Decades-long dreaming
It’s stupid how long I’ve wanted the rose named ‘Graham Thomas’.
A New Contender For My Favourite Garden?
Check out the video below.
An evening at Beth’s
The Beth Chatto Symposium, organised to celebrate Beth’s 95th year, and the 40th anniversary of the publication of Beth’s first book The Dry Garden included a garden party which, as if channelling Beth herself (who passed away in May this year) was wonderfully generous, warm and inclusive.
Great Dixter Revisited
It’s exactly half my life since I lived and worked with Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter. I returned yesterday – a rich, life-giving and pretty emotional moment.
Five Seasons Thrice
One way or another, I’ve managed to see ‘Five Seasons’ three times. Once as an online ‘review’ copy, and twice at the cinema.
Who Does What?
I was amused, relieved, and a little embarrassed a few weeks back when a respected and long-standing Landscape Architect stated, in a meeting of industry leaders, something along the lines of ‘what the public don’t really understand is that Landscape Architects don’t design gardens.’
Oudolf as himself
Piet Oudolf is a phenomenon. Not since William Robinson has a single figure given the gardening status quo such a shake-up, and drilled their way into the imagination of gardeners, recalibrating their dreaming.
It’s inexplicable, and wholly delightful.
The Look and the Feel
We’re all obsessed with making our gardens LOOK good, but
A Brief History of Stone Hill – Woodend North Garden
Primarily for the benefit of those on the ALC pre-conference tour today….
Puncturing the Plateau
I knew when setting out to do the perennial planting for a client that what I wanted to achieve was a big undulating plateau of colour and texture between about 800 and 1200mm, punctured by taller and strongly upright ‘aberrants’ or incidents. There’s nothing original in that idea.
Steppe Update
You may remember, from earlier posts, my ‘steppe’ planting (a misnomer that will remain until something better presents itself) from November 2015. Back then it looked like this:
Time to Upskill
It’s astonishing how few opportunities there are available for the home gardener that is keen to learn more. So it’s time to run some courses. I’ve been talking about it since I started this blog five years ago! So here’s our start – two single-day courses in Woodend, Victoria under the title ‘Mastering the Art
