View across south gardens. © Charles Hawes

The Hardy Plant 1999

Thinking in the Garden by Anne Wareham

Everyone wants their garden to appeal to all their senses, but can we go further than this in our gardening ambitions and add pleasures for the mind? In a country with a phobia about the least whiff of "pretentiousness", maybe not. Thinking in the garden may be the ultimate faux pas.

Visiting a garden with a party of garden enthusiasts, I have been known to make some reflective remark about the effectiveness of an aspect of the design of the garden, only to be met with the kind of pause, silence, and rapid change of subject that greets a lapse of manners in certain circles. Heads down, back to plant naming. A guide to a garden may offer an understanding of the time and context in which a garden was made, and the preoccupations and intentions of the designer. This should add to the pleasure of visiting the garden, but people often refuse a guide saying that they'll be happy just to look. We have lost any idea that thinking and looking might be a happy partnership.In the 18th century people deliberately set out to stimulate thought, with the idea that this would enhance the experience of parts of the garden by exaggerating a particular mood.

A gloomy woodland part might have a statue reminding the visitor, through a shared knowledge of classical references, of the transitory nature of beauty and life. A sunlight garden full of roses might refer the visitor's thoughts to love and courtship by means of a cupid. Perhaps elsewhere Bacchus might encourage thoughts of leaving for the nearest pub? Now we have not only lost most of that particular shared reference system, but any interest in having a garden stimulate thought. Against this trend, I have added aspects to our garden which I hope will encourage the pleasures of thinking. I find the garden offers an excellent way of expressing some of the difficulties and ambiguities of our current preoccupations with ideas about "natural" and "wild".

The most obvious and familiar bit of wild gardening at Veddw House is the meadow. At least, people associate the idea of wild gardening with meadows, and spontaneously describe ours as a wildflower meadow. But a meadow is hardly wild, being a kind of farmland, in this case with a heavy dose of garden added, as it is full of the flowering of small bulbs for three months of the year. Maybe it is the tulips which crystallise the issue. Few of the bulbs would grow here naturally ~ the native narcissi being so hard to establish that I hastily added the more reliable foreign hybrids. (What do people mean when they say that narcissi lobularis and pseudo obvallaris "take time to settle down" ? What are they doing in the mean time? Painting and decorating their new home?) But although the bulbs don't belong, most of them seem right apart from red tulips. They look stunning, of course, clear bright red against all that green. But they don't look natural .... Not in this country, where such colours are rare in the countryside. Our native plants seem on the whole to have modest dispositions, which is why it seems right to have small bulbs, too. Large daffs of the public roundabout type would have made the thinking point just as well as the tulips, but I am only prepared to play these games if they add to the pleasure of looking at the garden.

Meadow in summer. © Charles Hawes

A gardened meadow is now such a familiar concept that the contradictions and confusions are not immediately obvious. Some other parts of the garden provide a different slant on the theme. One wild corner is full of bluebells, buttercups and poppies. It looks like some of the best of the neglected corners of our countryside, the kind of thing you'd expect to see on the cover of a book about wild gardening, except that the poppies are oriental. They are an aesthetic addition rather than a natural component. The bluebells and buttercups are entirely natural, in so far as they were there when I started and have spread and thrived in the careful regime of mowing and weedkilling that supports this particular uncontrived effect.

I have recently made a totally formal small garden within clipped yew hedges, with straight brick paths and six regular, rectangular beds. This is where I grow cornfield annuals in their little formal fields. More ambitiously, I have elsewhere covered a hillside with my tribute to our local landscape. The garden has a small valley. On one hillside, well situated for viewing from the opposite side, I have planted box hedging, using the pattern of field boundaries on the local Tithe Map. I am filling in the "fields" that this makes with grasses and some hardy perennials, hoping to echo the appearance and subtle colours of the fields in the distance. It is, of course, an adaptation of a parterre. The box hedges are too small yet, and the whole thing is too newly planted to know how effective it will be, but I hope it will look good in winter as well as summer, with the fading flowers of the grasses framed in the pattern of the box hedges.

Cornfield Garden. © Charles Hawes.

In one part of the garden the profusion of wood anemones and violets in the spring has meant I had to garden in some way that could leave them undisturbed, so this is another wild patch. I planted a variety of tough hardy perennials directly into the uncleared ground. Then, as an afterthought, I weedkilled a lot of the grass when everything else was dormant, to increase the flower power. Penelope Hobhouse says: "In Britain the limited native flora (in the last Ice Age the English Channel provided a barrier for plants) makes wild flower meadows, although in vogue for other ecological reasons and for the promotion of wild life, rather dull" (Natural Planting Pavilion Books, 1997). It's true that the bulb meadow is a rather subtle pleasure in summer, so I thought that the hardy perennials I'd added here would compensate. However, this last summer at least, it was the stitchwort, clover, meadow vetchling, greater bird's foot trefoil, tormentil, wood avens and common knapweed (wonderful names!) that provided the excitement, and over a long period, too. Elsewhere I wage war on them as weeds; here I can declare a truce and enjoy them.

But there are constraints on this kind of gardening, it looks best in the sun, rain can suddenly make it look a mess. Framing with a hedge or a pattern of repeated shrubs or structural plants helps a lot: framing helps to finish and display any picture. I have surrounded this piece with rugosa roses, some spring flowering viburnums to complement the wood anemones, and some yew, which will be clipped. With a wild patch, framing also helps to redefine the status of the plants contained in the frame, assisting the transformation from weeds to ornamentals.

Wild Garden. © Charles Hawes

Then there is our piece of woodland. This is where, for me, the confusions and absurdities embedded in our ideas of natural and wild are most pronounced. When we came, the wood had recently been cleared of larch by the Forestry Commission. A wide ranging mixture of native trees and shrubs were regenerating, and the floor of the wood was littered with what became our firewood for the next few years. Then there was a period of neglect and it became a Sleeping Beauty wood impenetrable. I remember taking some shears one day and trying to work a path through the bramble and bracken, which was higher than my head. I had to give up half way when 1 totally lost my bearings. We have now cleared most of the undergrowth (or overgrowth, depending how tall you are), and the wood has begun to look the way you might expect a natural bit of British woodland to look.

(Apart, that is, from the plants in cages. This is not another play on the notion of wild; the cages are not there to protect us from the wild plants. They are there to protect young plants from that dreadful scourge of the natural or wildlife garden the rabbit.)

But our native woodlands are not natural: they have been managed by man for thousands of years. Our wood is a pastiche. It doesn't look the way woods used to when they were coppiced, or when standard trees were managed for a timber crop and had animals grazing the grass underneath. It looks the way most of us think woods used to look. In spite of the absurdity we are quite attached to that fantasy and we are using it as our model for the wood as garden. I prefer it to the kind of woodland garden that is simply an extension of the garden into an area shaded by a collection of trees. So we plant things which look "right" in a native wood, avoiding such obvious exotics as rhododendrons which have naturalised, of course, in many British woodlands.

Lizard in wood, Veddw.. © Charles Hawes

Making things look natural is a vastly underrated skill. It is definitely not about avoiding straight lines and planting things around in a random manner. (Has anyone who recommends planting bulbs to look natural by throwing then down and planting them where they fall, ever tried planting any quantity of bulbs like this? It involves a ridiculous amount of extra work picking them up again so you can make a hole for them where they fell.) I don't know whether we will end up with a wood which in spite of our efforts looks like a garden, or a wood that looks so much like a natural wood that it will seem totally boring. Does the avenue of old beeches look too formal? Or does it look suitably like an old woodland ride? We add shrubs and trees which we consider look right, often because they are close relations of those already there. We tend to avoid brightly coloured flowers in our shrubs white seems right. A corylopsis looks very like a hazel, if a little refined.

Clearly, some of the thinking about this garden needs special knowledge of the history of woodland, perhaps, or of our native plants and trees. And it makes a difference if you begin with an idea that there may be particular themes worth being aware of. In our guide to the garden I have included some information about the history of the land and the people who lived and worked here. Because I am fascinated by the traces of the past that I find, and I think some other people will be too.

When I visit the Forest of Dean sculpture trail I find that looking at the sculptures stimulates my awareness of the shapes and textures in the trees and rocks, as well as in the sculptures. A child who visited our wood, realising that some aspects were deliberate artefacts with hidden meaning, suddenly "found" a treasure trail (where none had actually been made) and spent hours in excited exploration. It seems to me that if we raise our expectations of what a garden can offer we can both create and discover multiple layers of pleasure and.interest. For the senses, the mind and the imagination.

Published in The Hardy Plant Autumn 1999

View across south gardens. © Charles Hawes