To Great Dixter, the garden designed by Lutyens, revolutionised by the late, great writer and horticulturalist, Christopher Lloyd, and which is forging into the future under its present custodian and Lloyd disciple, Fergus Garrett. Four years ago, Garrett decided to … Continue reading
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Work is continuing apace on an angular courtyard garden in Hackney, with a roof terrace. It’s been a complicated job, involving to-ing and fro-ing with a structural engineer, a rotten joist supporting the doors to the roof terrace, crumbling walls, … Continue reading
The English love their lawns. Maroooned in a faraway fantasy that has more to do with the Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey than Belsize Park or Dagenham, they dream of swathes of manicured lawns sweeping between magnificent herbaceous borders off … Continue reading
I've been commissioned to create a poppy meadow in a school to commemorate the centenary of World War One next year. We’ve found a sunny site near the playground that’s currently turfed over, which is ideal, as the soil needs … Continue reading
Euonymus europeaus ‘Red Cascade’. I saw this hiding in a hedge on Hampstead Heath. A plant I had forgotten about, since it’s usually to be found on the edge of a woodland garden, and there aren’t many of those in … Continue reading
Off to Cambridge Botanic Gardens for a bit of late August R&R. I went to see the new, prize-winning lab building, with the landscaping designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole. Blocks of yew hedging softened by a colourful fringe of perennials. Rows … Continue reading
I visited an inspiring garden recently in rural Connecticut.Its owner, an artist, lives in a wooden cabin set in five acres and backed by mountains clothed in maples that seem to catch fire in autumn. It’s laid out with his … Continue reading
Bees are in trouble. Their plight is the subject of an EU vote today, when environment ministers gather to decide whether to vote against the use of certain neonicotinoids – the pesticides that scientists believe are the cause of colony … Continue reading
People are funny about clematis. I have clients who won’t have them in their gardens, believing that they are fussy and capricious – feet in the shade, heads in the sun, greedy, drought-shy, needy, needy, needy. There’s some truth in … Continue reading
Now that spring seems finally to have sprung out of the shadows of winter, and buds are fattening fast, I wanted to sing the praises of bare trees and their importance in parks and garden design. Here in London, the … Continue reading