Denmans

A pair of Adirondack chairs painted a deep blue stand either side of a table on which is a bottle of Famous Goose Scotch whisky. Tumblers of the spirit balance on one of the wide flat arms of each chair. To one side there is a tall terracotta oil jar. In the corner behind one of the chairs the tall stems of Agapanthus complement the bluish grey of the flint walls of the house. Slate paving slabs edge up against a gravel filled bed planted in a limited palette of purple, lime green and grey. Through the glass of the patio doors I see a figure sitting at a table lit by a desk lamp. He appears to be making notes with one hand and leafing through a large book with the other. A Matisse cut out figure print in the same blue as the chairs hangs on the wall beside him, alongside a painting of a plump ginger and white cat.

Joyce Robinson and John Brookes’ portraits hang in the cafe at Denmans

Let’s return to that scene later. In late April 2024 I went to Denmans Garden, the creation of two far-sighted garden makers. Denmans is situated between the westbound carriage of the A27 and the foot of the South Downs, roughly halfway between Arundel and Chichester in West Sussex. It’s a garden that feels very contemporary so it comes as something of a surprise to learn that the garden was started 70 years ago. Joyce Robinson and her husband Hugh built a house and operated a market garden at Denmans after buying the land in 1946. A few years later Mrs Robinson began to plant an ornamental garden alongside the productive part of the site. After a visit to the Greek island of Delos in May 1969 where she was charmed by the sight of flowers growing everywhere in the island’s gravel, she resolved to use gravel as a growing medium. Ten years later she extended the garden into an area that had been a cattle paddock, and made two dry riverbeds. Enter modernist garden designer John Brookes (1933-2018) who in 1979 converted the stable block into his home calling it Clock House and set up a school of garden design. In 1984 Mrs Robinson retired and John Brookes took over management of the garden.

Mrs Robinson herself called her planting style ‘glorious disarray’ and when John Brookes arrived he introduced a more disciplined structure in layout and planting by reshaping some beds and adding clipped topiary features, all the while retaining the curving contours of the garden. He referred to his planting style as ‘controlled disarray’. The garden feels informal, with spaces flowing naturally from one to the next. John Brookes wrote:

I often see people going round the garden here at Denmans with their noses almost amongst the planting, and while I can understand their interest in individual plants, I long to say to them: ‘Now stand back and look at the associations and contrasts between individual masses and then see the plants individually up close, afterwards’.
John Brookes A Landcape Legacy

I confess to being one of those garden visitors who focus on plants first, but there is something about Denmans which makes you slow down to appreciate the unpretentious elegance of the garden which I hope some of the images which follow illustrate.

Now let me share some of those plants which I had my ‘nose amongst’. I’m afraid I’ve not been able to identify all of them.

*Teucrium fruticans* or shrubby germander

But what of the scene I described at the beginning of this blog? In July last year I was delighted that Denmans was one of the RHS Partner Gardens featured in the Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. Denmans Garden: Room Outside cleverly incorporated many of the elements of this Sussex garden and paid homage to its late custodian, John Brookes by showing him working on one of his many books, perhaps about to finish work for the day and enjoy a sundowner with a friend on the patio. The blue painted furniture and Mediterranean oil jar are trademark features of the garden, seen below in the garden itself. I shall certainly return to Denmans, where the joint legacy of Joyce Robinson and John Brookes is being lovingly maintained.

Kew Gardens 5 January 2025

A very special trip to Sainsbury’s

Woolbeding Gardens and West Dean Gardens in West Sussex

In this ‘Twixtmas’ period of short dark days with the promise of lengthening days around the corner, it’s a good time to reflect on garden visits this past year. Despite all good intentions, the number of blogs I write by no means reflects the number of gardens I visit. Inevitably some go unrecorded, save for a clutch of digital images, secured on the cloud but destined for obscurity unless I wrangle them into a blog such as that to follow here.

In late April I was on the road to West Sussex with a friend and colleague from Kew days, who is as comprehensive in her exploration of a new garden as am I. Not a plant or design detail goes unheeded or commented upon, meaning that visits take as long as necessary for us to feel we’ve not missed an important feature or tree! That’s not to say we don’t factor coffee, lunch and tea into the itinerary. These form an important part of the day and all the better if available in the garden to be visited.

We ambitiously plotted a course to two gardens near Midhurst, a stay in an Air BnB within a stone’s throw of Chichester Cathedral, and two gardens to the east of Chichester. In this and the next blog I’ll try to do justice to the gardens we explored. The first stop on the tour was the National Trust’s Woolbeding Gardens.

Because there is no parking at Woolbeding, a minibus picks you up in the car park of the Midhurst leisure centre. The jolly driver advised us that we were in good time for the opening of the glasshouse. As veterans of Kew’s visitor services team, and used to tracking the opening times of visitor attractions in the Gardens, we noted this and didn’t ask for further particulars. On having our membership cards scanned on arrival, we were again reminded of the glasshouse opening time and yet again in the cafe where we planned to orient ourselves over a coffee before setting off around the garden. We finally twigged that this wasn’t any old glasshouse, and that something rather special was about to happen. Trying not to be distracted by tempting borders to either side, we walked down to find a small cluster of people looking expectantly at a tall diamond-shaped glasshouse. Murmuring conversations petered away and above the sound of birdsong, we could hear a low mechanical hum whilst ten isosceles triangled panes of glass forming the upper section of the house slowly opened outwards, like the petals of a giant flower responding to the sun’s rays. After the process which took about three minutes in complete silence, it felt as though we’d taken part in some form of special ceremony.

Woolbeding is a curious blend of formal, landscape and contemporary gardens. At its heart is a C17 house which was leased to Simon Sainsbury in 1972, after being given to the National Trust in 1957 by the Lascelles family.

It is difficult to believe that the garden is barely 50 years old, especially the pleasure garden area called the Longwalk alongside the River Rother, which emulates the atmosphere and style of an C18 landscape garden, complete with ruined abbey, hermit’s hut, Chinese bridge, river god and gothic summerhouse. The abbey ruins were so authentic that it came as a shock to find they dated from the late 1990s! When I read the Longwalk was designed by Julian and Isabel Bannerman, I began to recognise their trademark theatricality, as exemplified in the Collector Earl’s garden at Arundel Castle. Yellow skunk cabbage (Lysichiton americanus) and globeflower (Trollius europaeus) were echoed in the colour of the painted Chinese bridge. A gnarly rustic fountain in The Four Seasons garden stands within a flint edged circular pool fed by a deep rill whose banks are planted with ferns and primroses.

We doubled back to designer Lanning Roper’s formal garden rooms, several of which are created around water features. High yew and hornbeam hedging divide the rooms within the old walled garden. The Fountain Garden’s centrepiece is a Renaissance style octagonal fountain surmounted by a figure of Neptune and dolphins. The original C16 Italian statue is on loan to the V&A. Trellised trained fruit trees adorn a brick wall on one side of the Vegetable Garden. The topiary and abundant greenery in that garden give way to an austere symmetry in The Swimming Pool garden.

A striking polished steel sculpture/water feature designed by William Pye dominates the elevation of the house facing the formal garden rooms. Again, this reminded me of a garden elsewhere: the eight water sculptures in the Serpent Garden at Alnwick are the work of Pye. One of these, ‘Coanda’, resembles that at Woolbeding:

THIS SCULPTURE SHOWS THE COANDA EFFECT WHICH MAKES WATER CLING TO THE UNDERSIDE OF SMOOTH OVERHANGING SURFACES, APPEARING TO DEFY GRAVITY. THE COANDA EFFECT WAS DISCOVERED BY HENRI COANDA, A FAMOUS AERONAUTICAL ENGINEER WHO WENT ON TO DEVELOP A FLYING SAUCER. HE STUDIED SCULPTURE WITH RODIN AND ENGINEERING WITH ALEXANDRE EIFFEL.

Extract from the Alnwick Gardens website

Leaving the classical formality of the garden rooms, we crossed an expansive lawn dominated by an eye-catcher, the circular Tulip Folly atop a low mound.

The garden zones of the Silk Route garden emulate the habitats of the ancient trade route from Asia to Europe, taking in the Mediterranean climate of the Istanbul region, the alpine environment of the Anatolian Plateau, followed by Iran represented by old roses and onwards to the Himalayas. Then come plants typical of Central Asia before arriving in the Chinese temperate region. Varying substrates distinguish one zone from the next, with rocks and gravel reflecting the geology of the regions along the route. The planting and landscaping throughout the Silk Route garden appear resilient to climate change: good drainage to cope with heavy downpours and a choice of species that might withstand droughty conditions without additional irrigation. In concluding my current talk to garden clubs on the topic of resilient gardening, I suggest a few gardens to visit where this kind of gardening can be seen in practice. Naturally the Silk Route garden features in my list.

The Silk Route ‘s destination is China’s sub-tropical zone inside the Heatherwick Studio’s glasshouse, designed to resemble an Edwardian terrarium, its glass ‘sepals’ opening and closing to maintain the correct temperature and climatic conditions for plants such as bananas and tender gingers.

April showers somewhat marred the afternoon visit to West Dean Gardens, a garden that I visited frequently when my parents were alive, as it was easily accessible from Petersfield where they lived after retirement. It is beautifully set, with views across the River Rother to sheep-grazed meadows at the foot of the South Downs and the St Roche’s Arboretum beyond.

The imposing flint built mansion is home to the Sussex campus of the West Dean College of Arts, Design, Craft and Conservation. The extensive walled gardens contain many restored Victorian glasshouses as well as a cutting garden area planted with dozens of tulips. I was disappointed to find that the 100m plus long Edwardian pergola was undergoing restoration, but the water gardens welcomed the damp conditions and the woodland planting was as varied as I had remembered. There’s an excellent cafe and shop at West Dean and I confess we retreated there for an hour or so to escape the elements.

We arrived in Chichester in the rain to plan the next day’s garden touring. The apartment block we stayed in was beside the multi-storey where I always parked on trips to Chichester with my parents! The apartment itself overlooked the elegant spire of the cathedral and the Downs in the distance.

Kew, 28 December 2024

In search of Richard Turner

Victorian glasshouse with curved roofs against a blue sky

Curvilinear glasshouses at two Irish botanic gardens and the Palm House at Kew

Engineer and iron founder Richard Turner (1798–1881) built glasshouses in two Irish botanic gardens before collaborating with Decimus Burton in the construction of the Palm House in Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. The first to be built was the Palm House at the Belfast Botanic Gardens completed in 1840. 1848 saw the completion of both the Curvilinear Range at the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin and the Palm House at Kew.

In early October I visited both the Irish gardens and was intrigued to observe how Turner’s glasshouses compared with Kew Gardens’ own Palm House. I had always understood there to be an Irish connection with the distinctive building at Kew that is often preceded by the adjective ‘iconic’, and erroneously thought that Decimus Burton was Irish. But a quick consultation with Wikipedia before my trip revealed that it was Dublin-born Turner who had mastered the art of creating curvilinear glasshouses through the use of wrought iron ribs linked with cast iron tubes. These glazing bars were light enough to support curving glass structures often likened in shape to the upturned hull of a ship.

Having used this innovative technology for a conservatory at a private estate in Fermanagh, Turner was engaged to build the Palm House at the Botanic Gardens, Belfast to a design by Charles Lanyon, and it was completed in 1840. The Curvilinear Range at the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland and the Palm House at Kew followed in 1848. According to historian of Kew, Ray Desmond, the collaborative relationship between Burton and Turner which resulted in Palm House at Kew was not without some tensions and once the glasshouse was completed, Turner’s role was relegated to ‘the subordinate role of a builder who had merely followed his architect’s plans’. This was despite his having devised a way to span 50 feet using the strength of wrought iron, meaning the central area was unimpeded by supporting columns. But Ray Desmond concludes that

an examination of all relevant archives reveals how much Burton was indebted to Turner’s engineering skills and ingenuity. Burton exercised a classical restraint on Turner’s tendency to decorative excess but, thankfully, did not entirely inhibit him. His scrolls and plant forms and the ubiquitous sunflower motif endow the ironwork with vivacity, even frivolity. The puritanical proclivities of Burton were counterpoised by Turner’s instinctive ebullience.

Because I started my Irish sojourn in Dublin, I’m going to take you first to the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland. Turner’s Curvilinear Range of intersecting glasshouses is located a short distance from the visitor centre and it didn’t take long to find some of Turner’s scrolls and plant forms both inside and outside the building. It’s one of two glasshouses open to the public, the other being the Palm House which dates from 1880 and, like the Tropical Ravine at Belfast (see below), is distinguished from its namesake at Kew by having a solid rather than glass rear wall.

The Curvilinear Range

The Palm House

There are many elements to Dublin’s botanic garden which occupies a relatively small area alongside historic Glasnevin Cemetery, and is intersected by the River Tolka, tributary of the Liffey. Those individual areas include a sloping walled garden with lean-to glasshouse and bothy linked by an intricate knot garden of box. Neat vegetable beds occupy the centre of the garden interspersed with handsome terracotta rhubarb forcers and pots stamped with the name Kiltrea of Enniscorthy in County Wexford. I was sad to read on Facebook that the pottery’s kilns are no longer firing and the potter’s wheel has stopped turning here at Kiltrea, the owners having retired.

On this side of the garden, which runs alongside the walls of Glasnevin Cemetery, and indeed includes a gateway into it, glimpses of the cemetery’s round tower appear through the trees. It was fascinating to explore Wild Ireland, where a range of natural areas have been replicated using characteristic soils and plants, including the distinctive limestone pavement of the Burren in County Clare, coastal habitat, various woodland habitats and a wetland area. Some of the 940 species endemic to Ireland are represented, including the strawberry tree, Arbutus unedo, which is such a feature of the woodlands around Killarney in County Kerry. Passing a colourful salvia border, I found the reconstruction of a Viking thatched hut, a reminder of early invaders of the country.

A steel sculpture looked familiar and I realised it resembled the Bootstrapping DNA sculpture outside the Jodrell Laboratory in Kew, the work of Charles Jencks, American landscape designer and architectural historian. The sculpture is called ?What is Life? and was installed to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of The Double Helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953.

After four days in Dublin, I headed north to Belfast to spend time with friends from northern Virginia, London and Northamptonshire. Naturally the itinerary for this reunion visit had to include Belfast’s Botanic Gardens in the University Quarter. I visited the Botanic Gardens on a dank, drizzly morning, reassured to know that the impressive Ulster Museum is located within the Gardens, offering a cosy retreat should the rain intensify. The curving silhouette and decorative ironwork of the building indicated Richard Turner’s role in its construction. Like Kew’s Palm House it is betraying signs of age. Turner’s Palm House consists of two wings, the cool wing and the tropical wing.

By contrast to the jelly-moulded shape of the Palm House, the facade of the evocatively named Tropical Ravine across the way, looks so solid and Victorian in style that it’s a surprise to find a two storey glasshouse located behind the brickwork. The ground floor is the preserve of the horticultural team and steps lead up to the first floor (with a lift making it accessible for everyone). The perimeter walkway allows you to gaze across and down into both tropical and temperate zones and to appreciate the architectural structure of the plants featured. There’s a corner devoted to ferns, which must have appreciated the moisture generated by the misting system which operated every so often. Every day’s a school day as they say and here I learnt for the first time of John Templeton (1766-1825) known as The Father of Irish Botany.

Before I leave Ireland and return to Kew Gardens, allow me to take you on a detour to the north west of Belfast. Having revelled in the geological phenomenon of the Giant’s Causeway on the Antrim coast we returned to the city via the grounds of Gracehill House to see the avenue of beech trees planted by the Stuart family in the eighteenth century to impress visitors as they approached the entrance to their Georgian mansion. Known as the Dark Hedges, the highest branches of the trees entwine to form a tunnel almost perpendicular in form. The location was used in Game of Thrones in which it was called the King’s Road.

Knowing I was going to write this post this evening, I took several photographs of the inside of the Palm House at Kew yesterday, paying particular attention to Turner’s decorative ironwork. I suppose what strikes you with this extraordinary building is its scale, both in height and length. The building is shortly to undergo a major refurbishment, with the preparation for closure already underway.

Two ‘decant’ glasshouses are being built to house the plants from the Palm House while restoration works take place over the next several years. One is being built near the house itself and the other behind the scenes near the Tropical Nursery site.

My close-up of one of the sunflower motifs shows why the refurbishment project is necessary. Having worked at Kew while the Temperate House project took place, in the visitor information team, I fielded many comments expressing disappointment at the house being closed, and no doubt my successors will experience similar complaints about the Palm House in the months to come. But the years of negativity were forgotten when the building was re-opened in May 2018 to reveal the sparkling glasswork and paintwork of what was described in a song written to celebrate the re-opening as a ‘cathedral of light’. Roll on the day when the same can be said of a refurbished Palm House and the combined genius of Decimus Burton and Richard Turner can be admired once again.

Kew Gardens, 8 November 2024.

Postscript

Richard Turner’s ironworks in Ballsbridge in south Dublin produced not only the materials for the historic glasshouses I’ve written about in this post, but the decorative ironwork for the fanlights which adorn the front doors of the Georgian houses on Dublin’s Leeson Street. When I first started visiting Dublin with my family in the 1960s and 1970s, the tourist board produced a striking poster featuring the Georgian doors of Dublin and I’d like to think that one of them at least might have featured a fanlight made at the Turner ironworks. Here is my tribute to that classic poster.

Lutyens in Dublin

This morning London was enveloped in dank drizzle but I flew into a Dublin enjoying dazzling sunshine on the first day of October. I dumped my luggage at the hotel and set off to the west of the city to Islandbridge, Dublin 8. My walk took me along the quays on the south side of the River Liffey, with wonderful views across to the Custom House and the Four Courts, not to mention historic bridges like the Halfpenny Bridge footbridge. This was my Dublin born mother’s favourite landmark in the city and I was so happy to see it on a fine autumn afternoon.

The Custom House, the Four Courts and Halfpenny Bridge

Past Guinness’s vast St James’s Gate brewery I walked, then crossed the river and followed the road to the south of Phoenix Park, until I reached my destination, the Irish National War Memorial Gardens. I wasn’t prepared for the scale and grandeur of the place. The Gardens form the centrepiece of a peaceful park beside the river. The appoach is dotted with Lutyens’ distinctive wave-backed benches. Each bench is painted red, which lends the place an almost Japanese garden air, save for a circular domed temple in classical style. In 1929 Sir Edwin Lutyens was commissioned by the Irish Government to design a Garden of Remembrance and a War Memorial. Ironically, the project was completed in 1939 on the eve of WW2. The Gardens are dedicated to Irish soldiers who died during the First World War.

This aerial view of the Gardens conveys the symmetrical design adopted by Lutyens, each ‘wing’ of the design occupied by identical sunken rose gardens and pillared colonnades entwined with vines and wisteria linking granite ‘book rooms’. Sadly locked this afternoon, I’ve read that the rooms house Ireland’s Memorial Records, eight volumes listing the names of Irish soldiers who died in the Great War. From the photographs I’ve seen of these beautifully illuminated books, they are truly beautiful objects. The artist was Harry Clarke, whose usual medium was stained glass.

An expanse of lawn lies between the book rooms, two large circular pools containing obelisk fountains lie to either side of a low and very plain rectangular monument. Beyond this wide shallow steps lead to a simple stone cross. The exquisitely carved inscriptions on the walls around the cross, in Gaelic and English, refer to the 49,400 Irish soldiers lost between 1914 and 1918.

My maternal great grandfather, Edward O’Leary, and paternal grandfather, James Roche, Irish men both, fought in the First World War. Thankfully both survived, although Grandad Roche as I called him, was wounded on the Somme. But I can’t help thinking that they must have known some of the men listed in the books housed in the book rooms of the memorial.

The calm elegance of Lutyens’ Gardens and monuments provide a peaceful oasis on the outskirts of a busy city. But also serve to remind us of the scale of the losses of the First World War. How sad to think that WW1 was not the war to end all wars and that so many parts of the world are still mired in bloody conflicts.

Mark Street, Dublin 1 October 2024

The herbaceous borders around the perimeters of the rose gardens are going strong. Including the Romneya coulteri, this one looking for all the world like a crinkly fried egg.

‘Butterfly, tell me where do you go?’

Meadow brown butterfly on yellow wildflowers

This year’s Big Butterfly Count, the results of which were published last week, reveals the lowest number on record, prompting Butterfly Conservation, the charity which organises the count, to declare a ‘Butterfly Emergency’. Compared to 2023, participants in the survey, which ran from 12 July – 4 August, recorded almost 50% fewer butterflies during a 15 minute period, down from 12 to seven of these beautiful creatures. The Big Butterfly Count citizen science project has been running for 14 years, with this year’s 84,000 participants spending the equivalent of four years worth of time counting in gardens, parks, school grounds and the countryside.

Dr Richard Fox, Head of Science at Butterfly Conservation, said:

“Butterflies are a key indicator species; when they are in trouble we know that the wider environment is in trouble too. Nature is sounding the alarm call. We must act now if we are to turn the tide on these rapid declines and protect species for future generations.“

As well as loss of habitat, the decline is caused by the use of neonicotinoid pesticides which kill butterflies as well as other pollinating insects. Dr Fox said

“When used on farmland, these chemicals make their way into the wild plants growing at field edges, resulting in adult butterflies and moths drinking contaminated nectar and caterpillars feeding on contaminated plants. Many European countries have already banned these chemicals, it’s time for the UK to follow suit and put the natural world first. If we don’t act now to finally address the long-term drivers of butterfly decline, we will face extinction events never before seen in our lifetime.”

The charity has drafted an open letter to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs calling for a ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. As I write this on Sunday afternoon, over 19,000 people have signed the letter: do please add your voice to the campaign to reverse the sad decline in numbers.

My summer got off to a butterfly-themed start when I took part in a concert by Kew Gardens’ staff and volunteers’ choir. As an ad hoc volunteer at RBG, Kew (helping with the annual orchid festival, commenting on draft interpretation messaging and taking part in the recent bench audit) I just about qualify to be a member of this inspirational choir which rehearses each Thursday in the church hall attached to the historic St Anne’s Church, Kew Green. One of the numbers we sang was ‘Butterfly’, a lilting and wistful evocation of the ephemeral nature of the creatures which, until recently, we took for granted as a fixture in our gardens. Written by Alan Simmons, I don’t have permission to reproduce all the lyrics but here’s a photo of my fridge door where I stuck a print out of the chorus to help me learn the words.

Let’s see how some of the species listed in the chorus fared according to this year’s list of sightings across the UK:

Tortoise Shell: Down 74% since last year.

Painted Lady: down 66%

Meadow Brown: good news at last! Up by 6% since 2023.

Holly Blue: down 80% on last year, but an increase of sightings of 35.6% since the Big Butterfly Count began.

Red Admiral: down 82% since 2023 but an increase since the count began of 28.10%.

On the afternoon of 26 July, Ruth Brookes, Natural Habitats Supervisor at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, returned to Pensford Field for the second year running, to give a talk about butterflies. It was hot and sunny and when we ventured into the Field from the studio it was heartening to observe Meadow Browns cavorting in the wildflower meadow. Ruth explained that to date it had been a bad year for butterflies. Caterpillars need a deep cold winter to remain dormant, as opposed to the mild wet conditions last winter. This caused them to run out of energy before the end of winter.

Ruth was very complimentary about the habitats created across the Field to support the entire life cycles of butterflies. This makes it all the more sad that a couple of weeks ago, the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames notified the Pensford Field Environmental Trust that it intended to terminate its lease of the three acre site, embedded in a residential area of Kew, about half a mile from the Gardens. For 32 years, the Trust and its volunteers have managed the site, maintaining the woodland that surrounds an open meadow area, planting a productive orchard of apple, pear, quince and medlar trees and creating a wildlife pond. Two sets of local beekeepers occupy sites at either corner of the Field and a local primary school holds weekly forest school sessions there. There are regular talks there: already this year we’ve learnt about amphibians, bats and hedgehogs. I have to declare an interest here: as well as being a volunteer at the monthly work parties to maintain the Field, I’ve recently been appointed a trustee, and have given two talks there relating to gardening for wildlife and resilient gardening. To say that we are disappointed about Richmond’s decision is an understatement. We are deeply concerned that the valuable wildlife habitat provided by the Field for butterflies and many other species, might be compromised by future use of the site by an organisation for which conservation is not a primary object.

In light of the concerning news from the Big Butterfly Count, sites like Pensford with meadow planting of nectar-rich species for adult butterflies and areas of long grass and nettles for caterpillars, are vital to stem the decline revealed in the survey.

I fear that this post brings gloomy news on two fronts and want to redress the balance a little by showing some of the butterfly and moth sightings I’ve had this year (while they stayed still long enough to be photographed!).

Butterflies

Meadow Brown photographed at Pensford Field

Moths

Seduced by images of prolific yellow orange flowerheads and the fact that its common name is butterfly weed, I bought five tubers of Asclepias tuberosa this spring. Planted up in separate pots, as soon as new growth emerged it was consumed by slugs or snails. I succeeded in establishing one plant and its flowers lived up to my expectations. I didn’t see any butterflies visiting it, but I like to think that by growing it I’m improving the chances of increasing the bio-diversity in the garden. At RHS Wisley’s recent plant fair I spotted a vibrant cultivar called Asclepias Silky Scarlet. If I was a butterfly those vivid yellow flowers would certainly attract me in search of nectar. This genus includes the various species of milkweed which host the caterpillars of the Monarch butterflies which undertake the extraordinary annual migration from southern Canada to Mexico. Earlier this year I listened to a fascinating series on BBC Radio 4 about one woman’s quest to follow this migration marvel by bicycle.

I’m going to finish with a couple of paintings featuring butterflies which I’ve come across this summer. At the Queen’s Park Book Festival at the beginning of September, I saw art critic Laura Cummings being interviewed about her memoir ‘Thunderclap‘, where she showed a slide of this exquisite study by Adriaen Coorte of two peaches. The colourful portrait was one of the entries in the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024 at the National Portrait Gallery: Alain at Kew by Carl Randall, with the subject standing in front of verdant vegetation in the Palm House: spot the butterflies!

Do please follow the link to call for the government to ban neonicotinoids and give our butterfly population the chance to thrive once again. God forbid that the only place for future generations to see butterflies is on a gallery wall.

Kew Gardens, 22 September 2024

Piers, Popes and Palaces

An evening visit to Hampton Court Palace

Had I been asked a fortnight ago to explain what links Hampton Court Palace and the Vatican, I would no doubt have trotted out some facts learnt long ago in A Level history about Henry VIII’s break from Rome, the falling out of favour of Cardinal Wolsey and rise of Thomas Cromwell, and Wolsey’s giving his grand palace beside the River Thames to the king to postpone his disgrace. But since 18 July, I’ve identified a personal connection between these mighty edifices.

The story starts in October 2021 when I went to Rome with a couple of friends. One friend’s sister’s Sicilian mother-in-law happened to be staying in the city at the same time with a friend whose friend (stick with me, it’s a bit convoluted) was a guide at the Vatican museums. She kindly offered to take us to see the Sistine Chapel before it opened to the public! We met her early one morning and were led swiftly through chamber after cavernous chamber of treasures (the Gallery of Geographical Maps in particular stays in my memory) until we reached the door to the chapel. There we remained for over an hour, our necks craning to study every detail in Michelangelo’s ceiling. After a few minutes a small party of German clerics arrived, awed into silence like ourselves. Then, almost imperceptibly, the chapel filled with people, murmuring softly then rising in volume to the brink of excited chatter, until a diminutive monk tolled a handbell and silence was restored. Surrounded by now with many dozens of fellow tourists we realised just how privileged we’d been to experience being almost the only people in that unique space only an hour before.

The week before last, with a group of friends, I joined about 16 other garden lovers for an after hours tour of the gardens at Hampton Court Palace, led by head gardener and estate manager Graham Dillamore, organised by the National Gardens Scheme. Although I’ve visited Hampton Court Palace on several occasions, the gardens and palace have always been thronged with visitors. We arrived at Hampton Court Palace in style, on the riverboat from Kingston Pier. It felt apt to travel to the palace by water, as Henry and his retinue would have done 500 years ago.

When Graham led us past the entrance to the palace out onto the towpath and after a short walk, opened a door leading directly into the gardens, I recalled that unforgettable Roman morning. We entered a silent garden, the day’s visitors had departed and we had the gardens to ourselves. To our left was the glasshouse which protects the Great Vine, the roots of which extend beneath the expanse of bare earth in front of us, its surface cracked following a few days of hot dry weather. We entered the glasshouse to admire the Black Hamburg grapevine trained high above us. Amidst the dahlia border which surrounds this corner of the garden, a life-size figure fashioned from bark leans on his spade, and shields his eyes from the sun. The high perimeter walls which once separated the palace grounds from the path along the Thames, were punctuated with arched openings in the C18, and are now decorated with handsome terracotta urns made by Whichford Pottery, planted with pelargoniums. Fruit trees are trained against the wall between the openings.

The tour progressed to two sunken pond gardens, both designed to be viewed from above. The first features elaborate knot parterres set in a hedged rectangle, a circular lily pond at its centre. Other than the deep pink roses planted within the knot garden, greens and whites predominate, with a few touches of pale mauve, the outer borders containing Veronicastrum, Acanthus and Hydrangeas. We were allowed to walk around the second sunken garden, its lower borders planted with a formal annual bedding scheme of silver-leaved Senecio, red pelargoniums and bushy sunflower plants. Graham explained that they are transitioning to more sustainable planting in the upper borders, with hardy cannas and bananas, Fatsia and Crocosmia. The mid-level is fringed with Heliotropium, part of Hampton Court’s collection of about 20 cultivars, one of its three National Plant Collections. The warm evening sun amplified the sweet cherry pie scent of the prolific purple flowers.

The next ‘compartment’ we reached was a narrow rectangular ‘orchard’ separated by a stone wall from a strip of ground which was planted earlier in the year with Phacelia as a green manure. It’s blue flowers of June, a magnet for bees, were now shrivelled and about to be hoed out. Next year Graham plans to introduce sunflowers into this space.

I loved the looser planting of Penstemon in shades of pink and mauve within the lavender and Santolina compartments of the knot garden. A warm breeze stirred the colourful blooms, the movement a contrast to the formality of the preceding sunken gardens.

*Lantana*: close-up of a specimen in a pot beside the Privy Garden.

I mentioned that Hampton Court holds three National Plant Collections, the others being of Lantana and the wonderfully named Queen Mary II Exoticks Collection. The latter represents the plants amassed by Queen Mary, who reigned with King William III from 1689-1694, for display at Hampton Court Palace, at the time one of the largest private collections of plants in the world. Many of them we saw planted in colourful pots on wooden boarding outside the Orangery, as shown here in an image from the Plant Heritage website.

Queen Mary II Exoticks Collection
© Hampton Court Palace

The Privy Garden: image courtesy of Historic Royal Palaces website

The enclosed ‘rooms’ of the tour to this point now gave way to the elegant expanse of the Privy Garden. Elements from three countries were reflected in the design of this garden made for William III in 1702, which was reconstructed in 1995. Italian sculptures and Dutch plants decorate the areas surrounding the intricate gravelled patterns in the French style. The narrow yew obelisks are 2m tall, demonstrating the vast scale of the Privy Garden. The original yews grew out of shape when the formality of the Privy Garden fell out of fashion, and were re-planted in the Great Fountain Garden opposite the eastern facade of the palace, where they were clipped into their now distinctive mushroom forms. They are clearly visible from the Long Water, the huge rectangular pond on either side of which the RHS show is staged.

From the Privy Garden, Graham guided us away from the gardens through the palace building, sunlit courtyards giving way to dimly lit interiors, shadowy stairwells looming overhead: a walk back through time from the 18th to the 16th century as we approached the earliest part of the building. En route, we lingered in Fountain Court to admire the baroque architecture, decorated with masks of mythical characters such as Bacchus and Medusa. We learnt that no mains water is used in the gardens at Hampton Court, instead the water features are fed from the Longford River, an artificial watercourse 12 miles long leading from the River Colne near Heathrow.

Fountain Court. Image courtesy of Eric Farnworth

I went yesterday to the National Portrait Gallery to see Six Lives, an exhibition about Henry VIII’s six wives and their influence upon popular culture. Frequent mention was made of Hampton Court. Third wife Jane Seymour died at the palace shortly after giving birth to Prince Edward. Fifth wife Katherine Howard was arrested there after discovery of her infidelity. Here are a couple of the exhibits: a transport poster from 1922 and a fragment of a heraldic shield depicting Jane Seymour’s emblem, a phoenix rising out of a castle from which Tudor roses and a crowned hawthorn tree bloom. It was originally set in the bridge at the west front of Hampton Court.

Our evening tour concentrated on the south eastern corner of the site. I shall return as soon as I can to explore the rest of the gardens. In the meantime, thank you to the National Gardens Scheme for arranging the tour and Graham Dillamore for sharing his knowledge and time and guiding us through these world famous gardens.

Kew Gardens, 2 August 2024

Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival: Part 2

Plant Heritage etc.

Spending an afternoon chatting to people about plants ranks amongst my favourite pastimes. So volunteering in Plant Heritage’s seed shop on the final day of the show was a great pleasure. I arrived a couple of hours ahead of my 1pm start time and took in those parts of the show I had admired a few days earlier, and a few more I’d missed the first time: see below.

In February I spent an enjoyable day at Stone Pine, Plant Heritage‘s office next to RHS Wisley in Surrey, where I joined a team sorting seed collected by members for sale at 2024 shows. One member of that team was June James who holds the National Collection of Clivia. Those exuberant orange or yellow flowered houseplants occupy a glasshouse in her Hampshire garden. I was thrilled to find that the indefatigable June was my fellow volunteer in the seed shop. In between customers she explained the finer points of Clivia propagation.

As it was the final day of the show, the packets of seeds were being offered in a special offer of five for a suggested donation of £10. It was fun recommending combinations of plants for the tricky sites which customers described. The range of seeds was impressive, from common or garden love-in-a-mist and pot marigolds to some very unusual Clematis cultivars.

The seed shop was one element of a very large stand occupying much of the far end of the show’s huge marquee, the official title of which was Floral Marquee and Plant Heritage, highlighting the importance of the charity’s work in conserving cultivated garden plants for future generations. Two of the National Collections represented in other sections of the Plant Heritage display area were mini Hostas and Rosa Persica. Another section of the display encouraged plant lovers to consider starting a National Plant Collection of one of the 15 environmentally friendly plant groups that are not currently part of a National Plant Collection. Before the show, when I read about the plants needing a home, I got very excited and imagined squeezing more Caryopteris shrubs into my garden alongside the one shrub I already have. Or devoting a corner to the different cultivars of Origanum. Of course good sense prevailed and I realised I haven’t the room for such a venture, but how special it would be to curate one of these living plant libraries.

Just before closing time exhibitors sell off plants in scenes reminiscent of the January sales. On our stand, I bought a dainty flowered Sanguisorba and was kindly given a hot water plant (Achimenes) and an unnamed Pelargonium with very attractive leaf markings. June also has also given me the fruits from two plants in her Clivia collection: a challenge now to propagate them successfully and look forward to flowers in about four years’ time!

Clivia miniata seeds already germinating in seed case. From June at Plant Heritage seed shop at Hampton Court FS 7 July 24

I’ve not been involved in the de-rig of a plant show before and it was an eye-opener to see how quickly the show is dismantled as soon as the last customer leaves the show ground. We all donned hi-viz and packed up the trays of seeds and other elements of the stand: pots, books and jugs of cut flowers (examples of the plants whose seeds were on offer). On the neighbouring display I watched as the plants were extracted from the ‘borders’ in which they were ‘planted’, revealing the ‘Chelsea planting’ method, where plants in pots are temporarily plunged into compost for the week or so of the show.

I mentioned that I arrived early that day. Here are some highlights.

The Lion King Community Garden designed by Juliet Sargent was awarded a gold medal by the RHS. Its warm colour scheme echoed the rising sun backdrop featured in the spectacular opening number of the stage show. The dry hedge shown here beside the yellow seats, is both a useful barrier in a garden and a wildlife habitat.

Scallop shell symbols point towards a garden inspired by the Camino de Santiago, one route of which passes through the forests of Galicia in Northern Spain. The statue represents a pilgrim (presumably the showers in the guest house were occupied and she’s opted for a skinny dip en route?) Not pictured is the clever route around the garden lined on either side with sweet scented star jasmine, through which tantalising glimpses of the pool were visible.

The Oregon Garden was the first of two USA themed gardens. Also featuring a central pool, its planting was evocative of the state’s rugged landscape with pollinator-supporting plants chosen to illustrate its biodiversity.

The elegance of the Antebellum South was the atmosphere evoked in the pocket garden replicated in the first section of the Explore Charleston Garden, morphing via a mulch of crushed shell into a beach representing the wild wetlands surrounding the city which I learnt are called the Lowcountry.

Look out for a future blog post about Denman’s Garden in West Sussex which I visited in late April. A corner of the garden (with garden designer John Brookes captured in a pool of light at work at his desk) was replicated to promote the RHS partner gardens along with Furzey Gardens in the New Forest in Hampshire. I visited the latter garden many years ago with a dear friend who lives nearby. She often took her children there when they were small and they loved to play in the range of treehouses. The Minstead Trust maintains the garden and supports people with learning difficulties to lead independent lives.

With time slipping by until my volunteering session was due to start, I briefly took in the several borders created by graduates of the London College of Garden Design, to celebrate the diversity of the daisy family. Here were an evocation of the planting beside a Wiltshire chalk stream, a display of healing remedies, a wildlife friendly border and a border of seed-bearing species, specifically designed to attract birds.

Next time I’m back at Hampton Court, visiting the palace gardens after hours and discovering they hold three National Plant Collections!

Kew Gardens 23 July 2024

Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival: Part 1

Resilient Gardens

Two of my particular horticultural interests were more than satisfied at this year’s RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival: resilient gardening and plant diversity. I was lucky enough to visit the show twice: first as a punter on the second RHS members’ day and on the last day as a volunteer on the Plant Heritage stand. In this post I’m reporting on the gardens at the show which were planted with an eye to our changing climate.

Climate forward gardening, resilient gardening, sustainable gardening, gardening for climate change: all these expressions describe the same idea. Given the gradual changes in our climate: warmer wetter winters and dryer summers (well perhaps not so far this summer) and extreme weather events such as droughts or flooding, it is vitally urgent that we adapt our gardens to cope with such changes and design new gardens with this in mind. The eight gardens in the Resilient Pocket Planting category demonstrated this admirably. Knowing that your garden will be seen from 360 degrees must pose particular challenges to the designers, but each pocket worked from whatever angle you viewed it. Admittedly they were’t easy for an amateur to photograph, but then that wasn’t the point. Be it rainwater harvesting, biodiversity, food forests, using sustainable materials: the designers of these small spaces had it covered.

I loved the concept behind The Moonshadow Moth Garden. When I give my gardening for wildlife talks, I emphasise the importance of attracting moths into the garden with plants with pale flowers and evening scent. Moths’ importance as pollinators can get overlooked by the arguably more charismatic creatures like butterflies and bumble bees. The creamy flowerheads of Achillea millefolium provided lots of flat landing stages and the hazy purple tangle of Verbena officinalis Bampton made a sheltered habitat.

Conservation charity Buglife sponsored The B-Lines Garden to promote a network of nectar rich corridors for bees and other pollinators. By increasing the abundance and diversity of flowering plants in gardens, we can extend this network across the UK. I was chuffed to see that many of the plants I’ve used in the resilient pocket planting I made in my little front garden earlier this year, featured in this and several of the other pockets. Specifically in this image, the purple-speared Salvia nemorosa Caradonna. Also used in the B-Lines garden is the spiky-leaved Berkheya purpurea with which I had less success when I attempted without success to grow it in the back garden last year but I’m going to have another go with it knowing it’s going to attract in pollinators.

Perhaps the first thing that comes to mind when considering what constitutes a resilient garden is planting for drought tolerance, but given our increasingly wet winters, rain gardens which harvest rainwater and absorb stormwater are just as important. In The Ripple Effect Raingarden, stepping stones made a path across a central wet channel between low mounds planted with species that can withstand temporary waterlogging. Reading about this garden, I’ve learnt a new word ‘berm’, meaning a mound composed of soil and vegetation to slow and absorb stormwater. The designer of the garden, Sarah Cotterill, is based in Ballina, Co. Mayo and the limestone used for the stepping stones is typical of the rock formations found on the west coast of Ireland. In this image the pink flowers of are those of Rodgersia ‘Bronze Peacock’.

I enjoyed chatting to Becky Box the designer of the pocket based on The Edible Garden at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, where the garden will be re-located to the walled kitchen garden. She explained how she divides her time between her garden design work and working in the castle gardens. I loved the willow structures which represent the castle’s chimneys: not shown to best effect in this image I’m afraid.

The designers of the resilient planting pockets were mentored by the doyen of resilient gardening, Tom Massey, whose gardens at last year’s Hampton Court Show and this year’s Chelsea Flower Show have done so much to promote the importance of adapting our planting philosophy to accommodate the changing climate. The designer of the Food Forests garden, Marina Lindl, told me how helpful it had been to consult with Tom when preparing for the show. Sadly I didn’t photograph her garden which highlighted the idea of multi-layered planting from fruit-bearing trees down to root crops. I admired an attractive plant with purple leaves which she identified as tree spinach, Chenopodium giganteum.

I had a lovely surprise when I moved across the Long Water to where most of the show gardens were located. Manning The Climate-Forward Garden designed by Melanie Hick, was Emma Whitten, one of my fellow students from the class of 2017 of the RHS Level 2 Practical Horticulture course at Capel Manor’s Regents Park branch. A garden designer and landscaper herself, she and Melanie often work together on projects. This is a front garden where slightly raised beds surround a porous gravel area designed as a soakaway for sudden downpours. Within half an hour of chatting to Emma in bright sunshine, which showed off the colourful planting scheme wonderfully well, the heavens opened to an intensely heavy thunderstorm. Just the weather with which this garden and the Ripple Effect Garden were designed to cope.

I’ll close this post with an image from the Strive and Thrive resilient pocket planting . This vivid tapestry will be re-planted at a girls’ care home in Ealing. As I left the show on Sunday evening, the pockets were being emptied and whilst it was sad to see such beautiful creations dismantled, it was good to know they were all going to have permanent homes where their messages of resilience in the face of the challenge of climate change will continue to resonate.

Next time I’ll report on more highlights of the show and my wonderful afternoon volunteering in the seed shop section of the Plant Heritage stand in the Floral Marquee.

Kew Gardens, 12 July 2024

Of Bills and Beaks

Wild geraniums and their cultivated cousins

I deliberately allow some wildflowers to naturalise around the pond, providing shelter for frogs and softening the brick edging. Last month, while peering into the water to see what the frogs were up to, I noticed two similar pink flowers, one larger than the other. Glancing quickly, I’d assumed the dominant plant in this area was Herb-Robert (Geranium robertianum), but closer inspection revealed very different leaf shapes. The edges of the leaves of the plant with the larger flowers are deeply cut, almost ferny, emitting a strong vegetative smell evocative of lettuces, even if just lightly touched. This is Herb-Robert and in common with all the geranium family, the seed heads comprise an elongated ovary out of which extends a long beak, hence the common name for the genus, cranesbill.

I consulted the wildflower oracle, Francis Rose’s The Wild Flower Key, to find that the roundly lobed leaves of the smaller flowered plant belong to Shining Crane’s-bill (Geranium lucidum). True to its name the leaves do indeed gleam and some are tinged red, a feature shared with Herb-Robert.

The profusion of both species of Crane’s-bill in May and into June has made me look more closely at the cultivated forms of geranium, which so usefully bridge the gap between the spring bulbs and the flowers more associated with high summer such as salvias. They are perfect ground cover plants and their almost always open-petalled flowers attract flying pollinators in droves.

Geranium macrorrhizum is the first to flower in my garden, its white, slightly reflexed petals off-set by distinctive inflated rosy coloured calyces. This image clearly shows its prominent white stamens fading to pink and tipped with black pollen-bearing anthers, and a longer ‘beak’ or style, topped with five stigmas, primed to receive pollen from another flower.

Bees and hoverflies flock to Geranium Phaeum with its small flat dark maroon flowers which account for its common name of dusky cranesbill. The leaves increase in size as the as the summer progresses, as do their purplish brown markings. Cutting the growth back after flowering in late June encourages a second flush of flowers later in summer. The clear pink flowers of Rosa Gertrude Jekyll combine well with the darker red of Geranium phaeum.

Last year I planted Geranium nodosum in a client’s garden in the dry soil and dry shade of several silver birches which occupy the rear of a long plot. I’ve been establishing an understorey of woodland perennials and this cranesbill has established perfectly. The plants are about 50cm high with mauve open flowers and quite large bright green leaves.

So far, the species geraniums I’ve mentioned have somewhat muted flowers, but G. Ann Folkard and G. Patricia have bold magenta flowers. I’ve included three images, that on the left in my garden, that in the centre growing in the borders of the pretty garden at Ardoch the Loch Lomond venue where I spent last weekend on a wonderful yoga retreat arranged by EmYoga and the image with several flowers taken at NT Osterley. Which is Ann Folkard and which Patricia I’ve not been able to distinguish, but they all share that vibrant colour which contrasts so well with the bright green of the leaves.

A quarter turn around the colour wheel brings us from purplish red through purple and mauve to the blues. Here are a couple of examples I’ve photographed in the last few weeks.

Returning to pastel shades, the white markings on the large pale blue flowers of Geranium pratense Mrs Kendall Clark always remind me of pyjama fabric. There are a couple growing in Mrs Child’s Flower Garden at NT Osterley and the petal colours are variable, perhaps fading with age?

All the examples I’ve photographed have had single flowers, giving easy access to foraging pollinators, but a client drew my attention last week to this pretty double flowered geranium she brought from her previous garden, in Somerset. A quick consultation with Dr Google reveals it might be Geranium pratense Summer Skies.

I shall round off with what must be one of the most reliable hardy geraniums, Rozanne, photographed on 3 October last year at North Hill Nurseries still flowering its socks off. Its shorter cousin Azure Rush, is another good ‘doer’ and I’ve used this successfully in containers also planted with mint (confined to a buried pot) and chives.

Hardy geraniums: good ground cover, a great range of colours and leaf forms, attractive to pollinators and not demanding too much moisture: they get my vote!

Kew Gardens, 16 June 2024

The Show Must Go On

Chelsea Flower Show 21 May 2024: Part 2

Since my last visit to The Newt* in Somerset about three years ago, the Roman Museum and Villa experience has opened at the gardens. The Newt brought a corner of pre-earthquake Pompeii to Chelsea in the form of a replica of the colonnaded courtyard garden of a villa belonging to a wealthy Neapolitan as it might have looked in 78CE. Dominated by a mulberry tree, the garden is planted with species that might have been used in the 1st century. It was fun to see some well-known TV gardeners wittily depicted in frescoes inspired by Virgil’s Dido & Aeneas. Can you spot them here? **Answers below.

As well as having children vote for their favourite show garden, this year’s show featured a garden designed by students from a primary school in Fulham with designer Harry Holding: the No Adults Allowed Garden. To quote from the show’s programme:

…the garden is a celebration of the natural world and the joyous wonder children experience within beautiful landscapes.

I’d have loved to try the slide which led to an underwater den! In this image you can see the Chinese fringe tree (Chionanthus retusus) which I have since read won the RHS Tree of the Show.

The Balcony & Container Gardens category of the show is always a great place for ideas for small space gardening and here are a few of them. I confess it was the beautiful blue scatter cushions that first drew my eye to the Anywhere Courtyard! The centrepiece was a waterfall flowing out of a living wall of ferns and Fatsia.

The weather conditions (by this stage of the day steady rain!) were perfect to demonstrate the message of the Water Saving Garden with stylish blue water butts fitted to the wall fed by copper rain chains. The three subtly lit items of ‘wall art’ were vertically planted frames containing drought tolerant succulents.

Tree ferns (Dicksonia antarctica) and nasturtiums burst forth from the balcony of the Junglette Garden, the vibrant green and orange shades intensified by the deep charcoal backdrop and furniture.

Sustainability is at the heart of the garden designed by Tsuyako Asada of Alice Garden Design. The ‘living drain’ at the top of the wall of the Japanese townhouse allows rainwater to filter along yet another rain chain to the water tank beneath, with the overflow directed to the various planters. A large terracotta pot without a base is buried deep into the raised bed for use as a compost bin and the beds are mulched with chopped prunings and collected leaves (conserving moisture and keeping the soil warm). The planters are stuffed to approximately half way with cardboard and newspaper as a solution to the weight limitations associated with balcony gardening.

Highlights from the Great Pavilion follow: a feast of plants from both well-known names and smaller specialist growers.

I was very happy to see the No Name Nursery from Sandwich in Kent won a gold medal. I visited the nursery in September 2022.

Pollinators will flock to this single petalled Rosa moyesii Geranium.

Kevock Garden Plants from Midlothian displayed these moisture lovers. I enjoyed chatting to Kevock about their beautiful planting scheme for the stream-side Church Walk area at Hever Castle which I revisited in April.

The mother and daughter team behind Days of Dahlia, another exhibitor from Scotland, created this ethereal installation of cut flowers grown on their flower farm and displayed on botanically dyed silk.

One year I’ll try to go to the show twice: one day for the show gardens and another for the Great Pavilion. So many treasures, not enough time!

27 May 2024, Kew Gardens

*The Newt is the sponsor of this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.

** From left to right: Monty Don, Joe Swift and Arit Anderson