Farewell to The Dillon Garden

A summer of gallivanting has taken its toll on my borders. Deadheading (that delightful gardening task undertaken while enjoying a drink of choice) has been neglected in favour of inspiring trips to other gardeners’ gardens. I have returned filled with remorse and overflowing with ideas. 

One of the gardens I visited was at Helen Dillon’s house in Dublin. Famed for her ever-shifting seasonal containers and no-nonsense advice, Helen Dillon’s garden was one of the most inspiring town gardens I have ever had the pleasure to spend time in. I say was, because the garden has closed. For good. 

We all have to leave our gardens eventually. Sometimes the garden continues to open to the public, as is the case at Great Dixter. In other instances the gardener moves on complete with plants and embraces the creation of a new garden, as is Helen Dillon in Ireland, and fellow garden blogger Helene at Graphicality-UK* in London.

A relationship between visitors and much-loved gardens deepens over time, and with it something akin to a sense of ownership develops. As I wandered around admiring the fruits of Helen's labours on that cloudy Sunday, other visitors were keen to express their views on the garden and its future. One local lady had been a regular visitor over the years and was there to say goodbye to it. Another was outraged, claiming that in the UK we would have preserved this gem for posterity. I disagree. One of the many wonderful things about this garden was Helen’s use of containers. Plants in pots are perfectly capable of travelling a few miles down the road to add value in the creation of a new garden.

Gardeners are a generous bunch. I have yet to meet one who refuses to share knowledge. Helen Dillon is a natural teacher. On the afternoon I visited she was in her garden, endlessly answering questions as if they had never been asked before, even though she must surely have answered those same questions thousands of times. Since I am not a natural born staker I need plants to hold themselves well, so I was keen to pick Helen's brains on a particularly strong pink Phlox with sturdy upstanding stems. Realising what a good plant it was, she arranged for a piece of it to be dug up so that she could take some of it with her to her new garden. She also made sure that I had a little to take back with me to England. The plant had come to her from someone else’s garden and she didn’t know the cultivar. Unable to give me the name, she gave me something better. 

Helen Dillon & I with the glorious pink Phlox

Now a little piece of Helen Dillon's extraordinary garden is settling into my shabby borders. Next year my garden will not look so sorry for itself. There will be pots aplenty and more than a few dustbins like the one behind Helen in the photo above. 

It seems a tad strange to be writing about a garden that is unlikely to exist ever again in the form we see in these photographs, but gardens don't stay the same. Great gardens move on, and in this case a great gardener is moving on. Here's to the future of all our gardens.

All photos were taken in The Dillon Garden, Dublin.

*Helene, who moved hundreds of plants to her new garden in London, blogs here: http://graphicality-uk.blogspot.co.uk/

Garden Rebels

When I was a teenager, a boy told me that I was a rebel. I must have been doing something wondrously hair-raising at the time, like playing Karate Champ under the influence of half a bar of chocolate and a bag of chewy sweets, but the words struck a chord. I rather fancied myself as a rebel in spite of a gaping absence of anything to actually rebel against. If only I had gardened in my teens, I would have found conventions aplenty against which to mount a rebellion.

I have just moved into a new office and with me came 200 or so precious gardening books. As I lovingly arranged them on shelves, I reread excerpts (the probable cause of my lack of blog posts of late) and realised how laden with rules these tomes are; and what are rules for? Exactly. 

Of course, any act of rebellion against conventional wisdom has to be well thought through. It would be folly to fly in the face of centuries of experience without knowledge. Leaves might yellow and plants could die, or at the other extreme, invasive species might take over and run amok through our borders and beyond. But if we intelligently question accepted wisdom, we stand a chance of experiencing the wonderfully exhilarating buzz of rebellion whenever we veer away from best practice (provided that everything goes swimmingly).  

Gardeners are a rebellious bunch. Just think of Christopher Lloyd’s use of colour at Great Dixter or the green walls we see adorning the sides of shops and hotels. This fascination with questioning best practice or fine taste can result in exciting strides away from convention and is one of the reasons why gardening can be so interesting. If we were to garden for a hundred years, we would still not know everything and if we did, some adventurous gardener would soon break with tradition and we would have to reconsider what we thought we knew. 

Until recently, we were advised to place broken crocks at the bottom of our plant pots. Then those rebels at Which? Gardening questioned our plant pot heritage and trialled plants with and without crocks in their pots and guess what? Nothing terrible happened to their Million Bells Trailing Yellow plants without those magical crocks and to cut a long scientific story short, we are now advised not to pop crocks in pots. 

This places the rebels in the gardening community uncomfortably on the horns of a dilemma. It is all very well to say that no crocks is the new crocks, but in order to rebel, clarity is required. How can we fly in the face of convention when convention keeps changing its face? On a selfish note, I have no issues with crocks since I have used recycled polystyrene in pots for years. It may do little for my perched water table, but I like it because it is light and it fills big containers cheaply. I see no reason to change, which is potentially a problem in itself. Is this rebellion or a worrying new development? Perhaps I am not a rebel after all; I may simply have Belligerent Old Gardener Syndrome (BOGS). 



P.S. It is always exciting to learn about new ideas and I’m really interested to hear about how you break with gardening conventions. You never know, you may be saving a fellow gardener from BOGS.

and... 

We are seeing so many bees this summer! All the photos in this post were taken in the farmhouse garden where Geranium, Cirsium rivulare 'Atropurpureum', Knautia macedonica and even fading Allium hollandicum 'Purple Sensation' flowers are top bee magnets.  

Border Beetroot, Anne Boleyn and a Clouded Yellow

If variety is the spice of life, then this has been a vindaloo week. Despite spending too much time jostling in the underground with not even a cut flower for company (if I had my way, nosegays and buttonholes would be compulsory for commuters), I managed to escape into the great outdoors for two wonderful, inspiring days.

My first fresh air was at Blickling Hall in Norfolk. The former home of the Boleyn family (Anne is said to have been born there) is one of my favourite places to walk and after an enjoyable afternoon exercising my legs and jaw with friends, I withdrew to the gardens to commune with the borders.

The hotter end of the double borders was looking particularly exuberant. I was reminded of your comments following a recent post on creative vegetable growing* so I thought I would share this photo showing ruby chard and beetroot ‘Blood Red’ making a valuable, yet cost-effective contribution to the planting scheme.  

The other big discovery I made in the double borders was that time is no great healer where plants are concerned. I have always loved Monarda, but after years of sorry plants with powdery mildew, I took the difficult decision to try to live without this beauty in our new garden. Then Monarda ‘Gardenview Scarlet’ caught my eye and guess which plant has been catapulted to the top of my must-have list? 'Gardenview Scarlet' has better resistance to powdery mildew than most cultivars, so I am hoping for a happily-ever-after ending to my Monarda love story.

Midweek, I found myself sharing shed space with representatives from nurseries and some of the most well-known gardens in the U.K. for a trade show focussing on sustainable ornamentals production; a subject close to my heart. We gathered at Howard, an excellent wholesale perennials nursery, where we were treated to enjoyable and enlightening presentations, followed by a tractor/trailer ride around the field grown areas of the nursery.

It was a day to consider issues of an important and serious nature, but maintaining an air of professionalism and composure is a challenge when you are bouncing merrily along on the back of a tractor through thousands of glorious perennials. The sight of a Clouded Yellow butterfly did little to quash my excitement.

Clouded Yellow butterfly

After a fascinating and entertaining presentation by Fergus Garrett on sustainability at Great Dixter, we turned our attention to sustainable growing media. This is a hot topic for me, as I choose not to buy compost containing peat. Using peat in the garden is inappropriate on so many levels: loss of habitat; CO2 emissions; and, as a friend pointed out recently, it is wrong to use something which has taken thousands of years to form, to grow an annual which will be dead in a matter of weeks. 

Scabious proving its credentials as a Peacock butterfly
 magnet at the nursery.

You may be surprised to learn that there are no plans in the U.K. to ban, or even place a tax on using peat; and while there are targets regarding reducing the use of peat in horticulture, these are targets - not legislation. Away from the trade, I wonder if gardeners really care about peat. Do people buy the cheapest compost irrespective of ingredients? Perhaps some gardeners are still smarting after having tried one of the earlier, less successful peat-free alternatives. I hope not. Peat-free compost has moved on; it's time we all did. 

*http://thegardeningshoe.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/creative-vegetable-growing-and.html 

http://www.howardnurseries.co.uk/latest-news/detail/49/
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/blickling-estate/

http://www.greatdixter.co.uk