What did the New Perennialists ever do for us?

 

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  framed for us  an idealised version of nature - vast rolling fields, serpentine lakes and clumps of native trees – one could say that we’ve been on quite a steep naturalistic trajectory ever since.  From then on, we’ve been given (deep breath!) Robinson’s Wild Garden, the herbaceous borders of Gertrude Jekyll, the arts & crafts ‘cottage muddle’ of Margery Fish & Co, the not-so-new ‘New Perennialists’, the seedy men of Sheffield University (your Dunnetts and Hitchmoughs) and now finally we’ve reached something of a high point/end point with the rewilding brigade.

As you know, I don’t hold much truck with garden design as a profession. Personally I believe a garden has to evolve, slowly over time: created and curated. Then, and only then, may it become one of the purist reflections of love, nurture and skill you’ll ever witness in nature. The sterility of a garden space, designed without these elements, armed only with a client brief, reveals itself to be as obvious as the interior décor of a top flight footballer’s mock mansion in Chigwell. Full of expensive items that hold no personal, historic or intrinsic meaning whatsoever: the mere signing off on a contract, a job well done, with very few (if any?) emotional links between object and owner.

Anyway, I digress. For a multitude of reasons, our garden spaces have been becoming more naturalistic for some 300 years now. Of course, we’ll need to scurry past and blinker ourselves somewhat from our 1970s dalliance with conifers and heathers, and also perhaps, the modernist garden: both of which have been swallowed up by the naturalistic movement. Bressingham's heathers and conifers have now been out-mingled by new perennials, and many a modernist garden has had its geometry somewhat softened by ornamental grasses.

I’ve always felt that the arts and crafts borders we find within the grounds of most National Trust properties, and in the majority of our English domestic gardens, represent a kind of woodland edge scenario: a convenient way of squeezing in trees, shrubs, perennials and ground covers, emulating a transitional zone, as it slopes its way down to the lawn. In many respects, even the lawn itself represents managed grassland. 

‘To me at least, our gardens have always emulated the woodland edge as its parental archetype’.

To a very large extent, here in England, within something of a maritime climate, we garden on some very fertile soils. Therefore, with no real shortage of moisture, within a very leafy and deciduous landscape, we quickly became a welcoming home to countless thousands of species gathered from all over the globe. Okay, many of the plants brought back to ol’ Blighty may have made adaptations that have somewhat altered their overall size and habit, but none-the-less, our fertile soils and levels of rainfall has meant that we can utilise a massively broad range of plants within our gardens.  Our own native pallet of plants may be quite limited, but our ability to accommodate such a broad range of plants from around the world has been horticulturally fortuitous.  

So, in many respects, what the new perennialists did for us was to offer up a robust planting pallet, mainly of clump-forming perennials and grasses that could thrive in our rather fertile soils. We didn’t all need to study meadow ecology, scrape off the top few inches of our lawns and go off in search of native wildflower seed in order to create something that reminded us of our pastoral past. The simple fact is that, somewhere hard-wired into our DNA, we have strong emotional links to a good daisy and grass combo. With very little horticultural knowledge, the layperson could simply blend a 50/50 ratio of ornamental grasses with perennial asters, chuck in a few dots, spires and umbels, and voila – all very Oudolfian.

Of course, art has always hung around the zeitgeist of the time. You only need to see how, in recent years, there’s been a whole naturalistic, back-to-the-land kind of way about things. Gardening has become trendy, especially amongst the young, along with companies and manufacturers realising that potential. These days, you can barely separate two pages of Gardens Illustrated without seeing a bearded chap wearing one of those blue French peasant worker jackets, along with an array of handmade Japanese or Dutch tools. I once saw one of those blue jackets for sale with the strap line ‘get the Dixter look’. It did make me chuckle.

In the end, I guess everything becomes appropriated for the consumer. Of course, the irony here is that to get the 'peasant look' tops likes these will cost you £100+

Now, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. Young people getting involved in plants, produce and gardens: what’s not to like? But having witnessed years of skilfully-designed naturalism within our gardens we have now reached some kind of pinnacle; a somewhat weedy world of nettles and puddles, where a new kind of aesthetic is asking to be appreciated. I am left feeling like some kind of aged head scratcher.

The New Perennial Movement certainly gave us gardens with much less maintenance to do. You could, more-or-less, just do an annual cut back or burn – maybe a spot of Spring weeding? – but that was about it. The clever use of robust clumpers should always out-compete most weeds. However, what rewilding has done, with its ‘everything goes and everything is welcome’ policy, is to make me wonder should I leave the garden to its own devices, let nature have its way, and go find something else to do?

Of course, with this in mind, the idea of having gardens where the hand of the designer is either invisible or non-existent makes me wonder about the future for institutions such as the RHS and the many colleges that teach garden design. All food for thought I guess?

Personally, I think we are still a nation of gardeners, but unless we all want to retrain in the ecology of plant communities and meadow management, the New Perennial way of things still offers us the best opportunity to create highly stylised, manageable, naturalistic landscapes within our garden spaces. 

Hauser & Wirth. Somerset.

Thanks for reading.

Marc