Weeds? or maybe not?

Pale yellow Tolpis barbata filling what is normally a path last month. Some Melianthus major flowerheads in the background and Pelargonium quercifolium.

Part of the zeitgeist is that there seems to be a great evaluation of what weeds are at the moment. The RHS (bending over backwards to be in with nature conservation bodies, and be generally politically correct) is even beginning to frown on the word. More on this later perhaps in a later posting (there is a lot of trendy nonsense to be probed) but for now I'd like to look positively at the annuals in my Portuguese garden. Many people would see them as weeds, in that they are spontaneous plants that can spread very rapidly and cause problems to our gardening efforts, but for me they fall into a more ambiguous category. In my last garden (Herefordshire in England) the weeds were legion, overwhelmingly perennial, overwhelmingly very competitive, and rooted into heavy loam – they were a big problem. Here they are legion, but overwhelmingly annuals, and rooted into a very sandy soil – so they are so easy to get rid of - there is no comparison with gardening in Herefordshire! I have the luxury then of being able to be much more pragmatic about what is a weed, and when it becomes a weed.

A border (left) with Romneya coulteria, Stipa gigantea and Lychnis coronaria and area of what is usually roughly mown ‘grass’ on the right, occupied over a period of a few weeks by yellow Crepis capillaris, which i left for a few weeks more before strimming down.

I suppose we have quite a typical Mediterranean climate zone arable flora. Lots of annuals, many Asteraceae, some Fabaceae, the usual chenopods (the 'fat hen' so useful to pull up for the chickens), an Amaranthus (edible but utterly boring – and the chickens don't like it either), some grasses (which are surprisingly feeble in their seeding), a succulent thing which I think people in England pay good money for as 'purslane', and is here used to make a rather underwhelming traditional soup. And of course the dreadful Canadian Fleabane, which must be one of the most successful weeds ever. A lot of the Asteraceae are very attractive, and indeed so attractive that I feel that they are in fact part of the garden composition. They are also no doubt great pollinator plants. My strategy with them is to leave them as long as I dare before cutting back (large areas with a strimmer), or in small areas hand-pulling. I want to stop mass seeding but not eliminate all seeding.

A partially-planted area with Gaura lindheimerii, Achillea millefolium and Artemisia ‘Powis Castle, which seemed to have avoided much incursion from spontaneous annuals. ‘Partially planted’ as it was so dry in spring it wasn’t worth risking too many new plants.

There is a certain learning process here. Coleostephus myconi (Corn Marigold) is a classic winter annual, germinating in spring, to grow through the winter to form rosettes which flower in April to May. They can form quite big plants, make a dramatic impression when in flower, but grow so strongly that they can outcompete slower-developing perennials or sub-shrubs. I rather let them rip last year and regretted it, so this year intervened and removed probably around 90% of the seedlings early in the year. It'll be interesting to see how many seedlings come up this autumn.

Tolpis barbata is another autumn or winter germinating daisy, pale with an attractive dark eye (but only flowering for a few hours around midday). It is prolific and could get out of control but not too completive and easily controlled – and certainly lovely in reasonable doses.

Crepis capillaris and (foreground) Andryla integrifolia; amongst planted Santolina chamaecyparis, Bupleurum fruticosum and a lot more not so visible.

Many spring-germinating annuals (or to be more precise, late winter-germinating) are particularly shallow-rooted and easy to remove, so this year I felt more confident in letting them go. Amongst the 'daisies' have been Crepis capillaris, which makes a big yellow impact and is singularly easy top pull out and Hypochaeris radicata. Then there is Andryla integrifolia which is an attractive pale yellow (unusual, almost a primrose yellow) which can get quite big (to 80cms+) and is tempting to leave, as its very beautiful in quantity. It is a vigorous seeder, although very shallow-rooted, and produces an unpleasant fluff which brought myself and Jessica Gomes (visiting at the time) to coughing fits while weeding it out. These late-growing annuals can put on quite a lot of growth but with little root mass they are not serious competitors, and indeed I suspect may actually be beneficial for young perennials and sub-shrubs around them, shading them from the worst of the sun.

Stipa gigantea with a Ceanothus in front (which no-one seems to grow here), Romneya to the left.

We have a lot of vetches. Indeed Portugal and Iberia generally have a lot of vetches. Some are very attractive such as the crimson Vicia benghalensis. In young plantings they are a problem because they can rapidly clamber over young plants. In theory they should be ok in established plantings especially if dominated by shrubs. So I shall let some go next year and indeed do some experimental sowings of V. benghalensis amongst established plantings as the colour is so wonderful.

Finally there is the wild carrot, Daucus carota, which this year seems to have spread a lot since last year, or maybe as just benefited from some late rain. It is attractive and since it flowers so much later than almost any other wild species here, I can't help thinking must be a good pollinator plant. As an aside, I do wonder what bees do here, during the summer, when, owing to drought, there is almost nothing in flower? This will be a good one to let go in the rough grass amongst the olives but I will need to keep an eye on it in borders.

I know I'm lucky with my current weed flora in terms of this kind of pragmatic management but the general idea is that we can often afford to think creatively about our spontaneous species. If you do choose to let species 'go' then I would advise doing it on a small-scale first and seeing what happens.

Just part of the Vicia page from the marvellous Portuguese plant ID website flora-on.pt

V. benghalensis is the 3rd from the left on the top row

Perennials sprout across Green City Warsaw

Image courtesy of Malgorzata Dudek-Grzegorzewska

Four years ago I was asked to do a workshop for Zarzad Zieleni, the Warsaw City Green Space Department. It all seemed to go very well, thanks to a dear friend, Malgosia Kiedzrynska, who is a highly proficient interpreter – working with Malgosia is almost like having a Polish alter ego. It is always difficult however to really know how much impact one is having.

Returning however, it is wonderful to see perennial planting appearing in many of the city's roundabouts and other high visibility roadside locations. I was able to spend a morning driving around the city looking at plantings, and a day and half providing some educational input. I felt very honoured at having been involved in making such a transformation to a major city. Warsaw is in any case a very green city, in fact I don't think I know of anywhere with quite so many trees. What I particularly liked was that this was not just tidy shapely 'street trees' but so many mature, full-sized native forest species (oaks and ashes) right up close to buildings, filling courtyards as well as in some of the city's many parks.

The perennial plantings use a combination of planting techniques: both block-based and mixes. I'm nearly always in favour of mixes as there is so much resilience and ability to adapt – if one species dies out, then others can fill the gap whereas in conventional block planting, species failure tends to result in unsightly gaps. My main comments were that mixes needed to consist of more species (the highly successful German research in this area often uses 15 species per mix), and that there seemed to be some very successful and robust plants that they were not using.

We also held our first ever Garden Masterclass Polska day conference, with four speakers, myself included, chaired by Maja Popielarska, Poland's leading garden TV personality. A sister organisation to Garden Masterclass, we aim to provide online (and occasional live) educational opportunities to garden/landscape professionals and enthusiastic amateurs. Its truly exciting being involved in such a rapidly developing new gardening scene.

Warsaw is an amazingly green city with large mature trees in many city centre locations

No Rain, No Spring, No Garden (the latest from Portugal)

Iris ‘Lorelei’ , inherited from previous garden with Linaria genistifolia, one of the real drought-resilient successes here.

It's raining in Vila Nova de Oliveirinha! According to the weather app anyway (as I'm writing this from Berlin). Such good news, as we had almost given up hope of getting any more this spring. We got lots and lots pre-Christmas but very little since and the soil (when we left last week) was like grey dust. I had been dreading something like this.

Lychnis coronaria intermingled with Stachys germanica, the latter a reliable locally-native perennial, like a chunkier version of S.byzantina.

Growing things successfully in a Mediterranean climate without irrigation (or at least minimising it) means having to rely on two phases in the year where there has to be a conjunction of temperature and moisture. I've discussed this before in previous postings. September, October when the first autumn rains hit warm ground sees incredible growth, and is when most seeds germinate. Annual (and most vegetable growth) seeds germinate now and make terrific growth, rooting in well until a winter slow-down and then speeding up again in the spring. Perennials and sub-shrubs do the same but more slowly, but doing this in containers over the winter for spring planting creates various problems – they do not root in so quickly, and it is often difficult to provide the shade cover they might have in nature. A reasonably wet spring and they will establish, a dry spring and they simply don't, and given how free-draining our soil is, watering does little to help. A dry spring then means very poor conditions for establishing new plantings and puts a lot of stress on the spring growth of things planted the previous year.

Most divisions of daffodils do well, but tazettas the best of all: ‘Falcoonet’, left, and ‘Martinette’ right.

A very dry December to April period has been very problematic for many bulbs too, and this has thrown up a very interesting surprise. I have always thought of tulips and (big) alliums as plants from dry habitats and regions (eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, Central Asia) and Narcissus as being from the relatively high winter rainfall western Mediterranean. So it surprised me to see how daffodils have been more or less unaffected by the late winter-spring drought but tulips, alliums and Iris x hollandica have been suffering terribly. I suppose the answer must lie in length of growing season; narcissus have a long growing season (root growth in autumn) and so can take advantage of moisture over a longer period, the others have shorter, more temperature-dependent growing season which naturally would benefit from snow melt or some guaranteed spring source of water. No water for them at a crucial time and they really suffer - brown leaves, or just very poor growth, stunted flowering, so less resilience – interesting!

An ancient wisteria has a new home on a pergola, along with a rather nondescript syringa, Echium candicans (going over fast, as they do); sculpture by Bristol artist Deborah Weymont.

This year's late spring rain will I hope, offer a lifeline to things I have planted out in January and February – mostly native sub-shrubs in forestry plugs (alveolas florestais). These I had grown from seed sown autumn 2021, kept watered through last summer, and either planted out in October or very early this year. Autumn plantings (mostly native Lavandula stoechas – confusingly rosmarinho in Portuguese) look fine – they have been growing. Later ones: lavenders and Phlomis fruticosa, Ruta graveolens, I have been more worried about, as they have not grown at all this spring.

The inevitable Stipa tenuissima (left) shows no sign of either dying or seeding. Here, with various Mediterranean shrubs. Will it still be here in two years time?

Grasses are particularly problematic about timing. I grew some Stipa gigantea (the garden's 'theme plant' and a local native) from seed last year; a few in plugs but they stayed quite small and the rest I planted out in a nursery bed. Grasses, notoriously, don't like disturbance when they are not actively growing, so the transplants I did in February, when they were not actively growing, have nearly all died, whereas the ones I did in early April (actively growing) have been ok, but only because I have watered them – something I have little patience with as it involves dragging hoses across considerable lengths of rough ground. In previous years, quite big divisions from plants dug up from the landscape, have taken well at this time whereas carefully taken divisions in winter were a disaster.

Euphorbia sarwschanica does well here, as do many Euphorbia. Melianthus major too, although this year they are flowering and seeding several months earlier than last and I fear will be summer/drought dormant. Papaver orientale ‘Königin Charlotte’ in front, not establishing well - indeed one of the interesting things here is how slowly (or badly) many perennials establish, all ones from drought or short-growth season regions; don’t really understand why yet. Orange Bulbine frutescens on the right, unkilleable, utterly durable, a useful low evergreen.

Bupleurum fruticosum has continued to be the wonder shrub, a native understorey shrub of the Alentejo (south, hot) but fine in full sun here. Never watered, now forming substantial shrubs, they are however beginning to fall apart, and so beginning to look a bit of a mess. The great thing about this is that it will take hard pruning (most Mediterranean shrubs don't) and so come the autumn, that's what I am going to do. This is one of those plants that is almost impossible to propagate; cuttings don't root and seed, however fresh, does not germinate. Seedlings do appear below the shrubs however and so if you get down on hands and knees it is possible to dig them up, pot them on and plant them out at a conveniently wet time of year. Another understorey shrub that flourishes in full sun is Viburnum tinus, and that's another difficult one to propagate – I recommend picking vast quantities of berries, soaking and washing over several weeks and then sowing – but expect a germination rate of 1%, with nothing the year after.

What is known as 'Portuguese' laurel, Prunus lusitanica, is not however one for full sun, as it get's horribly scorched. I wondered aloud to a landscape historian once about why it is so rare in the country for which it has its English name, and he suggested that it has been effectively driven to extinction by shepherds over many centuries, as it poisons stock. Never romanticise traditional agricultural practices! which here, as over much of the Mediterranean, have done huge damage to the landscape.

I must admit I am not looking forward to the summer. If it is like last year, it will be hotter than the norm, and a real test for the garden. Hopefully the late rain we are having will help with survival.

Rumex acetosella (Sheep sorrel), a typical weed of acid soils, a menace in the veg garden or amongst new plantings (one of the rare occasions I now reach for the Roundup) but in established plantings is ok to let wander and can be very atractive in the right light, here with Artemisia ludoviciana, a steppe species which has done really well.

Enjoying the Mediterranean winter

It has been nine months since I last did a blog posting. !!!! As I am sure most of you are aware, so much of my energies now go into Garden Masterclass.

Winter in the Portuguese garden is a time of lush growth, especially after the plentiful (and indeed above-average) rains we have been having. Most garden and wild plants are in active growth, although at this particular time, it is quite slow. Deciduous trees and shrubs (oaks in the landscape; pomegranates, viburnums, hydrangeas in the garden) seem almost reluctantly deciduous, almost as if they know they are missing out on something. Despite all the growth there is little in flower. Very few annuals are prepared to flower this early – the wild Calendula arvensis certainly is, but it is a horrificly weedy self-seeder, so only a few can be allowed. Cultivated Calendula officinalis is still in flower after a winter sowing a year ago – a bit garish, but amazing to have something that flowers through a very hot summer with minimal irrigation and then on into the winter. This time of year is all about the incredible range of evergreen or wintergreen foliage one has here.

Wild marigold, a terrible weed but nice to let the odd ones pop up to flower, as there is not a lot of other colour at the moment.

The obvious question to ask right away is “what survived the summer?”, which was long and very hot, definitely a climate change summer, with temperatures in the thirties most days. The answer is - “almost everything”. Very small shrub plantings (18x4cms forestry plugs) of Mediterranean natives and some in one litre pots were nearly all fine, on a 2 or 3 weeks interval watering. Most of the perennial and grass planting was too, on a similar watering regime. Only just though. Last year's perennial planting strategy was to use one year plants which had been grown in a nursery bed (unirrigated) for a year before planting to final positions. So they were well-established plants. But.... we had a very dry winter and spring and so a lot of them, I think, did not root well into their new homes and so did not do well. This year, I am going to plant out as 2.5cm plugs and water occasionally, and see if that is any better. Notable casualties were Eragrostis spectabilis and Pennisetum villosum.

Correa ‘Marian’s Marvel’. Correas are great for winter colour, but like so many Australian plants they can’t be hard pruned, and get increasingly gawky with time. Impossible to buy here - this one came from England before the stupid Brexit.

Working with lower shrubby evergreen plants is very different to working with perennials. A huge advantage of course is the year-round foliage interest. Change is perceived as more strongly incremental rather than purely cyclical. By which I mean, with perennials, the look of the garden or planting is absolutely determined and psychologically dominated by the time of year. With something dominated by evergreen shrubs or wintergreen plants, there is far more seasonal continuity and the changes we register tend to be the differences from year to year. As plants get bigger there is a more destructive competition, as anything evergreen will tend to shade out anything beneath it, unlike with perennials which have amazing ability to pack a large number of species into a small space (although this may be news to traditional growers). Many Mediterranean sub-shrubs however mesh together very effectively without too much competition, which is the effect I very much want to achieve in some of the less-managed plantings.

Layered planting works really well with gappy growers like this old Pelargonium variety , here underplanted with Thymus longicaulis, a really good ground cover, and possible lawn alternative.

Many of these evergreens will however grow sparser as they grow, which then makes space again beneath them. Echium candicans will be like this I think. A spectacular dome of silver foliage which looked pretty miserable in its first summer, expanded dramatically in its second, and rather more so than I expected. Some Papaver orientalis around it have had to be abandoned to stygian gloom, some irises rescued, and a hole cut for an abutilon. With time however the nice dome will open out and a small tree develop, allowing for planting around the base. Then of course, at some point, the whole thing will die. Probably annoyingly, but actually I may be glad to be rid of it by then.

One of the few Pelargoniums that forms a ‘conventional’ strong-stemmed shrub, and with such fine foliage. P. cucullatum.

The hummocky form of so many Mediterranean shrubs tends to preclude anything growing beneath them, although as just noted, their branches can interpenetrate and mesh nicely. There is another growth pattern however which does allow for growth. And that is the 'grow up and fall over' model. Sorry for the rather colloquial description but I do not know any technical terms here.

Which brings to a rather political point about botanical terminology. Which having been developed in Europe and North America (i.e. a European offshoot) is very much centered around the description and categorisation of plant forms in those regions. I often wonder how it would look if it had been developed by Africans, or Asians or South Americans? Much more focus on not-herbaceous-but-not-woody-either plants (cacti, many succulents) and on the very different patterns of woody-but-not-even-worth-starting-a-fire-with growth. Amongst the latter are two groups I have intended to major on here in the more decorative part, and one which has turned out to be amazingly useful as an impact plant (Melianthus major). There is a strong tendency here to grow up, with very unattractively leafless gawky stems, and in many cases to then bend over. Many pelargoniums make appalling pot plants – regals (Martha Washingtons to citizens of the EUA); neat little bundles in the garden centre; bending stems going all over the place by the end of the year. The traditional advice to hard prune of course brings back a nice neat plant, which then repeats the cycle.

Phlomis x cytherea. A particularly fine species for year-round foliage interest, although like all of these plants, not at their best in the summer.

Growing in the ground rather than in pots is a potential massive transformation in the way we grow these plants. The gappiness can be filled with other plants around the base; low creepies like Thymus, Satureja or smaller Achilleas, or in some cases the tumbling over then results in the stems growing back up again but resting on the ground to make an attractive lower-level clump. One of our Melianthus flopped over in the recent wet weather; I thought “oh dear, what a mess” but within a couple of weeks is looking rather fine but with just a different form to all the ones that managed to stay upright. Nearly all pelargoniums and salvias will in any case produce new growth around the base which then tend to fill in gaps.

A Melianthus major whose normally upright stems have fallen over but the new growth looks perfectly fine. I shall live this for this coming season I think. Like so many of these ‘messy growers’ they are very forgiving and can be hard-pruned - unlike so much of the more hummocky Mediterranean sub-shrubs.

Lots of foliage interest, but not much flower power at this time of year!

Priorities for this year? Planting out (mostly herbaceous) seedlings for a lot of gap-filling and some borders in a more open situation, with two grasses as theme plants: Eragostis spectabilis and Muhlenbergia reverchonii. No new borders, but consolidation, filling in, and building up plant density.

And hopefully some more blog postings!

End of the winter in the Portuguese garden

At the end of the winter here it is difficult to imagine it six months later. When it is wet it is very wet and any uncultivated ground is covered in a thick layer of lush green grass and various weedy annuals, all of which will disappear down to the thinnest lay of straw during the summer. Deciduous trees drop their leaves but that is the only thing that really tells you it is winter. Many of the summer-autumn flowers are still struggling on, for example we have various Salvia which are still in flower, but at the same time, the first spring flowers: the pure white Tazetta daffodils known as ‘paperwhites’ in England and ungrowable outside there, and Cyclamen coum, but then these quite often seem to flower in England in January. I hope to do well with cyclamen.

Coleonema pulchra, a compact little South African shrub with nicely aromatic foliage, flowering profusely over a relatively long period.

The Seasons

The seasons, those cycles of events of temperature, light and water that define the lives, plans and concerns of gardeners and growers are here all different. Different conjunctions of these factors cause plants to grow, but different plants at different rates and different times. Coming from south-west England we are used to spring being the start of growth of almost everything, and autumn the cessation of almost everything. The exceptions should flag up the greater complexity of growing anything from the Mediterranean climage region. Anyone in Britain or northern Europe is probably aware of the anomaly of globe artichokes (Cynara cardunculus) and Euphorbia characias growing so strongly during the winter. It took me a long time to really understand why, and then I started flagging up to people in workshops that much British weather is very much like a Mediterranean winter – yes, that's a sort of joke, but only sort of, i.e. cool and wet. Many Mediterranean plants are hardy (enough) to they do well in northern Europe, and their winter growth is perhaps not adequately appreciated.

Melianthus major, I would never have thought of trying this, but have seen it grow well in gardens near Toledo in Spain, which is a much harsher climate than central Portugal. They grow fantastically well and will flower this year.

Gardening here, in central Portugal, involves understanding that there are different cycles of growth which overlap rather than co-incide. Decidous trees leaf out in spring and drop their leaves in autumn, except that spring is so early and autumn so late, that the winter dormancy period is actually quite short. One of the 'natural trees' of the area by the way is Quercus robur/pedunculata, an obvious overlap with northern Europe. Sub-shrubs, grasses, perennials and annuals that are regional endemics start growth with the first rains in autumn and go dormant (or dead in the case of annuals) in early to mid summer. So winter is an active growing season. Things can grow insanely fast in both autumn and spring. IF there is water.

Phlomis x cytherea - one of the many garden-worthy Phlomis species. Longer-lived than most sub-shrubs of the region.

At the moment, there isn't water, as we have had almost no rain since before Christmas, and the whole country is in an official state of drought. Not unknown in 'normal' times but rare, and an obvious link to climate change. Scary. And frustrating. Knowing that it is warm enough for a lot of growth but everything just sits there waiting for the water to enable their physiology to function at a rate that allows for growth not just survival. The frightening thought that we may not have any rain until next autumn (this has been known to happen). The wild grass and flora just sits there looking sullen. We are already watering the veg, and since I just planted about 100 small shrubs I have had to water them, too. In February. All sorts of plans put on hold now. I may have to spend the rest of the year simply keeping stuff alive.

Pelargonium ‘Radula Rosea’ - this looks like it has taken off. But Pelargonium can be touch-and-go, as a lot of plants don’t seem to establish well.

Perennial stalwarts

The Mediterranean flora is immensely rich, but mostly in sub-shrubs and annuals/biennials: it is very poor in trees and not great for truly perennial perennials. Amongst the latter are some amazingly indestructible species, not always immediately predictable. Trachelium caeruleum is not something I have ever seen in Britain, and in Portugal frequents shade or cracks in walls, but as an open border plant is superb for its clusters of tiny purple flowers and attractive glossy foliage. Linaria is a good genus - L. genistifolia is extraordinarily tough, flowering in late spring, never going completely dormant in summer and then repeat flowering in autumn, its grey foliage is lovely, and the flowers a nice shade of yellow. Other Linaria do well too.

I want to try more of the fairly limited range of drought-tolerant perennials, such as Achillea, Nepeta and some Salvia, but these are only available as seed (from Jelitto) which precludes many cultivars. Plants you have to get from France or Germany; and actually my mail order experience so far has been good, and I’m hoping to get to Olivier Filippi in the spring.

Grasses The great thing about grasses is that they can go semi-dormant in the summer and still look reasonably ok. They contrast nicely with sub-shrubs too. Some need little water to establish - I have been astonished by the growth of Stipa tenuissima over the summer, which I never really bothered watering although having gone in as 25mm plugs in April. Locally native drought tolerant Festuca mairei though needs more water to keep it going through its first year, but seems ok in the second. This year I’m trying some Muhlenbergia, Eragrostis and Pennisetum species but am worried about aggressive seeding; I really don’t want to be the person who introduces the next invasive alien to this much abused landscape.

Echium candians - The ‘pride of Madeira’. Spectacular in flower, and loved by bees, but probably short-lived.

Risk management A big part of gardening here is risk management, which depends quite a bit on annual growth cycles. There are ‘continual growers’ like South American Salvia and Pelargonium, which grow whenever the temperature is warm enough and there is available moisture. It is possible to see how well they are doing quite quickly and they can make up for lost time, and recover well from drought or frost damage. The same applies to many sub-shrubs, which are clearly adapted to making the most of good conditions, and indeed seem to grow well at low temperatures. Bulbs are more problematic as being so cyclical in growth it takes more than one season to know if they are going to thrive. They will always pop up in year one, but to be sure it is worth investing in more it is necessary to see how well they perform in year two. Daffodils are definitely ‘in’, but then Iberia is their centre of genetic diversity, so they jolly well should be, snowdrops however don’t seem to really perform from year one, species tulips are still in year one. South African bulbs should be ideal, and the Ixias and Watsonias in some local gardens are wonderfully and clearly well-established. Obtaining them is another matter however.

Now, as winter turns to spring, we have lots of daffodils in flower, camellias - only big red cabbagey ones unfortunately, although I have planted quite a few single sasanquas, the first Pelargonium cultivars, a rather spectacular Senecio, and various of the odd assortment of southern hemisphere shrubs that the local nursery industry sells. Of the latter, South African Coleonema pulchra has been the most successful, and seems immune to the death-wish which seems to afflict many of the plants from both South Africa and Australia. Hardenbergia violacea has been a wonderful early-flowering climber; I remember growing them from seed when I had a nursery in the 1980s. It is a relatively small grower too – useful, as so many climbers are just so big and vigorous.

Hardenbergia violacea - a quick, easy and not too big, early-flowering climber.

That's the small sheltered garden at the side of the house. The largest areas I am planting up are further out in an old olive grove. These focus much more on regional flora, or plants from similar climate zones. This is much more about planting, doing some initial weed control and then leaving them to get on with it. I'm hoping for a quick meshing together of sub-shrub growth, interspersed with grasses. These are the sort of plants that grow quite strongly through the winter, or at least they did until it got so dry – I'm now even done some watering of young plants put in a couple of months or so ago; water now and they should be able to grow enough roots to get down to look after themselves when it gets really hot and dry.

For the record: species of Cistus, Halimium, Santolina, Salvia, Lavandula, Teucrium, and Pistacia lentiscus, Bupleurum fruticosum, Erica arborea. Grasses: Festuca mairei, Ampelodesmos mauritanicus, Stipa gigantea. Trying some Ceanothus too, from California these should be ideal but it is a complete mystery to me as why no-one here grows them.

In theory I'm integrating annuals in with some of this lot. In practice this is not so easy. Most Mediterranean climate annuals germinate in autumn, but if I'm thinking of planting over the winter that does not make sense. Spring sowing is ok for some, but because of the drought that's not happening this year. I'm also convinced that annuals germinate at different temperatures – as supported by the fact that it seems that we have quite different annual weed floras for different times of year. The annuals I really like are those that once established look after themselves and just fill gaps and need editing and weeding rather than active management. Larkspur (Delphinium consolida) is one, and the wild marigold (Calendula arvensis) is another. It’s lovely having such plants that require none of the active management that annuals need in England.

Senecio petasites - my favourite plant of the moment. I love it being so lushly leafy; flowering is unusual as the buds often get frosted.

Gardens Under Big Skies

So, a book out on contemporary Dutch gardens. The English edition came out late last year, and the Dutch edition was out first, in mid-summer. This was very much a joint production with photographer Maayke de Ridder, whose has a wealth of experience seeking out and recording the country's gardens. Amsterdam-based publisher Hélène Lesger, Maayke and myself had indeed all been thinking about something along these lines for some time, but when we first approached some British publishers (in 2014 I think), we were firmly told that English-speaking readers would not be interested. Roll on a few years and Anna Mumford of Filbert Press needed little persuading to pick up an idea from Hélène’s new publishing enterprise.

A garden by Carolien Barkman, who specialises in small gardens (this is Europe’s most crowded country) and has a great ability to work in surprises to whatever she creates. Maayke and I featured her work before in a book - New Small Garden. It was good to be able to visit more of her projects and appreciate how effectively she uses every bit of space.

The book feels like a timely outcome of many years visiting The Netherlands (or Holland as we usually call it, somewhat incorrectly, as 'Holland' is really only one province). A period of time, starting in 1994, which has seen enormous changes in Dutch garden culture. Back then, I may have been drawn by news of real innovation in planting: Piet Oudolf, the parks in Amstelveen, wild flower habitat creation etc., but most gardens were …. well... shall we say diplomatically, not very interesting... rather random placings of perennials, shrubs, conifers. Now, driving or walking around, and peering into people's front gardens, it is clear that there is a lot of thought going into what people do, with a huge variety covering every genre from historic to wild (but perhaps just a few too many Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’). This has been reflected in a constant flow of really good Dutch gardens appearing in the pages of Gardens Illustrated; from both owner-designed and designer gardens. It was this creative energy that Maayke and I were interested in tapping.

A city garden by Frank van der Linden, one of the real plantsmen whose work we featured. Compact sites lead many designers to adopt a ‘less is more’ approach. Frank is one who very definitely doesn’t but uses his knowledge of plant habitats to shoehorn in as much diversity as possible.

I have always been fascinated by the conjunction of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Which is what Dutch gardens present to a British visitor: all the elements we know and grow are there, but in just slightly different places. In fact, I would go so far as to say that drop me into a garden blindfolded and ask me where I was, I would nearly always know if I were in a Dutch garden. The differences are subtle, but I think they boil down to this – a definite aura of post-Bauhaus modernism, often something as small as a low hedge, in a place where no British gardener or designer would dream of putting one. Graphic elements that add architecture/framework/bones, contrasting with looser-grown perennials, but without falling into the trap of classical geometry that usually takes British designers over when they use straight lines. Although in fact there is plenty of classical formality too, which has been the traditional model.

One of the real privileges of researching this book was getting into gardens behind those amazing canal houses we all gawp at as tourists in Amsterdam - they’re often very secret places. This project, by Robert Broekema, cleverly integrates three narrow gardens belonging to different properties.

One name stood constantly in the background as I was writing this - Mien Ruys, who was a key figure in the development of modern Dutch landscape design. She dominated the profession for much of the 20th century, and inevitably we see her hand everywhere. Her approach combined the clarity of Modernism with the kind of liveability that is somehow at the heart of Dutch design generally (I mean everything, from office buildings to teacups).

Columnar hornbeams stand sentinel outside the home of Nico Kloppenborg, the designer in the book who most self-consciously follows the work of Mien Ruys. (Author picture)

Researching and writing this book involved talking to twelve designers, and looking at examples of their work. We chose them because they were all working in a way that could be loosely interpreted as contemporary, and yet chose to express this in very different ways – some through planting, others though re-interpreting historical design models. Crucially we were also interested in relating what they were doing to the Dutch landscape.

Another very plant-focussed designer who I felt a real affinity with was Arjan Boekel. This is a roof garden he has designed in Rotterdam.

Mention of which brings me on to an aspect of researching the book which I find fascinating about the country. All of us in western Europe live in landscapes that are multi-layered, the results of centuries of human occupation. The Dutch landscape however is the most dramatic palimpset, where rivers have moved, canals dug, old canals bypassed, dykes thrown up, overlain by new dykes, land drained, land drowned, land rescued. At first I found, like most visitors, the landscape monotonous (and pre-Satnav) terribly easy to get lost. Once you get your eye in however, it is endlessly fascinating, as you learn to pick out old dykes, abandoned waterways, every little hummock of ground telling a story of centuries of human endeavour making and remaking a landscape to survive in. I love looking at historic maps to see how the land has changed over time, and then trying to read the signs on the ground. Maayke for example has her houseboat on the Ringvaartdijk which borders the canal which was constructed around the Haarlemmemeer – a vast lake that until the late 19th century gobbled up land with every storm, threatening to join up with the Zuider Zee and hollow out the country. It is now the site of Schipol airport!

Luc Engelhard’s garden in an old polder landscape is an experimental space where he plays with structures and plantings before using them in clients’ gardens. I love its spare and enigmatic quality, and ability to play with forms in a very unpretentious and authentic way.

So, one theme we adopted in the book was to discuss our designers after looking at a particular aspect of the landscape: the sandy heathlands of Brabant, the industrial discipline of polder landscapes, the coast – dominated by a wall of protective sand dunes, and the mysterious 'waterline' – landscapes designed to be flooded in the event of invasion.

The twelve designers we chose to represent the best of contemporary design but offering very different responses to landscapes, from natural landscapes such as the coast to more strongly cultural ones, and finally, historic landscapes. Together they represent a huge spectrum of creativity, reflecting this country's vibrant and continually innovating garden design scene.

We couldn’t talk about Dutch gardens without mentioning tulips. Jacqueline van der Kloet’s own garden integrates bulbs with shrubs and perennials as a ‘tea garden’. Her work with bulbs for public and private design clients is very striking, as she continually invents new ways of distributing them through space.

And I couldn’t do a book on Dutch gardens without mentioning Piet Oudolf, could I? One of the designers we feature is Tom de Witte, who follows his work closely, and indeed works with Piet on many of his projects. His own design work is strong on structure and framing.

One of Machiel Vlieland’s coastal gardens, where appropriate plant selection is absolutely vital. Form and texture create interest where colours tend to be muted.

Margo van Beem and Emiel Versluis of Vis á Vis specialise in sustainability and have done so for longer than most of the practitioners in this area. This is a garden on the moat of one of the old fortresses of the defensive waterline.

A rather restrained corner in the garden of design duo Monique Donders and Pierre van der Heiden who are very prolific and very versatile in their design approaches - complex perennial plantings are also an important part of their work

All pictures Maayke de Ridder, unless indicated.

Further viewing.

Garden Masterclass offers the following videos by Maayke and some of these designers:

Maayke de Ridder - Use your smartphone like a pro.

Leo den Dulk - Mien Ruys: leading lady of Dutch landscape design

Tom de Witte - Structure in the perennial garden and The process behind a garden design project

Jacqueline van der Kloet - New Ways with Bulbs

For further details see here.

Summer in the (Portuguese) garden

Above: the garden in May, fresh, green and flowery
It's our second Portuguese summer and the big learning curve about drought tolerance continues. Actually so far, we have been very lucky, only a couple of days in the mid 30s and a lot in the 20s with cool nights, and overcast skies. Which makes life for plants, and us, so much easier. Grey skies can be such a relief sometimes!

So how are we getting on? It looks like I last reported on progress back in January, with a resumé of a year on the learning curve. Here’s the next update which I'm going to address things thematically.

The basic strategy

….. is “irrigation for survival, not to keep things looking good”, i.e. to accept that summer is a dormant season here in the Mediterranean region. Only new plants, vegetables, and one patch of annuals (Jo’s zinnia patch) are kept irrigated.

Shade

Light levels are surprisingly poorly addressed in the garden literature. It was some years ago I came across an American writer (sorry, can't remember who) pointing out what should be obvious to us all, that plants that in the South need shade may be fine in open conditions in the northern states, and of course in Canada and vica-versa.. This made me look at plants in Scotland and Scandinavia anew, and I realised that of course the further north you go, the less so-called shade lovers really need shade, and the further south you go the more that sun-lovers don't mind some shade.

One of the lessons of walking in the Portuguese countryside, is that things we north Europeans think of as sun-plants, often flourish under trees – cistus and lavender for example. I am coming to the conclusion that any bit of shade can be of huge benefit to anything on the wet side of cacti. Pelargoniums do far better in a bit of shade than out in the open sun. Mexican salvias are of course mostly plants of sparse pine and oak woodland, so we would expect them to do better under a tree; in sun they survive but look very scrappy from June til the autumn, in shade however they keep more leaves and flower more freely. Broadleaved evergreens are almost all woodland plants too – so it is no surprise that Prunus lusitanica easily burns in full sun and camellias can do to, even the supposedly more sun-tolerant sasanquas. It is normal to plant camellias out in full sun in our region, but the combination of intense sunshine and temperatures in the mid-30s that climate-change summers are bringing to this part of the world, may make this a practice of the past.

Variations in soil

There seems to be markedly-different survival rates/water needs between different parts of the garden. Quite often for no apparent reason. It is a sandy, gritty soil anyway, incredibly free-draining, and coarser texture areas not surprisingly are more problematic, but other in areas there seem to be real differences with dry-sensitive plants like abutilons for no apparent reason. Possibly to do with soil depth, which is not something you have any idea of from the surface – on granite this is particularly the case, as shown by the vast boulders that tend to rear up out of people's gardens and smallholdings and be quite a feature of the local landscape. Plants can get a huge amount out of the soil by capillary action and the deeper the soil the more reserves they will have to call on.

Some plants just survive
It is astonishing how some plants just seem to go on, with no need for irrigation. Gaura lindheimii (now Oenothera lindheimii, I was recently surprised to learn. It produces its white flowers pretty well all summer – shame it is such a messy grower! Bupleurum fruticosum has been incredible, planted out from large plugs from Sigmetum last year, they have never been watered and are now 1.5m high, and making a real impact. Tree seedlings also show amazing reserves, and the smaller they go in the better. Even oak tiny plants of Quercus robur seems to stay green all summer. I’ll try and do a round of good survivors later this summer.

The garden in mid-July. Only new plants (‘mulched’ with firewood logs) and the Zinnia patch are kept watered.

Flammability

Fire is an ever-present danger here, and partially accounts for the deep antipathy many Portuguese people seem to have to any kind of wild vegetation. Anything with oil in the leaves or minute hairs is more likely to burn, which means many of the classic sub-shrubs of the region: Phlomis, Cistus, Lavandula. Which unfortunately cuts out many of the really attractive silver or grey foliage plants that makes summer bearable here. Near the house one can only use them occasionally. No-one as far as I know has done any research on this. Box is apparently more or less fire-proof which makes me think that a lot of broadleaved evergreens like Bupleurum, Viburnum tinus and Phillyrea will be too. Olives burn badly by the way.

Grasses that go summer dormant (not necessarily voluntarily) are probably a great danger. Anyone growing restios deserves to be deported immediately (perhaps to Iceland) – their hollow stems are so inflammable that it has been speculated that the plants actually drove the evolution of South African fynbos egetation. Locally-native Stipa gigantea stays green and low and is almost certainly low risk.

Planting time

Little things (9cms pot and smaller) planted out late (like the beginning of summer) can survive if they are planted in Olivier Filippi – recommended depressions, which you can pour 3-5 litre of water once a week, or maybe even more. I am developing a theory that if you keep these well watered in the early part of summer they'll get their roots down enough to let them go more or less dormant the last part of summer.

Given our very mixed success with March planting of 25mm plugs (see last blog on the matter) and then not watering, this year I've started a nursery bed, lining them out to grow on for transplanting next winter. As it happens the area I chose has (rather randomly) turned out to keep them going with almost no irrigation so far this summer. In future I'm going to try to plant everything out in the autumn/earlier part of winter.

This July’s best performers.

A year of garden broadcasting !

A small fraction of the people we’ve had as guests on our Garden Masterclass public service broadcasting.

It is a year ago that Annie Guilfoyle and I launched our online broadcast service, initially called Tea Garden Talk, now Thursday Garden Chat, as a response to the Covid crisis lockdown. We had been a running a business putting on live events up til now, and the lockdown was obviously going to that what a sharp frost will do to a previously healthy tomato plant. So, we decided to go online. Around ninety broadcasts later…. ! …. here we are.

A year later is a good time to review an amazing twelve months. We're hugely proud of what we've done – building up a business at a challenging time but also providing over a hundred hours of free content on our You Tube channel.

We are of course amongst the annoying people who have 'had a good lockdown', as has the garden business as a whole. For many it has been an immensely difficult time, and gardening and growing things have been part of the emotional release that has helped them through. We know from many of the messages we have received that our programming has been part of this, helping a lot of people get through a very difficult time. That is very humbling.

We started our online broadcasts as a public service, and we will continue to do this for TGC. Like many new ventures we had very little idea what we were doing at first. Annie and I kicked off with a little interview about Garden Masterclass, and then a week or so later Nigel Dunnett and I did a Zoom presentation about our gardens. That has since had 5,715 views on our You Tube, which is deeply embarrassing because that was the first video editing I have ever done, and is very rough, and not just at the edges. I seem to remember being practically in tears trying to find an editing app I got on with. It was also one of the rare occasions I worked late into the night.

“Let's do a broadcast” I said to Anne, “we'll go through our address books and interview people or ask them to do little presentations... we'll grab everyone we know in the garden and landscape world”. “Once a week?”. “No, Annie, daily!”. We settled on five days a week. Our first guest on April 8th was photographer Claire Takacs. Then Juliet Roberts, former editor of Gardens Illustrated. We moved on to a rich and varied list of people, aiming to mix well-known personalities (Tom Stuart-Smith, Dan Pearson and Fergus Garrett were amongst our guests in the first few weeks) with, let's call them everyone else: designers, working gardeners, landscape architects, garden owners. We soon found ourselves with a pattern, people giving a presentation and then answering questions from our now global audience. It soon became clear that what people wanted at this time of unprecedented stress, and in some cases, real fear, was beautiful gardens as a source of joy and inspiration. The visual element, the ability to see gardens, landscapes, plants, beauty and good design, soon established itself as primary. Listen to some clips from Fergus’s presentation here.

However I have always wanted to steer the event towards having more discussion but this does involve a lot of preparatory work, either by ourselves or our participants. This was brought home to us by Rebecca Lemonius's lyrical tour of her historic garden in Kent (Vita and Harold before they went to Sissinghurst); apparently it was the first powerpoint she had ever done. You can see some clips here. This rapidly clocked up viewing figures in the thousands. Our audience responded to some lovely personalities; we like to think we have launched Katy Merrington as an up-and-coming star; she is the Cultural Gardener at the new Hepworth Wakefield Garden around the gallery that celebrates the work of sculptor Barbara Hepworth. We all found her very heartfelt engagement with her work and her public deeply moving. Some clips from Katy here.

Our more ambitious programmes involved my learning new techie tricks, and some high-risk timings, such the round-up we did with four interviewees in eastern Europe: one in Łodz, Poland, one in Kyev, Ukraine, and two in Vilnius, Lithuania; we actually carried that one off. Our critical panel to talk about the Chelsea Flower Show got off to an iffy start when my co-presenter forgot to introduce her old pal James Alexander Sinclair, while the panel to discuss Garden History rapidly went into depression mode over the state of heritage awareness in Britain. We have had some technical challenges: Piet Oudolf getting ‘locked out’ of the webinar he was meant to be giving, speakers suddenly disappearing leaving us to ad lib until they re-appeared - just because something works in rehearsal does not mean to say it’ll work on the night.

Annie and I both felt we wanted to stress the social engagement aspect of gardening and landscape. An early broadcast was with the President of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society who do amazing work helping deprived neighbours build and maintain public gardens. We delved into the hidden history of Black American gardeners with Abra Lee from Atlanta, Georgia and talked about school gardens, with campaigner Sonya Harris from New Jersey.

From early on, we decided to ask for donations, to cover our running costs and as some recompense for the amount of time (and sometimes stress) we both put into this. After a while though, at the end of the first lockdown period, we felt we should be reverting to something more educational, an online version of the live workshops which for the previous three years had been our main business. So we launched pay-to-view webinars, with presenters being paid on a profit-share basis. Dredging up a phrase that must have been drummed into my head when I did an adult education course many years ago, we have always insisted that these must have 'clear learning outcomes'. Our first one was with Jimi Blake in his spring woodland garden near Dublin. We then seemed to go to Holland a lot, with Jacqueline van der Kloet, Tom de Witte, Piet Oudolf, and a two-hander exploring the legacy of pioneer landscape designer Mien Ruys. If you haven’t already seen it, here is the link for our webinar programme.

A year ago we were astonished at how quickly our British audience was joined by viewers from all over the globe. Many became familiar faces as their little portraits popped up on Zoom, and we started to have little chats with the people who Annie calls 'frequent fliers'. One, whose company we have particularly enjoyed has been Wendy Hilty, who lives on one of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast, and has to deal with occasional alligators in the garden, although they do not eat her plants.

Particularly exciting has been working with collaborators. The Pampa Infinita school of garden design in Buenos Aires wanted to get Piet Oudolf to do a presentation as part of their twentieth celebrations, so we organised an event with them, with them providing interpretation into Spanish. Piet was really relaxed with his audience of over 400 and the discussion continued for over two hours. We've done similar with a Korean group, and most successfully with garden business in Japan. Sachi Tanabe is a landscape architect who works for Ikor-no-mori, a visitor destination garden and design business; so far we have run three webinars with her providing Japanese sub-titles as well as a Tea Garden Talk where she talks to some of the people making gardens on the northern island of Hokkaido.

People have been very generous with their time and support. In some cases this is going to segue into actual employment, as we find we are now having to devolve some tasks. Joanne Glättli in Basel, Switzerland, went off up into the Vosges mountains to interview Monique and Thierry Dronet in their heavenly garden of Berchigranges; again it was the first video work she had ever done, but she came up with what we feel has been one of our best Thursday events. Translations usually rely on transcription, and we're lucky in having Małgosia Kiedrzynksa to help us with this, as well as her doing some video editing for us. And we've take on Magda Pelka to help with some technial and admin support.

Things will obviously change with the end of lockdowns all over the world (even in Argentina where it has gone on for 10 months!) and the revival of live events in Britain and Holland, but we now have an international audience, which we hope to continue to serve with digital material. We look forward to getting suggestions of presenters from our audience too!

So…. come and join us….. 18.00 London/WET every Thursday here on Zoom. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83781125288

www.gardenmasterclass.org

Portuguese Garden Update

Yes, it's ages since I have done a blog posting. As you most of you may have guessed, it's because I have been so tied with the online adventure of Garden Masterclass. I've been working on a book about contemporary Dutch garden design too. Anyway, desk now partially cleared, and time to work on an update to our new Portuguese garden venture, it being a year since we got started here in central Portugal (near Oliveira do Hospital, or as I keep on exlaining: two-thirds of the way up and halfway across).

I should start out by explaining what I am trying to achieve: a minimal irrigation garden which is ornamental and supportive of local biodiversity. So, I'll firstly outline the space, then the plant groups I'm trying to work with, then do a report-back of how the first year has gone, its successes and failures.

Our more intensively cultivated space is a rectangle defined by the house, a retaining wall backing onto a road, the ruin next door (gutted in the fire of October 2017) and an elderly orchard. This had a number of narrow beds, defined by low walls of cubos (granite cubes, traditionally used as cobbles) which we have extended, so it is a bit like a monastery garden (we sometimes call it that). This is to be more intensively cultivated (although not irrigated, apart from to establish). Here there are some old camellias, roses and a few other left-overs from the previous owners, who I think had quite an interesting garden by local standards). Its a nice sheltered space to pack in all the things we want to try out, and give some attention to while they establish. Beyond this is about three quarters of a hectare of olive grove, orchard and an area that was until about 20 years ago, used from growing vines: it’s fertile with lots of annual grasses and vetches. Beyond this is a strip of thinner soil, a far more interesting flora (a wide range of annuals and perennials, some Cistus salvifolius) and some Cytisus, the latter to be eliminated as it smothers everything else, seeds madly and burns badly).

The plants:

Mediterranean natives. A rich flora, of which only a tiny amount is in commercial cultivation. How far can we go before mentioning Olivier Filippi? Not very far. Except that it is worth pointing out that he has his biases; in discussing his plant range with Alejandro O'Neill, I realise he has a strong focus on the hummocky sub-shrubs, indeed the dominant 'classic' Mediterranean plant shape; and not so hot on grasses or perennials. The big advantage of the sub-shrubs is a 365 day a year presence, their disadvantage that many are short-lived, impossible to hard prune and many are highly flammable. Herbaceous perennials and grasses however will have a long 'off season'. I’m going to go for plenty of both.

My plan is to build up as much structure and plant mass as I can with a limited range of evergreen natives: Arbutus unedo, Pistacio lentiscus, Bupleurum fruticosum, Myrtus communis – all of these are longer-lived, or resprout from the base if cut hard back, and are not especially flammable. And local grass Stipa gigantea, which is evergreen and when seen en masse (there are almost meadows of it near here) quite spectacular. I'm hoping good things from another big grass with a similar habit- Ampelodesmos mauritanicus.

I've started off quite a few of these with plants grown in alveolas florestais (landscape plugs to Americans, ?? to Brits, - +/- 18cm long, 5cm wide), from Sigmetum (an amazingly good native plant supplier in Lisbon). The myrtles I watered every 3 weeks during the summer, the rest had no water at all. 99% survival rate, and good growth.

The plants I got from Olivier Filippi are quite incredible, they had no water at all and have survived and started to grow again well this autumn. The deep pots they are grown in clearly point their roots in the right direction, and they are well-established plants too. Most impressively, I also got some smaller ground cover things in P9s too, which have also done very well, again with no watering. Achillea nobilis indeed spread to nearly a metre across, and was actively doing so well into August – so that has now been pulled out, divided and being trialled as a lawn substitute over about ten square metres.

As an aside, last summer we had 3 months with minimal rain and temperatures in the 30s for several weeks. The soil here is deep, but derived from granite, so very light, with minimal organic matter or clay, so water drains and disperses very quickly.

Jo is busy doing mosaics on these slate pillars, of which there are a great many around - they were used a posts for supporting wires for vines in the past.

Pelargonium. Widely grown of course but with a bias to perpetually flowering types, and although they clearly grow well in the ground, almost universally grown as container plants, presumably so that they can be watered and kept flowering. What interests me is that most appear to be reliably very long-lived plants (that ability to shoot from the base, which marks the true shrub), and that as well as the 'common or garden centre' cultivars there are a great many species, robust old hybrids (often quite difficult to source) and less showy classifications (like the 'Angels' or the scented-leaf varieties) which I think have great potential to be garden plants in this climate. The ease with which they can be propagated tempts me to think of mass planting in the future, alongside native sub-shrubs and grasses. They seem quite drought-tolerant too, so long as you are prepared to accept 'summer shut-down', with no flowers and leaf loss; however revival after mid-September rains was spectacular. Frost-hardiness may vary greatly though - we’ll just have to see.

Salvia. There are a lot of dry habitat species, but they are not so easy to source, and most of the garden world's interest has been in the very colourful central and southern American species. Most of the Mexican origin ones come from summer rainfall climates, but nevertheless I thought I should try some, as Salvia 'Hot Lips' and a few other of the greggii/microphylla species complex can be seen in people's gardens here, sometimes to quite large sizes. Otherwise the global salvia craze is yet to make much of an impact in Portugal. My first summer experience with some cultivars from this small quite shrubby group has been very good – virtually no water, and flowering all summer. The more lushly leafy types have been less happy: S. guarantica did not survive and 'Amistad' only just, although it may well do much better in year two. Some of these may do much better in shade than in full sun. So, I'm propagating them and will try more this coming year.

More generally, summer survival was mostly good, with just enough watering to keep new plants alive, not in growth, nor looking good – an important distinction. Given the massive size of camellias in the village, once relatively moderate water demand plants are established, there is clearly no need for irrigation once plants have established root systems.

The big experiment was to plant out some 700 25mm plugs of seed-grown dry summer climate perennials, as an intermingled 'mixed planting' in three places: 1) a bed in the 'monastery garden' mentioned and two places out in the olive grove, 2) on reasonably good-looking soil, and 3) on noticeably grittier soil, but which still had a vigorous grass flora beforehand. My reasoning was to copy what happens in this climate: autumn germination, slow growth in the winter, speed up in spring, summer dormancy. No irrigation.

The results have been disappointing: very high losses for 1 and 3 (80%), but quite good (80% survival) for 2. The one that really thrived (and flowered) was Limonium perezii, but that has now begun to succumb to frost. Eriogonum fasciculatum has been fine too with no losses and small seed grown Stipa gigantea have all survived too. Of the rest, survival was almost equally poor amongst them: Centranthus coccinea, Festuca mairei, Goniolemon tataricum, Lychnis chalcedonica, Marrubium incanum, Origanum vulgare, Papaver orientale, Penstemon barbatus. However odd plants scattered around the more established and slightly shaded part of the monastery garden did much better, especially Gaura lindhemii, and Marrubium incanum. I would do the same again, but with very occasional deep irrigation. I am also sure that the survivors will be ok for summer number two.

The lesson perhaps is that for summer drought-induced dormancy to really work plants have to be a certain minimum size? Shade, albeit minimum, may also be an important survival factor. Which is why the early succession plants characteristic of the Mediterranean (lavender, cistus and the much cursed - because weedy, aggressive and inflammable, brooms/Cytisus etc.) have an important role to play, shading slow-growing perennials and woody plants. It might even be worth planting out plugs and covering them with shade netting for summer.

What has worked was a more targeted occasional irrigation of young plants (an odd assortment of Pelargonium, Salvia and various others) put in in July, in the middle of the hottest weather. This wasn't really intentional, but I just didn't want them hanging around in pots any more. What made the difference was planting them all in a shallow depression (as recommended locally and by Olivier), so that when you water them they get a lot and it soaks down where it is needed. I tried to do this on an 'as-needed' rather than routine basis: more or less weekly to begin with but by the end of August I more or less gave up, as they were all growing so well; they have all done very well in the autumn growth period.

Limonium perezii - wonderfully drought tolerant but is it hardy?

What has worked was a more targeted occasional irrigation of young plants (an odd assortment of Pelargonium, Salvia and various others) put in in July, in the middle of the hottest weather. This wasn't really intentional, but I just didn't want them hanging around in pots any more. What made the difference was planting them all in a shallow depression (as recommended locally and by Olivier), so that when you water them they get a lot and it soaks down where it is needed. I tried to do this on an 'as-needed' rather than routine basis: more or less weekly to begin with but by the end of August I more or less gave up, as they were all growing so well; they have all done very well in the autumn growth period.

So, what next? Filling out the monastery garden with more young seed-grown plants, using the shallow depression technique, and I think getting a nursery bed ready. Next summer we hopefully will have a pump operational for our well, so that we can do occasional irrigation more easily. So I think I'll try growing plants on in an occasionally irrigated bed to ensure survival for one summer and then digging up and moving to final positions in the autumn, so that they will be considerably larger when they face their first un-irrigated summer. This will be practicable because the soil is so light that digging up and planting is very easily done.

A big learning curve, but enough has gone well to encourage lots more experimentation. Thanks to volunteers Hana Vanova and Josh Bennett for joining us and helping us, to Harald Milot who helps us one day a week, and we look forward to more progress next year.

Facing down the drought - our first Portuguese summer

The garden at the end of May before it begins to dry out: Rose Cecile Brunner, which is a great local favourite and Lilium candidum.

Our first Mediterranean summer, and a real challenge. Whether to water, or try to hang on and not? And if we do, how often, how much?

The purists, or at least those down on the Algarve or in Andalucia might object that somewhere that grows such huge camellias as the Beira region of Portugal cannot get that dry. True, it can potentially rain a lot during most months of the year, but three to four months with no rain and high temperatures is pretty testing for plants. Almost everything herbaceous dies back, grass browns and a lot of it dies (turns out a lot of the grass you see is actually annual). Trees and shrubs stay green, including those huge camellias, as there is moisture at depth. But first plants have to grow to find it.

My aim here is to create a minimal-irrigation garden. To this end however we need to be realistic, and think about how we work the growing season. Which is complicated, as it goes like this: spring - everything grows like crazy as it is warm and usually reasonably wet, I mean like crazy, you cannot believe how fast some things grow, even centimetres per day; summer – too hot and dry for much plant metabolism so most plants go into semi-dormancy; autumn – it rains and cools and there is a second spring effect, with a lot of growth, flowering, and crucially, a lot of seed germination; winter – wet and cool, deciduous trees drop leaves, but a lot of herbaceous plants grow, albeit slowly, annuals are growing too following autumn germination, often quite strongly, with some even flowering.

So what's the problem? Two semi-dormant seasons. Lots of flower in spring, some in autumn, some in winter.

The problem is a psychological-cultural one. Summer is holiday time and people on their holies want to see green lawns and flowers. So they water. Even if they don't go on holiday and just sit around their barbecues they still want to see flowers. That's the problem. The other problem, and a more fundamental one, is that this period endangers your newly planted plants. I can live with a dormant season summer alright, with a few plants in pots, but I do want my new plants to make it through, so that they will survive, hopefully to grow deeper roots come the autumn and be self-reliant next year.

Phlomis chrysophylla, with the summer leaf-drop look. Something we are going to have to get used to. The important thing is that he youngest leaves stay on!

So, lesson number one. Don't try and make stuff look good in the summer. It's unnatural and uses a lot of water. There are two howevers here. One is veg – and when we finally get the engineers from the electricity company round (a bit 'amanha' at the moment) we're going to get a pump so we can get water out of the very impressive well we have – but just for a veg patch and small nursery area. The second however is pots. Why do people in hot climates grow so much in pots? Because they are much easier to keep watered. Water plants in the ground and most of the water disperses away from the plant, but in pot it can be monopolised by the favourite pelargonium or whoever it is you have in the pot. There is a trade-off of course: fail to water just for one day at 35ºC and you can do a lot of damage, whereas for a plant in the ground there is a much bigger buffer of deep soil moisture, so the risks are reduced. That dispersal of water through the soil means of course that if you want to grow plants well through a Mediterranean summer you have to grow them in pots. 'Well' but of course unnaturally: which could be for flowers and general green cheeriness, or, in my case, because you want to crop them for cuttings all summer long. I'm able to do the latter with plants in pots but for anything in the ground, forget it. Next year, I'm going to keep all my mother plants in pots.

A huge amount of irrigation is incredibly inefficient. Local methods for vegetables involve flooding channels around the vegetables, a methodology hardly changed since Roman times; most of the water probably goes straight back down underground again. More modern growers used drip irrigation, which gets the water straight to the base of the plant. Which is great for veg but not for permanent planting, which ideally you want to root down deep and extensively and look for water themselves.

A pelargonium in summer shut-down mode, leaves turned to reduce exposure the sun and the whole plant in a state of effective dormancy.

It's that desire to get plants to find their own water that should lie at the heart of establishing perennial and woody plants here. Apart from Olivier Filippi's books and some advice from Miguel Urquijo, I have not been able to access much useful information on minimal first year watering. “Grow to keep plants alive, not to make them look good” was a useful bit of advice from a California website.

So, I'm trying the following strategy, based on the idea that the larger the container the plant has occupied on planting out, the smaller will be it's interface with the soil in its new home, and therefore the more vulnerable it will be. Smaller plants almost always establish better and in conditions like this, so much more so.

Nearly all my perennials (as opposed to woody plants) went in, in March as 25mm plugs, from a mid-October seed sowing, which is as about as close to natural process as you can get. They grew really well through spring and in some cases still look quite fresh; most are dying back now, but I am not that bothered as they are all plants of Mediterranean or steppe habitats and should be used to this. They are not receiving a drop of water.

Woody plants in containers from 0.5 to 5L. These are all getting water, because there is no way their roots have made enough contact soil to get enough to stay alive, but I'm trying to keep it to a minimum, so the variation is enormous. It's a case of reading the stress signals. A whole new art. From spending some time lurking around natural vegetation here (mostly Cytisus, Cistus, Lavendula, Arbutus) I am getting used to the summer dormancy look. Don't worry if they start to drop leaves, so long as it is gradual, and there is a bit of life left at the top of the plant. Plants less obviously xerophytic have to wait until the first sign of wilting.

There are some things I feel I have to water twice a week, others have had nothing and still look fine, most get a few litres every week in mid 30s temperatures and less otherwise. Ideally one waters less frequently than this, but our soil is so dry with no humus or clay content, that I don’t see any alternative.

The things I hate are those that don't show stress signals but suddenly go totally dead lookgin: Nepeta tuberosa, a plant of extremely dry limestone (did it overextend itself in our relatively deep soil?), Ilex crenata, Pimelia ferruginea. The latter's demise reminded me of what an Australian said to me not so long ago about a lot of Australian plants having a death wish.

All the plants I bought from Olivier Filippi are looking either alive/coping or fine, some of the latter have not received a drop. Best is the 'grass substitute trial bed', which is the worst soil in the garden and has not had any water: Thymus, Achillea and lots of funny little grey creepy things which are new to me. Very encouraging.

We are going back to England in September for a month and a half. I shall be very interested to see how things look when we get back!

Achillea coarctica, July 26, not had a drop, looks splendid. These are the kind of thing we need lots of!

Lockdown Diary - Garden Masterclass goes online

You can probably guess why I haven't posted for a long while. I have been busy. In fact this has been one of the most productive and intense periods of my professional life.

March 12th

A friend, Francisca, comes round for supper. She's involved in a botanical survey in the region (Beira Alta, inland central Portugal). We talk about the increasing worries over the covid disease and about her staying out here rather than going back home to Lisbon.

My friend Malgosia is supposed to be flying out from Poland, via friends in Madrid, in a weeks's time to help me plant up several hundred young plants. I begin to worry she may not come.

March 19th

We've driven down to the Algarve to see an English friend, Judy, for her birthday. Her family has had a house here for many, many years, long before the area got fashionable and so developed. A different world to the ascetic granite boulder littered landscape of Beira where we live. Gardens burst with plants, including Judy's, and I discuss with her about taking lots of cuttings the next morning to help stock our plot. A much more developed garden culture here. Much watching of news re. this health crisis.

March 20th

The Portuguese government are about to launch a lockdown with no movement allowed. So we decide to cut short out trip and get home ASAP. Ideas of ransacking Judy's garden for cuttings abandoned, with only one Pelargonium in the bag. Another on some waste ground near a petrol station is the only other one I can get my hands on. Jo and I spend the night in a layby north of Lisbon in the camper van.

March 21st

Annie Guilfoyle, with whom I run Garden Masterclass, and I discuss what we are going to do about our painstakingly worked out programme of events. We decide to start working out way through sequentially, rescheduling them to the autumn. People can ask for a refund, but in the event few do, which is just as well, as we have to pay quite a bit to the ticketing website and the online bank for every payment handled.

No Malgosia. It is also looking doubtful if my plannted trip to England in mid April will happen either. Oh well, that will give me more time to plant out those hundreds of seedlings that clearly no-one is going to help with now.

March 25th

We're very glad we are in Portugal. The government has acted quickly. The population have been sensible. There's toilet roll in the shops. The local garden centre is open, to limited numbers of people. Meanwhile, Britain appears to be in chaos, the government slow, clueless, the leadership bluffing. It later turns out that all the UK government pandemic planning was put on the back burner because of the need to “make Brexit happen”. Over the next few weeks, we become increasingly ashamed of our country, as the sheer incompetence of our politicians becomes apparent.

March 31st

Annie and I post a little chat between us on You Tube. Things have moved so much since then I cannot for the life of me remember what we said. I think we probably rambled on about what our Garden Masterclass business was and how we were going to try and do some stuff online, and we were not going to let our public down. Financially speaking, we are also really frightened of the consequences of mass refunding of tickets.

I vaguely recall some flanneling around. We agreed to do some webinars, and a good place to start might be doing something with Nigel Dunnett. Nigel is always up for it. He's great at publicity and explaining planting design. I send Nigel an email.

April 2nd

Jo helps me plant out seedlings, which since she is older than me finds the kneeling and getting up and down difficult. Very relieved when I decide we should stop halfway along a fairly sizeable sprayed off area of ground and put some in the garden where the soil is easier. The soil is very light, and amazingly easy to work. The seedlings in question are all 25mm plugs, tiny in other words. I sowed them in mid October, the autumn being when most Mediterranean region plants germinate. A lot are still really tiny, but I don't feel too worried as the weeds here are mostly annual and the soil so light they pull out or hoe off really easily.

April 7th

Nigel Dunnett and I do our webinar - a video about our gardens: his current one in Yorkshire, and my old one, in Herefordshire. I then have to publish it, on You Tube, but first I have to stitch together our images with our audio. I've never done video editing, and so I haven't got a clue what I'm doing. I seem to recall a long night trying to attach powerpoint images of Nigel's garden to our audio dialogue, and then to do the same with mine. I fluff something up, and lose a whole chunk of my commentary, so my garden loses out a bit. Damn! Oh well, tough, plough on.

Meanwhile I've had an idea. Rather than a string of webinars organised on the hoof, why not do a daily 'broadcast'. Everyone's at home - frustrated, bored, and quite often frightened. Between us, Annie and I know loads of people in the garden world. They're all at home too. With Zoom, we could interview them, get them to show some pictures, and we'd help keep the gardening and landscape community get through this strangest of times.

I mention to Annie, “nice idea, once a week” she said. “No, every day”. We agree on Monday to Friday. We agree that we should cast the net wide. We will ask the gardening 'celebs' we know, as well as nursery people, working gardeners, amateur growers. We later get complemented on our “egalitarian and non-hierarchical” approach. Which is lovely!

April 8th

Our first 'Tea Garden Talk' goes out with photographer Claire Takacs, who shows some stunning pictures as she talks about her work. I manage to upload to You Tube without too much trouble.

April 9th

Our second, with Juliet Roberts, former editor of Gardens Illustrated as our guest. An interview, no pictures, simple.

April 10th

Annie has an interview organised with her friend Mauro Crescini, who runs the Valfredda nursery near Brescia in Italy. Mauro is very involved with the Bergamo Landscape conference every September, a wonderful and increasingly important event. But right in the middle of the covid virus epidemic in northern Italy. We have harrowing emails from him describing ambulances all the time, day and night, every town and village losing so many, mostly older people.

April 17th

Over the last week, we've had Jimi Blake doing a wonderful tour around his spring garden. Jimi is completely dependent on visitors to his garden and workshops for his livelihood, so we are particularly keen to give him a hand. Jimi is not particularly techie though he has a good steady hand on his camera-phone. I said I'd stitch his videos together. I google 'free video editing software', download something which seems to be idiot-proof and get stuck in. Half an hour later, I jettison it, as I cannot work out how to do the simplest thing. Download another, get somewhere, learn the basics, but then something happens and I can't save it, look up instructions, watch a You Tube video on how to do it, get nowhere. Jettison that too. And so on. By the time I get to my fourth application I am practically in tears. But this one looks good, a nice combination of being intuitive and sophisticated. Great! Save film, then realise there is a socking great watermark across the middle of every image, so I fork out $50 to buy it. Money well spent. Thank you Filmora. I'll happily promote you. I have continued to use it.

Tom Stuart-Smith is our next guest. Some nice videos of the garden. Some drone footage. I fluff playing them while he talks live. But we get good numbers, and let's face it, everyone is watching dodgy videos at the moment, so we are all in the same boat.

April 21st

This was the day I was supposed to be taking a group of Garden Masterclass students around Keith Wiley's Wildside garden, and Holbrook Gardens, also in Devon. The previous day I was supposed to have picked up Elita Acosta at Bristol airport. Elita edits Verdeesvida (Green is Life), a quarterly garden magazine published in Madrid. Elita has been a tireless supporter of naturalistic planting and I wanted her to come to England to see some gardens and meet some people. But of course, I'm in Portugal, and Elita in Madrid, where things have got very scary. Her husband is a doctor, treating covid patients. He won't get a day off in weeks.

Meanwhile Tea Garden Talk has taken off. Annie and I sort of take turns booking people. We spend a lot of time on WhatsApp talking through what we are doing. In theory I suppose we discuss all decisions before committing. In practice we don't, but it doesn't seem to matter, as we really seem to think alike, and I think we have implicit trust in each other's judgement. Even though she is a dog person and I am cat person.

Today's TGT is with Claudia West, the very engaging and enthusiastic planting designer who wrote Planting a Post-Wild World with her business partner, Thomas Rainer. Except that no-one gets to see her fabulous smile because of the poor broadband connection to her Pennsylvania farmhouse. So far, so lucky with my broadband connection, which is with MEO, the Portuguese telecoms company we have so often cursed for the weeks we have spent without a connection. I dread losing my connection, more than the virus. By the end of all this however, I'm composing an email in Portuguese to the local office manager to thank them for their flawless service, as every day I download and upload gigabytes of data, and never once have I had to complain.

May 5th

Today's TGT was a lovely tour around Hestercombe, a historic garden in Somerset. Claire Greenslade, the Head Gardener, took a good half hour of video footage on her phone with a commentary, she's got a beautiful voice, and a good steady hand (oh how I am appreciating people with a steady hand on their phones!) but I curse myself for not having briefed her to hold the phone landscape fashion, not portrait, so the image is surrounded on both sides with a sort of grey fuzz, like footage of Middle Eastern wars on Al-Jazeera. But still, it's lovely, and green, and peaceful, and English, and I really felt like I had had a good and informative tour round.

By now, Annie and I are beginning to recognise our 'regulars'. They are in Amsterdam, in Chile, in Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain of course, and Ireland. A lot in Ireland, and indeed a feeling I am left with is just what a great gardening scene Ireland is developing. Before the 'broadcast' we exchange a bit of banter with those we recognise. Increasingly it feels like we are really building a community.

May 15th

A Friday, and the last TGT of the week. A slight feeling I might have overreached myself. So far we have just had one person to interview every time. This time we have a panel of four: one in Lodz, two in Vilnius and one in Kiev. Yes, that's right. Am I mad? I clearly have delusions of being a TV producer. Annie doesn't stop me, but I like to think if I proposed something really mad she would. You would do, wouldn't you Annie?

I am determined to do something about the post-communist gardening boom in eastern Europe. It's a part of the world I know well, ever since Jo had a job in Bratislava in the early years of Slovak independence. I pin down three women I know, all of them real innovators, and we agree dates, subject matter, and how they are to send me their images, we do a test the day before, with Victoria in Kiev in a black leather jacket actually driving as we did this. I want to include my friend Malgosia too – her family had greenhouses during the communist era in Poland and provided the little luxuries that meant so much to people in hard times: cut flowers, tomatoes, cucumbers. We pre-recorded her, which takes time editing, but makes it much less stressful on the day, which goes remarkably smoothly.

May 19th

Annie has gone out on a limb and invited Matt Rader, the President of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society to be our guest. A week previously we had had the society's Head of Horticulture, Andrew Bunting, talking about the society and his latest garden make-over. A bit of a feeling that the State of Pennsylvania is getting something more than its fair share of exposure perhaps, but soon dispelled by Matt's talk, which was really fantastic, showing how the PHS acts as an agent of social change through working with people across the city of Philadelphia (which apparently has some of the highest rates of poverty of any US city). Gardens go up, crime goes down. The society engages with the city's very diverse population to bring home-grown produce and beauty to all its citizens. I very much hope we can do more with this kind of social-engagement gardening in the future.

May 29th

The penultimate Tea Garden Talk. We have decided to drop down to one a week from June, with most of our focus being pay-to-view webinars. Today we have Katy Merrington who is 'cultural gardener' for The Hepworth Wakefield Gallery, a Tom Stuart-Smith public garden. Katy is one of those utterly engaging speakers, talking in a wonderful immediate way about her contact with the public. Very moving.

Time to take stock and move on. This has been an amazing experience. After we started we thought we should ask for donations, to cover some costs and maybe something to go towards our, not inconsiderable time input. We have been really astonished and gratified, and kind of humbled, by the response. People have been very generous. It's a whole new business model, which as someone who loves radical solutions, I find very exciting; it's not agonising over 'how much am I worth' (and usually underestimating your own value) it is asking the same question to your public – like I said, very gratifying. Thank you everybody.

This has been a very difficult time for many people. It has been obvious from the many emails or chat messages we have had that we have really helped a lot of people cope with this strange time. That's very special to realise. To take one example, one of our 'regulars' is a woman who has joined me on several garden tours lives with her (somewhat older and vulnerable husband) on the top floor of a block near Times Square. They have not left their flat for twelve weeks. Being able to offer people views out over so many gardens and landscapes has been really special. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank our many contributors.

We continue as Thursday Garden Chat at Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83781125288 every Thursday at 18.00 London time and we have a whole rolling programme of webinars - see www.gardenmasterclass.org/online and see what is coming up. The recordings are here. An incredible 40 hours plus!

Here’s my personal recommendations

Hardcore Horticulture

Jimi Blake's spring garden tour

Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter

Beautiful gardens, lush photography

Long Barn - Vita Sackville-West's first garden

Bill Thomas tells of Chanticleer

Cassian Schmidt takes us around Hermannshof

Marie Louise Agius takes us around Exbury

For dry summer climate gardeners

Tea time talk with James and Helen Basson

Alejandro O'Neill on Mediterranean Gardens

Public gardens and social engagement

Laura Ekasetya of Chicago's Lurie Garden

Zac Tudor walks us around Sheffield

Katy Merrington on the new The Hepworth Wakefield Garden

Gardening as social action - The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society

Gardening in a time of corona - first spring in our Portuguese garden

Lupinus luteus, an annual species widely used as a green manure. Our former garden volunteer Hana sowed these and we are hoping they’ll naturalise.

Well here we all are, in lockdown. Nearly all of us it seems. And it looks like anyone who can, is gardening. Annie Guilfoyle reported to me that on the last Saturday before lockdown her local garden centre took five times its normal turnover. The Chiltern Seeds website is shut, overwhelmed by orders. It is as if gardening is something we all turn to in a time of crisis; especially a springtime crisis of course.

Nevertheless the garden business will be hit very hard. Many nurseries and garden centres make nearly all their money in a two month spell from now until June. There will be millions of stockpiled plants that won't find buyers, and shelves stacked full ready for a spring boom that will never happen. It could not have come at a worse time for the industry. Only those who have geared up for, and able to continue offering, mail-order could come through this, which of course is continuing a trend which has been happening for some time.

The old ornamental garden whose pattern we have reproduced for the rest of this space. A little like a monastery garden? It’ll be where we try out plants, propagate from them and generally have fun.

We, Jo and I, are lucky, we are in a good place, in Portugal, a country with a reasonably competent government (unlike the UK, or even worse, the US), AND in the country, AND with a big bit of land. And, I might add, garden centres seem to be excluded from being shut down under the lockdown. On the subject of the embarassing failures of the UK government, I do an occasional blog post called Why is Britain in such a mess? which tries to explain the eccentricities and failures of the country that many anglophile garden both love but also puzzle over; there's another one coming up soon.

Trays of plug plants ready for planting - into sprayed off grass. They’ll go in at 25-30 cm spacing. Randomised.

So, we continue the story of our Portuguese garden. I explained my basic strategy in a previous post - which was basically to imitate what happens in this climate and sow seeds of hardy plants in the autumn, growing them on to plant out in the spring as 25mm plugs. A friend from Poland was going to come and help but of course she's not coming now, so Jo and I doing the planting all by ourselves. In fact by no means all the things I sowed and then pricked out into plug trays are ready; growth rates over the winter have varied enormously. So, all the things that are too little are either going to have to be grown on until the autumn (and watered :( ) or planted out in nursery beds and transplanted later.

So what were my choices when I sat down and ordered from Jelitto last autumn? and how have they done so far? Well for a start everything originated in a climate where there is a definite and potentially severe summer water shortage: which means Mediterranean climate origin, or steppe habitat, or in the case of Limonium perezii, coastal.

Ampelodesmos mauritanica, Stipa gigantea and Festuca mairei are all tough eastern Mediterranean grass species, forming distinct and decorative tussocks. Sesleria heufleriana possibly less drought tolerant but I wanted to try a shorter grass for matrix type planting.

Centranthus ruber, and Lychnis chalcedonica are two rapidly-developing, often self-seeding, possibly not that long-lived, perennials with good decorative impact. 'can't go too far wrong with them' plants.

Gaura lindheimeri (from Texas) seems to be an extremely successful perennial in many warm summer climate zones, including some pretty challenging ones. Goniolimon tataricum and Papaver orientale are both very drought tolerant steppe origin plants, the latter behaving like a bulb as it grows early and goes into summer dormancy. Also steppe origin are: Gypsophila repens 'rosea'

Jurinea mollis, Anthemis carpatica 'Karpatenschnee', Nepeta racemosa, Perovskia atriplicifolia (now Salvia yangii)!!, Phlomis tuberosa and Salvia nemorosa, but they are coming on too slowly to plant out yet. Pulsatilla vulgaris in this category too I suppose.

What is too small to be planted out in final positions this spring is going into these nursery beds. The soil is so light and extraordinarily easy to sculpt with a rake, allowing for targeted irrigation (although we intend to minimise this).

This distinction between 'Mediterranean' and 'steppe' is a very fluid one as they grade into each other, particularly in Spain where the Meseta (the high altitude plains) is definitely borderline steppe (anyone who thinks this region is Mediterranean should come in the middle of the winter!) and in the eastern Mediterranean basin where there is a continuum between the two. Through geological history, the steppe zone has moved up and down as the ice ages have come and gone; there have been long periods when there has been a continuum in vegetation between Spain and Iran, and between eastern England and China; re. the latter it is surprising how many British native plants you seen in eastern Kyrgyzstan, near the Chinese border. Origanum vulgare and Pulsatilla vulgaris are two examples of geographically very widespread plants that cross many boundaries and which cope with summer drought. The latter though is very slow, still sitting in their plug trays with only a few leaves, so we'll have to leave them for a bit.

Old cardboard boxes from moving coming in useful for suppressing bindweed (fortunately only the native little pink one).

There are various 'classic' Mediterranean region plants I'm growing from seed too: Lavandula angustifolia, Marrubium incanum, Ruta graveolens, Teucrium chamaedrys, and the odd Cistus. These tend to send down long roots and be a bit slow about growing much in the way of foliage, so they'll have to be grown on a bit slowly too.

I want to focus on Mediterranean and Eurasian natives mostly; given the terrible problems Portugal has had with invasive aliens, I'm a bit cautious about non-Iberian species. The American North-West though has many attractions however, not least because coastal Oregon has a very similar climate to northern Portugal, so all the various Eriogonium and Penstemon species are enticing for starters. So, I'm including Penstemon barbatus ssp. coccineus and Eriogonum fasciculatum. But if any of them start seeding too much I'll get rid of them. Trying new plants in a territory as open as this to invasives does require responsibility!

During the lockdown, check out www.gardenmasterclass.org - we are rescheduling all our events to the autumn, and we are going to be putting up blog posts at regular intervals and will try to put on some webinars. And, if you want to do something education check out Learning with Experts, who have a whole line of courses in gardening and garden design.

So, adios! and look after yourslves!

Jo edging the beds in the side garden. Young Cupressus sempervirens on the right - strangely hardly ever seen in central Portugal.

Re-seeders, re-sprouters and whingeing poms

“Wot, no natives?”

A wonderful ‘New Perennial’ garden, designed by Michael McCoy, near Melbourne. Yes, that Melbourne, Australia. Am I asking a naive question?

Pic. credit: Claire Takacs.

First, I had better explain what a 'whingeing pom' is to non-Brits or Australians. A 'pom' is short for 'pommie', a not always politely delivered Australian slang word for someone from Britain; the 'whingeing' refers to the fact that (traditionally) Australians have always been convinced their country is the best place in the world to live (Godzone country) and that anyone from the old 'mother country' who dared to think otherwise was slapped down as a 'whingeing pom'.

Well at the risk of being labelled one, I'd like to discuss Australian gardens and landscape design and plants in the context of developing naturalistic planting in dry climate zones more generally. The reason being that I'm working with the Australian photographer Claire Takacs on a book documenting naturalistic planting design (for Phaidon – goody!! nice big well-produced books and selling places that don’t normally do garden books, like galleries and museums) and we have found it really difficult finding examples to include. Which I find a puzzle because I have always been aware of there being a strong lobby for growing natives. But why has Claire been so stuck in finding good examples of naturalistic planting using the continent's stunning flora?

Now, confession time, my experience of the continent-nation is pretty limited: a week in Tasmania plus a few days the Australian Landscape Conference two years ago. BUT, many years ago, late eighties to early nineties, I had a nursery business, mostly perennials but a sideline in conservatory plants. Which basically meant stuff that was almost hardy and could take a bit of heat. I latched onto a lot of Australian plant material on the grounds that many new introductions from down under did rather well in early 19th century greenhouses, before being evicted by a fashion for plants from more tropical climes. So, I grew lots of Banksia, Dryandra, Anigozanthus, Melaleuca, Regelia, Prostanthera, Correa etc. To cut a long story short many of my customers tried them out in Cornwall and Devon and did rather well with them outside. When I closed the nursery, my collection became the first accessions to the National Botanic Garden of Wales where they may still be admired in the wonderful Kathryn Gustafson landscaped glasshouse. I like to go and visit them now and again.

So, I feel I know my Australian plants. One thing about them puzzled me though. Many would not take hard pruning. They just wanted to grow and grow and grow, with all their new growth at the top and many centimetres of rather unattractive dead-looking stem below. Prune them to the base and that was it.... curtains! I soon realised that this was similar to the problem with lavender and many Mediterranean sub-shrubs: they do not regenerate from the base, can't be pruned and therefore have limited lifespans as garden or landscape plants. The same is true of most species of Hebe, from rather different New Zealand climates. In the wild, they regenerate only through seed.

This was my first introduction to the distinction between re-seeders and re-sprouters, which focuses on how plants regenerate after fire (or the equivalent of hard pruning).

Now, that I am making a garden in Portugal this distinction is one that increasingly occupies me. The fact that so many good, attractive drought-tolerant plants of the Mediterranean region cannot be hard pruned and are short-lived is a huge negative factor in their use. The minority of species that can be, are of course invaluable. These are the re-sprouters. A lot of Phlomis seem to fall into this category, as do some of the most useful of foliage plants for the region: Arbutus unedo, Viburnum tinus and Pistacia lentiscus. After a fire, these re-sprout, usually vigorously (the burnt-out region of central Portugal where I am now is full of regenerating arbutus amongst seedling cistus, lavender, and brooms).

Banksia blechnifolia -was almost my favourite at the nursery, makes a great heat-proof conservatory plant. And since you ask, apparently a re-seeder although as it has minimal stem growth (it’s actually a shrub) this is not a big problem.

So, now I've gotten so aware of the re-seeder, re-sprouter distinction, I look for it everywhere. Many of the Australian species introduced to the Mediterranean are re-seeders and as they age they get bigger and bigger and eventually open out and topple over. You can see this in the otherwise rather wonderful evergreen shrub borders at Serralves in Porto, where, for example older plants of Westringia fruticosa are now showing their age.

The fact that so much of the Australian flora is made up of re-seeders rather than re-sprouters limits their use. It is all very well having really showy flowers but if they are on top of a two metre high bunch of dry twigs that's not a great reason for growing something. In addition we should add that many of the most attractive Australian species are from the South West and used to a dry summer climate and free-draining acid soils; they do not necessarily translate well to the more heavily-populated South East with different soils and climate. And, there are very few perennials. Almost none in fact. So, it is perhaps not surprising that although there has been huge interest in growing native plant species (the Society for Growing Australian Plants is one of the most impressive of any such organisation anywhere) the challenges of putting them together to make naturalistic planting combinations that work long-term is clearly a great challenge.

A Philip Johnson landscape, actually his own property driveway. All Australian! Phil is passionate about using native flora, and takes the view that many of his colleagues are still too hung up on European models of gardenmaking.

Pic. credit: Claire Takacs

On my brief trip to Australia the year before last, I discussed the re-sprouter/re-seeder distinction with quite a few people and got some rather contradictory answers. And continue to so; Carolyn Robinson whose garden in New South Wales I only know from pictures, told Claire “Ironically, the plants handling the drought least well are Aussie natives, they make up Ninety-five percent of my losses! I believe their drought strategy is not to waste energy on survival but to throw seed and die!  My perennials and grasses are faring really well. Certainly here, the naturalistic style is vindicated.”

I have also begun to realise just how poorly understood or documented this absolutely key distinction is. However perhaps I should not be surprised when there is such poor documentation of plant lifespan for our own north European garden flora. for which there is a much longer history in cultivation ? In many cases fundamental research into how to propagate or grow these plants has only just cracked the basics. The nursery trade are only interested in taking on native plants if they look good in a pot – result mass exporting of ground-covering Grevillea cultivars and precious little else (Portuguese garden centres seem well stocked, and the occasional Banksia).

Banksia marginata - yes, doesn’t it look like a Christmas tree? Well since they don’t have snow at Christmas down under…. Seriously , this one is a resprouter as it has a lignotuber underground to allow for post-fire regeneration.

One who looks like he is taking on the challenge is James Hitchmough, of Sheffield University (England) whose career in this field actually started many years ago in Melbourne. He has now been invited to develop a major planting design in the city, and James being James is not holding back from being controversial in addressing Australian audiences on the topic of why they aren't engaging more with their own flora. Not so much a whingeing pom as a very provocative one who is as he put it to me recently is “ready to give the pig a poke”. Indeed he started his career in naturalistic planting here many years ago, so he clearly knows the territory and the dangers of the well-aimed beer can (sorry, can’t help some stereotyping). James has recently been posting some amazing pics on his instagram feed of Australian flora as well as sharing information on his planting plans for the city.

Meanwhile, I'd urge everyone who gardens in seasonally dry climates to try to get to grips with the resprouter-reseeder distinction. We will never progress in these places unless we understand our planting material better.

Michael McCoy website here.

Philip Johnson website here.

Creating a new garden ..... in Portugal !

I have not done a blog posting in what feels like ages – very busy, amongst other things, with starting a new garden in Portugal. We're here, having followed Jo’s daughter and family who wanted to bring their children up to get European passports. I've never lived in another country and now (at the age of 62) if I don't I never will. And good to be in a country which is going places (albeit a bit slowly at times), rather than one which seems determined on a kind of slow and national suicide. Not that we're selling up in Britain, as we continue to keep a little house in Bristol, and I'll be working from there quite a bit. But, quite honestly, its good to be out of our depressing, hijacked country for stretches of time.

So, in Portugal we are, “two thirds up and half way across”; and for those with a better grasp of Iberian geography, an hour east of Coimbra and halfway to the Spanish border from the Atlantic coast. The Atlantic indeed tends to dominate the climate for much of the year – rain and grey skies can dominate for weeks, but we also get long periods of clear high pressure and in summer the climate goes definitely Mediterranean with a hot dry season from June to September. So, not the classic Mediterranean climate by any means – I think most people who hear that we are in Portugal think immediately of the Algarve and long days of sunshine by the pool. Wrong! The nearest climate parallel I can think of is Portland Oregon (but thankfully minus its occasional Arctic blast).

Understanding climate in a transition zone like this often involves talking about 'lines', defined either by minimum temperature or water stress. There is the 'olive line', south (or downhill) of which it is possible to grow them (and in a way this perhaps best defines the Mediterranean climate region), the 'orange line' (ditto for citrus) and the 'box line' (south of which you forget about box and grow myrtle instead). We are just north of the orange line (the valleys here are too frosty for them) and well north of the box line. I find myself talking about the 'camellia line' which I think is a little to our south; there are some enormous camellias in the village and so these plants (naturally from a summer rainfall climate) must be able to get their roots down deep enough to access soil moisture in the summer. A bit further north, around Porto, summer rainfall kicks in and the camellias grow huge, expansive and decadent.

We have inherited a little garden of stone-edge formal beds, and a few shrubs, including the never-stop-flowering Solanum rantonnettii, which I used to grow when I had a nursery business back in the 1980s; and about a one hectare terreno of burnt-out, but recovering, olive trees and some elderly (and interestingly unburnt) other fruit trees. This region was severely affected by the fires of October 2017 (please see my blog postings on Portugal's ecological problems ). And... it's all flat! Which is unusual here. And wonderful easy-to-work soil, probably very acid (it is virtually all granite) although towards the back of the area the wildflower population suddenly gets better (perennial species taking over from lush arable weeds) so I think the soil must be thinner; and in fact this area has some re-generating oak – 'English oak', Quercus robur, which gives some idea of the species' tolerance for different climates and the fact that it shows we are only marginally Mediterranean.

The little formal garden at the side of the house, with porcelain seed pod sculptures we brought from England (some people think they are slugs!). Solanum rantonettii still in flowering mode. These beds will gradually get filled with salvias, pelargoniums, Mediterranean silvers, cistus, abutilons and many many more.

What's the plan?

Basically, try out everything we think might thrive and then go with the survivors. We'll be doing this mostly in the little side garden where we can give new plants some attention, such as watering to help establish. Secondly trying out some more ambitious large-scale planting combinations further out where any irrigation will be impossible. I have decided I want to use Stipa gigantea as a theme plant -it's locally native and I like the idea of having great drifts of it linking the different areas together and creating a kind of meadowy haze between, below and around the olives, which is a bit how you see it locally as a woodland edge plant. Plantings out here will be made from plants put in as small as possible to maximise the root penetration of the soil and therefore increase the chances of them having access to moisture during the dry summer. I have visions of intermingled perennial beds, but since these will either be Mediterranean or steppe climate species they can be expected to die back during the summer. Dry season interest will have to be maintained with shrubs, of which the region has a great many. Having said that, most of these are sub-shrubs, which tend to be short-lived, and are often inflammable, more on this in another blog.

Jo has planted out a few veggies, but this is basically going to be a plant trialling area. If you look carefully, you can see a camellia just coming into bloom.

Mediterranean climates

We have a stereotyped image of a Mediterranean climate as being hot and dry. Which is really only the summer, which is the dormant season for plants. Growth typically restarts in the autumn with the first rains, so it makes sense to think of this as 'spring no. 1' rather than 'autumn'. Growth can then cease or at least slow down in the winter before reviving in 'spring no. 2' which segues into the early summer maximum growth and flowering, which is when the majority of the region's bulbs, shrubs and annuals (and the few perennials) flower, and the countryside can be extraordinarily colourful. Drought then leads back into the dormant season. Where we are in central Portugal the winters are not that cold, so growth actively continues – all my seedlings in trays are making slow growth and on our land the weedy annuals like wild radish, grasses etc. are all actively growing.

Hana Vanova, our Czech garden volunteer (recruited through Workaway) planting out some of the plants I bought from OIivier Filippi. Hana has been invaluable during our first few months. She fell in love with gardening while working in Devon, and aims to return there.

With our garden volunteer Hana, in an area of ground sprayed off and ready to receive plants. Hana has been doing a great job pruning our recovering olives, which got burnt badly in the 2017 fire.

The weeds

Always a major issue with any ambitious garden (actually I don't yet know how ambitious I'm going to be). Perennial weeds, grasses in particular are the curse of naturalistic plantings in Britain, particularly in the wet mild west. In Mediterranean climates annual weeds are far more important and thankfully easier to deal with. The lush grass that fills our patch of olives looks just like the suffocating competitive grass that smothers all before it in the west of England. But.... it is not the same. Crush it (as beneath the wheels of the tractor of the guys who came to cut out the burnt-out olive trunks) and it all dies, goes yellow and doesn't recover. The ground in September/October is covered in a dense carpet of germinating annual weeds, including grasses. I'm not even sure that any of that lush green is a perennial grass. That's something I'm thankful for.

To be continued …..

Jimi Blake at Hunting Brook - Planting Innovator

A Beautiful Obsession is out, the book I wrote with and about Jimi Blake last year. In time for Christmas if you need a present for a gardening friend. Hint, hint. Actually its been out for a bit now and getting good reviews. What I'm particularly happy about is the design, by Michelle Noel for Filbert Press; it's colourful, dynamic and modern. Just like its subject.

It was Anna Mumford, who runs Filbert Press, who first suggested we work together on a book. Jimi has done garden writing himself but confessed that he was just too busy gardening, running tours, doing lectures etc. to write anymore himself.

Jimi, for those who haven't yet come across him, is the voice of gardening in Ireland. He is a total plant nut and has a terrific gift for communicating his enthusiasm to others. Researching the book with him was a rather breathless experience as I constantly had the feeling I couldn't keep up, and then he goes and digs up a huge border in the garden and replants it! Nothing stays the same for long at Hunting Brook Gardens, which is where he has been garden making since 2002. Jimi is an innovator, but he also gets bored quickly. Fortunately there is enough space here for some long-term experimental planting as well as borders that get rethought and replanted every few years.

Jimi can be iconoclastic. I first saw the garden and met him when he was just coming out of his perennial and grass phase. He can be surprisingly critical of many of the late summer perennials which most of rate so highly and he cannot understand why people would want to plant the same dahlia cultivars every year. His own dahlias are increasingly a dynamic mix rather than a set of cultivars; he like to save seed of good single dahlias and sow some every year – genepool rather than cultivar gardening.

If all you saw was the planting around the house you might think Jimi was completely focussed on exotica - but there is a lot more to him and Hunting Brook Gardens

Visiting at the time of year when Hunting Brook is at its height, late summer, the visitor might be excused for thinking that this is one of those west coast mild climate gardens. Not really; Jimi was very quick to point out to me on an early visit that this is nearly a thousand feet (300m) high, and “one of the coldest gardens in Ireland”. So any exotica you do see is likely to be hard won, and a realistic proposition for many others. A love of big leaves and bright colour combinations dominates the summer-orientated plantings around the house, and there are many components here which are either annual or half-hardy, and therefore can be, and inevitably, will be, changed every year. Further into Jimi's considerable acreage of woodland there is a lot more long-term thinking going on. A shaded area just behind the house is home to a rich collection of spring-flowering plants, including erythroniums and trilliums which need long-term commitment to growing and propagating. Jimi sees this area as not just an end in itself but as somewhere to produce plants he can then plant out down in the steep shaded valley he has. He thinks big and clearly envisages drifts of woodland plants.

Another long-term aspect of what Jimi is doing it growing many exciting evergreen species, particularly Araliaceae. This whole family somehow seems to have been largely ignored in the great era of late 19th/early 20th century plant hunting. Think every variant of Fatsia japonica your imagination can come up with. Mostly of New Zealand or east Asian origin, this dramatic group of plants has great potential for garden or landscape use, with plenty being hardy enough for quite extensive use.

Jimi is like a one-man R&D department for ornamental horticulture. He's not alone in the family as a plantsman however. The book is dedicated to his mother Kathleen, and his sister June has a garden on the other side of the hill with a growing reputation. A family to watch.

Down in the woodland is where the real long-term interest of Hunting Brook will be, as Jimi plants out more and more Araliaceae and other relatively untried foliage plants.

Photo credits to Bernard van Giessen and Richard Murphy whose pictures illustrate the book - find out more here.

Climate Change and the Death of the Ornamental Garden?

XR - Extinction Rebellion at the recent demonstrations in London. My wife, Jo, is third from right.

I have always had a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that ornamental gardening is a vaguely decadent activity. After all for a lot of people in the world gardening is about growing veg and food crops and so is crucial to survival, the growing of plants for their looks or the sheer joy of growing them must seem a great luxury. With the threat of uncontrolled climate change this nagging feeling may be prescient. We potentially face the death of the ornamental garden. In the lifetimes of many of us who will be reading this.

I do not wish to sound alarmist or seem willfully pessimistic, but the signs are not good. We may get to the point where, once again, the demands of food production thrust us back to 'gardening for survival'. Gardeners and growers are very much at the forefront of noticing the changes, almost everywhere: hotter summers, longer and deeper droughts, more erratic and unusual weather. Having spent some time in Holland this summer, I was surprised to see so many fields of crops being watered, and gardens being laid out with irrigation pipes. Many I spoke to mentioned this as being a new and disturbingly alien experience for the country.

So here, in the spirit of XR – Extinction Rebellion, is my realistic-pessimistic bit of futurology. I want to stress that XR's preditions are thoroughly supported by the work of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists. Unfortunately the work of these climate scientists is not making the impact it should - all environmental activists of today still suffer from the backwash of Paul and Barbara Ehrlich's extraordinarily ill-conceived book of 1968, The Population Bomb, which was so little supported by evidence and so wildly wrong in its predictions (mass famine and water wars by the 1990s) that its refutation has kept American climate sceptics in ammunition ever since.

When many garden people talk of 'climate change and its impact on gardening' it tends to be couched in the rather genteel way of suggesting we might need to shift our range of plants somewhat and that perhaps some warmer climate crops may become practicable in the south of England; and that Kent might start to produce better bubbly than Champagne itself. I would like to suggest that these complacent thoughts might be a very long way indeed from the very real possibilities. It is becoming increasingly obvious that not only are CO2 levels rising alarming, partly owing to the pig-headidness of leaders like Trump and Bolsinaro (and of the electors who put them in power, and in particular of the media moguls like the Murdoch family who have misled them with misinformation for years), partly to the general slowness with which the human race has started to change its technologies and partly because it looks frighteningly as if the time lag between CO2 going in to the atmosphere and its impact on climate is such that what we are experiencing now might be the result of what we did ten or even twenty years ago. If so, imagine what it might be like in ten or twenty years time. And that many of the processes involve feed off each other in a positive feedback cycle, e.g. ground left bare by melting ice will heat up a lot quicker. Runaway climate change is a real possibility.

Such runaway climate change would result in drastic sea level rises and life-threatening heatwaves over much of the globe. Huge population shifts would follow as people flee the world's flooding lowlands or insufferably hot regions, which would threaten all our social and political structures. Gardening will inevitably turn back to its food growing roots – there will simply not be space for the luxury of growing anything else. I'm not suggesting that we'll all be growing our own food. Far from it, as in age of climate unpredictabilility, global trade networks will be more important than ever in getting food staples (by which I mean, our calorie crops like wheat and rice) from where they can be grown to where the are needed. What is highly likely to change is the need to grow fruit and vegetables (high volume, low weight – therefore expensive to transport) closer to where they will be eaten. The no-doubt-finally-introduced realistic carbon taxes will make their transport prohibitively expensive and so much of the land currently used for growing them en masse will need to be devoted to the all-important calorie crops instead. So finally, the rather idealistic and often poorly-thought through, urban veg growing movement of a few years ago will finally come of age. Goodbye inedible geraniums, tulips and roses; hello cabbages and potatoes (the one calorie crop practicable to grow on this small scale). Hostas and a few other edible-ornamentals may survive as luxury sources of vitamins.

The social dislocations caused by mass evacuation from the flooding lowlands will be so massive that much economic activity will be lost, as factories and offices flood. One skill that can be (and will need to be) re-learnt relatively quickly is that of vegetable growing. Many of the lowland refugees will become a new class of peasant farmers as every little patch of land around all the surviving human communities, many of them inevitably shanty towns built of scavenged materials, will have to be cultivated. We could end up like Haiti, where there is virtually no nature left, only intensive smallholding.

The outlook for nature could be grim. Just at a point where we were beginning to talk of rewilding, of handing increasing amounts of the earth's surface over to nature (in the developed world at any rate), we may get to the point that any surface capable of cultivation will need to be given over to growing food. Nature reserves and national parks will be ploughed up, or handed over to intensively-reared animals (if the wasteful practice of meat production is still permitted). With our backs to the wall, there will probably be much regret but little real opposition to such a human take over of our surviving wild spaces, and the resulting mass extinction of wild animal and plant species.

Enthusiasts may keep plant species extant by growing them in narrow strips between their veg crops or on green roofs or other spaces where cabbages and herbs will not thrive. They will probably swap them enthusiastically amongst themselves to keep genetic diversity alive. Vast numbers will probably fall by the wayside. There is a chance though that the coming together of genomics and computer software will allow species to survive long-term storage as digitally-coded DNA, ready to be re-written to real DNA when conditions (maybe in a few thousand years, even tens of thousands of years) allow.

The new class of vegetable growing peasants may well manage being organic, but the producers of the calorie crops will not have the luxury of indulging a system that only produces 60-70% of the yield per area of 'conventional'. Central to non-organic farming is synthetic nitrogen fertilizer; indeed around a third of the world's population is indirectly fed by it. Of all the industrial processes we rely on to supply our resource-hungry lifestyle, this is probably the easiest to render sustainable, using biogas methane to power the energy-greedy process instead of natural gas. On the other hand, key crops could just possibly become nitrogen-fixing like legumes, which was always the pot of gold at the end of the genetic modification rainbow.

Our other great plant nutrient need is phosphorus, which is in fact pretty much our most seriously depleted vital resource. Environmentalists have always warned about diminishing resources, despite the fact that there has not been much evidence for this; quite the opposite, as if we were really facing the last oil, the last iron and the last coltan, we would almost certainly have learnt to manage things a great deal better much earlier. Phosphorus however is getting really low, and once those deposits are exhausted there is nowhere to turn. Agriculture has, until recently, been incredibly profligate with the stuff, and foolishly, the one renewable source of it, sewage waste, has never been properly exploited by modern agriculture– modern people (unlike our ancestors) don't like the thought of using it as a fertilizer. That is going to have to change.

Genomics and high-tech gene editing and modification procedures will give us some hope. Laboratory procedures that used to be slow and vastly expensive, get cheaper and easier and more automated over time. The local artisan plant breeding lab in a shed, producing new genetically-modifed crops for whatever local climate or other extremes may throw at them, may be a real possibility. But not if the industries that produce the lab equipment and the accompanying computer software are under water.

I don't think many passionate gardeners only want to grow veg, as the waters rise around them. But if the politicians don't act, or be forced to act, that's where we'll be. All of us.

Ros Wiley - a tribute to an artist in the garden

I was very sorry to hear that Ros Wiley died recently, after an illness of some months. Ros was married to Keith Wiley and was the co-creator of the Wildside garden in Devon for which Keith is well-known. Any of us who knew Keith also knew Ros as an essential part of the garden team but also her unique contribution as an artist. I always felt she was one of the very few who could translate naturalistic planting onto canvas. I’m putting up a few images here with some text from an article I wrote about her for Gardens Illustrated in 2014

“The garden has always been my subject matter, I have always loved painting plants, and I have all this material on my doorstep... I love the colours, I just love colour”. So says Ros Wiley, whose husband Keith is the creator of Wildside, one of the most innovative, daring, and vibrant new gardens in Britain.

Photographing or painting naturalistic, perennial-based plantings, or wild plant communities like meadows is always a challenge. The loose, wispy, fine-textured mass of inter-twined stems, grasses, open flower heads, seed cases and complex arrangements of foliage have proved very difficult to represent artistically. Ros is one of the few who can do it successfully. Her paintings initially make an impact through their vivid colour, but many also represent the apparent chaos of stems and foliage which makes up contemporary perennial planting. Although her images of plants are stylised, and sometimes even verging on the abstract, it is very often easy to recognise particular species – she has a remarkable gift for capturing the essence of a plant.

As Keith's co-worker, Ros has an intense intimacy with plants and his planting style. The couple met at Wye College, Kent, when, as she explains, “he was doing Horticulture, I was doing Environmental Science, and then we came down to the Garden House around 1980... I was working in the nursery while Keith worked in the garden”. Until 2004 Keith was head gardener at this very special Devon garden, which gave Ros an opportunity to paint a very wide range of planting styles and garden habitats. When the couple left the Garden House, to start up their own garden business just down the road, Ros had a whole new world to explore. While it is Keith's unique vision which has created the garden at Wildside, an extraordinary private landscape of miniature valleys carved into the local shale, and then intensively planted, Ros has played a crucial support role, planting, propagating and weeding.

Never formally trained, Ros describes how “I have always painted, I studied Design at college, not painting... but's it's not in the family... we were Cornish farming people”. Some of her work is of particular scenes but a lot are general and non-specific, “I get ideas from lots of images, I take photographs and work from them in winter, it's a kind of jamming”. she explains, “very much like when Keith does planting, that's jamming too... its like going for a run, I get high”.

”There are a lot of parallels to what Keith does in the garden and what I do” says Ros, “we think of the garden as an art form, I love the way that he plants, drifts and dots of colour, he knows what I like to paint so I think it influences the way he plants too”. “We feed off each other” says Keith, “there are new areas I'm developing, where I'm going to try to make some colour mixes that Ros has painted”. Planting and painting influencing each other – a truly creative, and almost unique partnership.

Wildside Garden Openings 2020

see

wileyatwildside.com

Nori Pope of Hadspen Garden: a personal recollection

Quite often when I do a talk or run a workshop these days I ask the audience “who here had ever been to Hadspen?”. As the years run by, it gets to be a smaller number every time. Most of the newer generation of gardeners have never heard of the place. Which is sad.

Hadspen House during the 1990s, into the early 2000s was the most talked-about and raved-about garden in Britain. It was run by a Canadian couple, Nori and Sandra Pope. It was all about colour. Colour. Colour. Colour. And plants. And it was fantastic. And the Popes were fantastic.

I've just heard that Nori died, a few weeks ago, after a long struggle with Parkinsons and dementia. The couple had retired to Vancouver Island sometime in the noughties, leaving Somerset to be with their family after many years of what was famously an almost accidental exile.

Please not that this is a personal recollection and commentary, not an obituary as such.

PICTURE CREDITS: CLIVE NICHOLS

This shouldn't matter, but it does: they were both (is, of course, in Sandra's case) incredibly good-looking. The beautiful garden made by beautiful people.

I wrote about the garden several times, and managed to retrieve a few things from around the millennium year, but to be honest I cannot remember who they were for. In 2002 I had noted that “the couple had seen the garden whilst on holiday, and hearing that it was up for rent, took the bold step of taking it on as a business, opening the garden to the public and running a nursery. Since then they have worked at creating a garden of bewitching beauty, much of its based on experimental border plantings that play with colour, with a boldness, intellectual rigour and emotional depth that puts it in a league of its own.” (This had been in 1987).

“Colour is what makes Hadspen really special, especially the harmonies that are central to the couple's design philosophy. They have searched out an extraordinary range of flower and foliage colours, often planting up areas of borders around such rare shades as dark purple, salmon-apricot or pale orange, and then making seemingly effortless transitions from one to another. Sandra says that we use colour as the theme... the combinations of colour are the melody and we build on that thematically... ... it’s the same way that someone composing a piece of music would build on, say a chord.... to a whole symphony. We don’t think just about colour...but it is a place to start... it’s so diverse, you can make a monochrome border, or you can create harmonies and contrasts. Colour even played a part at the beginning of their relationship; Nori was running a nursery in Canada when he met Sandra who at the time was trying to create a red garden. “Sandra introduced me to colour... and in the courting of her I had every red plant known to man” he says.

“There is no separation: art, music and gardening are all one thing” says Nori, and one of the things that I love about talking to the couple is the way that they endlessly move from one to another with such ease. He really did say to me once “I'd love to plant the Mahler Second Symphony”.

The only person I know who talks like this now is Christine Orel, who should be the Pope's successor. Christine, who works in Germany, for private clients and garden shows, is an incredibly gifted designer, who is also passionate about music. She also writes and explains well.

Anyway, back to Nori. It was always special, visiting Hadspen, talking to them both, mostly to him – he was the bigger talker. So articulate, about plants and gardens and colour. Especially colour. He had a wonderful dry wit. Especially about opening the garden to the public. We used to stand and talk by the potting bench that served as a front-of-house. I remember one family who came in, flinging questions at Nori, paying up their ticket price and heading out; “teas and toilets... teas and toilets, that's all we are, providers of teas and toilets and a nice little garden on the side” or words to that effect.

And what was left of Hadspen? Nori and Sandra went back to Canada in 2005. They wrote a book for Conran Octopus, which contained about a third of the wisdom they (mostly he) wrote down. Too late in the day, I tried to access papers, notes, unprinted material, photographs. All to no avail. There was a tone of bitterness in Nori's last words to me on the phone from Canada, something along the lines of “so the English garden establishment has finally decided to take notice of us”. I hadn't realised it had been like that for them. Lionised, but perhaps excluded too?

The garden at Hadspen could not continue. Too personal. The owner, Niall Hobhouse, made a painful, unpopular, but I think correct decision. Bulldoze the lot and start again. Anything of value had in any case gone, looted by invitation, by the generous and sensible, but in the end, realistic, decision of Niall. By the good garden ladies of Somerset.

Niall then held a design competition for a new garden, the winner to receive a job as creator/gardener. A great and bold idea that came to nought. I am not sure why. I was on the (forty strong) jury. None of the designs really stood out. And in any case, Niall Hobhouse was incapable of making a decision. A classic intellectual dilettante, who had never shown much interest in the garden while the Popes were there, or indeed ever done anything remotely practical or useful in his gilded life, the best he could do was commission some landscape architects to come up with a plan, immediately laughed out of court by anyone who had ever handled a wheelbarrow, and of course, organise a conference to discuss the jury non-award, non-event, a comedic absurdity which is painful to recall, as a panel of entirely theoretical gardeners waved their hands uselessly in the air, spinning meaningless words that as it says in the wonderful English expression “buttered no parsnips”, and certainly dug no holes, planted no plants, warmed and fed no retinas.

Hadspen House and garden now has a new life. A total break with the past, new funds, new ideas. Something totally different has happened - a hotel and spa, called ‘The Newt’. Perhaps, realistically, the best outcome. I look forward to seeing it. I wish them all the very best. But I am sorry that Nori and his memory and his deep and extensive, and lightly-borne, generously shared, hard-worn, occasionally bitchily-delivered, finessed to the last shade, hue and tone of the colour chart, well-labelled, passionately-gained, knowledge........ may be too soon forgotten.

Dutch garden and landscape travels

An aralia to stab the horizon and silhoette the sky. Perennial/prairie style planting somehow fits so well into the big open agricultural horizons but the occasional bit of drama helps too. An Arjan van Boekel garden.

Well here we are. Another slightly lonely night in the camper van. I'm trundling around The Netherlands researching a possible book on contemporary Dutch garden design. It was an idea the leading Dutch garden photographer Maayke de Ridder and I thought up some time ago. We think we have a publisher now but it is all still a bit speculative. Anyway a great way of meeting people and learning more about a dynamic gardening and design culture.

I come here regularly anyway, but it is a long time since I spent so much time travelling the country's highways and byways. Part of the concept for the book is the background of the Dutch landscape, so I'm popping into various places along the way to explore this theme. I think I'm getting off the beaten track alright – my first night here after crossing over from Belgium was in a campsite, where my arrival caused a certain amount of consternation. I don't think they'd ever had a non-Dutch visitor. Eventually, a girl of around 13 was hoiked out of a swimming pool and deposited in a towel in front of the computer to book me in in halting English, stabbing her fingers at the keyboard with dripping fingers.

A corner of the private garden of designers Monique Donders and Pierre van der Heiden. I've gone on about the non-classical way a lot of Dutch designers works with clipped woodies in a 'non-classical' way; the other side of the coin is a greater adventurousness in selecting plant material. Anyone wanna guess what these bobbly chaps are? Enkianthus campanulatus! They must look amazing in autumn.

Of course, it was back in the mid 1990s when I first started coming here, but my focus then was naturalistic planting, which matured into the so-called Dutch Wave. But since then I have become so aware of how designers here are very good at working with small spaces. Not surprisingly perhaps. But I also like the way they have a certain air of modernity about them that means they could not possibly be British. Its difficult to decide why, and the funny thing is that Dutch colleagues find it difficult to accept too, but there is a certain way in which forms and shapes are distributed that no British designer would do. It's something to do with the fact the British desingners still seem often to be still stuck to a kind of Renaissance geometry in the way they use structure, whereas Dutch ones don't. Instead there is a kind of chunky modernism, a Bauhaus gene always in there somewhere. I find it refreshing, somehow freeing up the use of clipped woody plants to more uses.

The postman probably curses them, but the cement steps on the way to Frank van Linden's front door are a bit like the steps in a Japanese garden, slowing you down so you take more notice of your surroundings on the way, which basically means viewing a diverse range of perennials.

I'm not going to name check every designer in the book, and in fact I have not met them all yet. Frank van der Linden (www.vannaturetuinarchitectuur.nl) is one of those consummate plantsman who grows some of his own plants for jobs. He is, I suppose, on the Piet Oudolf wing, endlessly exploring the possibilities of the huge range of plants, mostly perennials, now commercially available. Some fantastic perennial plantings sprout from the drawing board of Pierre van der Heiden and Monique Donders too (www.denkersintuinen.nl), although as I discovered things get a little complicated here. Monique is front of house, meets clients, checks out sites, Pierre designs, but does not always visit the site. Yes really! They have a very successful practice, with a huge range of gardens on their website, and in reality too. Monique took me to eight. Complex planting however they delegate to a planting specialist. How sensible! I wish British designers did that more often. Ruurd van Donkelaar is also employed by Noël van Mierlo (how nice to meet another Noel) who creates adventurous gardens with a more informal character (www.vanmierlotuinen.nl). He took me to one, in Eindhoven, which was beautifully and sensitively maintained, particularly as regards the handling of self-seeding perennials.

Nico Kloppenburg is a dab hand with hedges, but also with using big blocks as another way of creating barriers and filling space. These are clipped bamboo, a Fargesia species, a softer alternative to more usual woody plant material.

Ruurd van Donkelaar is that planting specialist (www.ruurdvandonkelaar.nl). I visited him and his wife Deyke, in their cottage in Drenthe, their garden embedded in a nature reserve. His family have run nurseries or botanic gardens for good on 200 years. The nature reserve around the house was interesting, for the light it showed on an aspect of Dutch landscape which I am also keen to explore in the book. He and Deyke live surrounded by a 'new' nature reserve, the result of tree planting some thirty-odd years ago. This was compensation for woodland destroyed during a 'countryside rationalisation' exercise at the time. Overseen by government, dykes, ditches and field boundaries were straightened out to make everything easier (and more profitable) for farmers; but this being more enlightened times, nature had to be compensated by the creation of some new and more rationally-situated nature. I could never imagine this happening in Britain! It typifies an attitude to land and resources that I hope to explore more in the hoped-to-be book.

As well as Frank, the other real perennial specialist I met up with on this trip was Arjan van Boekel, who definitely sees himself as inspired by Piet Oudolf's work. He is much more open to integrating shrubs into his work with perennials though, as well as wildflower meadow planting. Definitely a young guy to watch to take the Dutch Wave forward. (www.boekeltuinen.nl).

A vignette of planting from a Noël van Mierlo garden in Eindhoven. The garden is full of this kind of fine detail. It had a very extensive and perceptive write-up from James Golden: https://federaltwist.com/part-3-noel-van-mierlos-balancing-act-with-carextours/

Talking of which, it was very interesting to talk with Nico Kloppenburg (http://nicokloppenborg.nl)about woody plants, perennials and the Dutch Wave. Of the twelve or so designers we have in the book, he is the most focused on both history and the use of woody plants. Nico is frequently involved in restoration projects, which he regards as a kind of creative editing (he is not one for exactly replicating a particular period) and is particularly inventive in his use of clipped woody plant material. He sees himself as very much inspired by Mien Ruys, the garden architect who dominated landscape and garden design here for much of the 20th century, and who transformed clipped woody plants from their traditional role into something much more modernist – that Bauhaus gene I mentioned earlier. His gardens develop slowly; he is not in sympathy with big perennial schemes, which he argues are a kind of instant gratification for the client who can spend out on thousands of perennials for an effect which will be nearly complete within two years. Real gardens, he would point out, take much longer to grow and develop, and in the long term are far less dependent on skilled maintenance. This is perhaps not an argument against perennials as such, more about their commissioning. Food for thought, most certainly. Visits here always provoke and make me think.

Meadow (lots of wild carrot, Daucus carota) with intervening blocks of lawn. In a garden by Arjan van Boekel. Simple but effective; children love the different size spaces, and hugely flexible, in that the areas of lawn and meadow could be easily changed over time.

Mind the Gap!

Why is so much perennial planting so gappy?

Why do so many gardens, private and public, which are supposed to be about growing plants, look like displays of soil or exhibitions of mulch?

Here, I'd like to address the whole issue of planting density, with some observations based on the results of a seven year trial which has just been published in The Plantsman journal.

One of my high density trial plots in May 2017.

Over the course of gardening history, planting density has been getting tighter. Back in the 17th century, gardeners would plant out garden plants in splendid isolation, to emphasise their rarity and to draw attention to them. By the 19th century we had got as far as the ancestor to the modern border, nice and full by the end of the growing season but still pretty gappy by our standards. The modern Beth Chatto and Margery Fish inspired planting style allows, even encourages self-seeding and a certain amount of intermeshing, but there still seems to be an underlying fear amongst gardeners in letting plants get really tangled up in each other.

Part of the issue with planting density is perception: most of us seeing the activity of growing plants as growing individuals of desired plants rather than creating a vegetation which contains desirable plants. We imagine that plants are somehow more easily appreciated and managed when there is a cordon sanitaire of bare soil or mulch around them.

These are the diagrams of the research plots discussed in The Plantsman article

High density planting is sometimes criticised for obscuring the natural form of the plant. But what forms do plants, perennials in particular, really take? Growing something on its own may result in a pleasing form – an echinops might be a good example, a nice neat clump of basal leaves with a flower head emerging as the summer progresses. But a geranium? That neat hemisphere of leaves quickly turns to collapse after, or even during, flowering. The fact is that most perennials do not grow on their own – the denizens of low-density, semi-arid environments being the exception. Most grow at very high densities compared to garden plants and typically adapt their growh forms in response to the crowded environment around them. Some, and geraniums are a case in point, are extremely flexible and plastic in their habit of growth, with leaf and flowering stems which elongate and twist their way through surrounding plants seeking support from them in their struggle to get to the light.

Modern thinking on perennial planting density tends to favour around seven to nine plants per square metre, considerably more so than conventionally. Plantings quickly look full and potentially a good canopy can develop, but only if the plant forms used mesh together – which single cultivar blocks of upright growers often never do, which is a good reason for using an 'intermingled' approach to planting. Both German Mixed Planting systems and Piet Oudolf use plants at this density, with the former filling in quickly and the latter potentially so, depending on what is being used. Management, which conventionally has always been focussed on the integrity of individual plants tends to prevent meshing together. Spreading and seeding can fill, and perhaps should, fill the gaps.

Interested in seeing how competition would affect plants I set up a trial in 2010 in our garden in Herefordshire. I subscribed then to the popular notion that competitive perennial species on a moist fertile soil would inevitably have a fight to the finish and one would end up dominating. Which I still believe, does sometimes happen. What this trial showed however is that this is by no means inevitable. So, do please read the article (link at the top).

One thing the trial shows is that some perennials at higher densities operate differently to perennials at lower densities. When we put plants together at high densities we make them compete, which is where ecology begins to take over from horticulture. Which is why the distribution patterns of plants in nature are often so radically different to those in the garden. A particularly important lesson is that what might form a neat clump in the conventional border may break up and become more mobile and more widely distributed at higher. This was very much the case with Geranium phaeum and Phlomis russeliana in the trial.

With this intermingled higher-density planting style, I believe it is possible to work towards developing successful intermingled perennial plantings. You see this in remarkably few gardens. Even Nigel Dunnett plantings at Trentham still seem to have a lot of space between plants and a lot of Oudolf plantings do, at least early in the year, because there is so little spring or early summer flowering species to fill in the gaps between late-flowering species which so often make quite late growth.

I had a go in my last garden but it really only worked in this experimental planting; I was still too cautious about packing the plants in tight elsewhere. A couple of months ago I stayed with my friend, the garden designer Catherine Janson, in Herefordshire (see gallery above). Her garden seems to have got it just right, with a density far higher than you normally see. Almost as much as in a wild situation. Lots of self-seeding and clumps spreading into each other. Its pics of her garden which illustrate this posting. Another really good example is Helen Brown's garden at Little Ash Bungalow, near Exeter in Devon (see gallery below).

Planting like this takes real confidence; both in your plants, and in your knowledge of plants, that they won't all fight each other to the finish, and you have enough experience to know that won't happen, and that you will have the ability to deal with problems like occasional weeds, over-enthusiastic growth or flopping.

Why I am banging on about dense planting like it is a moral virtue?

It makes practical sense: ground-covering, weed-smothering, and its complexity has an incredible beauty, the depth of interest of a natural plant community.

It is far better for biodiversity, providing cover, and far more food, habitat etc. for the invertebrates which are the basis of the garden wildlife food chain.

More vegetation means more biological activity, carbon capture etc.

It is really only this kind of planting which is genuinely ecological, in the sense of providing habitat but also something which approaches being a genuine vegetation. This must be the future of planting.