Letter from America – further comments
‘When someone describes something as ‘not their cup of tea’, it is telling you far more about them than the garden…..’ Philippa Perry
Letter from America revisited
‘We might say something is ‘crap’ to a friend who understands our reference points, but it isn’t an adequate critical comment. You have to define your parameters for critical discussion, not doing so limits potential response. It becomes yes it is/no it is isn’t…..’
The practicalities of making a garden by Mary Keen
“Like painters, gardeners select, discard and re-arrange. Like them, we are making something that needs vision and patience and skill. We bring out what lies under the surface….”
Tim Richardson challenges ‘real gardeners’ over garden design
“The anti-design agenda of some parts of the horticultural world is in part based on a shires-gentry brand of anti-intellectualism which sees design, and talk of design, as essentially vulgar.The country-garden conceit is that you just throw it all together and then, as a result of genetics or feudalism or something, it happens to look good…”
Nine Questions – Duncan Brine
by Susan Cohan.
An interview with American garden designer Duncan Brine.
Nine Questions – Michelle Derviss
by Susan Cohan.
An interview with American Garden Designer, Michelle Derviss.
“A well steeped cup of tea, a butter cookie and my sketch book is always good for inspiration too.”
Did you say the “G” word? Wash your mouth out with soap
by Tim Richardson.
” – the idea of gardens and gardening comes freighted with apparently unassailable connotations of bourgeois mediocrity and convention, accompanied by visions of elderliness and amateurism.”
The Things a Garden Centre Won’t Tell You
by Suzanne Albinson.
“Perhaps it would behove us to compile a central data base of garden plants, a Wikiplantia perhaps,….”
Pothole Gardens by Felicity Waters
“…the photos below show the best form of roadscaping that I have ever seen in the UK….”
I Hate Designing Gardens by Suzanne Albinson
by Suzanne Albinson.
“the client went to a local nursery and purchased a job lot of trees on sale and stuck them in all over the place and completely shot the design…”
The Gardening Animal: The Biology of its Behaviour
by Yolanda Elizabet Heuzen.
“….Gardening is mainly about pleasing our inner animal, catering to our body, our senses.”
Miscellany
by Steve Eddy, Brian Sewell and Anthony Quinn.
“I fell to wondering, yet again, at the vanity of painters incapable of even rudimenatary self-criticism and at the boundless conceit of amateurs.”
Hedonistic Gardens – A Return to Utopia
18th Century pleasure gardens by Malcolm Uhlhorn.
“as we emerge from this treacle pudding of a recession should we not be trying to shake off this national endemic of philistinism and austerity and be thinking as to how we could embrace the pleasure garden concept today?”
Feeling Gardens
by Amanda Patton.
“…art isn’t just visually appealing, it must move you, shock you, create emotion in you in some form. And so with gardens, they must move you on a deeper level than just being visually pleasing.”
Recent Posts from: Veddw
I’ve fallen in love with these.
I love my garden, I do. It’s at the heart of my life. But just recently I’ve been drawn back and back to a windowsill with some sweet dwarf pelargoniums.
Favour the Ferns
Many years ago The Financial Times sent me to do a feature on the RHS ‘Flower Show’ at Tatton Park . I was totally naïve and had no idea what I was supposed to do or to write about. So my excitement was tempered by acute anxiety. The term ‘imposter syndrome’ could have been invented for me. […]
Snowdrop mania is coming…
In the UK, right now, the horticultural world is about to drive us all mad with snowdrops. Pictures of. Articles about. Gardens with them. Anything people can think of to bash us over the head with snowdrops.
Brilliant Brecon
Recently we made a visit to Brecon. This is not far from us, in case anyone was getting over excited about the possibility that I might have been travelling again. It’s in Wales, in the Brecon Beacons, recently re-christened Bannau Brycheiniog.
You should have been here Next Year
Charles made a complaint recently when we were walking in the garden.
When I complained about him complaining he told me that it was good for me to have complaints about the planting.
