“But it wasn’t Piet Oudolf who got most of the early press about the High Line. New Yorkers are far more interested in architects and landscape architects than garden designers, and in this case it was the elevated rail line itself, and its very costly rehabilitation, that was the focus of public and media hype. Now that the aerial garden has been opened to the public for over a year, the plantings themselves are garnering more public acclaim.”
“Gardens are like theatre in that you have to be there to judge them. It is not enough to review a play by looking at the publicity photographs and hearing a second hand account. It is not good enough to judge a restaurant by looking at the menu and hearing what someone else thought. It is not good enough to judge a garden by looking at slides and hearing one person’s opinion of it.”
“I tend to think that in professionally tended gardens, the natural occurrence of targets, job descriptions, over-loading, all commonplace in a busy workplace, can quite often mask and tie up the creativity that exists within a gardener …”
‘When someone describes something as ‘not their cup of tea’, it is telling you far more about them than the garden…..’ Philippa Perry
‘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…..’
“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….”
“It happens all the time and quite frankly it lowers the bar :…”
I went to 24 gardens.
Some of the gardens were A gardens, some Fs. ……. my three favourites were……
“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…”
by John Brookes.
“Gardening is to do with continual regeneration, it is never ending but in a nice way.”
by Susan Cohan.
An interview with American garden designer Duncan Brine.
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.”
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.”
by Chris Young.
“…one of my new year’s resolutions was not to give my advice too freely…”
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.
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. […]
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.
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.
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.
