The only way is Essex?
I have just seen two versions of our gardening future. They are in Essex. One is planted with “future-proof plants”, according to its signboard. The other is billed as a “modern take on a country garden”. They strike me in different ways. Both are at Hyde Hall near Rettendon, Chelmsford, the most easterly of the Royal Horticultural Society’s public gardens.
To my relief I have never gardened in Essex. East of London, it has some fine gardens whose roses thrive in clay, but Essex clay becomes hard after a few sunny days. Hyde Hall is an example, with the complication of ice-cold winds across its hillsides in winter. Nonetheless, for nearly 40 years, beginning in 1955, a garden of 24 acres was built there by Dick and Helen Robinson, who also farmed the surrounding land.
Helen, who died in 2004, was especially famous for her knowledge of roses, a prime feature of the garden. I first met her at an RHS Autumn Show when those happy events were still held in the Society’s two halls in central London. When I asked her how to control black spot on rose leaves, she told me to start spraying early in March and to use the disinfectant Jeyes Fluid. The spraying, she said, must be repeated every three weeks. Aptly, she is commemorated by a fine namesake, the pink Helen Robinson Rose, bred and marketed by Harkness roses since 2006. It is a tall hybrid tea rose with big double flowers, well shaped in an excellent pale pink. I much recommend it and its strong scent.
In 1992, just before we met, the Robinsons donated farmland and their garden to the RHS. In the Financial Times, Arthur Hellyer applauded the gift and what it could become, a view he emphasised to me repeatedly. When the RHS changed presidents, the incoming Simon Hornby and some of his committee were less enthusiastic, even telling me that the acceptance of Hyde Hall had been an error. Its garden sits in open landscape, part of which leads up to a low hilltop with a view of Essex’s flatness beyond. Most of it lacks natural advantages but the RHS is no stranger to difficult sites. Its main garden at Wisley is one example, Harlow Carr near Harrogate another. The RHS is not just a patron of dreamy country house settings.
Contrary to Hellyer’s high hopes, Hyde Hall went on to the back burner during Hornby’s presidency. I avoided it despite Helen’s invitation but, in the new millennium, matters changed. The gardens were enlarged, gaining a long avenue of oaks. New subdivisions were introduced: a new Winter Garden, an Australia and New Zealand Garden, which looks a bit weird, and even a Queen Mother’s Garden, which looks a bit weird too. The latest initiative is a planting of 120 Japanese cherries to mark “the continuing friendship” with Japan. Only three varieties of prunus have been used: Beni-yutaka, Tai-haku and Somei-yoshino.
Vindicating Hellyer’s optimism, visitors now flock to the site, about 425,000 yearly. Twenty-nine full-time gardeners look after it with 89 volunteers. They do a fine job even if black spot has hit some of the bush roses in autumn: I doubt if Helen Robinson and Jeyes Fluid would have kept it all out. I looked closely at most of the subsections and failed to notice a single weed.
Up a main vista after entry, visitors reach big curved beds of salvias, sedums, yellow-flowered rudbeckias and so forth on the slopes of a once-bare hillside. I headed on past them to the Dry Garden, installed in 2001. Even in Essex, this sloping area is not irrigated. The beds on it are covered with pebbles about two inches wide, bigger than ordinary gravel. When I scratched them away, the soil underneath was hard and slightly sandy.
In it, a huge range of plants is surviving, sometimes flourishing, and I learned from the surprises. In my garden I follow advice in books and plant the excellent thistly-flowered Morina longifolia in rich soil, whereupon it dies. At Hyde Hall it is thriving in a hard dry mix. So are tulbaghias, various colchicums and the blue-flowered Veronica Crater Lake Blue. Even love-in-a-mist, though stunted, flowers too. Bigger shrubs are a backdrop to the sloping plantings, including an olive tree, a spiny colletia, that neglected garden plant, and a fine Acacia longifolia. The frosts in 2022-23 did not kill them.
Between the stones, the star turns are mostly grey and silver plants, especially the under-appreciated sea kale, Crambe maritima; a grey-leaved red hot poker, Kniphofia caulescens; and various euphorbias, especially the low-growing Euphorbia myrsinites, which is steely grey and robust in the dry soil. I will imitate this discovery at home.
Dry Essex may be a good intimation of Britain’s likeliest future weather. Hyde Hall’s Dry Garden is excellently contoured and repays close study. The overall effect is only marred by two choices, each easily rectified. There are far too many plants of drab dry grasses; stipas and pampas grasses predominating. Britain does not have vistas of dried-up bush or veld and there is no need to try to simulate them. Eighty per cent of the grasses should be taken out. So should the feeble sculptures of animals on oddly spaced pillars that purport to represent characters in Aesop’s fables. The RHS’s distinguished acronym could sometimes be taken to read Really Hideous Sculpture. Take it all out too. Children do not need it. If they play they hide or enjoy the ducks on the pond up by the Hall.
Nearer the entrance, a rectangular area presents “a modern take on a country garden”, promising “sleek lines, perpetual structure and a minimal palette”. What a dreary bore it is, short on flowers, full of long runs of repeated grasses, edged by frightful purple-leaved berberis and devoid of just about everything that makes a rural garden in autumn such a joy. (Go this weekend to the garden of daisies and golden rod at Old Court Nurseries, Colwall, near Malvern and see what I mean.) Why do “modern takes” have to be so drab? Colour, scent, roses and informal planting in formal settings are traditional but infinitely variable building blocks. Clipped pyramids of yew with tousled grey-leaved pear trees look all wrong.
For a different take, go up to the old Hall itself and enjoy the area of herbaceous borders against yew hedging. It mixes two familiar tricks. Buttresses of clipped yew, six in all, break up its length into smaller sections. In each, the colours are themed and limited, from hot orange and red at one end to pale pink and white at the other. I have never seen theming and subdividing combined. The dahlias in each section are superb, yellow Ruskin Limelight and white BJ Beauty to the fore. From white snapdragons to hot Chrysanthemum Royal Command, the planting is densely banked but thriving.
My take-homes for the future are many more types of plant for dry, sparse living and the idea of theming section by section in subdivided beds. Modernity and the future do not have to be dull and colourless. More is more, not less.
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