"sacha" wrote

Bob Hobden said:

I don't blame the gardeners but the NT seems to have a policy of allowing a
LOT of bare earth to show and that makes a garden look mean and grudging.
Frankly, all too often you can tell the number crunchers call the shots.
In the white garden, in one area, a dozen Cosmos were trying to do the work
of 3 dozen. I saw two plants I'd like to get, a Euphorbia cornigera (sp?)
and a lovely, very old climbing rose on the wall of the library entrance.
It's immediately on your left as you walk through that arch, past the steps
up to her writing 'tower'. It has no label so I doibt they know what it
is, though someone said she'd try to find out for me.

At Great Dixter, the place just bounces with exuberance and joy. I really
have never seen a garden like it. We all know the received wisdom of
planting loads of one thing in groups or drifts but there, nobody takes the
slightest notice of such 'rules'. A solitary Verbascum would normally look
forlorn but because it's surrounded by loads of plants and its friends pop
up here and there nearby, it's never in 'sore thumb' isolation. There
isn't an inch of earth to be seen where planting is complete and where it
wasn't, we encountered Fergus Garrett and assistants planting Francoa, so
he and Ray had a brief discussion about those! The garden is managed with
a light hand but never over-managed and certainly not manicured. The
quantities of meadow garden are a wonderful counterpoint to the cultivated
areas. For the first time we saw Amicia zygomeris in a garden other than
our own and as you so rightly say, loads of things we grow at home.
Tremendous!


Some people love to see earth between individual plants, I have friends like
that. My "overgrown" garden must be a constant irritation to them but then I
work in the belief that covering the ground with plants stops weeds growing,
so my plants compete for space.
At Great Dixter I got the feeling they garden such that if a nice plant
seeds itself they let it be knowing it will almost always work. So they let
the verbascums seed around and only pull them up where they really don't
want them. I bet they do the same with Opium poppies, I do.
--
Regards. Bob Hobden.
Posted to this Newsgroup from the W of London, UK