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Tag: Cherry Trees

  • Garden Visit: Charlotte Molesworth’s Topiaries at Balmoral Cottage

    When Donald and Charlotte Molesworth first arrived at their small Kent cottage more than three decades ago, there was a derelict house and an almost totally blank canvas. The plot had once been the kitchen garden of an estate that belonged to “Cherry” Ingram, the great Victorian plant hunter. It may have looked like a wasteland, but it was one with fertile soil that had been improved over centuries.

    What the couple have created since then is nothing short of extraordinary: a flourishing garden that centers around Charlotte’s awe-inspiring topiary and a cluster of small buildings (including a holiday cottage to rent) in the beautiful Kent landscape. On a rainy day we joined Charlotte for a tour of Balmoral Cottage:

    Photography by Clare Coulson for Gardenista.

    Above: The house and garden is almost entirely hidden from view, which makes the magical entrance under an arch of hornbeam and down a path of ball-topped boxwood, even more tantalizing.

    Balmoral Cottage is down an unmade track and tucked away behind St George’s church in the picture-postcard village of Benenden. Charlotte insists there was no masterplan when they began the garden. They requested yew seedlings as their wedding gifts and they planted them all before transplanting them at a later date.

    All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.
    Above: All the boxwood in the garden (and there are many varieties) was also grown from seedlings, many collected on Charlotte’s travels.

    Charlotte’s horticultural talent is in her blood. Her father was a farmer on the nearby North Downs and her mother was a plantswoman who grew and sold primulas and had a love of yew. It was her aunt, another talented gardener, who first planted the seed, of training topiary. Charlotte’s skills and her garden have grown organically.

    Charlotte
    Above: Charlotte’s advice for those starting a garden is to think vertically: “When you start a garden, I think it’s the one thing that you often don’t think about, yet it’s this structure that is so valuable in the garden.”

    Almost everything here has been grown, recycled, or rescued (“We are great scavengers,” admits Charlotte). The greenhouses have been built using unwanted materials destined for the scrap heap; the polytunnels were rescued. Even some of the garden’s most beautiful trees (including some stunning Malus Huphensis) were picked up as tiny seedlings on walks through the next-door estate many years ago. The large Pinus radiata and Scot’s pine that edge the garden also contribute to a wonderful borrowed landscape.

    The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.
    Above: The central walk of the garden is lined with box and towering topiary which leads down to a large pond. While the couple share gardening duties, Charlotte admits that she can be quite possessive over her hedging and topiary.

    She’s very picky about plant hygiene as her garden is currently untouched by the ravages of box blight. She uses an organic treatment of effective microorganisms to keep the plants healthy and she is fanatical when pruning, sterilizing tools as she trims with a bleach solution. When she works on other people’s gardens, she will not only sterilize all her tools when she gets home, she will also wash all her clothes and take a shower, to ensure that no disease or harmful blight spores can travel with her.

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  • 10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

    10 Ideas to Borrow From Japanese-Inspired Gardens – Gardenista

    It’s no coincidence if Japanese gardens remind you of those scene-in-a-shoebox dioramas you made in grade school.

    A Japanese garden is a miniature world full of abstract shapes–rocks, gravel, and cloud-pruned plants–designed to represent the larger landscape of nature. And Nature. For centuries, Zen Buddhist monks and other Japanese landscaping designers have been trying to provoke deep thoughts, with design elements such as raked gravel paths and moss checkerboards and tiny bonsai trees trained to look permanently windswept.

    A Deep Question: How do you channel all those centuries of serenity to add a bit of Zen to your garden?

    The Answer: Steal one or more of our favorite 10 garden ideas from Japan:

    Featured photograph by Ye Rin Mok, for Creative Spaces, from LA Noir: Architect Takashi Yanai’s Humble-Chic Bungalow.

    Japanese Maple Trees

    A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.
    Above: A Japanese maple, in all its glory, stands in front of a home in Kagoshima, Japan. Photograph by Hironobu Kagae, from “Spend Every Day with Peace of Mind”: A Labor-of-Love Family Home in the Japanese Countryside.

    Plant a lacy Japanese maple. There are hundreds of different varieties of Acer palmatum, the maple tree native to Japan. With gracefully articulated leaves and diminutive stature (most don’t grow taller than 30 feet), Japanese maples tuck themselves easily into nearly any size garden. Varieties with multi-branched trunks have a sculptural quality and become a natural focal point in the garden.

    For more ideas, see Japanese Maples: A Field Guide to Planting, Care & Design.

    Landscape Rocks

    Above: Boulders as sculpture at a Japanese dry garden in Ithaca, NY. Photograph by Don Freeman, from Designer Visit: A Gray and Green Garden at Tiger Glen.

    Use rocks as a design element. In Japanese gardens, the pleasing shapes of large rocks and craggy boulders are reminders of the larger natural landscape that surrounds us. Depending on the size and shape, a rock also can serve as a functional element–as seating or a table–in the garden.

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  • Dan Pearson: An Interview with the Masterful Garden Designer

    Dan Pearson: An Interview with the Masterful Garden Designer

    There are maybe a handful of living landscape designers whose names non-gardening types may recognize. Dan Pearson is one of them. Known for his beautiful, bordering-on-wild gardens and commitment to fostering biodiversity, the British designer, horticulturist, and writer (his quarterly online magazine, Dig Delve, is a must-read) started gardening at 6, opened his practice in 1987, and has since gone on to design jaw-dropping gardens all around the world, many of which we’ve covered here on this site (go here, here, and here for a sampling). Now in his fourth decade as a landscape whisperer, he continues to create immersive experiences that garden-philes plan trips around: “I’ve just started work on a public park in Japan, the second phase of Delos at Sissinghurst will begin this year, and I am working with Rachel Whiteread at a sculpture park in south of England,” he tells us.

    Clearly, the garden guru is very much in demand, but anyone can have access to his ideas via his online Create Academy courses (he launched “A Naturalistic Design Masterclass” in 2021 and a follow up, “An Expert Guide to Planting Design”, last year.) And, of course, you’ll learn a lot from his Quick Takes answers below—including his favorite plant, tool, and outdoor wear. 

    Photography courtesy of Create Academy, unless otherwise noted.

    Above: When he’s not in London or on a work site, Dan can be found at Hillside, his 20-acre property (a former cattle farm) near Bath.

    Your first garden memory:

    Making miniature moss gardens out of pincushion mosses.

    Garden-related book you return to time and again:

    Any of Beth Chatto’s books.

    Instagram account that inspires you:

    Cassian Schmidt. Cassian’s observations of plants growing in the wild and the way that he interprets those plant communities in naturalistic plantings are beyond compare.

    Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

    Above: A gravel path flanked by effusive plantings at Hillside.

    Wild, immersive, and contextual.

    Plant that makes you swoon:

    One of Dan’s dogs admiring his Yoshino cherry tree (Prunus x yedoensis). Photograph via @coyotewillow.
    Above: One of Dan’s dogs admiring his Yoshino cherry tree (Prunus x yedoensis). Photograph via @coyotewillow.

    Prunus x yedoensis—the quintessential Japanese cherry for blossom. I love the anticipation of bud break every March, the way that every inch of the branches is covered in the single, soft pink flowers and how the tree buzzes with bees on a warm spring morning.

    Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

    Euonymus fortunei ‘Emerald ‘n’ Gold’. Of all variegated shrubs this is the most difficult to live with. The brashness of its yellow makes it the loudest and worst-dressed guest in any garden, demanding attention.

    Favorite go-to plant:

    Butomus umbellatus. Photograph via @coyotewillow.
    Above: Butomus umbellatus. Photograph via @coyotewillow.

    Umbellifers. From cow parsley to giant fennel umbellifers have the most pleasing form and are all pollinator magnets. I couldn’t garden without them.

    Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

    To be able to let go of a garden when the time comes to move on. Creating a garden requires total application and commitment and a large part of the process is making an investment in the future. When I have had to give up gardens I have made—both for clients and for myself—there is always a sense of loss, of grief almost, which takes some time to process.

    Unpopular gardening opinion:

    Above: The critters at Hillside love a bit of overgrown messiness.

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  • Cherry Blossoms Are Edible: Easy Spring Recipes Using the Flower

    Cherry Blossoms Are Edible: Easy Spring Recipes Using the Flower

    Who doesn’t love cherry blossoms? Even ardent native plant advocates can’t help but admire their uncomplicated optimism. While native woodlands and gardens are still quietly waking, showing no more than the pale effervescence of spicebush and the silver buds of serviceberry, the white and pink froth of ornamental cherry season rolls across the land, a great and beautiful gift whose roots are East Asian. After the long months of winter, and after the suspended weeks that are technically spring but hardly effusive, the wonder of their imported arboreal eruption catches us all like a sudden exhalation. We’ve been holding our breath.

    Stand beneath the trees and wonder at their petals. And perhaps nibble one or two: These weeks taste like bitter almond and marzipan, and they will not last.

    Photography by Marie Viljoen.

    Above: Nanking cherries (Prunus tomentosa) bloom very early, on the heels of winter.
    Above: Prunus x subhirtella ‘Autumnalis Rosea’ follows a light, late fall bloom with showers of early spring flowers.

    Above: P. x subhirtella ‘Rosy Cloud’ behind (possible) P. yedoensis ‘Akebono’ at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

    Above: A weeping P. pendula ‘Yae-beni-shidare’.
    Above: P. x yedoensis at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
    Above: The ruffled blooms of ‘Kanzan’ cherries are the last to open in spring’s cherry blossom sequence.
    Above: Spring eggs, with cherry blossoms and chickweed.

    Chew a cherry blossom. The first impression is one of delicacy, followed quickly by bitterness. After a couple of seconds that is replaced by a strong transition to almond essence. It is fleeting. But pairing the blossoms with ingredients that do not overwhelm their distinctive flavor yields some surprising results.

    Above: Edible flowers transform treats into celebrations.

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