Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2023 i The English Garden

I’ve recently become acquainted with the charity Songbird Survival at a time when I’ve become much more aware of the birds in my garden. I’m not sure why, possibly because there’s more birdlife in this area than in my previous gardens, or maybe I’ve just come to value them more. I’ve been watching a robin busily building a nest in the Lonicera nitida hedge that runs along the front garden, while a few others can often be seen picking whitefly off what’s left of my kale (not much, thanks to the attentions of the local pigeons). A few evenings ago I noticed a tiny wren hopping about in a border, ducking under clumps of perennial foliage. And judging by the incessant sound of a squeaky high-pitched see-saw each morning from…

Darren Hawkes Darren Hawkes is back at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show to celebrate the Samaritans’ 70th anniversary with a Listening Garden I trained to be an actor and while resting between jobs and auditions I did a variety of different part-time work. A friend was working for a landscape gardener and got me a job, so I worked on the site for six weeks trying my hand at everything. I started landscaping between acting jobs and it was such an antidote to the theatre. The work was addictive, the people friendly and I loved seeing immediate results at the end of a hard day’s work. After a few years I became more curious about plants and started to ask the garden designer I was working with so many questions.…

Nestled in a woodland clearing at the foothills of the Cleveland Hills in North Yorkshire, Mount Grace Priory is a magical place. It has a history that spans nearly 650 years: an imposing manor house, which was redeveloped at the turn of the 20th-century in the Arts & Crafts style, sits amid the ruins of England’s best preserved Carthusian charterhouse, established in 1398. From the solitary monks through to a wealthy, pioneering Victorian industrialist, Mount Grace’s unique gardens help trace its history and provide a link across the ages. The Carthusians were a silent order of monks from France who lived in almost complete solitude in individual cells, their lives governed by a strict timetable of prayer and work. The cells were more elaborate than the name suggests, each one…

Marysa and Graeme Norris moved from London to Suffolk in 2011. When they began house-hunting, Graeme said he didn’t mind where they lived as long as it was not in the flatland of Suffolk! “But what delighted us about Suffolk was the wide-open skies and the light,” Marysa recalls. “It was also less crowded and very rural, yet within striking distance of London.” By a stroke of luck they found Church Cottage in the village of Troston and, in the dozen or more years since moving, Marysa has worked her way through the garden she inherited, adapting and changing parts of it, as well as creating new areas. “When we arrived, the garden was a series of small rooms with several internal hedges and small fences that had helped keep…

TOP 10 PLANTS Not far from the River Spey in Morayshire, Scotland, the restored eight-acre walled garden at Gordon Castle includes an orchard, cut flowers, vegetables and soft fruit. “The climate in the north of Scotland is perfect for growing soft fruit and almost half an acre is dedicated to it,” explains head gardener Ed Bollom, who honed his productive gardening skills at Highgrove. “We grow myriad wonderful berries to use in everything from jams and chutneys to shortbread and gin, and of course delicious compotes and crumbles,” he adds. Here Ed recommends ten good soft fruits to grow. Gordon Castle, Fochabers, Morayshire IV32 7PQ. Tel: 01343 612312; gordoncastle.co.uk 1 Redcurrant ‘Rotet’ “Unbeknown to most gardeners, redcurrants can be trained into all sorts of wonderful shapes making them both beautiful…

Early in the month there’s not much in the way of produce to bring into the kitchen, but within a week or two things start looking up. We now have plenty of rhubarb, new salad leaves and the lettuce that was sown in March, along with an array of herbs, early onions and our number one productive crop: leafy greens. It’s a top moment for a couple of different spinach varieties, plus Swiss chard. This is a plant that keeps on giving at almost any time of year, but it’s now in May – and then again in September – when it is at its peak. Towards the end of the month, we also have radishes. You need to eat these quickly once they’re ready or the roots get too…

CRAFTSPEOPLE Anyone who has visited southern or south-eastern Europe is likely to have walked across a stone mosaic pavement at some point on their travels. Embellished with swirls and geometric designs in contrasting light and dark stone, pebble mosaics were used in flooring and often in more decorative spaces such as courtyards. Archaeologists have excavated examples dating from the 7th- and 8th-centuries BC in central Turkey, but even if you’ve toured the Alhambra and wandered around the streets of Granada in Spain, your feet will most certainly have passed over decorative pebble mosaics at some point. The Lune Valley in Lancashire is a long way from such sunny climes, but this is where Maggy Howarth established her eponymous business, which is now run by her son, George, and designer Elizabeth…

Stepping into the Suffolk churchyard of St Bartholomew’s, Orford in May is like stepping into a dream. The handsome 14th-century church rises gently from a hazy sea of cow parsley. Nestled among the lacy flowerheads are fleets of pinkish-grey gravestones, velvety with mustard lichen. The tones are exquisite against the gauzy cream from which the stones emerge. A couple of hundred miles to the west, a roundabout near the Welsh Marches’ town of Presteigne, shimmers with cheerful ox-eye daisies and long-stemmed meadow buttercups. The roundabout has been transformed with wildflower seed from a local churchyard. This circle of land, quite literally an island of rich, local biodiversity, floats serenely amid the usual highway clutter of black and white chevrons and soaring street lights. For the past 20 years, the charity…

Zia Allaway Zia is an author, editor, and journalist, who writes for magazines and newspapers on all aspects of gardening. She has also written ten practical gardening books for the RHS and DK. She visits The Manor House on p22. Dr John Grimshaw John is director of the Yorkshire Arboretum and manages the collection in Ray Wood, which he tells us about on page 149. He’s also the author of books including New Trees and Snowdrops: A Monograph. Helen Billiald Helen is a freelance garden journalist with a background in plant science and ecology. She’s passionate about the natural world and the stories that lie behind beautiful gardens. She admires Yews Farm on page 32.…

Building one of the most highly anticipated Show Gardens of Chelsea 2023, Cleve West returns to the show after seven years with the Centrepoint Garden. The focal point, a part-demolished Victorian house where nature begins to colonise the rubble, is an apt metaphor for the work Centrepoint does in helping young people to find homes and jobs and build lives. “It’s daunting because this is not the kind of garden you expect to see at Chelsea,” Cleve explains. “But the main thing – regardless of whether anyone likes it or not – is that it gets talked about.” Jihae Hwang is also back at Chelsea, after a 10-year break, with her garden Land of Healing: Korean Mountain Light, which evokes Jirisan, a mountain in South Korea. “We hope to convey…

PLANT FOCUS It would be easy to assume that astrantias, with their mass of dainty pincushion flowers held above mounds of soft foliage, are less than hardy or require special attention, but that could not be further from the truth. Their delicate appearance belies their toughness. Dr Andrew Ward, who holds the Plant Heritage National Collection of astrantias at his nursery in Norwell, Nottinghamshire, grows almost 70 cultivars on heavy clay soil in a frost pocket where they regularly experience lows of -12ºC in winter – not perhaps the most obvious conditions for a National Collection, but Andrew says the astrantias are “completely unfazed by the conditions”. Also known as Hattie’s pincushion or masterwort, astrantias are clump-forming perennials with low mounds of lobed green leaves from which arise, branching stems…

GROWING HERBS She travelled through Europe, eloped with a married man, and worked as a librarian in Cairo in the 1940s. But when the adventurous Elizabeth David returned to the austerity of post-war Britain, she realised one very particular thing: British food was dismal. And so began the main work of her life, for which we have much to be thankful. By 1950 she had published A Book of Mediterranean Food. This was the first of eight titles that brought to our tables such exotic substances as garlic and saffron and, crucially, encouraged generous use of herbs. Today, as the Mediterranean diet is increasingly recommended for good health and long life, herbs are becoming ever more popular. If you’ve cooked from Claudia Roden, Yotam Ottolenghi, Rachel Roddy or even Skye…

The rate of plant growth in the Deanery garden seems exponential. Each day brings a new floral delight. The first silvery pink spheres of Allium cristophii followed by the magenta spires of Gladiolus communis subsp. byzantinus. The first double ‘Duchesse de Nemours’ peony blooms watched over by the equally creamy ‘Lichfield Angel’, a David Austin rose just getting into its stride. These all bask in the strong sunshine. Meanwhile, the lime tree canopy is closing in and the contrast between sunny and shady areas becomes increasingly pronounced. Our native cow parsley and red campion flower in the dappled light, hiding the fading foliage of spring bulbs and bringing the woodland area’s show season to an end. Somewhere between these extremes of light, in the lee of a north-facing wall but…

With its tile-hung walls and tall chimney stacks, the 16th-century cottage at Copyhold Hollow is the stuff of fairytales, made all the more enchanting for its wooded backdrop. Set back from a quiet West Sussex lane, it sits at the bottom of a steep sided hollow that looks as if it has been left behind by a giant wielding an enormous ice cream scoop. Geologists believe it’s a natural formation, but Frances Druce, who has lived here since 1993, isn’t so sure. “There are a lot of hammer ponds from the iron ore industry in the area, and they’re all man-made,” she says. “But, who knows?” However it was formed, the cottage and setting are magical and made even more so by Frances’s 30-year creation of a beautiful woodland garden.…

THE NATION’S FAVOURITE GARDENS In association with This year, The English Garden is once again teaming up with the National Garden Scheme to identify the Nation’s Favourite Gardens. This is your chance to nominate the gardens you love to visit that open to visitors in support of the National Garden Scheme and its fundraising for nursing and health charities. The winning gardens are named the Nation’s Favourites and are featured in the magazine. We know many of our readers have their favourites, so here’s your chance to share these special places and help them raise even more money for this incredibly worthwhile cause. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when 2022 let us get back to normal garden visiting after the disruption of the pandemic: gardeners keen to explore other…

Astrantias require a reliably moist soil, and the sunnier the position the greater their water requirements. If they are thirsty the flower stems will droop. Mulching plants in spring, when the soil is damp, will help. Cutting back the old stems in June or July, once the first blooms have faded and dried, will encourage a second flush of flowers. This will also help to prevent unwanted seedlings, which won’t come true and can often outcompete the parent plant. Unlike most herbaceous perennials, astrantias don’t need regular division to maintain their vigour. If a plant outgrows its space, use a spade or serrated trowel to cut away sections from the outside, rather than lifting and dividing the whole plant. Astrantias don’t suffer from many pests or diseases, but if whitish-brown…

BETTER BORDERS Spring is here and with it an opportunity to add plants to improve your borders – although do remember to keep watering any new additions, particularly if the summer is hot and dry. One of the joys of gardening is this process of constant review as we strive to make our planting better. Now is the time to make tweaks, fill gaps and refine the overall picture by repositioning certain plants. The other great joy of gardening is the fact that almost everything we do to make our borders look more appealing to us will also benefit wildlife and increase our garden’s appeal to the insects, bees and birds we share it with. The two aren’t mutually exclusive: borders can be made better from a gardener’s aesthetic point…

Immediately to the east of the great mansion of Castle Howard in North Yorkshire rises a small wooded hill. This is Ray Wood, a place with important horticultural histories, set 300 years apart. Shown on the estate map of 1694, Ray Wood was a patch of ancient woodland retained to provide fuel and timber for the occupants of what was Henderskelfe castle and village. The building of Castle Howard from 1699 swept away all traces of both: the castle was razed, the village translocated – but the wood remained. Over time, it was transformed through some of the theatricality that characterized Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor’s vision for Castle Howard for their patron, the third Earl of Carlisle – a pleasure garden was created at its heart. In the early 1700s the…