took a closer look:

“It was as if I was seeing it for the first time! There was an intense world of colour waiting to be perceived. Grape purples, flame blues, rusts, plums and endless shades of ochre and camel…” (from Kaffe Fassett at the V&A)

Well, for this reminder to really look we must applaud and appreciate this man, who muscled into our world and helped us suddenly feel pride in our crafts and then also opened my garden eyes. 

Has your garden world ever been illuminated and enhanced by an outsider? Does it take an outsider to wake us out of horticultural torpor?

An almost invisible hellebore bud..

I love winter. Though not the dusting.