It's not a garden that you could ever say
"Oh well, there's this part and that part"
"Here we are in the herb garden"
"Here we are in the rose garden"
"Here we are in the blue garden"
It's not like that
It just gradually leads you
from one place to another
This is a very forgotten little valley
somehow very much with this feeling
that I want to make this handshake
between the garden and the wider landscape
Not an abrupt transition, but a sort of melting
from one to the other
I'm very much ruled by the form of a plant
particularly by its foliage, its texture
I think the garden probably as you wander through it
is mostly made up of leaf
and then you have these scatterings of color
as the flowers come and go
There's a tulip moment, a big tulip moment
There's an iris moment
There's a peony moment
Not much of a rose moment
I'm not really very keen on roses
I have a few Pemberton musks just for old times' sake
I think you sink into this wonderful immediate connection
with the soil which is always good
And the turning it over
I love weeding
and I love that sort of ability that weeding gives you
to look closely at all the things
that you've actually introduced into the patch
You know, there's that great mantra
'look after the soil and the plants will look after themselves'
It's absolutely true
I'm absolutely in love with ferns
always have been
but here, the circumstances
are even better for growing them
So, you know, somehow I've ended up with 48 different sorts of ferns
but the fern encapsulates the sort of plant
that I now tend to go for
Superb form, wonderful beauty
sort of giving you a long time to wait while it actually
delivers the full performance
This is magnolia wilsonii
which is actually one of the first ones ever to go in
I think it's one of the best ones, too
Look into those amazing flowers
that extraordinary texture
Each one doesn't last so long
but a lot them, including this one
have the most wonderful seed pods as well
I like putting in things that reveal their delight slowly
Some of the magnolias haven't flowered yet
but that doesn't matter to me
You know, six years, what is that?
It's a blip in the life of a magnolia
and I'm perfectly content to wait
This is our best possible defense
our bulwark against an increasingly, it seems to me, hostile world
We have increasingly less and less control over
what is going on out there
and in our gardens, we can make the sort of world
that we wish we lived in