26 September 2026
By: James Lennox

Occasionally, I wonder if I've bitten off more than I can chew at La Corolla. The thought tends to occur when I'm on my hands and knees weeding around the base of every tree in the new Grove or clipping my way along the bay hedges for the second time that year.

Cholmondeley demonstrates the wisdom of knowing when to stop and the virtue of not over-extending oneself. The intensively gardened areas are kept deliberately compact; while all around, generous, looser areas provide an assured (and less physically or financially onerous) backdrop.

The gardens are largely the work of Lavinia, wife of the sixth Marquess of Cholmondeley, who arrived here in 1947. Sensibly, she decided not to have the gardens compete with the Gothic Revival castle perched on its mount. Instead, they've been developed discretely to one side, spreading through a sheltered dip in the land and taking full advantage of the water that flows through that part of the grounds.

The Temple Garden is the first port of call, enticing the visitor to enter with a handsome Metasequoia and one of its American cousins nearby. In mid-September the repeated Acer palmatum 'Sango-kaku' were lighting up the rocky bankside, with russety tones developing on the Darmera peltata ringing the water. A satisfying composition anchored by a leggy Arbutus x andrachnoides, its glossy red bark glistening after every shower.

A word of caution. I'm no fan of the flowering cherry but somebody at Cholmondeley clearly is. Fair enough, each to his own. There's nothing wrong with satisfying a personal urge but it can't be at the expense of the composition as a whole. The danger is that the new additions will, before you know it, start to dominate the whole garden and interrupt sightlines – for the briefest imaginable reward.

Already the gladiator in his temple is having to fight the darn things off. A hack here or there is no solution – it's tricky to make an amputated cherry look in any way naturalistic. One to watch.

From there the path leads to the undoubted highlight of the season: Lavinia's Walk, a relatively recent re-imaginging of the old herbaceous borders. Nothing here strains for effect. At nearly a hundred yards long, the scale is spot on for the site, generous without being too grand.

Most striking is the absence of shrubs – this is a herbaceous border, pure and simple. Instead of falling for the Christopher Lloyd way of doing things (as I myself have), this preserves something of the essence of an older tradition.

But instead of a carefully controlled gradation of colour from cool to hot and back again along the length of the border (as is the Jekyll way), here repeated groups of pink, red and orange flowers (heleniums, crocosmias, persicarias, etc.) are offset by dark-leaved dahlias providing a foliage foil.

Old school with a modern twist. The effect is subtle rather than dramatic and all the better for it. A simple idea executed with conviction.

And in another departure from the tried and tested, the borders are not backed by yew. Height is provided by ironwork frames within and a screen of Malus hupehensis behind at intervals to act as a leafy corps de ballet – decorative but definitely there in a supporting role.

The Walk delivers you to the Rose Garden, where a metalwork rotunda makes for an eye-catching full stop. And if you were wondering where the yew was, it's here in spades.

This is very much a garden of two halves. The first, older part might benefit from a refresh, although I hesitate to judge a rose garden on its appearance in September. The second, newer part, even at such an unflattering season, is a success, thanks chiefly to a smattering of well-placed statuary adding height and contrast. Views back to the castle have been opened up while at ground level the beds are edged with box to preserve the roses' modesty.

Between here and the castle, the Glade is strong on specimen trees (a fine Paulownia with some decent magnolias for company) with plenty of bamboo clumps and stalwart shrubs (doughty deutzias, camellias) to liven things up in the spring. Persian ironwoods abound – singly or in clumps – a tree very much in tune with the general tone of the garden, understated and elegant, even if their sheer quantity suggests someone, somewhere might have stumbled across a bulk buy offer that was too good to refuse.

The area around the castle itself has little to detain the garden visitor - the planting is functional and self-effacing, presumably so as not to interfere with the view from within of the action on the estate's cricket ground below. Which to my mind easily outranks a helipad in the rural bragging stakes.

The walled garden is thankfully off-limits. I've never understood the typical garden visitor's fascination with inspecting what is essentially someone else's evening meal, wandering the paths looking for leeks when outside there's bound to be another Parrotia to peer at. Full marks in this instance for not subjecting one's groceries to public scrutiny.

Linking these looser sections together are meadows, recently mown and licked back into shape. All suitably soothing but one thing did catch the eye: newish Cornus kousa dotted across the grass had clearly found the summer a bit of a challenge, with scorched leaves hanging to possibly lifeless branches. They're tough plants so might well bounce back in the spring. But it doesn't help that they were having to cope with grass growing right up to their trunks. I'll say it once again and with feeling:grass is public enemy no. 1 for young trees. You've been warned.

The Folly Garden was gearing up nicely for its own autumn moment, sweetgums colouring well over an underplanting of hydrangeas and other informal woodland favourites (Euonymus alatus, etc). Plenty of new planting again confirms this isn't a garden content to rest on its laurels. Subtle interventions and re-inventions are the name of the game.

A small arboretum nearby contains some respectable hemlocks and a golden honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos f. inermis 'Sunburst'), which together with the plethora of Parrotias, the chorus-line of cherries and, elsewhere, the downright weirdness of a walnut grove, suggests a keen interest in all things arboreal.

Cholmondeley is the very opposite of confrontational. It doesn't seek to shock or challenge. Which is not to say that it's stuck in a rut.

There are plenty of instances of innovation, even if I don't necessarily agree with all the decisions being made. (Yes, those blasted cherries again.) There's a spaciousness, an uncluttered air that means there's room to grow and develop at an unhurried pace. It's all very gentle, deliberate and considered. And unlike a certain garden close to my heart, it certainly knows not to overplay its hand.

More information here: https://cholmondeleycastle.com

25 September 2026
By: James Lennox

It has been a brutal summer for British gardens. Record heat, a drought that turned lawns the colour of digestive biscuits, and a general sense that the only rational response is to down tools and start researching the price of artificial grass.

At La Corolla we have the option (very rarely exercised) of sitting by the pond with a good book when it all gets too much. A garden open to the public just has to man up. Professional pride and demanding visitors mean the show must go on, however hard the hosepipe bans bite. Powis, perched on a red sandstone ridge in mid-Wales, was as good a place as any to see how a great garden copes when the weather refuses to play ball.

The garden's history involves a sequence of hyperactive bursts followed by indolent longueurs resulting in a complex layering of styles and the occasional regret. The first terraces were blasted out of the rock in the early 1680s for William Herbert, 1st Marquess of Powis, who fled to France with James II before the job was finished.

Baroque flourishes were added from 1703 onwards: grand Italianate terraces, a water garden and cascade, and lead statuary from the Van Nost workshop. The later 18th century added a landscape park to soften the formality.

In the early 20th century, Violet, Countess of Powis, turned the old kitchen garden into a formal Edwardian set piece. Later, National Trust head gardeners pushed the planting into more adventurous climes. And it's that streak of horticultural audacity, more than the 17th-century bones or subsequent history, that makes Powis worth the drive.

Nowhere is that bravado more evident than the Top Terrace's tropical border. Unusual salvias (S. oxophora and S. atrocyanea) flowering their socks off, spiky Solanum atropurpureum keeping trespassers at bay, bamboo and charming Hibiscus trionum lend the whole scene a genuine touch of the tropics. For once Chusan palms fit the theme rather than reminding one of Torquay and municipal bedding-out.

Is this is a vision of the future of British gardening? Probably not. As tempting as exuberant foliage and tender subtropical blooms might be in heatwave conditions, we're not quite in guaranteed frost-free territory yet.

But there's something to be said for exploiting the opportunities afforded by a longer, warmer growing season, even if there still has to be a decent heated greenhouse and a reliable water supply hiding round the corner.

And who knew good old yew would be the perfect foil to tropical excess? Planted way back when, the yew was clipped to start with, then succumbed to middle-aged spread (haven't we all?), before the Victorians laced it back into its stays and the modern miracles of electric hedge-trimmers and cherry-pickers mean that the vast tumps and humps are here to stay. The collective noun is, apparently, a 'blobbery', a term I intend to use frequently.

Cutting was in progress on my visit: scaffold poles and string lines where needed, the full monty. It's a useful reminder that in a summer like this one, indestructible evergreens earn their keep - a soothing dark-green backdrop when all things herbaceous are flagging. (Thank goodness I had the foresight to plant a quarter of a mile of bay hedges at La Corolla, even if they do need clipping twice a year.)

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Even the box along the terraces was immaculately precise, no sign of blight or moth yet, thinner and taller than the usual model, adding an elegant, crisp definition to the fading summer borders. All of which gives way to looser, wavier forms in the Box Walk, a shift in tone as you move down the hill.

Statuary and pots do a lot of the theatrical heavy lifting. The Van Nost lead figures - dancing shepherds, musicians and their molls - put me in mind of Melbourne Hall, another garden leaning on the same sculptor's workshop to comparable effect.

Bedding in pots has been something of a trademark of Powis and the particularly 'bold' orange fuchsias and begonias lift the whole Orangery Terrace well above the run of the mill.

The entire composition - building, staircase, balustrading, statues, pots crammed in wherever there's a flat surface — is remarkably inventive and unashamedly flamboyant, more Isola Bella than rural Wales. It shouldn't work as well as it does but on a warm September afternoon it positively sings.

After all the high jinks, the Fountain Garden and Yew Walk are excellent palate cleansers: pared-back, almost modernist in their restraint but with a nod to the Renaissance. It's the sort of quiet, confident simplicity that a garden needs after it's let off a few fireworks elsewhere.

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And if at any point you crave an escape from the madding crowds, head to the Wilderness on the far side of the stumbling block that is the Great Lawn (more of which below). Not only does it provide a killer shot of the castle and terraces tumbling down the slope below, there are two tulip trees worth the walk on their own.

Ramrod straight and performing more like they do in their native America, they bear a passing resemblance to the specimens I admired at the Scott Arboretum, which is more than can be said for most of their brethren in Britain.

Not everything works, the Great Lawn being the main offender. I'm no fan of vast expanses of grass at the best of times – do your bit for climate change and bang in a few trees instead (cf. the new Grove at La Corolla). Of course, in a garden open to the masses, concessions have to be made to the mummy-and-buggy brigade. The lawn occupies the footprint of the old Water Garden, drained and grassed over once fashions changed. Now there's a project I could get behind – banish the lawn and reinstate the water. Quite apart from righting a historic wrong, a still pool would be a boon to the Instagram crowd (think selfies with upside down reflected castles) where a parched and lumpy lawn currently does nothing much.

It would also solve the problem of the bank of acers, in desperate need of a rethink. Thirsty trees, signs of dieback, grass growing right up to the base of every trunk – just not a good look.

Well-shaped acers used with more conviction work a treat on the parterre at Drummond Castle in Scotland. Here, the anomalous hint of Japan just feels slightly misguided on a Welsh hillside. If the water does go back into the Great Lawn, the bank could be cleared, anything more than grass (yes, I know) being fussy and surplus to requirements. A two-for-the-price of one solution.

The formality of the old kitchen garden is a bit of a mixed bag.

The fruit trees are good, the shapes echoing the yew tumps below the castle and there's a satisfying walk down to the wrought-iron gate, the Herbert family elephant and griffin leading the eye nicely.

But the croquet lawn feels like a space still looking for a purpose (hoops, a mallet or two?), and the planting around it is largely uninspiring: scrappy hardy fuchsias on one side and early summer herbaceous past its best on the other. Next door is a random smattering of obligatory David Austin roses for no discernible reason – they seemed to enjoy being there as much as I enjoyed seeing them.

Much cheerier in a nearby border was a smorgasbord of 20th century floribundas, varieties that rarely get an outing in fashionable settings these days – 'Sarabande', 'Frensham', 'Lili Marlene', 'Evelyn Fison', 'Anne Darkness', 'Anna Wheatcroft'. Unsophisticated perhaps, but they made me smile, an underappreciated response in most gardens today.

Quibbles aside, Powis is a gem. The horticulture on display is genuinely skilful – tender beauties (such as Bartlettina sordida filling out the top terrace), botanical curiosities (Carica candamarcensis, anyone?), stunning pots (Dodonaea viscosa 'Purpurea' with a Rhodociton atrosanguineus a particularly joyous combination). Not to mention getting a Cornus capitata to flower and fruit in mid-Wales - no mean feat.

And it wasn't the only thing doing better than it had any right to – callistemons, cistus, buddleias akimbo, Colletia paradoxa, dahlias and a decent collection of sedums ('Gooseberry Fool', 'Xenox', 'Red Cauli', 'Jose Aubergine', etc.) jollying things along nicely at the tail end of summer.

Enough with the plant lists. Experimental, occasionally over the top and still going strong after a downright challenging summer, Powis exceeded expectations. Now, about that pond...

More information here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/wales/powis-castle-and-garden

Summer is finally over. The autumn rains have arrived – and not a moment too soon. I've lost track of how many days I've spent lugging watering cans to the top of the hill and the furthest reaches of the orchard. But on my travels, I've entertained myself with some of life's bigger questions: Do aliens exist? Will AI be the end of us? And why on earth do we garden?

Not people in general – me and Alan. Why do we spend our days weeding, watering and worrying? Should we not seek to emulate so many of our fellow countrymen in Spain whose biggest dilemma is whether to start the day with a gin and tonic or a brandy-laced coffee?

There are three overlapping answers that keep us motivated when the universe conspires against us and our best laid schemes gang so aft agley.

Activity

No doubt about it, the devil makes work for idle hands. Early retirement was never going to mean putting my feet up. Once we'd finished building two houses by hand, we couldn't wait to get stuck into the next project – the garden. And this was in the days before ADHD was all the rage.

Gardening is one of those activities that expands to fit, and often exceed, the time available. It gets you outside, using your hands and thinking about something other than yourself. For me there's real satisfaction in the sheer physicality of it – digging, hedge-cutting, pruning and then hauling the resulting debris across a treacherous slope.

None of it is particularly glamorous; some of it is decidedly unpleasant – but you finish the day having achieved something. You can see the results, even if sometimes they're not the results you wanted.

It's not all physical exertion, of course, although no-one has ever applied the dread phrase 'low maintenance' to this garden. There are calmer activities, those small acts of attention that accumulate over the course of a day – staking, dead-heading, general tweaking.

Over time, you can't help but develop a relationship with the garden as a separate, living entity, a sense of responsibility for everything growing there, constantly checking whether particular plants have recovered from yesterday's heat (hydrangeas in particular) or noticing when something starts to look a little tired and emotional (currently, an irreplaceable handkerchief tree).

Rather than get overwhelmed by the scale of the task, it helps us to think of this garden as our very own adventure playground. One minute we'll be clambering up a tree to lop off a branch, the next rolling boulders uphill to repair a crumbling dry stone wall. We're left to our own devices to come up with our own solutions in our own time – a real luxury.

Creativity

Nobody can tell you what to do with your own garden. They might try to force you down the wildlife-friendly, native-plants-only, rewilding route, with its own vocabulary and the insidious implication that you're a moral failure if you don't comply. Don't let yourself be intimidated. If you want to put up a deer fence and plant exotics, go for it. Equally, if you prefer to share the space with all and sundry, why not?

We tend to plough our own furrow. Golden weathervane in a redwood circle? Fine. Cloud-pruned osmanthus? Nobody's coming to arrest me. It might look fabulous; it might look ridiculous and then collapse in a heap. But that's the whole point – gardening lets you be creative for your own selfish pleasure and generally away from prying, judging eyes. Unless you choose to put the results on the internet for all to see.

Of course, exercising one's creative instincts can bring creative differences to light. Who knew ornamental grasses could be such a bone of contention? Movement, delicacy, informality – what's not to like?

Some people, apparently, have yet to see a miscanthus they didn't want to burn to the ground. You win some, you lose some – they've now been banished to the sweetgum avenue, leaving just the odd well-behaved calamagrostis, pennisetum, deschampsia and stipa to enliven the terraces. The art of compromise in action.

Above all, gardening satisfies the urge to impose a little of ourselves on the world around us. There is a particular pleasure in taking an unpromising piece of ground and imagining what it might become. And that's where having a resident photographer comes in handy.

It's all well and good assembling a collection of plants. That's exactly how I started out – with roses, oaks, epimediums and daylilies among other plant obsessions. I was tempted to set them all out in straight lines, neatly labelled and easily maintained. Until someone pointed out that I might like to consider such things as leading the eye onwards, framing a view, using complementary colours and contrasting textures to add interest to a scene.

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The real challenge, though, is creating atmosphere – the trickiest quality to nail in a young garden. You can plant everything correctly and still end up with a jumble of plants rather than a coherent sense of place. It takes time but the woodland is starting to project that aura of peace and tranquility that I'd hoped for, while the hilltop reveals unexpected and dramatic views of distant peaks and the terraces overwhelm with immersive exuberance. A work in progress, but we're getting there.

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Curiosity

If the adventure playground keeps us physically fit and composing scenes satisfies our creative urges, curiosity is what keeps us going when things don't always go to plan. Gardening is a huge subject — history, design, botany, soil science, climate, and the eternal question of why a plant thrives in one spot and turns up its toes mere yards away.

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This garden is one giant experiment. Our prized gordlinia is living its best life while right next door the franklinia that provided half its DNA longs for the eastern seaboard. Go figure. Eryngiums have been a total bust every single time – the perfect sunny, well-drained conditions and somehow I manage to kill Eryngium 'Picos Blue' within sight of the actual Picos de Europa. A katsura dropped its toffee-scented leaves for the last time after one dry spell too many; a eucryphia shuffled off pining for lush Chilean forests.

Then there are the grafted plants that have failed spectacularly. Grevillea, oak and dogwood — the tops died back while the rootstocks went from strength to strength. The results? A Grevillea robusta sprouting out of a shrubbery, a Quercus cerris digging in at the top of the hill and more Cornus alba 'Sibirica' than you can shake a coloured stick at.

We make our choices, the plants make theirs. Self-seeders will invariably spring up in the middle of a path, while Japanese irises, daylilies and camellias thrive in the hottest, driest spots they can find. Yet more plants that haven't read the textbooks and have a better understanding of the garden's quirks than we do.

Much of the appeal of gardening lies in discovering what happens next. We're constantly learning, often through failure, occasionally through luck. Sometimes a plant decides to do something entirely unexpected. And before you know it, you've learnt something new.

So, why do we garden? Mainly because this garden is never going to be finished. There is always another plant to try, new combinations to explore. And perhaps that's the real attraction. A garden is not simply a place that you maintain. It's a space that you inhabit, physically and emotionally. You put your time into it, your energy, your ideas and, occasionally, a ridiculous amount of money.

In return, it gives you something that is difficult to find elsewhere: the opportunity to spend your days carving out a spot that is entirely your own, while never quite knowing what it's going to become.

Tomorrow there's a hillside to mow, newcomers to water and geraniums to split. And somewhere out there, some pesky plant, probably an eryngium, is waiting to teach me a lesson.

16 July 2026
By: James Lennox

Fashion can be a fickle mistress. Your two and a half acre walled garden is the toast of the horticultural press – lauded as an innovative take on new perennial planting in the last place you'd expect to see it, the wild and windy east coast of Scotland. Swathes of grasses, late season prairie stalwarts, asters, heleniums, salvias aplenty – the London-based garden media crowd couldn't believe their luck, an undiscovered gem just begging to be splashed across a double page spread.

Fast forward fifteen or so years and the garden is still there doing its thing in the face of stiff competition and an even stiffer breeze. The Piet Oudolf look has been embraced far and wide, spawning untold pale imitations. Naturalistic planting schemes were once startlingly original, a reaction in part to the grande dame school of '80s gardening. But what once felt radical now feels almost par for the course. So how is Cambo, one of the early adopters, holding up? Does it still pack a punch?

Yes and no. The site itself dictates much of what is possible. The walled garden occupies two long slopes divided by a burn running through the middle, an unusual topography but one exposed to almost relentless wind. (Did I mention it was a bit blowy the day I visited?) If ever there was a place where ornamental grasses earn their keep it's here. Stipa, miscanthus and calamagrostis were bravely standing their ground while their broader-leaved companions (not to mention the poor, double-flowered roses) were looking decidedly storm-tossed. On the whole, the garden wisely works with its conditions rather than against them.

Without doubt, the most successful area of planting is either side of the long path running from the greenhouse at the top of one slope all the way to the sculpture of two cartwheeling Chinese acrobats surmounting the far wall. (The only instance of sculpture in the entire space and I mistook it at first for a cheeky wind turbine peeking into the garden.) Deep, confident planting seemed to be coping, nay thriving, in these coastal conditions. After all, it's not every day you spot an Echium pininana in Fife, a much more welcome sight than the scrappy cordyline further down the slope. Just because you can grow something doesn't mean you should.

The exuberant planting around the sundial is equally memorable. Anthemis, eryngiums ('Picos Blue' to remind me of home?), achilleas, penstemons and sanguisorbas add a certain technicolour gaudiness that is only kept in check by the grasses and supporting greenery. It's feel-good brazenness to gladden the heart - saturated colour, bold combinations and unapologetic visual drama. It is the opposite of subtle and enormously effective. This is one of the garden's strongest, freshest compositions.

Elsewhere, there are similar flashes of inspiration. Old apple trees underplanted with shrub roses and lilies make for an unexpectedly successful combination, proving that orchards need not be carpeted with nothing more imaginative than rough grass. Even the cutting garden, normally a no-go zone for me with its regimented rows of sacrificial blooms awaiting the flower arranger's knife, felt blowsier and more integrated in the grand scheme than is often the case.

The range of woody plants is unexpected. A lilac walk with a couple of dozen different specimens runs along one wall; an Osmanthus yunnanensis appears on the far side in a woodland-style corner that caught me off guard, a particularly bold juxtaposition with the sundial planting nearby. New shrubs are being added along the north-facing wall hinting at further evolution.

Not every decision convinces, particularly the weak internal organisation of the space. The planting lacks a sufficiently confident framework to keep it in check. Rather than being a coherent whole divided into distinct spaces, the garden feels curiously ill-defined with different areas just bleeding into each other. Compare this to Scampston Walled Garden, an actual Oudolf design where each space possesses its own identity and atmosphere, where the transitions are, if anything, arguably too abrupt and self-contained rather than non-existent. It's clearly a tricky balance to strike.

The burn at Cambo should be the garden's great organising feature, yet somehow becomes little more than a boundary between the two slopes. The chance to create a stronger sequence of spaces arranged around this one axis has been squandered. Long grass is rather unimaginatively the order of the day and a couple of rickety bridges and a tired gazebo do not inspire confidence. A timber pergola occupying the site of demolished glasshouses by the water's exit from the garden looks, itself, rather shabby and lacks the sense of permanence and scale that the setting deserves.

The same lack of definition, of crispness, is evident at times in the planting itself. There's nothing wrong with allowing a more relaxed feel to develop assuming always that it's the result of a conscious aesthetic decision rather than a mere cost-cutting exercise. But romantic haziness and prairie or steppe planting do not, to my mind, make compatible bedfellows – it's the sharpness that makes this style so compelling at its best. Without a firm hand the whole scheme can lose its footing and slide into something that simply looks under-maintained.

Outside the walled garden, there is the woodland that plays host to Cambo's famous snowdrop collection. It was, of course, resting in early July, so the walk downstream to the beach offered nothing more than the excitement of dodging wayward golf balls struck by Scotsmen perfecting their swings.

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The approach to the walled garden itself was full of interest and handled expertly. The path winds through a woodland zone with epimediums and ferns at ground level to a more open, yellow-infused mixed border composed of thalictrums, euphorbias, digitalis and acers with a podocarpus and hoheria thrown in for good measure.

There's even room for a rather diminutive North American prairie which was showing promise (I'm a sucker for a tradescantia) but with planting yet to reach its late summer crescendo. Narrow paths and towering eupatoriums hint at an immersive experience to come.

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Perhaps my biggest gripe with Cambo is that it felt ever so slightly bland. Some gardens tell you immediately whose garden you're standing in. Branklyn Gardens could only have been created by alpine specialists obsessed with the latest Himalayan discoveries. Carolside Gardens is the result of one woman's passion for old roses. The personalities of their creators are woven into every border and every decision. You leave feeling as though you've met the gardener as much as you've visited the garden.

Cambo is rather different. It is certainly one of Scotland's most ambitious gardens. The horticultural standards are high, the range of plants impressive and there is no shortage of visual impact. Yet I came away having appreciated it more than I liked it. Cambo is very much a visitor attraction, complete with café, shop, events and the wider enterprises of the estate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with commercial motivations, but it does give the place a subtly different feel.

Rather than discovering someone's intensely personal vision, there are moments when you feel you are walking through a professionally executed interpretation of how Scottish gardens, too, can move with the times. It's an impression re-inforced by the all conquering ubiquity of this style of gardening where Branklyn and Carolside feel like increasingly rare holdouts against the prevailing wind.

Fashions come and go. The style of garden on show at Cambo is still very much in the ascendant, preferably with a side-order of biodiversity added to the new perennial mix. But the gardens that stand out from the crowd are those that could only have been made by one particular person in one particular place. Cambo is undoubtedly accomplished, but I can't help wondering whether, in striving to be one of Scotland's finest examples of contemporary naturalistic planting, it might have sacrificed a little of its own individuality along the way.

More information here: https://www.cambogardens.org.uk

14 July 2026
By: James Lennox

"Go to Branklyn in May for the Meconopsis" seems to be the standard advice. Which makes sense as this is the home of the national collection of Himalayan poppies (as well as of Cassiope – a niche plant interest if ever there was one). Or if you can't manage a spring visit, swing by in the autumn when the acers are colouring up nicely. Again, perfectly sound advice.

So I went at the beginning of July, missing both the poppies and other obvious crowd-pleasers – the erythroniums, trilliums and primulas carpeting the ground beneath blazing rhododendrons, the offspring of seed collected in Tibet, Bhutan and China by the likes of George Forrest, Frank Kingdon Ward, George Sherriff and Frank Ludlow and tended by Branklyn's owners, John and Dorothy Renton from the 1920s onwards. Would there be anything to see 'out of season'? And how much interest can there really be in a suburban plot of under two acres beside a thundering thoroughfare in Perth?

Buckle up, Dear Reader, as this is going to be one of my more plant-heavy reviews. Which is hardly surprising, as there are over 3,500 species represented here, from woodland trees right down to alpine gems. One minute I was craning my neck to take in the top of a Sciadopitys verticillata, the next spotting a potted 'Spotty Dotty' perched next to a rushing waterfall, before turning to be dazzled by the amphitheatre sweep of the main rock garden. It's an intense experience.

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And this is the obvious place to start. Kiftsgate recently turned its tennis court into a water feature. The Rentons were even more ambitious, converting theirs into a rock garden, altering the topography of the site with the aid of enormous rocks hauled down from the hillside above. Every single plant looked to be living its best life. A Morina longifolia was being spiky and assertive echoing a Desfontainia spinosa in the background while celmisias, lewisias, saxifragas, roscoeas and dieramas were gearing up, recovering or flowering away.

The danger of cramming so many plants into such a confined space is that it becomes less of a garden and more of a chocolate-box selection of botanical treasures, the 'one of everything' school of planting, an incoherent jumble where every plant competes for attention and nothing has room to breathe. Incredibly, that's not the case here. The cushions, domes, drifts and mounds all seem to be rubbing along nicely. Yes, there are plant labels tombstoning the ground but it's a small aesthetic price to pay when there are so many otherwise unidentifiable rarities to be admired.

Yet again, it all comes down to the skill of the gardeners. No precious real estate is allowed to go to waste. Narrow paths create intimacy while also allowing the visitor to get up close and personal with the plants. It's a masterclass in how density need not result in overcrowding. The secret, I suspect, lies in discipline and ruthless editing. Every specimen earns its place, but equally, every plant knows its place. Vigorous plants are carefully restrained to prevent them dominating more retiring neighbours. The result is extraordinary richness without visual chaos. And just when I thought I'd spotted a flaw, a weed indeed, I stumble across my first Taraxacum pankhurstianum. Thank goodness for those labels.

It would have been all too easy for Branklyn to become little more than a living catalogue: an invaluable collection perhaps, but not a particularly satisfying garden. Somehow it avoids that fate. Every decision seems to have been made with one eye on the individual plant and the other on the composition as a whole. The garden always wins.

That might well be Branklyn's greatest achievement. As well as preserving the Rentons' original vision, the National Trust for Scotland has managed the far trickier task of preserving the way they gardened. It's a difficult balancing act to preserve a legacy without embalming it. Personality can be eroded when decisions are made by committee; individual vision gives way to consensus.

Branklyn manages to escape that particular doom-loop. The garden is impeccably maintained, but never feels institutionalised. It still gives the impression that behind the scenes are people obsessed with plants. The garden is clearly still moving forward, a young wollemi (Wollemia nobilis), for example, earning itself a cushy billet by the pond.

The recent removal of overgrown trees and shrubs has led to a rejuvenation of the garden and rather than simplifying the planting, the gardeners have doubled down. Renewed crevice beds are filling out, Penstemon pinifolius andErigeron aureus 'Canary Bird' providing colour while Jovibarba allionii and Rosularia serpentinica add their inimitable shapes to the mix.

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Both this and the main rock garden function almost as open glades among the trees and shrubs such as magnolias ('Daphne', M. wilsonii and M. x wieseneri), a fine Eucryphia glutinosa, a random Nothofagus antarctica (why not?) and a Disanthus cercidifolius adding autumn colour worryingly early in the season.

Beyond lie the bulk of the rhododendrons, the new growth of R. fictolacteum and R. 'Everred' still offering something after the flowering season with a Lyonia villosa and a Schefflera (Heptapleurum) fengii loitering in the background for the plant nerds among us to discover. At ground level there are still such beauties as Calanthe tricarinata to add to the ever-expanding wishlist. There was even one last Cardiocrinum giganteum taking a final bow.

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At the risk of sounding churlish in the midst of such horticultural marvels, I have two minor quibbles. The group of Japanese maples at the end of the upper lawn could do with taking in hand. They've been indulged for at least one season too many, losing definition and rapidly becoming amorphous blobs. Against the sharpness elsewhere, they look fuzzy and middle-aged. An easy fix.

The herbaceous border at the top of the garden is the other area of concern, an anomaly that doesn't quite fit with the rest of the garden. Perhaps it's just a historic hangover or a concession to the expectations of your average garden-goer more interested in a decent cup of tea on the lawn than recently discovered rare Scottish dandelions. Either way, the inclusion of a clump of Lobelia tupa and a Pseudopanax ferox (both looking remarkably happy this far north) did manage to redeem this section somewhat and rescue it from the run-of-the-mill.

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This is definitely not a garden resting on its laurels. Instead the impression is of a living collection of fascinating plants rather than a relic preserved in aspic. There's a spirit of adventure and experimentation at play, exemplified by the many recent additions which are pushing at traditional climatic boundaries. Will every bet pay off in Perth? Possibly not, but nothing ventured, nothing gained seems to be the attitude now as it was back in the 1920s. And who doesn't love a garden that sells its own surplus arisaemas?

Branklyn achieves something extraordinarily difficult. One of the widest plant collections in Scotland never becomes merely a collection of curiosities but remains a coherent garden imbued with its own personality whatever the season. The Himalayan poppies may steal the headlines but they're far from the whole story. This is a garden that repays close attention. Dorothy Renton thought it would appeal to "the enthusiast who goes round the garden at five minutes a step". I couldn't agree more.

More information here: https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/branklyn-garden

11 July 2026
By: James Lennox

We gardeners are forever being encouraged to think about extending the season and spreading our bets. Always make sure one end of the border is coming into flower while the other is gracefully going over, that sort of thing. All very sensible, I'm sure, but there's a certain devil-may-care thrill to be had from throwing sensible advice out of the window and putting all your chips on red.

In an age devoted to drifts of ornamental grasses, New Perennial plantings and prairie-style swathes, an obsession with old roses and a National Collection of pre-1900 Gallicas makes a refreshing change. And just because most of these roses have been around for a couple of hundred years doesn't make this any less of a high-stakes gamble.

There's something deeply appealing about a gardener (in this case, Rose Foyle, 36 years into her time at Carolside and still very much hands-on) who decides to focus on one glorious moment, to commit fully and unapologetically to a very particular vision. Forget compromise and the dictates of fashion. Instead, go all out on what brings you joy and, in this case, make one month of the year truly unforgettable.

Uncomplicated honesty is the hallmark of old roses. For a few heady weeks, nothing else in the garden matters. No second flush as a pale imitation of the first. No jaded re-appearance among September's asters. No overstaying their welcome like a superannuated singer on a final, yes, final farewell tour. Old roses have the good grace and impeccable manners to know when to leave the stage.

Mind you, they've had to earn their keep. By the beginning of the twentieth century they had largely disappeared, swept aside by newer hybrids promising bigger flowers, novel shades and longer seasons. Their revival owed much to the likes of Vita Sackville-West and Graham Stuart Thomas, whose writing in the 1950s onwards reminded gardeners what they had been in danger of losing.

Rather ironically, Mr Thomas's name lives on for many in David Austin's finest yellow rose – one of the ever-increasing tribe of English roses that hog the limelight these days and are in danger of side-lining the old roses completely. Marketed as the answer to every rose-lover's prayers, combining old-fashioned good looks, fragrance and repeat-flowering, English roses have a habit of sweeping all before them.

Except I'm starting to have nagging doubts. Grown side-by-side at La Corolla with stalwart Gallicas, Damasks, Albas and Mosses that seem positively to relish a decent blast of Asturian heat (with another record-breaking summer well underway), newer roses can look like also-rans, succumbing to blackspot while trying valiantly to keep the show on the road. So much so that I've consigned a fair few of them to the woodland and even the orchard where they seem to prefer some light shade. Repeat-flowering can turn out to be a compromise.

If any garden shuns compromise in favour of commitment, it's Carolside. While the whole garden lies in a valley bottom frost-pocket that might test more delicate plants, the old roses that dominate the two acre oval walled garden are made of sterner stuff. In a refreshing change to modern orthodoxy (in other words, a welcome return to tradition), the roses are grown in dedicated beds, side by side with one another and not lost among companion planting or consigned to fighting it out with herbaceous thugs.

Every rose is labelled; every support is discreet but effective. The pruning regime has been refined over years and seasonal deadheading is prioritised. And thanks to the labelling, I now have to track down my own 'Belle Rosine', 'Boule de Nanteuil', 'Georges Vibert' and 'Minerve'. It's an occupational hazard when visiting such a covetable collection. In due course, they'll be added to the clumps of 'Charles de Mills', 'Tuscany Superb' and good ol' 'Officinalis' already romping up the hillside at La Corolla. And as they couldn't be easier to propagate or more dependable, the more the merrier, I say.

Somehow, there's still room for other goodies in the walled garden. As a nod to tradition, the centre of each quarter is given over to raspberries, sweet peas, cabbages, asparagus and potatoes, discreetly tucked away behind the roses and herbaceous borders but adding to the intensity of planting. This is a rather elevated version of cottage gardening.

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The central axis leading from the main entrance gate to the glasshouse is a triumph of herbaceous planting, as is the intersecting path running between doors on either side. Alchemilla mollis froths all along the paths backed by delphiniums, lupins, Campanula persicifolia 'Cornish Mist' and Aconitum napellus 'Rubellum'. Irises serve as a warm-up act to the roses with oriental poppies adding their inimitable ruffled glamour.

Just when you think there can't possibly be more to Carolside than the walled garden, each door opens onto further delights. And what impresses in each space (and unifies the whole garden) is the standard of horticulture. It is all, quite simply, immaculately gardened, an approach that appears to be increasingly unfashionable these days.

The box hedging is probably the healthiest I've seen anywhere in Britain for years. Lawn edges are razor sharp. Even the pelargoniums in the glasshouse have been pimped to perfection. Towering beech hedges are clipped with precision. They were being trimmed on the day I visited, swooping down to frame a view into the parkland or a gate festooned with copper roses.

To one side is a laburnum tunnel underplanted with immaculate hostas forming a shady counterpoint to the rose show. This leads in turn to a wildflower meadow and a river walk by the Leader Water, nothing more than a crystal clear stream gently slipping by in July. Something tells me it was on its best behaviour.

On the far side of the walled garden is the Herb Garden, triangular box-edged beds filled with oregano and thyme, the whole planting picking up on the yellow-green explosion of alchemilla in the walled garden. Here the overall impression is of a soothing space, the white bench lightening the mood even further after the curated drama of the roses.

The Secret Garden follows on, with a shift in colour to pinks and silvers. And as a contrast to the fuller-figured roses in the walled garden, here the daintier musk rose 'Felicia' surrounds the central oval, underplanted with Stachys byzantina. There's a gentle romance to this section hidden away between walls and yew hedges, the intricate metal benches protected by yet more overhead roses.

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The Apple Orchard was resting between its spring and autumn exertions while the Winter Garden surprised by providing more interest than most in summer. It has a woodland feel, Acer palmatum 'Garnet' playing off the copper beech behind, ornamental rhubarb and Veratrum viride serving up foliage realness, with a smattering of hostas and mahonias to bulk out the border. An unexpected bonus.

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Without doubt, Carolside was one of the finest gardens we visited on our recent tour of Scotland. Not simply because of the roses, nor because of the extraordinary standard of horticulture, but because it knows exactly what it wants to be.

Too many modern gardens seem to have lost their way. They worry about extending the season, pleasing visitors, catering to wildlife, following the latest fashion, squeezing another fortnight of colour from every border. They hedge their bets. Carolside does the opposite. It commits itself wholeheartedly to one unforgettable event each summer, then quietly gets on with being an excellent garden for the rest of the year.

Repeat-flowering roses may well have won the commercial battle. But standing in the middle of Carolside in full flower, breathing in perfumes that no modern breeding programme has quite managed to match, I started to wonder whether we've become just a little too willing to sacrifice seasonal excellence in favour of year-round mediocrity.

In an age when so many gardens seem to be converging on the same hackneyed palette and the same trite ideas, there's something deeply refreshing about one that has the courage of its convictions and remains faithful to itself.

More information here: https://www.carolside.com

12 June 2026
By: James Lennox

I've recently waxed lyrical about the role of garden visiting in sharpening the gardener's eye, and I teased a summer sortie north. Watch this space. But first, a flashback to the other end of the country. Picture the scene – April in Kent, spring was still mulling whether to put in an appearance and the hordes hadn't yet rediscovered their love of tea-and-cake outings.

Sissinghurst was calling. Visit in June and you'll be swept along by the blowsy planting and the crowds. Visit in April and you are reminded that Sissinghurst's real achievement is structural. The planting doesn't get in the way of the design and you see more clearly how the one relates to the other. Which, as it happens, is the whole point.

This is the garden that popularised the idea of the garden room, dividing an entire plot into a sequence of enclosed spaces, each with its own atmosphere and identity. Harold Nicolson, the diplomat, supplied the strict geometry and was in charge of establishing the axes, sightlines and proportions; Vita Sackville-West, the poet, took care of the exuberant planting, wanting to 'cram, cram, cram every inch of soil'.

The scale of its influence is hard to overstate. In her weekly newspaper columns, Sackville-West combined practical authority with a romantic sensibility, writing about her own garden as if it were a potential paradise she was perpetually in the process of perfecting. A generation of British gardeners – overwhelmingly female, overwhelmingly middle-class – was inspired. White gardens proliferated across the country for good or ill. Not every idea she promoted has aged perfectly, but the notion that a garden could express personality and creativity remains central to British gardening.

Of course, Sissinghurst isn't the only historic garden built along these lines. In many ways it merely adopted the template established at Hidcote. And, at the risk of horticultural heresy, Hidcote remains the more dramatic experience. The transitions are bolder, the surprises greater, the sense of experimentation more pronounced. Sissinghurst, on the other hand, feels gentler and more domestic, less theatrical, perhaps, but more intimate.

That domestic scale is part of its enduring appeal. Climb the tower and the whole place is revealed at once. The famous gardens occupy a surprisingly modest footprint, each compartment neatly contained within a larger framework. Seen from above, they resemble a collection of miniature show gardens arranged around a medieval curio. It's easy to understand why generations of visitors have left uplifted rather than intimidated. Unlike some great gardens, Sissinghurst doesn't seem unattainable. Most of its rooms could be recreated, at least in spirit, in a modest plot.

The White Garden is surprisingly small given the cultural shadow it casts. Restricting the palette to white, silver and green forces attention onto texture, form and light. Quince trees line the central path (replacing the original almonds) with low mounds of artemisia and drifts of Stachys byzantina ready to take over from the daffodils and Dodecatheon meadia f. album dotted around. Before the summer crescendo arrives, the space possesses an airy elegance. Come June, the much-imitated arbour draped in Rosa mulliganii will be stopping visitors in their tracks. Whether the newly planted magnolia I spotted (possibly M. denudata) will one day overpower the space remains to be seen.

The Nuttery was the area of the garden that 'settled' the decision to purchase for Nicolson. Parallel rows of coppiced Kentish cobnuts are not, on paper, the sort of thing that should make the pulse race. Yet in spring the effect of low filtered light illuminating a woodland floor alive with anemones, fritillaries, trilliums, ferns and erythroniums is magical. The current planting is surely an improvement on the polyanthus carpet that was removed long ago as a result of disease. It's the kind of disciplined, restrained naturalistic planting that I can get behind.

The transition from the Nuttery to the South Cottage garden is startling. Restraint and caution have been thrown to the wind with old-fashioned wallflower cultivars in tones of brick red, burnt orange, deep yellow and mahogany. Again, a formal layout and deep green yew just about manage to contain the riot.

Not every 'room' has the courage of its convictions. The Moat Walk is no horticultural showstopper and feels like a big chunk of real estate in search of a purpose. You walk along it, admire the Elizabethan wall and move on. Perhaps to the Herb Garden, suffering in April from timing, but all year round from its position in the far corner of the garden, as far from any kitchen as possible. Aristocratic indifference to practicality, perhaps, and definitely not a problem when you've got a cook and a garden boy at your beck and call.

The Lower Courtyard alongside is no triumph of design. The proportions seem awkward, the thin and patchy border at the base of an imposing wall is a missed opportunity. Beyond lies a view towards the orchard which, for me at least, failed to reward anticipation. I hadn't appreciated until this visit quite how much is given over to orchard. Regular readers will know my reservations about sacrificing valuable space to either fruit production or meadows, and seeing the extent of it here did little to soften my position.

Which brings us to Delos. In 1935, Nicolson and Sackville-West cruised the Greek islands, liked what they saw and, on their return, tried to re-create a slice of the Med at home by sprinkling a few ruins, rocks and sun-loving plants on a north-facing slope. Kent refused to co-operate. 'This has not been a success so far, but perhaps someday it will come right', wrote Sackville-West. Well, has it?

Recent reimagining by Dan Pearson has sought to realise the original vision using a much better understanding of ecology. It is thoughtful, skilful work, well executed. But I remain to be convinced. The ambitious planting (cork oaks and Judas trees for height, cistus, thymes, broom and Ballota pseudodictamnus) certainly lend a Mediterranean air and appear, so far, to be coping well in the much-improved conditions. Under an English sky, though, silver-leaved plants can appear wan and subdued, longing for a decent burst of blazing sun and prolonged drought.

Perhaps the problem here is contextual as Delos has a certain charm and does manage to evoke the Mediterranean, despite the milky sunshine. But beyond the planting are traditional red-brick buildings, lush green fields and oast houses. Throw in as many broken columns and hot summers as you like but you're still in the Weald.

Are we simply being asked to applaud a well-to-do couple for returning from Greece with a yearning to recreate a fragment of a foreign land in an alien setting? If somebody came back from Torremolinos and installed a wicker donkey and a ceramic flamenco dancer next to the hot-tub, we’d be tempted to mock them mercilessly. Add a few classical references and some drought-tolerant shrubs, however, and suddenly Delos is elevated to the status of a sophisticated recreation of an Aegean hillside.

Those involved in the restoration have done a remarkable job with a difficult brief. My suspicion is that the original idea was simply flawed. Some concepts deserve preservation because they are important. Others should be consigned to the reject pile as beyond redemption.

What lingers after a visit to Sissinghurst is, more than misfiring experimentation, the mastery of enclosure and revelation. Every room possesses a distinct atmosphere, achieved through shifts in planting, colour and geometry rather than brute scale. Even areas that feel underwhelming at certain times of year contribute to the wider composition.

And April may be the ideal moment to appreciate that achievement. The crowds are thinner, the structure more visible and the spring planting judicious and refined. If you want to understand why Sissinghurst became one of the most influential gardens in the world, don't necessarily wait for the roses. Go when the architecture of the place is still showing through. Just don't confuse Kent for Greece.

More information here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/kent/sissinghurst-castle-garden

The garden is excelling itself right now. And I only deserve a little of the credit. Take care of a plant's basic needs – soil, water and sunlight in more or less the right combination – and it'll reward you handsomely.

In some cases, the darn things embrace life at La Corolla just a little too lustily. When a tulip tree puts on three feet a year or a geranium self-seeds itself through a border as thickly as cress on a flannel, you realise you must have been doing something right to make them feel so at home.

I'm slowly realising that I'm storing up trouble for myself down the line – a dozen coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) in a circle all because I can't bear to throw out anything I grow from seed; more Euphorbia mellifera than is strictly necessary for that Canary Islands vibe; ornamental grasses springing up at every turn. The next generation will be cursing my name before I'm cold in the ground.

If only I'd got round to visiting other gardens before embarking on this mad adventure, I might have been able to spot future problems before rushing in blindly. It's one of the reasons why I'll be spending considerable time this summer in other people's gardens (escaping the heatwaves and the crowds in Northumberland and Scotland, to be precise) – trying to spot mistakes before I make them, finding solutions to problems I've already created and, hopefully, finding inspiration for the next phase in my own garden's evolution. Established gardens are, in effect time machines. They allow you to see the consequences of decisions that, in your own garden, are still a life-time away.

When we started out, we knew next to nothing. Growing fruit and vegetables was the gateway drug. It seemed rude not to imitate what our village neighbours were doing, even though apples are my least favourite fruit and I'm not overly keen on potatoes. I soon grew out of my utilitarian phase. Productive gardening certainly feeds the body; the soul, not so much.

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Then came the various plant obsessions. Roses for a while – even though, as a friend once warned, they would cause me no end of grief in a hot, humid climate. Trees followed, oaks in particular – do I really have 30 different species? More recently, attention has turned to the ground level and I've been piling into all the herbaceous goodies that newly created shade has enabled: epimediums, toad lilies, ferns, all manner of woodlanders that would probably prefer to be somewhere cooler and damper but are making the most of the situation.

As a garden matures, plant collecting gradually gives way to plant combining. Individual specimens standing in splendid isolation become less important than the contribution they make to the overall effect. Atmosphere, rhythm and contrast start to matter more than whether a particular plant is rare or unusual. That's not to say I've given up my covetous ways entirely – it just means I have to incorporate the five latest 'must-have' Cercis sympathetically into the existing scheme and not plonk them all in a line like new recruits on a parade ground.

At the same time, the maturing garden starts throwing up entirely new problems. Plants that once flourished begin to feel the pace. Leave it too long and a plant suffering in a changing environment will eventually turn its toes up. Earlier this year I played musical chairs with a dozen roses being shaded out by expanding tree canopies. After a hard prune to the top-growth, a tidy-up of the root system, plenty of water and a stern talking-to, they're all enjoying a new lease of life in the re-vamped grass terrace and orchard. Problem solved. At least until the next plant decides it would rather be somewhere else.

The garden demands a different response and constant re-evaluation as it ages. And that's where visiting other, older gardens can play a role. I'm one of those curmudgeons who doesn't really subscribe to the tea-and-cake school of garden visiting. I tend to sidestep the cafe and dive straight into the garden. Why does this path feel inviting? Why does that view work so well? Why does one planting combination sing while another merely fills space? How has an established garden coped with the exact same challenges I'm now facing at La Corolla?

Travelling with my trusty photographer-in-chief is invaluable. We gardeners have an unfortunate tendency to become absorbed by the detail. We notice plant labels, cultivars, maintenance issues and weeds that escaped attention. Photographers often see something entirely different. They notice shapes, outlines, composition, light and drama. They ask whether a scene works as an image long before they start worrying about plant identification.

The trick is not to copy those exact same images – that would be too easy. Any reasonably competent gardener can reproduce a planting combination, build a similar structure or acquire the same plants. Social media is full of gardens that appear to have been assembled from a checklist of fashionable ingredients. The same meadow plantings, the same New Perennial palette, the same combinations repeated from one end of Europe to the other. Often beautiful, but increasingly interchangeable.

The objective is not to return home and recreate somebody else's garden. The aim is to identify what's missing from your own. One thing that struck me a few years ago about my own garden was that it was, if anything, too plant heavy. It was only after visiting gardens from Dumbarton Oaks to York Gate that I realised La Corolla was somewhat lacking in the incident department. The garden was in need of punctuation among the planting.

And so in our own humble way, we've started to introduce the occasional eye-catcher on a rather more domestic scale than Rousham or Plas Brondanw. A vase here, a golden ball there, usually surmounting a rendered white column or plinth – a simple hand-crafted house style to fit in with our other building projects. Nobody is likely to mistake them for eighteenth century masterpieces – they very much belong here and nowhere else. But the inspiration, the prompt to create some drama came from seeing other gardens and appreciating what they were doing better.

Forget the tea and cake, that's the real value of garden visiting. The purpose is not to return home with a shopping list or a blueprint. It is to return with sharper judgement. To see one's own garden more clearly, question assumptions, challenge habits and occasionally discover that somebody else solved the exact same problem way back in 1873. Most of all, it is to continue the process of finding one's own garden voice. And if I manage to get a few garden reviews out of it, so much the better.

6 June 2026
By: James Lennox

British gardeners have gifted the world two great stylistic innovations. In first place is undoubtedly the eighteenth century Brownian landscape. Often imitated but never bettered, it's occasionally scorned by those who can't see the genius of its re-imagining of the English countryside as an aesthetic object pared back to the bare essentials – rounded hills, grass, water and trees. Running it a close second, and lending itself more readily to modern-day budgets and spatial constraints, is the concept of a garden made up of separate 'rooms'.

And of all the places I least expected to find an evocation of Hidcote, Sissinghurst et al., a secluded, rain-blessed valley in the Basque Country would have been top of the list. The brainchild of Iñigo Segurola, a professional gardener, designer and TV presenter, a series of distinct 'rooms' has been carved out of a valley bottom ringed by verdant hills and alongside a rushing stream that greets the visitor with a hint of the planting that lies within. Tree ferns are something of an obsession here, perfectly at home in this permanently damp, sheltered spot.

In a mere 5 acres of flat ground, Segurola has played with colour-themed spaces (red, white and yellow), genus-specific areas (bamboo, ferns, hydrangeas) and different habitats (wetlands, meadows). So far, so unexceptional. After all, every Home Counties matron worth her salt has had a stab at a White Garden dedicated to dear Vita's memory.

Crucially, though, concepts that might seem tired, even clichéd in an English context suddenly look fresh and new under a foreign sky, taken out of context and far removed from hints of the Yellow Book and a cup of tea for charity. Taking a traditional notion (the garden 'room'), extracting it from its usual milieu and then re-working it from a perspective steeped in a different gardening culture can clearly work wonders. Especially if hedges aren't the proto-typical yew and box, but the rather more inventive Japanese maple. Sacrilege to some, playful reinvention to others.

Part of the appeal of this garden to an English visitor must be the cognitive dissonance generated by a familiar concept being interpreted in a novel way. Here, it's the unconventional planting that forces you to look anew at the very idea of, for example, a red border. Where Hidcote relies on dahlias, crocosmia, cotinus and berberis for its ruddy glow, the Red Garden here lets Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii'and Persicaria microcephala 'Red Dragon' do the heavy lifting. The central grass walkway might be the same, but the planting either side is radically different.

Hidcote's border culminates in twin pavilions. Here, the Red Garden leads to the striking angularity of the owner's neo-brutalist concrete and glass studio-cum-home. And if visitors needed a reminder that this is a private space, the collection of cacti, succulents and scrap metal act as eye-catching defence mechanisms. Again, another subversion, this time of more traditional garden buildings such as conservatories or orangeries.

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The familiarity at one remove applies also to the Moon Garden – a more successful space all round than the actual White Garden here that, for me, somewhat lacked definition and expected a Cornus controversa 'Variegata' to do all the hard work. The Moon Garden, on the other hand, is a triumph, a fusion (to continue the comparison) of Sissinghurst's White Garden and recently revitalised Delos. Pale forms, ghostly glaucous foliage and enormous slabs of sandstone, all offset by artfully positioned white metal chairs, create a complete contrast to the tones found elsewhere in the garden. The Mexican daisies (Erigeron karvinskianus) were running riot, Acacia pravissima had been trimmed into leggy Modigliani-esque sculpture, Yucca rostrata spikily played off the yew domes dotted throughout.

Other well-executed 'rooms' include a wetland area beneath an imposing Taxodium mucronatum leading to a Jurassic-themed walk by the stream. The first area is filled with bog and swamp-lovers, while the second is a haven for ferns of all kinds and mounds of moss echoing the rounded stones used to form the path. This shady, moody, contemplative route wends its way to a clump of bamboo that curiously lacked impact – the scale was just a little too diminutive, the drama of being transported to an alien environment absent, the requisite sense of menace missing.

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Another good idea that fell slightly short of its target is the Hydrangea Maze. Admittedly, April is not the most exciting time of year to view mophead hydrangeas. But the density of planting suggests that at the height of the season the whole area might be impenetrable without some careful tweaks and adjustments. And at the risk of sounding a negative note (still frowned on in garden reviews, but that's a whole other discussion), intriguing ideas are occasionally let down by a slightly too carefree attitude that suggests some areas might get overlooked when they should be popping.

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There's a fine line between delightfully loose and distractingly scrappy. Structural lines lose their crispness, planting is not shown off to its best advantage. Features should draw the eye, not confuse it. A charming tale about subterranean watercourses meeting in the exact spot identified by a visiting witch for a pond deserves better. A general tightening up wouldn't go amiss with certain 'rooms', such as the Secret Garden, being hopefully a work in progress rather than just a missed opportunity.

Some areas (The Garden of Extravagance and the Big Leaf Garden) weren't yet firing on all cylinders so early in the season, but show promise of things to come. I have a soft spot for the razor sharp Pseudopanax ferox and the weeping katsuras repeated throughout this section of the garden. And you can never have too many tetrapanax. Just as well, given its propensity to sucker with gay abandon.

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But while the planting is playing catch up, the structure comes to the fore. Rounded or slightly elliptical forms abound in water features, planting beds (in the Meadow, for example, looking dishevelled but geometrically sound) and in the plants themselves – domes, balls and mounds proliferate.

All of which can be explained by the designer's inspiration coming in the form of an egg, the whole garden being organised around this one shape, imbuing the space with a unifying significance. Without the aid of a drone, the visitor can only sense the larger patterns reduced to their essence in the various repeated, small-scale structures more easily appreciated from eye-level.

Where the designer's inspiration is most successfully translated to the ground is the Mirror Garden, embraced on one side by the Yellow Garden. A generous expanse of water edged with manicured grass and a border stuffed with yellow leaves and flowers (take that, stuffy good taste!) certainly packs a punch, amplified by the discipline and skill with which the entire scheme is carried through.

There's a reason this is the most photographed part of the garden – it's where concepts, materials, plants and design all come together to form a pleasing whole. It's not perfect (one side is marred by an experiment in contortion where weeping swamp cypresses are propped up to provide a screen), but it's not far off.

While the water provides a link to the heavens (reflections of scudding clouds a speciality), the planting showcases some of the repeated signature plants found elsewhere in the garden – architectural tetrapanax, bananas, flowering dogwoods, phormiums and phlomis. Balanced, rhythmic and sufficiently startling to give Vita a fit of the vapours, this is the culmination of a garden that is at once intensely personal and a striking re-imagination of a well-trodden garden path.

More information here: https://lurgarden.eus/index.php?lg=en

There’s nothing like an arbitrary self-imposed deadline to force me into action. Without one, I’m inclined to sloth, managing nothing more than drifting through the garden dead-heading the occasional rose like a dowager duchess in her Country Life pearls. The year I attempted to go biodynamic (way back when I thought I needed to grow vegetables to establish my horticultural bona fides) was an utter failure on all fronts. Somehow the phases of the moon, changeableweather and my own innate laziness all conspired to ensure that nothing got done at all. There was always someplanetary excuse for procrastinating.

So, the third week of May has become an immovable feast in the gardening calendar. By then, the garden has to be shipshape and ready for inspection, no matter the weather. And what a torrid time it’s been – so far, spring has seen an entire month of cold rain followed by a heatwave and incipient drought. 12 degrees C and squelchy to 33 degrees C and crispy in the space of 4 days. Worryingly similar to last year's pattern, in fact – and we all know how that ended.

None of which got in the way of the hard graft that is an essential part of gardening – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The secret is to remind yourself to take pleasure in the process, every tiny task contributing towards the end goal. Winkling weeds out of paths with a hori hori, stripping ivy from tree trunks before it’s off to the races – mind-numbingingly time-consuming to some, an act of meditative deliberation for me.

The rest of the village might retreat indoors to hunker in front of a fire or seek refuge from the noon-day sun, but I’ll be out there in all weathers, reminding myself that you can only get wet or hot once, after that it’s just a continuous state of mild discomfort. A wide-brimmed hat to keep the rain off one’s glasses and the sun off one’s miraculously youthful complexion is worth every ounce of ridicule from one’s nearest and dearest.

But not all tasks are repetitive chores. Planting new booty has to be a highlight for any gardener. A plant fair here (Iturraran in the Basque Country being unmissable), a mail-order delivery of herbaceous goodies there – all in the ground lickety-split while the rains were still with us. Another self-imposed rule is to make sure everything is out of its pot by the end of April at the very latest if the newcomers are to stand any chance of getting through the summer unscathed. Mulch well, keep the little darlings free of weedy competition and the endless round of supplemental watering can be kept to a bare minimum.

Among other treasures were added more magnolias (I never can resist), a Mexican Clethra pringlei pushing the geographic boundaries of the American planting in the grove, an osmanthus or two for the orchard (olive family, you see), yet more epimediums and a brace of Japanese maples – I feel another plant addiction coming on. All of which have been entered on the Plant List – very much a work in progress but a handy aide-mémoire for the rapidly dwindling little grey cells.

Of course, the combination of heat and humidity, while not ideal for the appearance of some of the fuller-figured roses, means everything has galloped away – unfortunately including the dreaded grass, remnants of old sheep and cow pasture that haven’t yet been eliminated entirely by planting. You can probably tell where I stand on the whole fashion for ‘meadows’ – grass just gets in the way of proper plants.

It’s fine for a rustic path, but otherwise it just takes up precious real estate and effort, with most ‘meadows’ lookingmiserable for about 10 months of the year. And as every woody obsessive knows, grass is the enemy of trees and shrubs, especially on a naturally dry hillside. I’m only too happy to tilt that eternal struggle between savannah and forest in favour of the trees. Reduce it to a bare minimum, preserve anything truly special that crops up (not even I can scythe an orchid) – and leave the grass-growing to the professionals, i.e. farmers and groundsmen.

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With the essentials taken care of, attention turns to the finer points of garden maintenance. Some people assert that the price of democracy is eternal vigilance. The price of a half-way presentable garden is a thousand subtle interventions – a much more exacting, and rewarding, endeavour. A tweak here, a snip there helps to sharpen up the whole picture without drawing attention to the changes. To the untutored eye it will appear as if I’ve just been lounging by the pool with a G&T, whereas I’ve actually been holding the downward dog pose for hours on end while grappling with secateurs, string and a wayward stem.

Wisteria was pruned (at least a month early by English standards, but not a moment too soon in Asturias), moss was scraped from the most treacherous paving and promptly deposited amongst the shade lovers (waste not, want not) and the herbaceous planting was assessed for staking and pinching out purposes. Chelsea chop all you like, particularly if you’ve got four young children, time constraints and a nascent drink problem. I prefer a slightly more focussed, less frenzied approach that doesn’t leave the plants with split ends or unsightly tears.

While the trees and shrubs can more or less look after themselves in spring and summer, the herbaceous planting in the terraces and rose garden needs more attention right now. Slug and snail-watch can be exhausting but nobody wants to see a dishevelled daylily or a holey hosta. And it’s never too late to correct obvious mistakes – a misplaced Pinellia tripartita really won’t thank you for finding itself in full sun at high noon. Intervene early or repent at leisure is as good a motto as any to see you through the summer with minimal regrets.

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At the risk of understating how exhausting the spring rush can be, let me spell it out – this is, by far, the most frantic time of the year in the garden. But it’s also the most satisfying, rewarding and uplifting moment in the calendar as well. Otherwise, none of the effort would make any sense. To see the borders fill out, the surge of new growth all around, the garden coming to life when all seemed brown and inert just a moment ago, is the biggest thrill of all.

And somehow, in the midst of all the relentless activity, there was even time for some good old-fashioned hard landscaping. Reconnecting with my trusty spirit level, shovel, trowel and bucket was long overdue – there are only so many years I can rest on my laurels for having once built two houses with my very own hands. Even I need a break every now and again from the green stuff. At long last, and with just a little help from my resident photographer, we now have an entrance to keep unwanted animal riff-raff out and, more importantly, through which we can welcome guests.

What’s good for the garden isn’t necessarily good for the gardener. I love steady rain as much as the next man gardening against the odds on a steep dry hillside in northern Spain. Particularly after the drought year of 2025. But two months of solid rain has left the borders water-logged, every grass path a treacherous mud-slide, and me chomping at the bit to meet the new season head-on.

While the piano-playing has been coming along a treat, the relative lack of physical activity has left me battling early-onset middle-aged spread. The garden, meanwhile, has definitely hit its unruly teenage years, clinging to the same favourite unwashed t-shirt and dreaming of its first piercing or, heaven forbid, tattoo. A spot of firm parenting was in order.

Every gardener lies somewhere on a continuum stretching between two extremes: the old-school soldier (trusty tweeds, oiled and sharpened tools, moustache regardless of sex), planning every attack with military precision, determined to subdue, if not defeat, the enemy in the field; and the hippified peacenik, permanently attired in rose-tinted spectacles and shapeless tie-dyed creations (again, regardless of sex) floating serenely through bramble-strewn meadows, trying to find a flat patch of weeds that won’t object to a yoga mat being unfurled.

After months of giving free-rein to my inner hippy, it was time for the brigadier to lead a few carefully-planned sorties between downpours to lick the place into shape. Nothing drastic, you understand, just a case of showing these plants who’s boss while I’m still allowed and before the re-wilding johnnies finally achieve absolute cultural supremacy. The under-gardener/conscripted cannon-fodder was less keen, citing the risk of drizzle on his camera.

Dealing with the still-expanding rose collection is a two stage process – those in more formal areas are carefully pruned before Christmas. Wilder, blowsier specimens in the outer reaches are taught a lesson in January. Or February. Or even March but that’s definitely cutting it fine vis-à-vis new growth.

Rosa x odorata ‘Mutabilis’ was heaving itself into a handkerchief tree, R. ‘Pleine de Grâce’ was obscuring a Persian ironwood, and R. ‘Cerise Bouquet’ was just behaving badly along the Avenida, layering itself about with gay abandon (a regular occurrence on a hillside where horizontal branches, particularly those weighed down with flowers, end up touching the ground sooner or later). They are all absolute thugs here, so secateurs, loppers and even a pruning saw were all pressed into action.

For the first few years, other shrubs are allowed to do their own thing. I rejoice when they manage to survive and, if they don’t, am relieved that I didn’t waste too much time on a lost cause or hasten their demise by interfering. But once their roots are down and they start to look less shop-bought up-tight and more relaxed, if not downright shaggy, it’s time to think about shaping them to meet my aesthetic needs while respecting their natural forms.

After all, the last thing I want is a group of ‘meatballed’ oddities reminiscent of an Ikea canteen’s finest. Abelias, pittosporums, smoke bushes, hollies, hydrangeas all received attention. This past year, more than previous ones, has taught me that it’s crucial to have a contrast between tightly controlled shapes and looser ones – too much green fuzziness just becomes a blur without a few sharp lines. I’ve been spurred on by the success of various pieces of bay topiary dotted around the place – for once I remembered to trim them at the right time (end of October) to have crisp outlines right through the winter.

When you’re hauling masses of material to the compost heap, the last thing you want to have to do is duck and dive under low-hanging branches. Crown-lifting is one of the most satisfying jobs for winter – trees suddenly look more mature, vistas are opened up, access is improved, more bark is exposed. My approach is little and often – catch 'em while they’re young and no more than one rung of branches a year from any tree.

The sweetgums on the Avenida always need a little intervention (I always forget how much branches droop with the weight of leaves, never mind flowers or fruit), as do the oaks, honey locusts (no-one appreciates a thorn at eye-level), tulip trees, redwoods – they’re all shooting up and out at a crazy rate. Some judicious pruning helps them look more statuesque, less haystack-ish. And this year, I finally got round to tackling the Chilean myrtles (Luma apiculata) in the orchard, a reward for them coping so brilliantly and unexpectedly with last year’s drought. Here’s hoping they continue to thrive with fewer branches.

Even though I declared planting season over in January, I might have been somewhat premature. After all, you can’t keep a good plantaholic down, or stop him from expanding the repertoire even further. I mostly stuck to my rule of no new trees or shrubs in the new year (what’s the odd camellia between friends?), but no frosts and copious rainfall meant I couldn’t resist banging in more, many more, herbaceous beauties. Of course, dormant perennials don’t make for the most photogenic new additions to the garden (despite the best efforts of my under-gardener-cum-photographer).

In fact, they’re almost invisible, resulting in the borders looking like they’re playing host to an invasion of leafless running bamboo or miniature plastic gravestones where I’ve marked the new arrivals to avoid any mishaps in the coming months. Some have earned a place merely because I’ve never grown them before and never shy from a challenge (Peltoboykinia watanabei, anyone?), others have been added to flesh out a collection (epimediums, hemerocallis, dahlias) and others because I just got carried away (tradescantias – do they like me? do I even like them?).

And for once, I enlisted the professionals. I’ll turn my hand to most things but felling two dead/dying trees, both 50 feet tall, one hanging over a sitting area, the other a power line, is probably beyond me. I was briefly tempted to get a friendly neighbour with a tractor, a chainsaw and a long rope to have a crack at the job but thought twice. Discretion being the better part of valour, and all that.

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Not only have views been opened up, potential hazards been removed and next year’s central heating been taken care of, but I got to watch others working in the garden for a change. There might even be a repeat performance soon, as recent storms have done their darnedest to destroy the shelter belt on the far edge of the gully. Such is gardening life.

Seeds have been sown, wandering acanthus has been mercilessly hacked to knock it back (I’m not foolish enough to think I can eliminate it) and the exhausted but in no way demoralised troops have been withdrawn for a well-earned spot of R&R. A tactical, temporary retreat to prepare for the upcoming spring offensive.

18 January 2026
By: James Lennox

When was the last time you flicked through a glossy garden magazine (Gardens Illustrated, say, or The English Garden) and saw a rainy photo shoot? Never, is the answer. Basing your blurb on photos of wet gardens must be the publishing equivalent of taking a camera to a funeral. Just not the done thing, old boy.

As you know, my long-suffering under-gardener doubles as chief photographer, forced to capture every leaf of note for the archive. He views persistent rain as a ‘challenge’, in much the same way Scott found the Antarctic slightly more demanding than he’d been led to expect. For the garden writer, it’s quite the opposite, often an atmospheric revelation, the garden all to oneself (even the staff have taken refuge in the bothy), all dripping limbs and sparkling drops, one minute decayed Southern Gothic, the next torrential Himalayan valley.

So it was at Holker Hall last September on a typically dreich Cumbrian day. I was in my element; Chief Photographer was cursing like a trooper, struggling with fogged lenses, misty vistas and bedraggled blooms. As anyone who gardens in Asturias will appreciate, when you live between the coast and the mountains, you’re going to get your fair share of rain (drought being an unwelcome exception).

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But the gentle climate also means you can expand the repertoire and push the odd hardiness boundary. Which keeps me on my toes, identification-wise. After all, it’s not every day you spot a Fascicularia bicolor up a tree this far north in England, a delightfully whimsical touch at the transition from formal garden to looser woodland.

The bones of the garden are straightforward enough: formal Arts & Crafts-style rooms, building on early 18th century antecedents, give way to expansive meadows, arboretum, woodland and water. One long axis runs from the Elliptical Garden by the house (all yew hedges, stylish stonework and clipped limes) through a wibbly-wobbly green corridor to the Summer Garden, the stand-out feature of which is a herbaceous border still packing a punch at the end of the season. Calm assurance abounds; the controlling hand of man unites the whole sequence.

The planting is generous, without being obnoxiously clever; layered rather than choreographed. Plants are allowed to bulk up, overlap and occasionally jostle for space, which lends the whole a sense of momentum. There’s none of that brittle, over-edited look that suggests a border has been assembled for a magazine spread rather than an entire growing season.

I’ll pass swiftly over the silver weeping pears (Pyrus salicifolia ‘Pendula’ adding a touch of 80s/90s Cotswold cliché) at the heart of the Summer Garden and instead applaud the cut-leaf hornbeam standards (Crateagus orientalis) as being more of an indication of the imaginative planting around every corner. High-input annuals edged with low hurdles (a neat response to box blight and the dreaded caterpillar?) keep the show on the road and demonstrate that the team here are more than capable of nailing the details as well as refining the broader brushstrokes of the woodier areas.

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While I can admire an aster with the best of them, at heart I’m a dendrophile. A typical bloke, in other words. For folk similarly afflicted, one of the big draws at Holker is the arboretum. With a National Collection of Styracaceae, Holker has serious tree cred. If ever you need proof of a gardener’s good taste, see if his snowbells outnumber his flowering cherries. As well as the different species (including S. americanus, S. hemsleyanus and S. obassia), there are some stylish forms such as ‘Fargesii’ and ‘Pink Chimes’. Of course, they weren’t showing off in September, but they have an elegance and poise that carries them right through the year. Much like the garden as a whole.

Even if you don’t know your styrax from your elbow, you won’t manage to miss the Great Lime (Tilia x europaea). It’s an absolute beast of a tree. Around 400 years old and with a girth of over 8 metres, it holds the stage, Ent-like, quietly biding its time while relative youngsters frolic all around. And it’s the co-existence of different generations’ interventions that is one of the most remarkable aspects of the garden.

Beyond the attention grabbing stars lies an arboretum of real substance. There’s a depth here that only comes from decades of sensible planting and the occasional calculated risk – the chances of the young Emmenopterys henryi ever flowering this far north must be slim, climate change notwithstanding. Trees have been chosen because they suit the site, not because they photograph well or come with a compelling backstory, an unfashionable approach and all the better for it. Most are already proving their worth, including a Chinese sassafras (Sassafras tzumu, showing no sign of suckering unlike its American cousin in my orchard), a newly recognised champion Metasequoia glyptostroboides ‘Goldrush’ and over 100 magnolias dotted throughout.

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Where Holker excels is in its ability to marry old and new, skilfully incorporating modern insertions into an established framework. One of the earliest examples of this is Thomas Mawson’s early 20th century Sunken Garden. Once a refuge for roses, now it’s the very definition of artful abundance, an overtly romantic space. The salvias were front and centre in September, holding their own against the imposing stonework, while a charming summer house provided a very welcome refuge from the elements. It feels used rather than preserved, which is exactly what you want in a garden with history.

The tradition of carving fresh spaces within the centuries old gardened landscape is most impressively on show in the Neptune Cascade, a nod to family ties to Chatsworth perhaps but on a slightly more domestic scale. It’s pitched just right - grand enough to feel intentional, restrained enough not to slide into theme-park territory.

Neptune peers out from his lofty perch towards the estuary with a faintly world-weary expression, flanked by Italian cypress. I just query whether he doesn’t need anchoring more securely. The young eucryphias leading up the slope might do the job in a few years’ time, as well as adding horticultural interest to break the climb. (There’s an impressive collection of these southern hemisphere beauties in the wider garden, ranging from the widely seen Eucryphia x nymansensis ‘Nymansay’ to the lesser-spotted Eucryphia moorei.)

The Burlington fountain at the foot of the cascade is, on the other hand, very firmly grounded in its setting, surrounded by vast Rhododendron arboreum which, even out of flower, offer luscious big-leafed glamour and glowing trunks. It’s not difficult to see why this area is the Instagrammer’s favourite.

As a release from the ever so slightly claustrophobic gloomth of the fountain, the recent labyrinth set within a wildflower meadow (a forgivable nod to modishness) acts as something of a palette cleanser, even if it’s not entirely successful. Somehow the combination of labyrinth and standing stones might just be too much of a good thing – a neolithic yin-yang mash-up which in September was partly obscured by wildflowers/weeds (delete as appropriate) in dire need of a good scalping.

The nearby slate sun dial mounted on a glistening slab is an unqualified triumph. Designed by Mark Lennox-Boyd of Gresgarth, based on an ancient design and incised with the signs of the zodiac around the rim, it works as sculpture, focal point and destination, drawing the visitor out into the wider landscape where he can mull weighty matters such as transience, impermanence and whether it’s time to head for a cup of tea.

Perhaps, though, the most enigmatic new space is the Pagan Grove. No hard landscaping, this is a thoughtful counterpart to the Sunken Garden, a shallow, oval bowl, a grassy hollow, ringed with a collection of stewartias, another impeccable choice to provide autumn colour.

It’s a very stylish demonstration of the power of absence in a densely planted garden. A recent innovation, it was designed by Kim Wilkie whose CV stretches to the curvaceous green wall in the toilet block at Longwood, a world away from this serene spot and, for me, an unexpected highlight of that American showpiece.

Holker is not a garden that ambushes you at every turn. There’s no big theatrical reveal, no manipulation of emotion. Instead, the garden unfolds gradually and with nothing to prove, with the quiet confidence of a place that has been treated seriously over a long period of time – there’s no apparent urge to reinvent itself every five minutes in search of relevance.

Visitors looking for novelty, provocation or the gardening equivalent of a manifesto may leave wondering what all the fuss is about. But that’s missing the point. This is a garden built on continuity, judgement and an enviable lack of insecurity. That confidence is apparent throughout. Holker feels settled. And in a horticultural world increasingly addicted to novelty and narrative, that feels borderline subversive.

More information here: https://www.holker.co.uk

Far too many books give the impression that the gardening year starts in January. Wrong. The calendar year is for brown-thumbed mere mortals. When the only excitement on offer is browsing through seed catalogues and waiting for snowdrops to appear (cheerless, glacial things that have somehow found their way onto the Lady Gardener’s list of good taste plants), I prefer to stay indoors, get to grips with more Beethoven (18 sonatas down in a 32 year project) and sample some of Speyside’s finest. The combined results aren’t always what Ludwig might have hoped for, but it saves me from scrabbling around in the dirt looking for the first signs of spring.

As every fool knows, the gardening year actually kicks off in autumn. That’s make or break time for next summer’s displays of horticultural excellence, the best time to plant, shift and tweak. If you want to wow the local gardening club with your prowess while they shovel down the free cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey, you need to start making plans in October. And after a long, scorching drought of a summer, any tedium in the terraces or awkwardness in the orchard are too glaringly exposed to be ignored any longer. About the only upside of having no rainfall for four months is that the grass is so short that it doesn’t need cutting and the crocuses can rejoice in the lack of competition. Everything else needs attention.

Four areas of the garden have been ruthlessly re-assessed, re-jigged and re-modelled – the dogwood arc below the Avenue, the Grass Terrace, the Rose Garden and the Orchard. Some, like the Rose Garden, have been there from the beginning and were starting to show their age. Others, such as the Grass Terrace, were youthful follies, the result of reading too much New Perennial propaganda during a period of prolonged impecuniousness, constant reminders of the garden equivalent of living on Skid Row. I was tempted to call the whole process ‘Operation Rethink and Refine’. In truth, it’s been more like ‘Operation Rip Out and Replace’.

Dogwood Arc

Do you have any idea how far the surface roots of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’ spread? Too far – they’re greedy, thuggish and have a tendency to colonise new ground wherever a stem makes contact with bare earth. Sure, they have brightly coloured stems and are an obligatory component of any winter garden. But I’m playing the piano and drinking whisky, remember, so devoting 50 square yards of prime real estate to them is frankly wasteful. Out they came, after much huffing and puffing. I’ve left a token drift at the very top of the hill, in remembrance of things past, but I knew I could come up with something better here.

In went a variety of shrubs that can cope with increasing levels of shade and will flatter yet another seed-grown redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) that was surplus to requirements elsewhere. Of course, such radical revamps can take a couple of years to settle down and look ridiculously sparse in the meantime. Which is why I’ve used one of my favourite tricks, ‘the shiny bauble’, to draw attention away.

In this case, I’m breaking all the rules and have popped in a risky tree to hold the space – a Camptotheca acuminata, pushing the limits of its comfort zone here and already about 5ft taller than the trees I normally plant out. It was a novelty purchase I couldn’t resist adding to the autumn bulk-buying extravaganza organised by a local gardening group and fulfilled by a Polish nursery – modern-day international plant-hunting at its most civilised. I’d first seen one at the Coker Arboretum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, suggesting it can cope with freezing winters as long as the summers are hot enough to ripen new growth. And if it’s good enough for my under-gardener’s alma mater, it’s good enough for La Corolla.

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Grass Terrace

Have you ever tried to hack out an established clump of Miscanthus sinensis with nothing more at your disposal than blood, sweat, tears and a mattock? And then having to repeat it five more times? A prime example of planting in haste and repenting at leisure. They were too big, too unruly and offered too little in return for keeping them upright and stopping them seeding everywhere. Staring at their indifference to drought all summer long oddly just made me want to cull them once and for all – they were just too static, too dull. Again, because I’m a sentimental old thing, I’ve left a couple of clumps along the Avenue where the mood is more relaxed and they can loll and collapse to their heart’s content.

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Other grasses (Deschampsia caespitosa, Pennisetum macrourum, Calamagrostis brachytricha, Stipa gigantea, S. tenuissima and S. pseudoichu) have been edited and re-arranged. Only the pennisetum might make a run through the border but a sharp spade applied to its circumference every few months keeps it in check. While it remains the Grass Terrace, the grasses have been turned into supporting players with the focus now on a trio of redbuds (Cercis canadensis ‘Vanilla Twist’, ‘Ruby Falls’ and ‘Golden Falls’), a group of plants I first fell for at Stoneleigh outside Philadelphia. Again with a Polish provenance, they pick up on others (‘Forest Pansy’, of course, ‘Carolina Sweetheart’ and ‘Alley Cat’) in the Woodland as well as a group of seed-grown Judas trees maturing nicely over by the pond. None of the established redbuds blinked during the drought so hopes are high that the newcomers will thrive in the Grass Terrace.

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The Rose Garden

Under-performing hybrid teas and far too many agapanthus made for a dispiriting combination in a prominent location. Inspiration came from the grandiosely named tea pavilion (on the site of an old chicken house, of all things). Could I possibly get away with planting a few Japanese maples? It’s a sheltered enough spot so I don’t have to worry about wind-burn. But would it be too sunny and would the wandering roots of an Eriobotrya japonica suck all the moisture out of the ground and inhibit growth?

Local gardening friends assured me that Asturias is made for acers. I had my doubts and so an Acer palmatum ‘Shishi-gashira’ was the guinea pig earlier in the year. Nothing ventured, and all that. Somehow, with very little attention over a trying summer, it showed no signs of distress at all, put on a foot of growth and coloured up nicely in the autumn. Cue a further contribution to Polish GDP and the planting of another four maples (‘Ariadne’, ‘Wilson’s Pink Dwarf’, ‘Coonara Pygmy’ and ‘Orangeola’). Very much a ‘go big or go home’ strategy.

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Am I guilty yet again of over-planting? Possibly. Will the acers sit awkwardly with the couple of roses I couldn’t bring myself to remove? Time will tell. Covering the ground in the interim is an adventurous mix of geraniums, tradescantias and salvias – anything to avoid the dreaded bare soil scenario while the acers take hold. Quite a restrained planting scheme compared to some.

The Orchard

The evolution of the Orchard continues apace. Where once apples reigned supreme (hardly surprising in the heart of Spanish cider country), I’ve gradually been weaving in some more unusual ‘productive’ trees and shrubs – Japanese raisin trees (Hovenia dulcis), sugar maples, Chilean guavas (Ugni molinae), Sichuan pepper (Zanthoxylum piperitum), etc.

But I don’t always stick slavishly to my own self-imposed scheme, particularly as the whole area needed more evergreen, dare I say winter, interest. Enter yet more magnolias and every osmanthus that caught my eye. There’s no excuse for the magnolias except my enduring obsession with the entire genus, but at least the osmanthus are in the olive family. Throw in some refugee roses from elsewhere in the garden (for their hips), a pineapple broom (Argyrocytisus battandieri) and a few tea plants (Camellia sinensis) and I can fool myself that I’m still sticking to the brief. Just.

Here endeth planting season, a frenzy of activity to set the garden on the right track for the year ahead. Of course I won’t be able to resist adding more as the months go by (herbaceous especially). But while the new arrivals enjoy the rainy season, the occasional light frost and a flurry or two, I’ll be safely tucked up inside tickling the ivories and downing the odd dram. If I get desperate, I might even force myself to leaf through a seed catalogue.

3 January 2026
By: James Lennox

What should any self-respecting gardener do at the end of a very testing drought? Well, this one offered up a prayer for rain in his absence and hot-footed it to somewhere reliably wet for a change of scene. There’s only so long I can bear to look at slowly crisping foliage and underperforming borders before I get the urge to go off and cast my eye over someone else’s efforts.

The first port of call on this year’s autumn odyssey was the Lake District, a notoriously damp part of the world even by British standards. I’ve climbed every mountain there that I ever want to (a youth mis-spent above the treeline), so it was high time I got acquainted with its gardens. I was in sore need of green inspiration, lush planting and soothing swards.

Lowther Castle should have ticked all the boxes. It’s got a quirky backstory (potted version: impecunious aristo decides to economise by removing the roof of his house to do away with the need for housemaids) and serious garden design credentials (courtesy of Dan Pearson, responsible for the masterplan of an ongoing 20 year re-imagining). As a result it’s gained plenty of (at times) fawning coverage and free publicity ever since the scheme was first unveiled.

And yet it didn’t quite hit the spot. Some gardens, one senses, are intended to impress photographers more than visiting gardeners. On the page or on the screen, these gardens look impeccable, immaculately composed, clean and serene. Inviting angles abound, views are framed, eye-catchers lead on. On the ground, though, they can all too often appear sterile, devoid of emotion, disjointed and uninspiring.

Lowther Castle is, I’m afraid to say, a photographers’ garden. It’s also unashamedly, first and foremost, a visitor attraction. Dogs are walked, legs are stretched, cups of tea are consumed. And it’s very much a work in progress. Reviewing it and forming an opinion at this stage in the development of a garden feels somewhat premature. But if you open to the public and charge them handsomely, “notes” (in the theatrical sense) are to be expected.

The most established areas are the Parterre and the Garden-in-the-Ruins. The former is the more impressive visually. The illegitimate offspring of a Tudor knot garden and a Victorian exercise in bedding-out, the Parterre fills the space directly below the ruinated castle and is an imaginative and generally successful re-working of traditional forms. While the plant palette is limited (perhaps an instance of a designer playing it safe in a challenging climate far removed from his usual more southerly stomping ground), the herbaceous stalwarts backed by clipped yew provide the required pops of colour and textural blocks. Selinum wallichianum, Actaea simplex (Atropupurea Group) ‘James Compton’,Symphyotrichum turbinellum, Hemerocallis ‘Hyperion’ (one to add to the collection) – all dependable doers and nothing to frighten the horses.

The impact of this area is diminished somewhat by two major shortcomings. Parterres should be viewed from above, preferably from a first-floor window or these days a drone, or the planting should be kept so low to the ground that it’s possible to see the intricate pattern while standing next to it. Here there is no access to an upstairs room and the planting, in particular the yew, has (presumably deliberately) been allowed to grow to head height. The effect is of walking through a spacious maze while having the tops of the grasses and taller perennials at eye level blocking the view through. A curiously flat and static two-dimensional effect is the unsatisfying result – a tableau to be admired laterally.

The second shortcoming is unforgivable in a garden open to the public. Each planted subsection of the Parterre is individually edged in rabbit wire. And it’s a hideous distraction. Either change the planting to make it less palatable to rabbits or find a less jarring way of excluding the blighters. Install a disguised rabbit-proof perimeter to encompass the whole Parterre, trap them for the pot or “accidentally” release a strong dose of myxomatosis into the local population – anything would be preferable to the current unsightly arrangement.

The Garden-in-the-Ruins seems less troubled by the furry foe. What should be an atmospheric woodland-esque space within the walls of the castle instead comes across, though, as slightly dank and depressing. I had hoped for an air of romantic decay, a hint of the old sic transit gloria mundi, but no such luck.

Admittedly September is probably not the finest hour for woodland planting, but the cheery yellow bells of repeatedKirengeshoma palmata were doing an awful lot of the heavy lifting.

There are some fine moments (a fallen statue here, a curtain of climber there) and Cornus ‘Norman Hadden’ (a personal favourite and surprisingly hardy) and Tropaeolum speciosum add a welcome touch of sophistication to the planting. But northern lighting and the too too solid stone walls deaden any attempt to lift the gloom.

While garden comparisons are invidious, they can instruct. This gardened ruin struck me as markedly less successful than Chanticleer’s version outside Philadelphia where a lightness of touch animates the stonework.

Further afield, the signs are encouraging that there will soon be more for the garden visitor to enjoy. An orchard of full-sized apple trees (none of this twee step-over nonsense) holds the space below the castle walls well while a slightly stranded Roman bath waits for its surrounding planting to catch up.

The Edwardian era Rock Garden has been cleared and the stones steadied ready for the planting to take hold. The progress made in the Japanese Garden bodes well – already there is an inviting atmosphere created by those essential elements of water, dappled light and beautifully crafted structures. It’s always reassuring to see ferns going in the ground in great quantities. Give it a couple of years and it should have filled out rather nicely.

While there’s still quite a lot of bare earth on display in these areas, the Rose Garden has been ticked off and declared open for business. Of course, no Victorian or Edwardian garden worth its salt would have been without one, but here the overwhelming impression is of a clear commercial imperative dictating the order in which the restoration is happening. First highlight the castle, then draw visitors into the wider estate with a guaranteed crowd-pleaser.

And it works, up to a point. There is a sea of David Austin’s finest (including those glamorous beauties ‘Darcey Bussell’, ‘Lady Emma Hamilton’ and ‘Munstead Wood’) arranged in swirling patterns perhaps best appreciated again from a drone. On the ground, the design had been slightly lost by September in a sprawling thicket of vigorous growth. Where the Parterre keeps the visitor at arm’s length with its overly generous paths and anti-rabbit fortifications, here the danger is of being slightly too immersed, entangled even. Unfortunately, no-one really wants that in a Rose Garden.

To date, very little has been done elsewhere in the 130 acres of garden. Paths snake through some of the forestry-style plantations (one leading to the obligatory children’s playground) and obvious areas of neglect have been tidied up, although work still needs to be done to shore up some of the outlying garden buildings. One of the finest views looks out beyond the garden from the Western Terrace down into the Lowther Valley – a reminder that, various quibbles aside, it is still a remarkable undertaking to carve a cultivated garden out of such an unforgiving landscape. And easy to see why a previous generation thought it wasn’t worth the candle.

Lowther is a vast space dominated by a stark ruin in a challenging setting. Most designers would run a mile when asked to take on this particular garden project. Kudos to Mr Pearson for not shying away. Is every part of the garden equally successful? Of course not, but that’s the case with every garden, more so on this kind of scale. And some sections exist more on the drawing board or in the imagination than in reality. But there are hints here and there that something special might rise from the metaphorical ashes. One to revisit in about 10 years’ time, I should think, once the planting has bedded down and the masterplan is complete. And that should give the gamekeeper just about long enough to deal with the rabbits.

More information here: https://lowthercastle.org

28 December 2025
By: James Lennox

Now we all know which trees to plant for the future, what about the plants in between, the shrubs in their borders and the perennials in their beds? After a year of extremes, which have risen to the challenge and exceeded expectations and, just as importantly, which ones have fallen short?

Again, I’m not going to deal with the usual suspects. A cistus will cope just fine with heat and drought and an agapanthus will look like it’s living its best life. What I want to do is shine a spotlight on those plants that have just got on with the job uncomplainingly. And give a word of warning about the ones that needed a helping hand or just failed miserably.

Superb shrubs

Gardening is all about celebrating the wins in the perpetual struggle to create a thing of beauty, noting each triumph over adversity. For once, the roses were blackspot-free and for that I am truly thankful. I gave up spraying years ago but I still feel that I should be doing more by them to ensure their happiness. This year the rose border was a picture of health with the once-flowering old roses doing their thing before the drought really kicked in.

Even the repeat-flowering roses fared better than expected despite the demands of pumping out the odd flower throughout the season without any additional watering. The tea and china roses did particularly well, ‘Le Vesuve’ deserving a special mention – a non-stop wonder. And, mirabile dictu, ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’ didn’t disappoint once – no rain, drizzle or dew means no danger of balling. I’m sure normal service will be resumed next summer.

While old roses are renowned for their ruggedness, I wasn’t sure how that relatively new kid on the block, Loropetalum chinense, would respond. I’ve got various forms dotted all around the hillside, from the green-leaved, white-flowered species to the darkest plum-coloured types (‘Pearl’, ‘Fire Dance’, ‘Pipa’s Red’, ‘Burgundy’) via the half-way house of ‘Ming Dynasty’. Some are in full shade in deep soil, some in full sun on the driest powder imaginable. All proved themselves worthy of a place in the garden. They put on new growth and put out more flowers than I can ever recall. Neighbouring plants flagged. I’ve never seen a normally cast-iron Viburnum tinus or a buddleia droop with sheer exhaustion, but the Chinese witch hazels shrugged off everything that came their way.

Nobody expects hydrangeas to cope unaided in such conditions – I certainly don’t fancy a mophead’s chances in full sun on this hillside. And yet, barring slight discolouration to the flowers, good old floppy ‘Annabelle’ managed to recover each night ready to do battle the next day, despite being adventurously placed on a sunny slope.

As did the various oak-leaved hydrangeas – the extra heat seems to have spurred them into more growth than normal and certainly improved the autumn colouring. Most surprising of all was a particularly floriferous H. villosa that took the full force of the sun for about four hours each afternoon and didn’t drop a leaf all season. The only explanation I can come up with is that it must have sent its roots in search of moisture in a nearby compost heap. Which shows remarkable resourcefulness bordering on cheating.

Plucky perennials

Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in a while. And somehow I seem to have stumbled across a few perennials that have come through the summer unscathed. The garden would be a lesser place without them.

I’m convinced there must be a factory somewhere in deepest, darkest China churning out new epimediums every year, and I end up buying most of them. We all know that Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ is a real toughie and will happily spread amongst the roots of greedy trees. But the newer, more delicate looking hybrids such as ‘Lilafee’, ‘Domino’ and ‘Pink Elf’ scarcely demand better conditions. Sure, they flower earlier in the season so don’t have summer interest per se, but any plant that looks perfectly content and glossy right through the hottest summer on record and doesn’t need any attention from me is a keeper. ‘Amber Queen’ even managed to bulk up in full sun once the katsura dropped its leaves in August. The books all insist that they prefer moist soil, but they seemed happy enough to me in bone-dry dust.

Another group of plants that supposedly need a moist, cool root run are the toad-lilies. Admittedly I try to give mine a shady spot, but that means that they’re competing with tree roots and they do just fine. Tricyrtis hirta looked completely unfazed under a Judas tree, while T. macropoda and T. ‘Empress’ both frolicked among the roots of a Magnolia grandiflora. All the others dotted around the terraces did a sterling job as well, flowering before the first of the autumn rains arrived. Much like the magnolias and agapanthus, I suspect toad-lilies’ resilience in drought conditions can be put down to their fleshy roots, the camel’s hump of the plant world.

Which brings me neatly onto day-lilies which share a similar root structure. I’m definitely late to the party on this one but am now making up for lost time. From trusty old Hemerocallis ‘Catherine Woodbury’ to the startling ‘Edge of Chaos’ (which neatly sums up my gardening style), day-lilies are as close to indestructible as perennials get. They might not give of their best in the hottest, driest, sunniest spot but they’ll hang on in there. Even when a couple of gaps unexpectedly opened up among the roses in August, the newly purchased day-lilies I stuffed the border with actually seemed grateful to get out of their pots and get on with the job of growing. More please.

A quick shout-out to Rudbeckia fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’. The RHS suggests popping it in your best moist free-draining loam. Nonsense, save that stuff for your real treasures. This handsome brute will take over a border in full baking sun with no extra water whatsoever. It might droop slightly during a genuine heatwave but it soon perks back up every night, flowering freely and ready to resume its campaign of world domination. I wouldn’t be without it, but you have been warned.

And the ones banished from the garden for letting down the team? Well, at the risk of bragging, the only abject failures have been the border phloxes (leaving gaps swiftly filled by yet more day-lilies). They’d clung on for a few years, looking decidedly peaky, but they’ve now been put out of their misery and permanently retired from the collection.

They’ve joined other youthful follies like delphiniums, astrantias and lobelias. I often wonder what I was thinking when I look back at some of my original planting plans. At least I knew even then to draw the line at meconopsis. Something tells me this past summer would definitely have bought them a one-way ticket to that great poppy field in the sky.

20 December 2025
By: James Lennox

It’s safe to say that the dust has finally settled on this summer’s four month-long drought and its record-breaking temperatures. Friday 15 August was the nadir - 40 degrees C in the shade (a suffocating 104F) and a scorching, enervating southerly wind was exactly what the garden didn’t need after 10 weeks without rain. And it’s certainly not what I had in mind when I first started planting up my south-facing Asturian hillside all those years ago.

The immediate aftermath has not been a pretty sight. In fact, I was tempted to call this post ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. But as ugliness is something I strive to avoid in the garden and elsewhere, I’ll limit myself to giving a rundown of my star performers this year, those plants that have surprised me with their resilience against all the odds. And I’ll consign a few plants to the hall of shame for woefully underachieving.

Extreme weather certainly separates the men from the boys, the sheep from the goats and indestructible plants from those living on borrowed time. And looking on the bright side, as all gardeners must, there have been some fascinating results.

Planting strategy

Some plants are bomb-proof (famously so in the case of our old friend the ginkgo); others might need some mollycoddling to get them through life’s travails. On the whole, I aim to slot my plants into the kindest available spot for them – shade lovers in shade, and so on. Give them the appropriate conditions for their needs and they’ll reward you by thriving rather than merely surviving. I’m really not one of those horticultural psychopaths that gets a kick out of inflicting unnecessary cruelty on living creatures, so that’s the general approach. (There’s a swamp cypress at the very top of my dry hill that might beg to differ, but so far it’s doing just fine so can’t really complain.)

As a rule, I plant my trees small, in a square hole at least two feet wide and no more than one foot deep, and water them generously once a week in dry weather for the first three years. After that, they’re on their own – no feeding, no watering, just an occasional attempt to keep the root zone weed-free. Given that there wasn’t a single tree on this hillside when I first arrived here, they’ve all had to cope with full sun from day one and only some protection from the prevailing wind provided by existing native trees along the boundaries.

This past summer, every single one has been pushed to the limit, and sometimes beyond. Even treasures in the most privileged positions have been bowled a googly by the weather. It’s been a garden-wide experiment in resilience. Some trees lapped it up; others not so much. And in both instances, it’s not just the usual suspects.

Top marks

Some of the trees I’ve planted are designed to cope with dry summers – pines, for example, just laugh in the face of drought. I was less sure how oaks would react, especially the North American species that I’ve piled into. For a start, they tend to have larger leaves than their Mediterranean cousins (Quercus suber, Q. ilex, Q. canariensis, Q. coccifera,Q. pyrenaica, etc., all of which have predictably thrived). And most of them come from the East Coast which tends to be reliably damp in summer.

Well, I needn’t have worried – those Americans knocked it out of the park. For the first few years the amount of top growth might not impress; that’s because all the action is taking place underground. But once they get their roots down they manage to find every last drop of water on this rocky hillside. Even supposed moisture lovers like Q. nigra and Q. palustris have barely batted an eyelid this year. All of them put on their Lammas growth at the very height of the drought and the autumn colour this year has been spectacular. Top marks go to the scarlet oaks, Q. coccinea, one in the relatively benign surroundings of the woodland (part-shade, deep soil), the other tucked below the more challenging escarpment (full sun, thin, sandy soil over solid rock). Both put on three feet of growth. Neither flinched.

Equally surprising was the response of the young wollemi, Wollemia nobilis. Planted in full sun and, as it’s been in the ground five years already, with no additional water, it coped admirably and put on a foot of growth, an annual rate it seems to have settled on regardless of the weather. There’s a good depth of soil in that part of the orchard and there’s no competition nearby, but even so, it was an impressive response. Where neighbouring trees ended up with scorched leaves, even the new growth on the wollemi maintained its usual silvery-blue bloom. The advice to date has been to play it safe – plant it in moist, well-drained loam (a quasi-mythical substance in these parts) in a sheltered spot in light shade. I’ve a suspicion after this summer that the wollemi is a whole lot tougher than we first thought.

Not to be outdone was the xGordlinia grandiflora. Unlike a neighbouring franklinia that jettisoned most of its flower buds and went into survival mode (and looks to have lived to fight another day, thank goodness), the gordlinia showed no sign of distress at all. It grew its usual three feet and flowered non-stop from mid-August to the first week of November, peaking in September after three months without a drop of water. In full sun, on relatively thin soil, its performance this summer has justified it being given such a prominent spot in the garden. Again, the literature suggests it would prefer more moisture in the growing season. But beggars can’t be choosers – it just knuckled down and get on with the job in hand. It’s definitely not one of this garden’s many prima donnas.

Mixed results

Now for the less encouraging news. Unlike the uniformly impressive oaks, the magnolias were a mixed bag. Those in the most favourable positions sailed through with only minor signs of wind- and/or sunburn; those in slightly more challenging spots struggled. All have formed and held onto flower and leaf buds for next year which is a relief. Both a M. grandiflora and a M. insignis suffered with the double whammy of extreme heat and strong wind in mid-August after months with no rain, leaving some dieback at the extremities and scorched brown leaves. Unsightly but not, I hope, life-threatening. Time will tell. A cosmetic tidy-up in the spring once the damage is definite and old leaves have been shrugged off should make them look more respectable.

If you’re in the market for a broadleaf evergreen magnolia and have an eye on future scorchers, then my top tip is to look no further than M. delavayi. It comes from wet Chinese forests and is said to prefer a moisture-retentive loam. Those textbooks might need updating. Mine is in an exposed position on a free-draining slope and sailed through the summer without a care in the world, flowering and growing all the while. Bravo.

At least the magnolias all tried to hold onto their leaves. My nomination in the category ‘Sorriest response to drought’ goes to the katsura, Cercidiphyllum japonicum. By the first week of August, one specimen, admittedly planted in shallow soil in full sun, decided to call it a day and drop all its leaves. Kudos, obviously, for such decisiveness – very much a strategic retreat rather than a vainglorious last stand. Next year’s buds look fully formed and it tends to go into an early autumn most years, so fingers crossed. Another katsura, in an equally dry spot higher up the hill but shaded by a sweetgum, fared better and clung onto its leaves for a whole month longer. However, both give off a slightly resentful air, wondering how on earth they ended up here when they would rather be in a cool, moist Japanese forest. So if you want one, my advice is to treat it more generously than I have – it clearly prefers a comfier billet with a fully-stocked drinks cabinet.

Next time: Stubborn shrubs and herbaceous heroes

15 December 2024
By: James Lennox

At times, fashionable gardening advice seems to be nothing other than an exhausting series of exhortations. Do this now or, more often than not, don't do this ever again. Hot on the heels of ‘No Mow May’ comes the invocation to ‘Leave the Leaves’ in autumn. The tone of hectoring tweeness is enough to set my teeth on edge - and obscures what should be a couple of useful hints behind a veil of patronising worthiness.

There really is no need for all this finger-wagging. Some of us have been neglecting our mowing duties for years. I've never had a lawn nor do I aspire to cultivate one. The only grass at La Corolla is there for walking on. It's rough and ready, full of wildflowers/weeds (depending on your viewpoint) and is lucky to get a once over more often than every other month in the growing season. And if there's a promise of orchids in the spring or crocuses in the autumn, not even then - I'm more than happy to hang fire.

At this time of year, it's the quandary of what to do with all those leaves that preoccupies many a gardener. Back in the day it used to be all the rage to pile them up and burn them. Sacrilege, of course, even though I do have a penchant for a good burn-up. I leave mine where they land - within reason, of course. Who wants to skate over wet leaves on a much-trodden path? Slips and broken hips lie that way.

And that's where I take issue with blanket prescriptions - there's no nuance, no subtlety and no leeway for the gardener to exercise a little discretion. It's more a case of different horses for different courses. Leaves should absolutely be cleared from paths and any grass that you would rather didn't turn into a bald, muddy mess by the spring. As for borders, if you've crammed them full of irreplaceable herbaceous specimens or miniscule alpines, it's probably wise to remove the bigger brutes. Oak, sweet chestnut, bay, tulip tree and magnolia leaves, I've discovered, take an eternity to decompose and will smother anything underneath in the process.

What to do with those leaves and the ones lying on hard paths? Easy - suck them up and shred them, preferably in one smooth electric-powered operation. Then sprinkle the shredded leaves back on the borders between the plants to suppress weeds and to be dragged down into the soil by your pampered invertebrates. And a further bonus is that you don't have to walk miles to and from the leaf bin or have to wait a year or so for the leaves to break down.

Thus do minor tweaks to garden maintenance make life easier for the gardener - and ultimately more beneficial for other garden dwellers. Easing back a little seems to result in a win-win scenario for all concerned. That's not to say that I would ever condone sacrificing aesthetics completely for an easy life. After all, I might not shave every day, but I wouldn't dream of growing a full beard and renouncing permanently all hopes of cutting a dash.

It’s the same in the garden - a degree of laissez-faire looseness every now and then is inevitable with 4 acres and no staff. There are always rough patches, unkempt corners and neglected nooks - this is defiantly not a garden of tweezered perfection à la japonaise.

And I’m not the only one to appreciate the light touch maintenance regime. Ever since I started to turn an over-grazed sheep pasture into a densely planted ornamental garden and woodland, I've been rewarded with an astonishing increase in wildlife activity, some welcome, some decidedly less so.

Let's start with the good news. The resident bird population has exploded. There seems to be a house sparrow nesting under every roof-tile. They're a noisy, twittering bunch but they certainly know how to keep on top of the aphids - the roses are greenfly-free all summer long. Robins are reliable garden companions, woodpeckers (green and great spotted) are already investigating knocking at the rapidly maturing trees, and buzzards and kites squeal and circle overhead on the look-out for scurrying rodents. There's even the occasional owl swooping by.

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They don't seem all that interested in slithering creatures. I'm probably alone in the village in turning a blind eye to the odd snake - I rarely move fast enough to startle one and induce it to go into attack mode. Tapping the ground with a big stick is normally warning enough, a wise precaution whenever I'm about to plunge into the herbaceous border for a spot of weeding.

As for the local lizards, they go for the ‘freeze and he won't see me’ approach. An interesting move for something that can be over a foot long and bright green.

Foxes, badgers, pine martens and hedgehogs all keep a low profile during the day. All harmless enough since I got out of the chicken business and there's no danger of the badgers tunnelling their way across the hillside undermining the trees - the soil is nowhere near deep enough for sett-building. The recent addition of a tiny pond equipped with escape ramp has proved a huge hit with all of them - after dark it's the local equivalent of a watering hole on the Serengeti.

But for me, there's one creature in particular that brings unexpected excitement to the garden - the hummingbird hawk moth. This little fellow is one of the best reasons to grow buddleia and ensures that I leave far too many Verbena bonariensis seedlings knocking around - both are absolute hawk moth magnets all summer long. There’s something therapeutically hypnotic about the way they hover mid-air before rapidly darting to the next nectar hit.

I cater for other insects by leaving piles of logs artfully dotted around - often out of sheer laziness. Some are destined for the home fires; most are left to crumble away providing vital habitat to what must be the greatest concentration of stag beetle larvae in Spain. Given that it can take years for them to turn into adult beetles, I leave well alone - and look elsewhere for my firewood.

Every gardener should take pride in his compost heap - even though he's not the one doing the heavy lifting. As a garden develops, it inevitably produces more ‘waste’ - prunings, spent flowerheads, weeds, grass clippings, leaves. All can be chucked on the heap and left for nature to work its magic, a remarkably speedy process in a climate as warm and wet as Asturias. The only work involved is in taking the debris to the heap. Which is why I have two - one at either end of the main garden so I never have to walk the full length of La Corolla with a bucketful of clippings. I recently re-vamped one - a collection of old doors and some rusted scaffold poles never looked better. The pillars are just icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, all is not rosy in the garden - there are those critters that even I take objection to. Voles and moles are a constant worry, a definite plague on this house. There's nothing to be done beyond encouraging the local felines to take an interest and setting the occasional trap when there are signs of them creating a highway below a particularly delicate young tree. At least they’ve never attacked me directly - unlike the Asian hornet I once disturbed in a sprawling heap of Rosa wichuraiana. A sting to the forehead from one of those beasts is something not easily forgotten. I much prefer bees and butterflies.

Those are all very much occupational hazards, the slings and arrows of gardening life. There are only two creatures which would prompt me to reach for the shotgun - deer and wild boar. The local hunters do their best to discourage them, but every now and again there's an incursion. And it leads to murderous thoughts.

The deer will happily browse on leaves and strip bark; the boars will sharpen their tusks and plough up the ground to leave the hillside resembling the aftermath of a particularly bloody day on the Somme. And they've developed a taste for the wild orchids I've been encouraging in the orchard – an unforgiveable sin.

Both have made an appearance in the past year. Security has been heightened, fences have been raised and all manner of spells cast and incantations recited. Until I hit on the perfect solution - the dead hedge, an impenetrable linear thicket of branches, twigs, thorns and spikes fixed in place wherever a deer or boar might think to penetrate the perimeter.

A defensive solution to make any battle-hardened general smile. Not only are all the materials readily available (and free!) but I'll be providing yet more habitat for all those creatures that I don’t mind having on the premises. Here's hoping it puts a stop to any more unwelcome frolicking.

7 December 2024
By: James Lennox

Garden photographers are obsessed with light. Full sun at midday, as my long-suffering sidekick claims, is something of a challenge - harsh, glaring and ‘contrasty’, apparently. Golden hour, when the shadows are long and the sun low, is king - soft tones, a hint of mist, the world slowly coming into focus. Wordsworth nailed it before photography, let alone garden photography, was even invented: ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive’.

We gardeners, on the other hand, are all about the vagaries of the weather. Show me the gardener who doesn't keep a sharp eye fixed on the horizon at all times. But we’re not necessarily unreconstructed Luddites, so these days we’re just as likely to be constantly glancing at our preferred apps for advance warning.

Whether it's fretting over the arrival of the dreaded early first frost or a dry spell that's overstayed its welcome, we're always on high alert for whatever the weather gods are ready to throw our way next. Armed with bundles of fleece to protect borderline-hardy boundary-pushing experiments or a hosepipe to revive wilting perennials, we do our best to anticipate what's coming our way and deal with it when it arrives.

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But there's not a lot you can do to protect a heavily-wooded hillside from a hurricane. The North Carolina Arboretum was hit on 27 September this year. It's estimated that more than 5,000 trees came down over the 434 acre site. Astonishingly, the 65 acres of gardens at the centre of the arboretum re-opened just one month later while the clear-up continues elsewhere.

I visited well before the storm struck. A year before, in fact. And I knew I was in for a treat when I spotted a nonchalant franklinia gracing the car park. It's the kind of planting that screams confidence in the staff’s horticultural abilities and in the growing conditions - as well as an urge to cram in as much good stuff as possible. (I empathise - why else do I have a suckering sassafras in an orchard?) Plus a dash of incongruity to make the visitor stop in his tracks never harmed anyone.

The next jolt to the senses arrives hot on the franklinia's heels. In the midst of the glorious Southern Appalachian hills and placed at the very centre of the Arboretum’s formal gardens is the Quilt Garden, a dazzling parterre of bedding plants arranged in a geometric pattern recalling one of the region’s traditional craft skills. The exact design changes every two years, with the planting refreshed three times during the growing season.

Carpet bedding has been pretty much abandoned in Britain for financial reasons masquerading as a pre-occupation with sustainability. It was refreshing to see the skill still being practised here. On my visit, the garden was made up of a mix of Chrysanthemum x morifolium interspersed with the recently re-named Jacobaea maritima ‘Silver Dust’. Quite the combination.

Even as a set-piece viewed in isolation, garden statements don't get much bolder or more striking. But then there's the Quilt Garden's relationship with the wider environment. It's not sited in an enclosed garden room. Instead, somehow, the viewer is supposed to lift his head from the intricate design and allow his gaze to be drawn to the distant tree-clad hills.

As challenging juxtapositions go, it's a triumph - demanding, unsettling and irresistible all at once. And in case you were in any doubt where you should be looking, there’s a pair of columnar Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Slender Silhouette’ to focus your attention. Who needs a boring old ‘Dawyck’ beech, purple or otherwise, when this sweetgum selection is on offer?

This composition serves to encapsulate the dual purpose of the arboretum - it's a place that wants to entertain and educate at the same time. The aim is to gladden the eye while instilling knowledge, hence at its core a display garden of possibly under-appreciated native plants in a sensitively preserved, sublime natural setting.

This is no dusty old hodge-podge of weedy-yet-worthy plants but a lively and exciting exhibition of possibilities, a well-judged assortment of native species and garden-worthy cultivars thereof. I've never come across the striking groundcover Pachysandra procumbens ‘Forest Green’ before, a welcome change from the more common Japanese species, or seen Muhlenbergia capillaris used more effectively. And I always love to see an illicium thrown in for good measure.

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The rest of the formal gardens are slightly more conventional, in design terms at least. There's a Stream Garden, a Heritage Garden (with a chimney folly and hammerbeam pergolas now added to my wishlist), vistas along paths and even an amphitheatre.

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Throughout are sprinkled various sculptures - whimsical, figurative, naturalistic, you name it - as well as hard landscaping elements, such as pools, steps, railings and gates that have all been carefully considered and obviously commissioned for each exact location. There's no hint of the ‘shop-bought’ or run-of-the-mill here. I had serious ‘bling envy’, as I often do on my travels.

And then there's the bonsai collection, an incongruous element only if we think an arboretum should be concerned exclusively with growing specimen trees in their natural form.

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There are native species on show (Tsuga caroliniana and canadensis, Acer rubrum and Carpinus caroliniana all caught my eye), highlighting the potential to control and snip away at what would otherwise become a forest giant. Even an art form as distinctive and rarefied as bonsai can be adapted and developed to suit its non-traditional surroundings, a Southern Appalachian twist on a theme.

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As displayed here, with a starkly simple concrete backdrop and a winding walkway that suggests something akin to a pilgrimage to a mountain-top monastery, the bonsai aspire to the condition of living abstract art. It's a stunning and unexpected interlude.

Beyond the confines of the ordered, formal gardens are areas that tentatively push out into the surrounding forest. The gentle slope below the education centre (featuring one of my favourites, the North Carolina-bred Magnolia ‘Daybreak’), the grassy knoll dotted with specimen trees (Stewartia malocodendron and ovata now firmly in my sights), the meadow ablaze with goldenrod - all aim to provide a transition from the manicured to the wild. It's skilfully done without minimising the sense that at any moment the forest could reclaim the man-made clearing.

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And it's quite a forest. I defy anyone not to take the plunge (especially on a scorchingly hot day) into the woods. Only then will you realise that this is really a garden with a vast forest of native trees attached - Quercus rubra, coccinea, alba and montana to name a few oaks, hickories of course and even endangered rarities like Torreya taxifolia from slightly further afield.

Hiking trails strike off in every direction. Down by the stream lies a comprehensive collection of native azaleas, those rhododendron species that first caught the eye of discerning British gardeners back in the early eighteenth century. Overshadowed by later Himalayan and Far Eastern introductions, these shrubs have a charm and simplicity in a woodland setting that suggest they've been unjustly neglected, in Europe at least. And there were even one or two in flower at the start of autumn (including Rhododendron prunifolium first collected as recently as 1913), a gift to any garden flagging at that time of year.

Garden-visiting in Britain rarely comes with the opportunity to go for a serious hike. Strolling along the herbaceous borders and making a bee-line for the cafe for a slice of cake is about as much exercise as you're likely to engage in. Here there are gullies to explore, hills to scramble up and majestic trees to hug around every corner. It's a fully immersive experience, a world away from the bedding out and delicate sculpture elsewhere.

More than anything, the Arboretum serves as a reminder of the riches lurking in the local forests. It’s astonishing to be reminded there are probably more native tree species in one acre of a wild hillside in Asheville, North Carolina than in the whole of Britain.

Whether tree, shrub or perennial, some of those plants have been brought into our gardens and cultivated; others have been left exactly where they've always been, fending for themselves, supporting each other. It's this diversity that is its greatest strength, a natural in-built resilience to outside threats, whether wildlife, disease or storms. Something tells me it'll take more than a hurricane to destroy that.

More information here: https://www.ncarboretum.org/

30 November 2024
By: James Lennox

Once upon a time, all respectable houses were subjected to a thorough spring clean. The rugs were beaten, dull metal was polished back to shiny life and the sofa was pulled off the wall to reveal a year's worth of accumulated debris.

It also used to be the case that, roughly six months later, the garden would be given its annual once-over. Shrubs would be hacked back, leaves would be raked, perennials would be chopped down to the ground and all the tools oiled, sharpened and then ceremonially hung up for the duration.

Both are perfect examples of the Big Bang approach to life. Bite off a sizeable list of chores, go at it hell-for-leather and then forget all about lifting a finger for the next 12 months. That modus operandi might work in the house (I mean, do windows really need cleaning more than once a year?), but out in the garden, the little and often school of thought reigns supreme. A little light weeding here, a spot of watering or dead-heading there - these are tasks that, like the poor, are with us always.

But there are certain jobs that I reserve for autumn alone, garden rituals specific to this time of the year. Lest we forget, ‘to every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’ And it can be immensely satisfying when the weather co-operates and the long-anticipated activities all go off without a hitch. The past month has been glorious on the whole - misty mornings, clear blue skies and barely a breath of wind.

Perfect bonfire weather, in other words. No, I'm not one of those immaculately dressed Victorian gardeners decked out in tweeds, ties and flat caps who slashed and burned everything in sight the moment it had outlived its usefulness or no longer merited its allocated spot. But how else to deal with the dreaded buddleia prunings, the clippings from the bay hedges and the ever-encroaching brambles? None is suitable for the compost heap or for adding to the leaf-mould pile.

Let's be honest: when the conditions are just right and you've not got any washing hanging on the line, tending a bonfire for a couple of hours with a flask of coffee (or something stronger) to hand is one of gardening's greatest primitive pleasures. A time to unplug, leave the modern world and its carbon footprints behind and re-connect with one's inner caveman, normally kept well under wraps.

Once I've got all the death and destruction out of my system, I turn my attention to what really matters - watching the leaves colour up. Americans have a term for it, leaf-peeping, and I get to do it for about 6 weeks solid without leaving home. And this past autumn has been the finest for colour that I can recall. Was the cooler, wetter summer responsible? Was the dry, bright, unusually mild autumn behind it? Or is it simply that my adolescent trees have now got the bit between their teeth and will put on this sort of show every year from now on?

First off the blocks this year were the oranges - the Parrotia persica, the Nyssa sylvatica, the aronias, amelanchiers and a multi-stemmed Acer cappadocicum ‘Rubrum’. A relatively brief prelude to the main season, they blazed across the hillside and in the woodland while all else was still an emerald green. Even the orchard lit up briefly with the suckering sassafras turning as many different shades as its leaves have different shapes.

Next up were the yellows, with tulip trees, honey locusts and a cluster of birches grabbing all the attention. The latter, Betula lenta, always catch me by surprise. I grew them from seed - and ended up with far too many. But birches are a clubbable tree, enjoying each other's company, looking best in batches. It's an unassuming species, quietly biding its time, without startling white bark or distinctive leaves, waiting to turn the most eye-catching pure buttery yellow, visible from miles away. Literally - no visitor to the village could miss them lighting up the hillside in late October.

Of course it's the reds that are such a novelty in Europe - our own native species don't seem to go in for anthocyanin in a big way. Thankfully, there are plenty of North American species to fill the colour void. Whether it's the flaming pillar-box red of Acer x freemanii ‘Autumn Blaze’ or the towering inferno that is my lanky juvenile Quercus coccinea, the boring browns and underwhelming russets of the indigenous offerings look suitably resentful of their more glamourous cousins.

One of the justifications for planting quite so many sweetgums (Liquidambar styraciflua) was that, in a good year, they might add a splash of colour. In Britain, where summers are cooler and wetter, they’re not a massive success. Great claims are made for various cultivars - but no guarantees are given. Perhaps what they really need is a good dose of global warming. If so, the future might very well be brighter for them there.

No such concerns here at La Corolla (colour-wise at least). The normal advice when planting an avenue is to avoid seed-grown trees. Too much variability and not enough uniformity. I happen to prize character above conformity. Which is just as well as each of my two dozen trees is a law unto itself when it comes to bark texture, leaf size and fall colour. I'm quite taken with the resulting kaleidoscopic effects, but a purist would no doubt find fault. No dull monotony here, instead there's every shade under the sun from orangey-yellow to scarlet to crimson to purpley-black. All technical terms gleaned from the RHS colour charts, you understand.

Last of all, once the excitement on the hillside and in the woodland is starting to wane, my dear old Ginkgo biloba decides to join the party and steal the limelight. It's one of the first trees I planted here and I selfishly planted it right outside the library windows. Watching it turn into a column of molten gold in the last week of November is a very private pleasure. I should probably sell tickets when it coincides with an azure sky and each individual leaf is picked out in detail.

I savour them all while I can. A cool night, a blustery shower or just the passage of time will see them end up on the ground before long. But there’s a great consolation – there are few pursuits more uplifting for the soul than simply kicking your way through a pile of rustling leaves. Yes, some are raked off the paths to save the grass beneath and others are plucked from the borders and beds to give the perennials a bit of breathing space. But, in the absence of strong winds, most stay exactly where they land, allowed to work their slow, silent magic through the long winter ahead.

26 October 2024
By: James Lennox

Much like a headstrong mistress, a garden can be a wilful and demanding beauty. I've neglected mine (garden, that is) for the past few warm, wet summer months. It has sulked, pouted and ever so slightly gone to seed, while I've been travelling, garden visiting and messing about on boats. As every self-respecting international playboy should from time to time.

Now I'm giving the garden at La Corolla my undivided attention. I'm old-fashioned enough to prefer not to look out on a brown, scruffy wasteland for months on end so a certain degree of slashing and burning is called for. Nothing too energetic, you understand, more a general wash and brush up, trimming a hedge here, removing an unsightly sprawl there.

The garden is still a long way from being ready for its close-up, which is where the odd bit of garden ornamentation comes into its own. I normally rely on the planting to bring the bling - carefully curated compositions, a stand-out specimen, the occasional rarity. But combine benign neglect with the inevitable winding down of the floral fireworks at this time of year, and garden structures really come into their own, worth their weight in gold.

Which is oddly appropriate as I have only one style of creating garden incidents - a rendered white pillar surmounted with a golden vase, urn or bauble of some sort. I hesitate to call it sculpture for obvious reasons. I'm definitely more artisan than artist, preferring rustic realness to polished professionalism.

A limited decorative range, you might think - cohesive design, I say. And there's nothing wrong with consistency - if gold and turquoise is good enough for Clough Williams-Ellis at Plas Brondanw in north Wales, gold and white will do me nicely in northern Spain.

While hacking my way around the garden this past week, trying to de-wild a hillside all too keen to re-wild itself, I've been constantly reminded that I'm in good company in the way I've been using garden ornamentation. I like to think I've invented the wheel all by myself, but chances are I've been unconsciously influenced by far greater gardeners and landscapers who have gone before and am merely following in their footsteps.

Because there are only so many ways you can add non-plant interest to a garden. I've stumbled across a few and incorporated them at La Corolla and they're coming into their own right now, when the garden's been left to its own devices for too long and the soft landscaping looks decidedly ratty.

Here are some of my tried and tested favourite techniques for bringing the bling.

• Create a vista and force the eye to follow. An oldie but a goodie - whether the view is stopped by a structure as at Nemours or allowed to travel onwards to infinity as at Hidcote, this never fails to create a spot of drama in the garden. I've done a variation on this theme with pillars at the end of the sweetgum avenue. Modest but, dare I say, effective.

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• Provide a spark of interest in the bleak midwinter. Dumbarton Oaks adorns its walls and gate pillars to tide it over the harsh US winters. I needed something to mark the centre of the deciduous American Woodland - a calm, still space for three months of the year with little but bark and fallen leaves to keep a golden bowl company.

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• Throw in a shiny bauble. Particularly useful when you want to trick the eye into looking away from necessary evils, such as leaf mould bins. A white fire hydrant in the gloom at York Gate does the job nicely - as do shiny white gate pillars between the guest cottage and the compost heaps at La Corolla.

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• Fill a gap while plants get established. The walnut sculpture in the midst of a national collection of Juglans provides a focal point while the trees get going at Upton Wold. Cedric, aka ‘le coq d'or’, does much the same in the new grove at La Corolla - he'll be doing a fair bit of heavy lifting on the interest front for a while yet.

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• Interrupt a long walk with a chance encounter. Halfway up the avenue here an exhausted visitor unaccustomed to steep climbs can catch his breath with the excuse of admiring yet more of my handiwork. At Duncombe Park, eighteenth century gentlemen could promenade between a pair of temples hidden from each other on the sweeping terrace above the river.

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• Commemorate a loved one with a mausoleum. Notable examples abound as at Castle Howard, Bodnant and, less successfully, Althorp. Or have a diminutive urn on standby to receive the ashes of a distant, impecunious relative when the time comes.

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• Dress to impress. If you've got it (money, ambition, exalted sense of self-worth), flaunt it. Temples, bridges and rotundas make an emphatic statement at Stowe - Capability Brown creating the Grecian Valley with shovels and wheelbarrows, and a few extra pairs of hands, takes some beating. Throw in a Palladian bridge, a Temple of British Worthies and another of Ancient Virtue and you've got a none too subtle political statement.

• Tell a story. How about the allegorical tale of a young man setting out on life's long journey, gaining experience and wisdom en route before returning to his point of departure older and wiser? No, not a wander around La Corolla, but a gentle stroll through the unchanging landscape at Rousham where every statue, structure and pool marks a staging post on the road to enlightenment.

• Suggest a different place. Stuck in Yorkshire but would rather be in the Himalayas? Plant a few rhododendrons in a dramatic valley and add a Buddhist stupa to complete the picture, as at Harewood. Nostalgic for your misspent youth in India?

Then how about some Brahmin bulls on a bridge or at your front door, as at Sezincote in the Cotswolds.

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Or fancy a hint of Italy outside Bath? Then follow Harold Peto's lead at Iford and fill your terraces with Roman antiquities and colonnades. It certainly beats taking a no-frills flight to jostle with unwashed backpackers to get close to the original inspiration. Cross-cultural homage or plain cultural appropriation - just think of the debate your garden could ignite.

• And most importantly, have some fun. There's always room for a spot of whimsy, especially in wet Wales where it's most needed. Portmeirion reigns supreme in this regard - rejoicing in architectural detail at every turn.

Or how do you entertain less horticulturally minded friends who might not be bowled over by your never-ending borders of bedding plants changed seasonally or your immaculately curated collection of trees? Longwood opts for a green Italian-style water theatre for staging live performances, failing which a jaw-dropping fountain display, colour-coordinated and timed to coincide with Miss Diana Ross hitting the high notes should just about do the job.

I'm still wondering how best to do a Longwood, a Stowe or an Iford at La Corolla. Thinking big seems to be key - perhaps I just need to scale up my efforts and hope my hypothetical distant elderly relative isn't as impoverished as I thought. I can but dream. In the meantime, dear old Cedric will continue to entertain and put a smile on my face on a blustery autumn day.