Posts

Me and My BIG Work...!!!

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  Hello Folks, As you probably know, over the years, I haven't tended to use my blog posts for any kind of self promotion. I tend to write up the odd post, generally on subjects that interest me, and send them out and on to the WebSphere, mainly to the many people I know within horticulture: friends, head gardeners and designers etc. Anyway, for this post, I thought I would showcase a little of the kind of work I do.  In recent years I have 'sort of' fallen into quite a niche category with regards my gardening work. Primarily I am still a maintenance gardener; maintaining and working skilfully in borders is still very much what I do. However, in recent years, I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to design and develop many gardens (often aged and neglected), turning tired borders into something more colourful, abundant, luxuriant and naturalistic.  To a certain extent, it's much harder working with existing plantings than it is when designing a new bord

What did the New Perennialists ever do for us?

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  Looking back at the many rewilding messages on display at Chelsea this year, I guess it was kind of inevitable that the march of the naturalistic movement would end up there. It’s stuff of the nth degree really. It’s not necessarily about things going in cycles, or even circles. Yet sometimes, when an evolutionary path has been taken as far as it possibly can be, suddenly the only way forward is back. Rewilding, as a horticultural concept, has been around for a good few years now, but to me, sometimes it feels like the end of the road for the naturalistic movement, and not to mention garden design.   During Chelsea, Lula Urquhart, described her Best in Show garden as a ‘deeply naturalistic capturing of a really authentic landscape.’ She also described herself, and Adam Hunt the garden’s co-creator, as ‘passionate ecological restorationists’. Rewilding at Chelsea So, commencing with the English Landscape Movement of the 1700’s, when the likes of ‘Capability’ Brown and William Kent