Tag: Brit Style

Confessions of a Tulip Addict: Britt Willoughby on the Appeal of Cultivating Super-Rarefied Tulips – Gardenista

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Most of us like to walk away after putting a plant in the ground, having made sure in advance that it has a good chance of surviving unaided. Right plant, right place—it’s a sensible mantra, made famous by the late Beth Chatto. Tulips, though, do not fall into this category, especially if you don’t live in the well-drained, mountainous conditions where the various species thrive. Tulip cultivars, pampered most famously in 17th century Holland, still have the reputation of a rich person’s amusement: They need to be replaced every year, if they haven’t already self-immolated from tulip fire (a fungal disease).

With smaller, simpler species tulips growing in popularity (they naturalize well, and are reliably perennial) it’s a reasonable question why anybody would want to get involved with Historic Tulips (historics), whether classed as Dutch Breeder or Broken, or the super-rarefied sub-group, not even available on the open market, called English Florists’. Our contributing photographer Britt Willoughby is one of those people. Below, she explains her obsession:

Photography by Britt Willoughby.

Above: Dutch Historic tulips tough it out in Britt’s Gloucestershire cottage garden.

Britt’s sumptuous show of art prints (on display until February at Thyme at Southrop, Gloucestershire) includes platinum prints, the expensive and painstaking process pioneered in the 19th century, and continued by art photographers due to its ravishing effect. “The platinum process started in the 1800s when English Florists’ tulips were being bred,” says Britt, who decided to apply this rarefied process only to these most rarefied, contemporary subjects. Dutch historics were left out, being from a different era. A limited edition, two-volume book, set by hand and printed at Rooksmoor Press in Stroud, is also part of her offering. This enthusiastic attention to detail and quality is an insight into Britt’s obsession with a flower that begins to die (beautifully) as soon as it starts to bloom.

Above: Britt is able to maintain a higher level of control over her nascent collection of rare English Florists’ tulips when they are planted in pots. Their bulbs are smaller than the Dutch historics.

Flaming and feathering is caused by a virus. When a tulip begins to “break” it is a source of some excitement, as well as anxiety. Tulips change every day when they are growing, and a break adds to their visual intrigue as the markings spread (or not) over the petals.

Above: A broken tulip in Britt’s garden, which will be separated from the others after it has finished feathering and flaming.

Tulip Breaking Virus was discovered in the 1920s, almost 300 years after the great tulip craze in the Netherlands. Spread by aphids, it is a more prosaic explanation for the entrancing markings of certain blooms. “It can happen any time,” says Britt. “I think my carelessness in the beginning led to almost all my Dutch bulbs breaking.” The virus can weaken affected bulbs over time and broken tulips need to be separated from the rest.

Dutch historics that are feathered and flamed through breeding are on the open market. Also known as Rembrandts; Britt buys hers (plus bulbs in solid colors) from Jacques Amand.

Above: English Florists’ tulips are exhibited traditionally in beer bottles, at the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society Show. They have been graded and classed; the markings on these are bred into the tulips and are not caused by the Tulip Breaking Virus.

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September 25, 2024
‘Gardening Bohemia’: A Fascinating New Exhibit on the Bloomsbury Women at the Garden Museum

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“It is lucky perhaps that Bloomsbury has a pleasant reverberating sound, suggesting old-fashioned gardens and out-of-the-way walks and squares; otherwise how could one bear it?” It is apparent throughout the rest of this reminiscence by British artist Vanessa Bell that the fertile post-Victorian cultural movement known as Bloomsbury, based on the London neighborhood that was the intellectual hub of the era, drew unsolicited attention from its earliest days. When the First World War broke out, gossipmongers became even more fixated with the young iconoclasts when they declared themselves to be conscientious objectors. Leaving behind the gardens, walks, and drawing rooms of this low-key part of central London, the Bloomsbury Group relocated to the country, helping the war effort by working on farms. This period is the focus of the Garden Museum’s small and remarkably well-packaged show Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors (until September 29).

Paintings, photographs, and letters relating to the gardens of three Bloomsbury women, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell—as well as Vita Sackville-West, who was part of Bloomsbury’s constellation—show us that regarding this much-discussed group, there is always something left to say.

Vanessa Bell at Charleston Farmhouse

Above: An English treatment of Mediterranean plants (with tight, gray spheres of santolina) at Charleston. Photograph by Kendra Wilson, from Bloomsbury in Sussex: Garden Visit to Charleston Farmhouse.

The bohemian atmosphere of Charleston, when occupied by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant—and a variety of intellectuals who did a lot of room swapping —has been well documented. The house was and is very much connected with a farm, located at the end of a bumpy track. The garden was a form of self-expression, just like the house, and plants that were grown for color and shape made their way into some of the paintings that are gathered in this show (and are mainly missing from Charleston Farmhouse). The garden was designed by artist and critic Roger Fry, whose garden portraits of Vanessa, for whom he had a briefly reciprocated passion, are included here.

Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House

Above: “The point of it is the garden,” wrote Virginia Woolf about Monk’s House, the house she shared with her husband Leonard Woolf, a few miles from Charleston. Photograph by Caroline Arber, from Required Reading: Virginia Woolf’s Garden.

“She often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” The quote on the endpapers at the back of the well-illustrated catalog has a particular resonance with ideas around mental health and gardening today. From Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, it is revealing of Woolf’s own relationship with gardens: she left the hard graft to Leonard but her diaries reveal that she enjoyed getting her hands into the soil. Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, and Between the Acts (unfinished at time of death) were written in a “lodge” by the orchard.

Above: Bloomsbury favorite: Kniphofia, or red hot poker. Photograph by Jim Powell, from Red Hot Pokers: Rethinking a 70s-Retro Flower.

The Stephen sisters, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, had a thing about red hot pokers. Making an appearance in To the Lighthouse, they frame Mr and Mrs Ramsay as they walk in their summer garden, and the show has an endearing photograph of Woolf standing between some of these South African giants. It is very possible that Vita Sackville West included them in her cottage garden of sunset colors at Sissinghurst as a homage to Woolf. Red hot pokers were more suburban than bohemian at mid-century, and Vita’s husband Sir Harold Nicolson couldn’t abide them.

Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst

Above: “I visualize the white trumpets of dozens of Regale lilies,” wrote Vita Sackville-West when dreaming up the White Garden at Sissinghurst. Photograph by Kendra Wilson, from The English Gardener: His and Hers, Harold and Vita.

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July 18, 2024
Designer Visit: Sheila Jack’s White Garden in West London – Gardenista

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A career in art direction is a useful grounding for anybody wishing to go into garden design. Sheila Jack’s career shift was not so much a break as a continuum—of research, editing, and presentation. Before designing the pages of Vogue magazine, her first job was for the architect Norman Foster, and these visual strands from the past feed into her present-day career as a landscape designer.

We visit the project which turned Sheila’s design ideas into something more three-dimensional: her own urban garden.

Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer for Gardenista, except where noted.

Above: A work studio faces the house in Sheila Jack’s garden in Hammersmith, London.

“When we installed my husband’s garden studio, we needed to create a pathway to it,” explains Sheila of the garden’s layout. “Our children were beyond the need for lawn, so there was scope to include more planting.”

Above: Photograph by Sheila Jack.

I first met Sheila by the photocopying machine at Tatler magazine, several decades ago. Amid the madness, Sheila stood out as a beacon of clarity, in a crisp white shirt. A few years later I spotted Sheila, ever crisp, at 444 Madison Avenue, a recent arrival at Condé Nast in New York. While I failed to take my job on the 17th floor seriously, Sheila worked hard downstairs, in the scary offices of Vogue. Fast-forwarding a few years, she suddenly appeared on Instagram, with beautifully composed pictures of gardens, in focus. How had she got from there to here?

Above: Sheila’s London garden of mainly green and white.

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June 7, 2024
Tom Stuart Smith’s Garden at the 2024 Chelsea Flower Show

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This week, as the Chelsea Flower Show goes viral on every media outlet, we take a look at Tom Stuart-Smith, the comeback—after an absence of 14 years. A super-heavyweight of British garden design, Stuart-Smith’s show resumé describes his work as combining “naturalism with modernity, and built forms with romantic planting,” before reminding us that one of his clients was HM the Queen. And just to recap: He has now won nine gold medals at Chelsea, including three Best in Show. Stuart-Smith’s gardens caused such a stir in the 1990s that their legacy is still very much with us: water-filled tanks of Corten steel, peeling river birch, cloud pruning, and strongly disciplined color all come to mind.

Stuart-Smith has implied during his long absence that he didn’t have a compelling reason to do another garden on Main Avenue. He was lured by Project Giving Back, a private funding collective (who last year bagged the reluctant star Cleve West). One of PGB’s conditions for funding—that a show garden must be permanently re-sited afterwards in a place where it can do good—is also part of its attraction to garden designers. They make a garden for a charity of their choice, then Chelsea’s publicity machine puts it under a giant spotlight. Tom Stuart-Smith’s show garden for the National Garden Scheme is about the joy of garden visiting and garden making. It’s that simple.

Photography for Gardenista by Jim Powell.

Above: Seasonal favorites, foxgloves and cow parsley make the grade on Tom Stuart-Smith’s Chelsea garden.

The National Garden Scheme is a staple of summer for British gardeners, allowing them to look in other people’s backyards, while having a bit of tea and cake—all for a nominal fee. Since this is a transaction that takes places all over the British Isles, from spring until autumn, the NGS makes a lot of money, which is donated to nursing and health charities. It is also inherently “good for you” to be out in a garden, gazing at plants and listening to birds singing, so the benefits are exponential.

Stuart-Smith is a reliable purveyor of unusual plants in his gardens but also, the very, very familiar, which are the elements that will be reproduced all over the world: towering white foxgloves in a sea of cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris), almost shockingly “common” since it’s found on every wayside and, now that the Royal Parks allow unmowed areas, in every park.

Above: A stone sink is filled with rain water, which works its way down from the roof (of oak shingles), funneled into a terracotta pipe and then fed from the bottom. It is surrounded by Farfugium giganteum.

Since we are talking about garden visiting, this is a good one to walk on, should you be so lucky; it is lightly shaded by three multi-stemmed hazels, which give an idea of coppicing, a practice which only real gardeners understand the value of, since hazel re-sprouts after cutting down almost to the ground, providing useful straight poles.

Above: Geranium pratense ‘Mrs Kendall Clarke’ with kinetic grass, Melica altissima ‘Alba’.

On describing his last woodland garden for Chelsea, Stuart-Smith said that he uses repeats of species, focusing on texture and form, over color. This still rings true, and in the 2024 garden he takes his restricted palette to the point of monochrome, and a slightly chilly, detached air. But if you look, and then look again, the garden reveals itself. The plant basics haven’t changed much either, with iris, umbellifers, astrantia and hardy geraniums also making a comeback.

Above: Maianthemum flexuosum, groundcovers Galium odoratum and shiny Hosta ‘Devon Green’, Kirengeshoma palmata.

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May 21, 2024
Perennial Tulips: Polly Nicholson on How to Grow Native Species

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It is the straight species, though, that hold the most promise. “In my opinion, species tulips are the future, and an exciting one,” says Polly. They can be naturalized in grass or gravel, taken indoors in small pots, or placed in a tulipière (this one above is made by Katrin Moye). Species tulips are the past as well: “also known as wild or botanical tulips [they] are the forerunners of all tulips grown in gardens today.”

The tulips that we mainly think of as classic are a bit like standard King Alfred daffodils or Pink Lady apples; the mainstream selection is narrow in comparison to the huge variety of species and historic cultivars. This book will persuade you that these are worth seeking out, and there is not much detective work to be done, if you consult Polly’s lists toward the back.

Above: Naturalized under globe-pruned pear trees, Tulipa clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’, is offered widely and easy to grow.

Successful, multiplying colonies of species tulips in a garden are the result of trial and error, while attempting to replicate their original conditions. Sometimes they need to be moved around before they find the right home. Tulipa clusiana is recommended for beginners. T. clusiana ‘Peppermintstick’ grows at the front of a border in Polly’s walled garden; its looks are a mix of diffidence and artifice that annual tulips cannot match. “It has obviously been introduced, but it looks completely natural and at home.”

Above: Naturally spreading, yellow Tulipa sylvestris is one of the original, un-hybridized wild tulips.

In gardens, Tulipa sylvestris is best placed among spring herbage and flowers that are not also bright yellow, so that its shape and subtle coloring, with brown-green stems and sepals, can be seen at their best. It’s shown here with Narcissus ‘Thalia’ and dark hellebores in woodland beds. Rough ground is more accommodating than a flower bed, though, as they spread through underground stolons. With a similar profile and intensity of color, Tulipa sprengeri is a throbbing, warm red species flower that may find itself radiating alone, or mainly against green. Polly grows them with irises.

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March 21, 2024
Sandy Mush Herb Nursery in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC

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When a former student at Great Dixter in East Sussex moves to North Carolina and recommends a remote nursery in the Blue Ridge Mountains, we take note. “Fairman and Kate’s nursery has an amazing selection of plants: herbs, natives, pelargoniums, salvias, et cetera,” reports Ben Pick of nearby Saturnia Farm. “It reminds me a lot of some of the old nurseries in England.” It is called Sandy Mush Herbs, another reason to investigate. Established in 1977, the nursery produces collectible handbooks designed and embellished with calligraphy and line drawings. The catalog begins, “Dear Herb Friends, We continue to expand our collection of handmade plants…”.

Let’s delve in.

Photography by Christopher Jayne.

Above: Sandy Mush Nursery, near Leicester, North Carolina, was established over four decades ago and is nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Talking to Kate Jayne and her son, Christopher, it quickly becomes apparent that here is a nursery that is focused on growing things properly, and offering advice on how to do that—in other words, real customer service rather than a chatty bot in a pop-up window. Christopher maintains that Kate, who is the person answering the phone, recognizes all of her older customers before they have a chance to identify themselves. Plants are sent out all over the country but mainly in the eastern half. Kate discourages people from ordering plants from Sandy Mush when they could be had closer to home.

Above: Fairman Jayne, applying skills in propagating seeds learned at least 60 years ago when he studied in London at Kew’s famous horticulture school.

Kate and her husband, Fairman Jayne, met at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he was assisting the director of the arboretum and she was a student. Fairman already had a degree in horticulture from Kew, having been one of the first overseas students admitted to the renowned school. Says Kate: “Fairman’s been working with plants his entire life, and I’ve been involved with plants ever since I went to college.” With a shared interest in hard-find-plants, they knew early on that they wanted to run a plant nursery together.

Above: Bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis) growing around the Sandy Mush gardens in spring.

The couple moved to Asheville, North Carolina, before heading further out to the surrounding mountains. With herbs and aromatic plants high on their list, the couple realized that if they couldn’t find them locally, they should be supplying them. “We put an ad in Organic Gardening magazine and had a very enthusiastic response, and that generated publicity on a national scale,” Kate recalls. This was 1977, proving that Kate and Fairman’s interest in “handmade plants” struck a chord back then, and is today ever more relevant.

Of their specialisms, Kate says: “Our collection reflects our interest in fragrant plants and herbs, then going on to trees and shrubs, and then moving on to more wildflowers and native plants as interest has grown in that field.”

Above: Immaculately tended evergreen shrub cuttings.

A note on the nursery’s name, as related by Christopher Jayne (who photographs the nursery for the website and social media): “Sandy Mush is the name of the community we are in. The oral history is that in the early days of European settlement, animal drovers would stop in the valley. When they went to get water for their mush (think oatmeal, cornmeal, or porridge) it would always have sand in the water. So it became Sandy Mush Valley. We have fast-moving streams coming off the mountains, and the sand never completely settles.” And the soil is well-drained.

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February 27, 2024