You will all note with horror just how long ago it was that I received this piece. Takes a leap of the imagination, back to March perhaps. Thinking gardeners will have no problem with that. (I’ve been busy)
So what do you think? How many repeat plants do you use?
Anne Wareham, editor.
Katherine Crouch:
I was recently stunned by multiple Hamamelis x intermedia Jelena and Arnold Promise (or witch hazel). Planted en masse in woodland at Trentham, they flower in late winter and perfume the airs on still days. This planting was designed by the excellent plantsman and landscaper Nigel Dunnett. The Trentham Gardens are undergoing daring and extensive development (funded I know not how).
These are NOT witch hazels. I have no pictures of witch hazels. This IS from an August visit to Trentham though, courtesy of Charles Hawes
The website states
In a first of its kind in the UK, the Zig Zag woodland walk area has been planted with 400 witch-hazels alongside richly scented flowers beneath a canopy of 250-year-old beech and oak woodland creating a new ‘perfumed walk’ of highly scented winter flowering shrubs. In 2018 new planting will add hundreds of thousands of spring flowering bulbs too.
I fancy a witch hazel or two, but only if I possessed a garden big enough to indulge in large winter flowering plants that are going to look rather plain by summer. I ventured only very briefly into my small garden recently to admire my snowdrops and would rather save the space I have for the main display for summer, when I will have more desire to sit out there.
A witch hazel of a decent size will cost at least £30, and so they are usually seen in solitary splendour. There is a good one at East Lambrook Manor and another in Ilton which is visible from the road. With broad vision and deep pockets, Trentham have spent thousands of pounds on one kind of plant, which has boggled my mind. Let’s say hundreds of thousands of wholesale bulbs translates as just a hundred thousand crocuses, and a relatively cheap one like Barrs Purple, that will still work out at over £3000….crikey.
They haven’t stopped at witch hazels.
700 magnolia trees have been planted to date with single species groves in “naturalistic stands” to create a wave of white, pink and claret red. Advised by Jim Gardiner, magnolia expert and RHS ambassador, this unique scale and style of planting of magnolia will continue to mature each year before reaching its full potential in seven years.
We have half a dozen of them… (editor)
This is going to be amazing, and I can’t wait to visit. It set me thinking about how I decide how many of what kind of plant I put in my garden designs.
It is a general rule that one must mass plants for good effect, and on the whole, the smaller the plant, the more you have of it. A garden might have 1 cedar or beech, 6 fruit trees, 30 shrubs, 500 perennials and 3000 spring bulbs, and no one would be much surprised. Slow growing expensive items may be bought as a wicked extravagance, set amongst cheap and vigorous groundcover perennials such as hardy geraniums to eke out the expense.
I recently bought a rare pure white Daphne bholua with astonishing winter scent called ‘Garden House Ghost’. Actually I bought two, one for me and one for a client, possibly hoping that he will jib at the price and then I will have a pair. Standing under a foot tall in a 2 litre pot, they cost £35 each, eventually growing to 2 metres tall if they succeed. I imagine a sheltered courtyard wafting with sweet scent of 20 of them growing as corner groups – if only I could persuade a client that spending £700 on 2 weeks of March scent is a good idea.
Oddly there are some plants usually grow as singletons that do not lend themselves to single variety grouping. I love Japanese maples such as Bloodgood and Ozakazuki on the edge of a shady woodland, and to see the different kinds at Westonbirt Arboretum in the third week in October is a joy. However, an avenue of them along a Devon drive was strangely underwhelming, their delicate outlines merging as a rather dreary double row of matt maroon.
Japanese maple – I went out in the rain to get this pic for you. XX Ed.
Neither was I enchanted by a driveway lined with weeping birch Betula pendula ‘Youngii’. My children called them ‘the spooky trees’. A single weeping birch served as a living parasol in my old garden, but I rather tired of it.
My lonely Cornus controversa variegata was more thrilling, another expensive plant that now sets me wondering if a forest of them would thrill or disappoint. It is a rule enforced by the Garden Taste Police that variegated foliage is vulgar and should not be overused, therefore such a rule might be worth breaking in a big way. An experiment with hundreds of Cornus c. v. underplanted with white and green Euonymus Silver Queen, a million snowdrops, a thousand Carex Icedance and hundreds of Anemone Whirlwind, would be exciting, expensive, and possibly dreadfully vulgar. Who dares?
Katherine Crouch
I visited Trentham last December, loved it.
An article in rhs October 2017 by Noel Kingsbury outlines its model : “owned and run by a property company on hard nosed commercial lines”
Loved the article by KC she always cheers me.
There have been a lot of interesting new introductions in Hamamelis and Magnolia in the last 30 years, and it takes an institution-sized scale to let them show what they can do. This is one of the most exciting plantings I’ve heard of in a while.
I’ve been sketching out fantasy witch hazel groves in my notebook for a few years now, grouping colors and selecting underplanting companions. (Advances in hellebore breeding make this particularly entertaining). It’s possible in most of the color groups to cover the early, mid, and late season, and to guarantee scent, especially if you bulk up on the most fragrant cultivars. Suitable backgrounds enhance the color effects — dark green for the pale and medium yellows, grey wood or stone for warm red and orange, white or silver for purplish reds.
There are new offerings of the smaller US native Ozark witch hazel H. vernalis selected for fall foliage color; with the right planning and companions, the grove could have a second season. It’s easy to imagine growing viticella and other fall-blooming clematis up some of the duller witch hazels to strengthen the autumn display.
Magnolia fanciers probably have similar winter notebook garden plans. This should be fun to follow from afar: go you UK garden writers and photographers!
Masses, drifts, or sweeps? I think drifts and sweeps are certainly ‘massed’ plantings, but perhaps ‘massed’ infers that there are blocks of plants that are commercial plantings? Oh for the right noun and adjective to describe the loveliness we all seek! And Anne, I love your words: “discrimination, aesthetic sense and judgement,imagination and bravery”. I think discrimination & judgement take a certain amount of independence, too.
You’re right! xxx
massing plants….I felt my spidey senses tingling when I saw a new client who wanted a new patio. She had two new borders nearby. Plants about a year old and a full yard apart. A tray-of-scones planting of low and unremarkable pulmonaria, geranium sanguineum. armeria, phlox douglasii, spiraea Goldflame and a dozen more. But only one of each.
Well, I said, trying to think of something positive to say, it’s a canny gardener who trials just one each of interesting plants to see how they perform before committing to buying enough for generous swathes.
Oh no, says she, I don’t see the point in large groups, I like it like this, it’s much easier to keep tidy. I couldn’t think of anything else to say…..I shall quietly pass her straight over to a good contractor and save myself much pain.
Katherine, I started laughing out loud when I read this. I think your reply was brilliant and I’m going to remember it. Too bad the client wasn’t equally brilliant.
I love massed plantings as it has the potential to be quite amazing, BUT it should always be in some reasonable proportion to the size of the garden and it depends on the plant. Cornus controversa ‘Variegata’ is really more of a single focal point, while a mass of Hamamelis in winter can be amazing. I experienced just that this winter in the arboretum at the University of WA in Seattle. My guess is they had roughly 10 or so of them planted near each other and the fragrance was fabulous! Hamamelis is also not a focal point plant unless you do something around it to make it so. Which is why I think it can be successfully massed.
I like big sweeps of colour and planted muscari for spring bloom and astilbe for summer at Glen Villa in the Dragon’s Tail, a 300-foot long path that scribbles across a flat grassy area under old crabapple trees. I don’t like institutional mass plantings and am sensitive to the potential problems that Catherine Stewart points out. But big drifts … yum.
So I wonder, is there a difference between mass plantings and drifts of a single plant? One certainly sounds more romantic.
Is it like many things in gardens – a question of discrimination, aesthetic sense and judgement,imagination and bravery – and all those things which make a great and beautiful garden but which rarely ever get discussed? (because all gardens are ‘lovely’) Xxx Anne
Judgement, imagination and bravery: I like those words, particularly when applied to garden design. Aesthetic sense and discrimination are so culturally determined. I think, for instance, of something simple like colour choice. Atone point orange was an abomination, and to use it would have been brave and imaginative; now, because orange is an ‘in’ colour, those of ‘discriminating’ taste would scorn it.
Should I add independence?
Independence: yes!
The MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts has witch hazels along a long walk on the campus. Every spring I can hardly wait for their blossoming, after a long dark winter in New England. There are definitely not too many witch hazels! And I find them to be graceful, lovely small trees throughout the year, including blazing autumn color! I have two hybrid cultivars (one rather expensive, one bought for a bargain because it had been ill-cared-for) and 2 natives (cheap big box store purchases) in my own small garden and they are treasures, perfect size for a suburban plot. On warm days in midwinter, I clear off the snow and sit on a bench next to one of them, breathing in the fresh-laundry smell that promises an end to cold and dark.
Mass planting can be visually arresting but biologically disastrous in the long term. In Australia, every season reveals yet another plant that was once fabulous for mass planting but is now regularly ruined by some new pestilence, either fungal, insect, bacterial or viral. The concentration of one species in a mass planting (and then multiply that by many hundreds of mass plantings) allows a pest to proliferate to the point that old plantings become so infested or diseased that they have to be removed. Old bullet-proof stalwarts now a disease-ridden liability in ornamental horticulture in many areas include agapanthus (mealy bug), clivea (lily caterpillar) and lilly pilly (leaf-eating beetle). In America its buxus and knock-out roses.
Garden designers need to be aware that there’s a lot more going on in a garden than aesthetics and that by mass planting, they may be ruining the future for that plant.
For me this works on a big scale and if you have the funds! Not in your average garden. Then it would depend what the average garden size is. Now I’m thinking! Good article.
I think the ruin of many an ‘average’ sized garden is fussiness and bittiness. Being bold with some plants can ameliorate that effect even in a very small space. You might substitute one large, star plant for the million witch hazels at Trentham but it would be for similar reasons that you would do it. Xxxx Anne
I’m very much in favour of huge drifts of the same plant – the visual impact when on full display is stunning nee breathtaking, Bluebell woods , Laburnum tunnels, Wisteria avenues or the referred to planting at Trentham of Hamemeilis, so long as another block planting of something that flowers later in the year that co-exists with H. , planted in vast sweeps is included. It would look amazing. On a recent trip to California I visited the Berkeley Botanical gardens … a whole hillside almost was a carpet of Alstroemeria in flower ..an astounding sight !
I had a design project a few years ago -and planted a mix, throughout the space, of Erica carnea cv, loads of Allium Globemaster and Salvia ‘Cerro Potosii’. The whole site ,whatever the time of year is a carpet of colour ! Simple but floriferous.