Dublin garden wip. Beautifully restored & modernised house with Wicklow granite (where I grew up).
Clear brief: keep some lawn; include hydrangeas & palmate plants, & give a sense of enclosure & privacy.
Previously just one big lawn & a couple of box hedges.
Delightful horticultural neighbours who I chat to endlessly.
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#irishgarden #gardendesign #flowers
Client visits, nursery visits, & gardener catch ups in between.
Caroline Kent’s dreamy family home, where I have been having an ongoing dialogue about the garden, planting around the house, connecting with the established meadow & hedgerows. Inspiration for her paintings & drawings
Olivia Morris’s enviable sea view. A sloping garden I planted in 2020. Revisiting this week for an update & edit.
Toby at @zophianplants doing extraordinary things at his new nursery. Open two days a week. I highly recommend going.
@plantpref at this time of year is a must for the lilac hedgerow & topiary front garden on route.
@greatdixterofficial for everything!
A chance to catch up with @jameshornergardens at Benton End on my drive to Suffolk.
James has been creating something very special. Identifying, protecting & curating the most important remnants of Cedric’s garden and taking it forward with his sensitive & knowledgable approach to gardening with ornamental & wild flowers, & rare woodies.
All the iconic pieces from Sarah Price’s beautiful Chelsea garden are now in place. Most of them exquisitely hand made by the garden build team lads (not sure many people know that).
New paths curve around the meadow section James wanted to preserve, & a huge water bowl added near the house from Sarah’s team.
Everything will soften in time beautifully, & get more interesting over the years. There’s a fascinating collection of plants already, sourced through James’s wide network of growers & gardeners, but mostly grown on site from seed.
The garden officially opens soon, but it looks exquisite right now. It will be great to see people using this garden, & I’m sure James will enjoy visits from other plants people sharing thoughts & suggestions.
Last stop @bethchattogardens for the nursery, a long stare at the gravel garden, & peering at the Pellies
The garden I work on for Penny Snell is now open for group bookings in aid of @nationalgardenscheme
Think this might be Penny’s 35th year opening the garden.
Always enjoy our chats together.
“Sorry Penny, I left way too much Lunaria in”
“No! I love them!”
“I need more flowers Marc! Stop bringing me green things”
“Bob Brown recommended that one Marc”
“Peter Beales gave me this when he came”
etc etc
I wonder if I will be gardening every day like Penny when I’m in my 80’s.
Good to get time for the home garden lately.
As the weather warms up the pressure builds on getting my veg out of the greenhouse. Also time to start bringing out the tender freaks.
The plot.
My happy place & constant source of food.
It’s veg growing on the wild side, with in-edibles added for interest & plant diversity.
There is always something to eat here, & at home I grow some extras like Korean perennial celery.
I’m not sure how I would cope without access to an allotment. It’s a great place to be, & at this time of year it’s full of blossom everywhere.
I get to rent 160 square meters of London land that I can protect from development, over cultivation, weed killers, pesticides, slug pellets etc (though I do walk past enormous piles of blue pellets people scatter around their veg!?).
Looking after a plot this size can be a source of anxiety, but I’ve learnt to be more relaxed about it, & grow edibles with the “weeds”. Also, all that ground clearance for neat lines of veg just exposes & stresses the soil too much imo.
There’s a hedgerow at the back of my plot which offers plenty of bird habitat & a place to put dead wood for beetles.
My neighbour (last pic) has more of a farmer approach. Rotivating, fertilising, & pesticiding. Grows some very fine Borlotti beans, but his plot is silent. Mine is probably less productive in a conventional way, but gives a succession of edibles & sings with wildlife. Makes me happy.
#allotment #growyourfood
Tulip time at @maggiesroyalmarsden & the garden opens for @nationalgardenscheme on Friday 17th.
Details on the NGS website.
Come along if you can. Explore the garden & building, & see why green spaces in hospitals are critical for wellbeing & recovery.
The garden is sandwiched between a busy road & a carpark, but is a green oasis for all the patients, staff, families, & wildlife. It’s pretty special.
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#pietoudolf #garden #gardendesign #flowers
