Indholdsfortegnelse for October 2025 i The English Garden

Nic Wilson Nic is an author, editor and Guardian country diarist. Her work has appeared in magazines and anthologies, and she’s written a memoir, Land Beneath the Waves. She pays a visit to 20 St Stephens Avenue on page 42. Val Bourne Hands-on gardener Val is a committed plantaholic who manages her Cotswold garden organically. She is also vice president of the Hardy Plant Society. She writes about autumn’s colchicums on page 81. Alex Mitchell Alex is a flower grower at Mitchell Flower Farm and the author of books including Crops in Tight Spots, The Edible Balcony and Gardening on a Shoestring. She visits a restored Japanese garden on page 103.…

Sheila Das The head of gardens and parks at the National Trust on developing climate-resilient gardens and worrying less about our choices I spent time in the garden with my mum when I was young, but I drifted away from gardening in my teens. After university I was more interested in music but, just as I realised I wasn’t good enough to make a career out of it, my mum got an allotment. I started helping her with it and something clicked. My first gardening job was at The Grove Hotel in Hertfordshire. I went on to do the Kew Diploma in Horticulture and then worked for English Heritage at Wrest Park. I then moved to RHS Garden Wisley and stayed there for nearly ten years, alongside curator Matthew Pottage…

Walled gardens are an everyday feature of large country estates, but the splendid example at Broughton Grange defies all expectation. Rather than being a tucked-away working area for growing flowers and vegetables, it’s arguably the visual centrepiece of this intricate 25-acre garden. As for the walls, there are only two: on the west and north sides. The eastern edge is bordered by a series of neatly clipped beech tunnels, while the southern boundary is left open with the Oxfordshire countryside spread out rather like a stage set before it. It’s this considered use of its elevated position that lends the walled garden its magic, according to head gardener Andrew Woodall. “We’ve got this amazing backdrop,” he enthuses. “We can’t buy that landscape and we can’t rent it, but we can…

Shropshire’s Weston Park is a country estate offering visitors a mixture of history, nature, and events. The 17th-century mansion is set within 1,000 acres of parkland designed by ‘Capability’ Brown. But closer to the house, head gardener Anna Krapivina has recently been tasked with bringing new energy to the gardens. Her background in restoring historic gardens, not least at Templeton House, former home of Sir Winston Churchill, makes her well suited to the job. “I want to introduce some jazz and rock and roll to the classical music,” she says of her brief at Weston. Here she selects ten of her favourite plants for autumn colour. Weston Park, Weston-under-Lizard, Shifnal, Shropshire TF11 8LE. Tel: 01952 852100; weston-park.com 1 Symphyotrichum novae-angliae ‘Barr’s Pink’ Bold, loud and proud – this plant is one…

It’s here again: that most exciting time of year, when gardeners grapple with their willpower and try not to get too carried away as they place their spring bulb order. There are so many reasons why planting bulbs is such a heady and anticipated ritual each autumn: partly it’s because it’s such a smorgasbord of choice, with many hundreds of different daffodils, tulips and all sorts of other bulbs to try. But it’s also because all that choice gives gardeners a chance to experiment and ring the changes each year, having fun coming up with different combinations and colours. It’s probably also got something to do with the effort-to-reward ratio, since it’s hard to think of any other task where just a few moments work – popping bulbs into a…

Two things have struck me while we’ve been working on this issue. The first, which I admit is not overly practical or realistic, is how much I’d like a wavy lawn (see our feature about the garden at Corsley House on page 32). The other, much more achievable thought, is that I need more grasses. Ambra Edwards has been to visit Knoll Gardens on page 58, where the grasses sold in Neil Lucas’s specialist nursery are displayed to perfection in beautifully autumnal gardens. I wrote last month about how dismal my garden has been looking because of the lack of rain, but the few grasses I have appear completely unbothered by this year’s trying growing conditions. Stipa gigantea is looking tremendous, wafting its lofty golden heads above flagging perennials, the…

ALL PRICES ARE CORRECT AT THE TIME OF GOING TO PRESS.…

In March 2019, gardener Jo Downes dropped in to Corsley House in Wiltshire to see a friend, and by the time she left she had a job. Glen Senk and Keith Johnson, Anglophile Americans who had bought the house, midway between Warminster and Frome, the previous autumn, were talking about needing help in their new garden. “When they heard about my background, they asked me if I could come and help out.” Two days a week quickly grew to full time and, six years on, Jo manages a team of four, maintaining a 15-acre garden that’s been brought back to life both above and below ground level, a place filled with colour, scent, texture, creativity and life. When Jo arrived at Corsley the garden was in a sorry state: “The…

There’s something very special about colchicums, which are also known as autumn crocus. Their dainty pink or white flowers emerge as if by magic, long before the leaves appear. Like elegant young débutantes, they appear just as the rest of garden is starting to look somewhat jaded. Evocative Old English names include ‘naked ladies’, ‘naked virgins’, ‘naked boys’ and ‘meadow saffron’. These epithets were used in the west of the UK to describe our only native autumn crocus, Colchicum autumnale, a plant of low-lying meadows, although it’s also found across temperate areas of Europe. However, there are 104 species in total, their name deriving from Colchis, an ancient region at the eastern end of the Black Sea just south of the Caucasus, where many of them are found. It’s easy…

It’s daunting to take on any established garden. Not least one that is more than a century old, Grade II listed and was described by the garden historian Professor Christopher Thacker as ‘the most convincingly authentic of the Japanese gardens created in the British Isles.” Add in a silted up pond, 100-year-old trees desperately in need of pruning and only an indecipherable plant list written on calico to work with, and you have a challenge. Luckily, as Keith Regan notes: “I don’t mind a project. It’s maybe more of a project than I thought it would be though!” Keith and his wife Belinda were living in Hong Kong when the particulars of a cottage just outside Sevenoaks in Kent popped into their inbox. They were keen to move back to…

By the time we get to this point in the season, I’m ready for a good clear-up in the garden. The sense of order that’s come from trimming the hedges and cutting down the meadow has lingered, becoming somewhat addictive, and although I know we’re supposed to leave stems to shelter birds and insects, it’s hard to resist chopping things back. So I do a bit, where plants have flopped and sagged, focusing on the paths and contours of the garden in particular. Much as I love the blurring of summer outlines as things outgrow their boundaries, it’s lovely to regain the long-lost border edges that give definition to the garden. Many plants tend to give up on it all this month, their va-va-voom having sunk back into the earth.…

Bollenglass Hand-Blown Glass Bud Vases A set of four 13cm vases available in clear or green glass. £186, abask.com Twist Bulb Vase 12.8cm A wavy twist makes this vase the perfect pedestal. £21.50, royaldesign.co.uk Bjørn Wiinblad Eva Vase The Danish designer’s quirky vases come in two sizes. From £39, nordicnest.com Canopy Trio Vase Set Eden Project-inspired curvaceous forms in recycled glass. £40, lsa-international.com Brass Cone Hyacinth Vase A modern design with a brass cone funnel atop a glass vase. £24.99, crocus.co.uk Ribbed Hyacinth Vases In Victorian times, colours such as cobalt-blue and emerald-green were all the rage for bulb vases. This elegant design is rooted in that tradition. £8.75 each, grandillusions.co.uk…

On the south-western edge of St Albans, winding paths lead into a heart-warming garden that embraces autumn flowers and family memories. The borders are as vibrant and colourful as most gardens’ in midsummer, and although the plot is only 53m by 12m it seems far larger thanks to mature trees and shrubs creating structure and curving paths offering tantalising glimpses around every corner. When Heather and Peter Osborne moved here in 1988, the long rectangular garden consisted of an uninspiring lawn and a collection of straggly conifers. Family life fully occupied Heather’s time until, in 1993, she began to make changes to the garden. After completing the RHS Level 2 in Horticulture and a garden design course at nearby Oaklands College, Heather added south-facing beds across the garden to divide…

It’s one thing to achieve exactly the look you want near to the house, but where closely attended planting may peter out, the none-too-small matter of what lies at the end of the property or, indeed, on the other side of the garden wall, can present quite a challenge. “Essentially, you’ve got two ways to deal with a boundary,” says Josh Parker who, with Matthew Butler, runs Butler & Parker Garden Design. “You can make it disappear by covering it or disguising it with a hedge or a big border of plants. Or, if it’s made of a nice material, you can highlight it. If you have a large brick wall, for example, you could repeat that material throughout the garden using it to tie the boundary in with the…

The Welsh word for hillock or high point is ‘crûg’, which, in the case of Crûg Farm Plants refers to a thickly planted mound, the site of a lookout with views over a Roman road between Conwy and nearby Caernarfon, that is now home to the rare trees, shrubs and perennials collected over 35 years by Bleddyn and Sue Wynn-Jones. Despite the different spelling, it’s also a word that brings to mind the fine champagne. Both connotations are fitting, for Crûg Farm Plants is held in the highest esteem by connoisseurs, a pinnacle of excellence for rare and often unheard-of plants. The climate here is cool and moist. Maritime conditions produce mild, if windy winters, while the rich soil is helpfully acidic. Much of the 15-acre site is wooded, providing…

Garden designer Tom Hoblyn is mad about plants from the Mediterranean. During his prestigious Kew Diploma, he worked in Cabo de Gata in Spain, famously the driest place on the Iberian Peninsula. The wild plants and flowers he saw there were a revelation, and he continues to make as many trips as he can to learn from this astonishingly tough plant palette. Tom was botanising in the Taygetus mountains in mainland Greece when he received the call asking him if he would design his tenth RHS Chelsea Garden. The brief was to create a practical and inviting space that would afterwards be relocated to St Cuthbert’s Hospice in Durham with sponsorship from the charity Project Giving Back. “I said ‘I will if I can design a Mediterranean garden!’” he recalls.…