WEEKEND COLUMNISTS Designers design and the rest of us garden. This rule of thumb is brusque but works more often than not. I side with Helen Dillon, the queen o f gardening in a confined suburban space. Her recent book on gardening put it typically bluntly at the end of a chapter on garden layouts: “Bugger plans.”
It is, then, with particular interest that I have turned to a new book by gardener Diarmuid Gavin and Sir Terence Conran, called Planting: The Planting Design Book for the Twenty-First Century. It is great to discover that Conran, the master of lifestyles, also enjoys gardening. In the chatty dialogue with Gavin that opens the book, he writes warmly of his pleasure from vegetables. “The rows of terracotta pots for blanching rhubarb and sea kale, I find, add a sculptural seriousness to the vegetable garden.” They certainly cost a small fortune. He likes his pots of “Mediterranean herbs”, which thrive, he says, on neglect, and he retains a sense that at his home, Barton Court in Berkshire, he “certainly hasn’t got the planting completely right”. He is keen on nettles, of which he has “plantations” and finds the “delicate toothed leaf structure of nettles is just right in an informal setting”. I am glad I am not one of his pot-grown basil plants. I am also glad that he does not use the phrase “habitat for wildlife” despite his years as king of the Habitat store chain.
Like millions of British television viewers, I have a soft spot for Gavin’s Irish ways. He writes fondly of the white cherry blossom which opened in the Ireland of his childhood at the time of his first holy communion. I liked him best for a TV show that he and the broadcasting authorities are probably wishing they could forget. Called Only Fools on Horses, it showed TV celebrities trying to master a horse and take it round an arena of small show-jumping obstacles. Gavin was outclassed on horseback by the tireless comedian Ruby Wax but remained wholehearted in a good cause.
As a garden designer, he is tireless too. You might remember his show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2003, which was strong on clipped, rounded evergreens, what a brochure called “green balls”.
Green balls have plenty of space in Planting: The Planting Design Book for the Twenty-First Century. It has a split personality. One moment Conran is telling us that “simplification” is essential and Gavin is waxing lyrical about gardens with “unruly” grass and an old apple tree in which nothing, I would say, has been tried at all. The next we are pitched into colour photographs of the inevitable Piet Oudolf garden in the Netherlands, with its densely planted drifts of so many plants or the virtuoso plantings by Helen Dillon in Dublin. Is less more or not? The photos are printed with a sheen that reflects light and I wonder what Dillon thinks of the ones that show her colour-planning in an odd tone.
I hope the 21st century will respond with a vigilant sense of the difference between a great photo of a garden moment and an actual garden with which one would like to live for more than a week. The brutal difference is nowhere made plain in the text. The best of the many photos show unfamiliar new gardens in ways that suggest that the planting might indeed have staying power for several months. Les Jardins de Séricourt, just east of Oeuf-en-Ternois in northern France, are well shown for their evergreen topiary framework and their ingenious use of whitewash on the trunks of a line of lime trees. The summer planting at Broughton Grange in Oxfordshire, is one of designer Tom Stuart Smith’s major works and looks in the fine photos as though it will still be presentable when the vast sweeps of lavender are out of flower. I rebel, however, at the captioning of a mass of wild cow-parsley in May as “a spectacular monochrome garden of cow-parsley which fizzes with excitement and life”. By mid-June it will be a straggly mess, fizzing with black flies and dying stems.
Green is not the only colour to attract comment. The old myth of a “colour-wheel” is wheeled on again to tell us with pseudo-science which colours will “go” together. Orange with blue and so on. The colours themselves are linked to curious “therapeutic” values. Blue “encourages contemplation and healing” (tell that to the Tories), orange is “welcoming and luxurious” (in marigolds?) and as yellow is “stimulating and inspirational”, it is a “great colour if you want heated debates in your dining area”. What colour, one wonders, is currently in the dining room at Conran’s company headquarters?
The chapter on artificial lighting provokes thought. Fibre-optics and tiny fairy lights can transform gardens at night, especially in enclosed spaces and I think the 21st century has a lot to learn, some of it sketched here. I am not joking when I say I missed a good chapter on the latest types of artificial grass. Astroturf has improved beyond recognition recently and is not in the least naff if it is well chosen and properly laid. I have even discussed with the designer Kim Wilkie how one can weave lighting into artificial turf and light up patterns, even words, in it without any flex or light bulbs showing. I had not exactly thought, as Conran does, that “a lawn is a fantastic medium to manipulate within the landscape”. But I do not think, either, that a wildflower meadow is “essentially a lawn that has been allowed to grow wild”.
What I do think is that it is extraordinarily difficult to lay down any but the most obvious “rules” about “plant design” and that this difficulty is telling us something important. Settings vary so much and the least predictable combinations of plants can suddenly work so well. I rebel when told here that “it is impossible to approach the subject of choosing the most beautiful plants for shady areas without making reference to Beth Chatto”. I like my shady planting and I have never read a word she has written on the topic. Have confidence, use your eyes and take advice from good nurseries.
I do not want all this book’s stale brown grasses, feathery hedges of “waving” Miscanthus or sweeps of pale pink pokeweed anywhere near me. Why do I have to admire drifts of purple, carmine and stale pink just because old Piet Oudolf cannot stop using them?
I pine for a well-grown sky-blue delphinium, a cascade of white roses and a clearly coloured yellow lupin with a pink and white peony beside it. Why are roses reduced to occasional mentions for the 21st century just because Christopher Lloyd once dug up his mouldy rose garden? I risk one prediction. Hot or cold, the 21st-century planter will be dreaming of a sea of roses long after Conran’s nettles have gone brown.
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