Shellwork at Ballymaloe

Would you like a grotto? Do you warm to the idea of a cool shell-lined cave, water dripping from stalactites, mysterious reflections in a dark pool? They’re back in fashion. I went to what must be the most beautiful grotto of modern times at the Ballymaloe Cooking School near Cork, a crustacean mosaic, a pristine masterpiece of a summerhouse (no water, admittedly) that perfectly expressed the spirit of what? Grotteity? Grottiness?

Last year’s winner of the PJ Redouté Prize for the best garden book* in French is a tombstone of a volume on grottoes, illustrating a score of magnificent creations, some glistening bright, some spooky, all cool retreats from the sunlit world. It classifies them as, for example, Primordial, Diluvian, Labyrinthine, Sacred, Tellurique, Profane, Underworldly – and the Introductory chapter is called Ouvrir L’Ombre – opening the shade.

As it happens, we have a grotto of our own, deep in the Welsh woods; a rocky tunnel a hundred yards long that set out to be a goldmine but drew a blank. Its mouth, protected by an iron gate, is a gloomy hole overhung by ferns and issuing a dark and gleaming stream. Penetrate the depths (take a torch) and you are in a world of black, dripping rock, with here and there a little cascade to cool your collar.

The grotto spirit, though, can be expressed in less ambitious ways. I have been looking round this tiny garden for a corner to transform into an alcove plastered with shells, with perhaps a pretty dribble into a basin. For now we just have a tank with a Mr Spit like a Green Man and four goldfish; two tiddlers and two gorgeous ‘comets’ with wide waving tails called Halley and Haley (Bopp).

*The book is ‘L’Imaginaire des Grottes dans les Jardins Européens’by Herve Brunon and Monique Mosser. Oh yes; moss. Another essential.

A busy evening after an Ascot downpour (the Queen Anne Cup, I believe: I stayed at home) emptying brimming saucers and relocating snails. Where do they live, waiting for Ascot week? There were fifteen in one corner enjoying the shelter of the agapanthus. Total score for the evening: twenty seven. And why do they climb? I’ve found senior snails climbing down from ten feet or so on a wall. Do they want a better view?

The slugs have meanwhile climbed a newly-planted Clematis wilsonii (a treasure from Hergest Croft) and munched its top shoots before disappearing – presumably to destroy the little Eccremocarpus scaber I planted to keep it company. How this unobtrusive climber came to be called ‘Glory Flower’ I can’t imagine. Its little red and yellow bells on the flimsiest rigging deserve ‘charming’, but certainly don’t compare with Morning Glory. The strain I have (or had) has modest pale creamy-yellow flowers, all the more welcome for unexpected cameo appearances among more socially confident blooms.

I tend to think Chilean plants should be rainproof, but E. scaber likes it dry. So does the marvellous Abutilon vitifolium (American name: Flowering Maple!). Its tissue-weight petals, rather on the hollyhock model, in either lavender or pure white, look as though a shower would destroy them, yet I have seen them in rain forest growing with luxuriant Eucryphia and Weinmannia as dense as redwoods.

A wet Ascot makes a good growing season. Just-planted specimens can grow on without check; established ones, even big trees whose hydrology you would think had settled into a pattern a century ago, can react with a surge of lusty shoots the very next day. You think a tree or shrub (or indeed a perennial) has done its spring thing. Then another downpour and away it goes again, the new wood barely able to support the new new wood.

You can see the effect of rain on growth rates, but what about temperature? It has gone down to below 10 degrees C, ‘growing temperature’, several nights recently – and not got much above all day. Clearly the average temperature is enough to keep things going, but I’m sure when there were two days of sunshine I saw them put on a spurt. I’d love to understand the sensitive mechanism that tells cells what to do.

There’ll be a lot of hacking back to do to keep the paths open this summer.

Tom Stewart Smith models a hard hat

It was hard hat night last week at the Garden Museum. Hard hats with flowers, of course, Ascot-style. It was an evening for supporters of this ambitious conversion – the medieval church of St Mary’s, Lambeth, to museum and school of garden history, art, design and botany (a word described by the director as unfashionable. Really?) to see how the building work is coming on.

The museum and all its works are centred on the fact that John Tradescant the elder lived and died at Lambeth, that this was his parish church, and that just nearby he initiated England’s first museum. His term was his Ark, his Cabinet of Curiosities. Curiosity was on a roll in the first Queen Elizabeth’s reign. There was the New World to explore, better ships and seaways. … and since the Reformation relief from the sense that the church had the answer to everything. Almost anything was a Curiosity, from a monarch’s cradle to a dragon’s scale. London was agog; there were queues to see the Ark. Tradescant’s son John kept up the collection and in due course disposed of the contents to the acquisitive Elias Ashmole, whose name is still familiar from the Ashmolean Museum. When the new museum opens Oxford will lend back to Lambeth exhibits that were first seen by Tradescant fans 400 years ago.

New buildings are going up around the ancient churchyard to house the teaching room, kitchen (a vital and much-appreciated asset) and the archives. Britain’s first archive of garden design and designers, their plans, photographs and memories, is taking shape here around its oldest gardening treasures. Work on the Chancel also revealed a big brick vault containing the lead coffins of four 16th Century archbishops who of course lived next door, as Justin Welby does. Sadly (as it seems to me) a high brick wall separates St Mary’s and its churchyard from the palace and its nine acres of gardens.

It is all being done with £3.7 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a similar sum from donations. To round the whole thing off a few more are needed. Urgently, of course.

Mrs Bird, dressed for Manchuria, courtesy of Wikipedia

Who was Isabella Bird? Her name kept cropping up when I asked a Japanese friend questions about history; it seemed that Mrs B was a prime authority. Then I learned. She was a Victorian traveller – and what a traveller. She went, alone, to the limits of the visitable world – and beyond, particularly in Japan.

This was in 1878, when the country had only been open to foreigners for 25 years, and was very far from being modernised. In the north, which she explored with patient thoroughness, there were essentially no roads. She searched for rideable horses (even the best were broken-down nags) and hacked with her native manservant/interpreter from village to village, recording every detail. Lodgings were local inns, devoid of any privacy or comfort. She was mobbed as the first foreigner (let alone foreign woman) ever sighted. Fleas and mosquitoes were everywhere. Often there was only beans and rice, sometimes an egg, to eat. Tracks were often streambeds – it rained incessantly – and she was constantly coming off her stumbling mount. But her prose never falters, and at times becomes poetry. She spends a week examining the great Shogun shrines at Nikko, detailing every carving in its overwhelming decoration. She identifies plants with a keen botanical eye, she describes the Shinto rites: a whole expedition could not have done more.

When she reaches the land of the ‘Hairy’ Ainos, the indigenous tribe conquered by the Japanese, she shows total fascination with the ‘savages’, as she calls them. She finds them physically far more attractive than the ‘puny’ Japanese, and I suspect falls half in love with a young warrior. She spends weeks recording their language, moving from coast to mountains, to compare dialects. And it is clear they fall for her.

This Edinburgh housewife (her married name was Bishop) was not often at home. Her accounts were written on letters to her sister (there were 44 from Japan, thousands of words in each). How she handled pens, ink and paper on horseback through floods is a wonder in itself. But Japan was just one trip. She explored the USA, by steamboat to Cincinnati and St Louis, then the Great Lakes to Canada. She reports on each emerging city in detail, recounts appalling voyages on the stormy lakes and the paddle-steamer passage down the St Lawrence, shooting rapids where one in eight ships came to grief.

Where else did she go? To Malaya, China, Korea, Persia, Tibet and Australia – each one a volume. Since I found Mrs Bishop on my Kindle, she takes every bus ride with me. TfL has competition.

A terrible photo of Ashwood Nurseries' Hepeticas

Whether the world of horticulture is holding its breath or not, Trad deliberates long and hard about his Annual Chelsea Award. Here is his rather breathless report. Last year was easy: Dan Pearson ran away with it for his inspired extract from the gardens at Chatsworth. This year? None of the Show Gardens really stood out. (It was disappointing to see the old Rock Garden Bank largely given over to mere commerce.)

It was the Big Top that held the real treasures – the usual suspects all on top form – with the display of hepaticas from Ashwood Nurseries rightly awarded the top gong. (My sole pot of them has never flowered at all.) – Outside it was a tussle between Cleve West’s Exmoor Garden on the corner site of the title sponsor M&G and Andy Sturgeon’s more portentous geological garden for the Daily Telegraph. Cleve West’s was more sympathetic and believable. Both (and many others) seemed to spend so much space – and presumably money – on stonework that the plants risked becoming mere infill. There were lovely quiet wildling colours in many of them, rather than displays of high horticulture.

A potential challenger for the Trad Award was the Winton Beauty of Mathematics garden, precise, beautifully engineered but a tad too highbrow for this simple brain. My second favourite last year was the Occitane Garden by James Basson. This year was a bit of a repeat, but was so much a corner of Provence (admittedly one with a lavender field) that ‘garden’ was stretching the definition too far. It was beautiful. It represented the dusty backwoods of everyone’s favourite part of France with exceptional accuracy. But horticulture had been left behind.

A shower at Mount Congreve

Back from a week in Ireland. ‘The magnolias are over’ everyone said. Ah, but the rhododendrons are in full cry, every leaf is fresh in the sun, and two of the most audacious gardens I have ever met were gleaming in the sunshine between the showers. Nor were the magnolias over; not by any means.

Mount Congreve is a legend – in the sense that few people used to see it. I tried to visit in the days of its creator, Ambrose Congreve, and failed. He had reached 104 before he died, still gardening, in spirit at least, in 2011. For the moment, his 80 acres of intelligent, intricate and supremely picturesque planting lives on. For how long is a delicate matter, between his trustees and the Irish Government. For the moment, what the garden needs, and richly deserves, is more visitors.

Ambrose Congreve was apparently inspired by Lionel de Rothschild at Exbury to create a woodland garden for the vast variety of rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias. Exbury Gardens are spread over two hundred acres, gently sloping to the Beaulieu River. Mount Congreve has a mere eighty, tumbling down (almost diving off a cliff at one point) to one of Ireland’s biggest rivers, the broad, reed-fringed Suir. a few miles above Waterford.

We are used to magnolias as single specimens, sometimes groups, but rarely a forest. The Congreve way was different. He planted hundreds of seedlings of one particular M campbellii that now form a wood of pale-barked trunks perhaps 60 feet high. His style was decisive: a wall of pieris, a long ramp of one Japanese maple, another wall of an orange azalea, facing one of purple. All the colours are calculated: this is picture-making with plants on a heroic scale, and with breath-catching results. A gardener told me how Ambrose, as he called him (though possibly not to his face), rode his horse round the garden every morning, often before breakfast, then re-emerged in mid-morning, fork in hand, and worked with his gardeners all day. He was, I am told, weatherproof. No bothy for him in a shower; he gardened on.

Thomas Pakenham comes from the same hardy race, with as little restraint in planting. Meetings with Remarkable Trees was the first display of his splendid – indeed unique – tree portraits, twenty years ago. In his company, it must be said, every tree becomes remarkable, intrinsically, scientifically, whimsically, pathologically, and as a source of human stories.

Four hours of walk and talk only skimmed his collection, scattered through parkland, woods and gardens. Tullynally is a great grey Regency Gothic battleship of a house surrounded by beeches and oaks of the biggest size. Among them, then on and out into the countryside, the new collections go, many of them from Pakenham-collected seeds from China or the Himalayas. Reaching eighty seems only to have invigorated him. Half a mile from the house, magnolias form a glade, then camellias, dogwoods, tiny rhododendrons just planted out… without guards. Have rabbits gone the way of snakes in Ireland?

We only scratched the surface of both these great gardens – then went on to Ballymaloe, near Cork, for the utter indulgence of a ‘Litfest’ around the famous cooking school – and gardens. They hadn’t told me about the gardens.

Evening at Ballymaloe

It’s taken me a long time (all my life in fact) to pin down a trait that steers my way of looking at my surroundings – gardens, views, streets, above all buildings. My eyes fly to the oldest. In a park it is the oldest and grandest trees, avenues, fountains, gazebos – the evidence of past intentions. I am a prisoner of history (as indeed we all are) and my sentence demands that I look for its traces wherever I go.

It is most demanding in London, as the City dons and sheds its never-resting coats of scaffolding. The crane count in the past few years must be the highest it has ever been. It’s true that every great city throughout most of its history has been a building site; it’s only later generations that see the finished (for the time being) scheme. The Roman forum was never a pristine panorama of pillars and pediments; there was always scaffolding in the picture as another temple or monument went up or had a face-lift. Athens the same; Paris (imagine the mess when Haussmann was bulldozing his boulevardes) and now London. Exhibitionist towers are the mark of our times and we have lost control of where they go or how tacky they look. And a new threat goes beyond tacky: the threat of a ‘garden’ bridge to block London’s most majestic view, the Thames between Westminster and the City. Who in his right mind would try to grow plants on the most exposed possible site?

So I wander the town with my eyes skinned for relics of its past; easy to find in the quiet residential areas of terraces and squares, harder and harder in commercial streets where old buildings, if they have survived thus far, have their ground floors hacked out to make shops and their facades hidden by the banal fascias proclaiming Boots or Tesco.

The Victorian pub on the corner, the calmly handsome Georgian house-front hiding a solicitor’s office, the pompous Edwardian stone front of the old Town Hall (now a dance hall), a quirky bit of timbered building or even a war memorial, are precious clues about the past. These are the things that give you a sense of place. And they make me sad that all this history happened and I was not there to see it.

What catches the eye? Crocosmias at Bourton House, Gloucestershire

Why is red such a tricky colour in the garden? Use it accidentally (out of a mixed seed packet perhaps) and you throw a random emphasis onto the spot where it lands. It grabs the attention. It is intended to. Red is the colour of danger, of domination – and of painted lips. Use it deliberately and you can dictate where people look, influence their whole reaction to the picture you are painting.

The huntsman’s red coat is one of the oldest tricks in landscape painting. Turner famously infuriated Constable by painting a red buoy in the foreground of his sea painting to upstage his rival’s elaborate and highly-contrived Opening of London Bridge hanging next to it. What’s more, he did it as an after-thought, on varnishing day, as an act of provocation. That’s the power of red.

Why does red do this to your eye? Chromatically speaking, it is so close to green that, dogs tell me, they can’t tell the difference. And yet it appears to us as green’s diametrical opposite. It lies at one end (the longest-wave end) of the spectrum we can see, with the quiet violet at the other end. Are ‘quiet’ and ‘noisy’ valid descriptions of colours?

In a garden, red indicates your policy, if not your philosophy. Christopher Lloyd at Great Dixter changed tack completely when he abolished a rose garden with its colours in gentle harmony and brought in cannas and dahlias and everything strident. It amounted to a career move; out of middle-aged respectability and convention and on to the cutting edge.

Myself, I’m leery of it. I’ve never painted a door red – almost alwaysclean but bashful colour we call ‘chateau grey’. Light has a lot to do with it: hard Mediterranean light takes strong colour in its stride; bougainvillea is an example. Plant it in our island’s softer light and it looks like an accident in a paint factory. On the other hand, one can’t have too much of that scarlet pelargonium Roi des Balcons in the window-boxes of the Black Forest or the Tyrol.

In my timid garden, on a ground of as much green as I can manage on walls of yellow-grey London brick, white is a pretty daring colour. Cream to blue, and pink so long as it’s pale, are as emphatic as my delicate sensibilities can entertain. Sometimes I remind myself of Lizzy Bennett’s father, who said something like ‘A small pullet’s egg, lightly boiled, is not unwholesome’. Rather daring, though.