My Thoughts – Plant Fair at Courson

A couple of weekends ago I flew to Paris for some serious indulgence; no, not food, not culture but plant hunting.  Several of my Italian friends had visited the plant fair at Courson in previous years and were full of enthusiasm.  I have to admit to being a little sceptical.  So far, no plant sales fair in Italy has been very good – poor quality plants, always in large sizes and often straggly tall plants that don’t bush out.

I left home late-morning on a warm, sunny Friday; I’d studied the forecast and rain was predicted for late Friday afternoon and Saturday early morning but clearing by 10 am – it might be cold, but warm clothes were not a problem; I’d actually rather be hot than cold.

I was with a French-speaking friend who had visited on several occasions previously (she is a Botanical artist and has had stand to sell her work at Courson in the past).  Our hotel was near the Jardin du Plantes so our walk to the station the following morning was through the garden; a nice start to the day (it was very grey with very low cloud but trusting in the forecast I was hopeful that by the time we arrived the sun would be shining!

As we boarded the shuttle bus that took us the last 30 minutes of our journey to the Chateau of Courson the rain began to fall in earnest, I was trying to be very positive that the rain would stop before we arrived, but no, it rained and it rained and it rained for most of the day turning the ground into a quagmire of mud.

But I had come too far to be put off; French couples and ladies on their own were arriving well prepared with shopping trolleys on wheels, waterproof boots and weatherproof coats with hoods!

Undeterred we entered the showground, first port of call a small tent manned by two patient men each with a computer.  Ask them the name of a plant you were searching for and they would look it up and tell you which stands had it!!!!!!!!!!  I was impressed.

Rows and rows of plant stands, all with great plants; it seemed like paradise.

I wasn’t sure what I would buy but I was hopeful that I would find a good selection of Agapanthus.  Now you may think that Italy would be an ideal place to grow Agapanthus and indeed many gardens have them but all I have been able to find are the very large evergreen varieties that suffer badly each winter and every year I am fearful they won’t survive.  I wanted some hardy perennial varieties that I knew would survive the winter well in my free-draining soil.  Success!  I soon spotted a stand specialising in only Agapanthus!  Better still (from my point of view) he was a Yorkshire man, a holder of the National collection.  We were soon deep in conversation while I was selecting which of his vast assortment of varieties to buy.  The rain came down even harder, he very kindly offered me an umbrella (I had left mine in the hotel – believing the forecast and also not wanting to have one hand occupied uselessly).

With my purchases from him made and the plants safely in bags behind his stall, awaiting collection later in the day I was ready to begin searching for other plants that would fit in my one suitcase.  With my borrowed umbrella I could at least keep my head dry.

Do check out his website, all the plants were well grown, good sized and he promises will flower in their first year in the ground. Agapanthus specialist.

‘Something for the Garden’ – The Agapanthus stand in a moment without rain

Next up Irises; something else that grows wonderfully for me here but which for some strange reason are difficult to find in nurseries here or when you do find the odd one cost a fortune.  Cayeux, one of the leading Iris growers and sellers in the world did not disappoint although if I had been searching for particular varieties I might have been better to simply order on-line; they too have an excellent website and if I decide to buy more I will order from them in this way.

My other passion, as my regular reader will know is grasses; again I was spoilt for choice with many of the stands having grasses and a couple of specialist growers too.  A few found their way into my bags along with some Asters a friend asked me to look out for.

Plant hunters were undeterred by the incessant rain

The show doesn’t have show-gardens, nothing to distract from the pursuit or plants!

This was the closest to a show garden any of the stands got.

I have never seen anything like this before; maybe Hampton Court Flower Show would be the nearest thing but Courson had hundreds of top quality nurseries selling an amazing number of different plants.  I haven’t mentioned the vast selection of trees, shrubs all in different sized containers.  I think many English gardeners would love this show.  It’s not far from Paris and so great for a weekend break.  We combined this with a day seeing the show gardens at Chaumont.  But that’s for another day.

If you are travelling by plane, some careful thought is needed.  My choices of Anapanthus and Iris I packed without soil; the grasses too, I removed most of the soil while still at the show ground.  A tiny Kaffir Lime I tenderly wrapped and placed with soft cushioning around it to protect it from the sometimes rough treatment of the baggage handlers.

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Visiting Villa d’Este in the evening

I visit Villa d’Este, Tivoli, regularly; I take students to study its place in Garden history.  We are amazed by the amount of symbolism.  You can walk around the garden and be educated the references to Greek and Roman mythology.  The original owner, Ippolito d’Este was a member of one of the richest most cultured city states in Renaissance Italy.  He just missed being voted in as pope five times; his yearning to be in Rome is ever present in the garden.  It is a wonderful place to visit (you can easily take the bus to this UNESCO site from Rome for an afternoon away of the crowds and heat of the city.

When I visited in July I saw the publicity about the garden being open Friday and Saturday evenings for July, August and into September.  During the summer we often go to the beach at the weekends so the trip was put off (as it has been for the last 2 years).  Eventually we organised ourselves to go on the last day of August.

..and Wow!  I was blown away by the different experience, seeing the garden illuminated by lights and candles and a full moon instead of sunlight!

Looking down onto the Tivoli fountain

The fountains were all illuminated, there were candles everywhere.  What surprised me more than anything was that the fountains sounded even more powerful than when you see and hear them during the day.  The water roared!  It thundered.  I was also struck that all the people visiting were there to ENJOY the garden, not to look at it as if were only a piece of art.  It is art too, of course, but it was as if we were experiencing the garden as it was by the numerous visitors when it was first completed in the 1560’s.

There is a link to my garden too.  Villa d’Este’s iconography is based on Hercules’s 11^th labour of collecting the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides.  In the Renaissance almost all gardens allude to this story a way of stating that the garden was ‘the perfect garden’ where the golden apples (in Greek they were probably Quinces, not apples) could give immortality to whoever processed them.

The dragon Ladon guarded the entrance to the garden and in some versions of the story Hercules had to fight the dragon to gain entry and be able to steal the apples.

In daylight The hundred fountains path is my favourite part of the garden

Not just the fountains were illuminated

The visit has made me want to add more lighting to my own garden.  To create silhouettes of trees, to highlight features.  It becomes dark here earlier than in the more northern latitude of the UK so that when we have dinner on the terrace it is always dark before we finish; we have a light over the table and some lights on the pillars (these need replacing as they fuse when they are switched on after it has been raining.  I am also aware that I don’t want to create a huge amount of light pollution (not that my neighbours seem to consider this) but I will be thinking about making the garden even more enjoyable at night.  I am already concentrating on having white flowers near the terrace and of course perfumed plants are even more important at night.

The courtyard of the Tivoli fountian; I’ve hardly noticedthis amazing tree in daylight

The organ fountain plays music using the power of water! it is amazing and was only recently restored by an English company.

If you have the opportunity to visit next year, do go you won’t regret it at all.

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My Thoughts – Chelsea Flower Show 2012

It is hard for me to leave my garden in May.  It is the month when everything flowers including some plants that only flower at this time.  But I like to keep up with new trends in design and also see new varieties displayed in the Grand Marque.  So I we went to London, met with friends and family saw a couple of exhibitions, ate some ethnic food (doesn’t really exist in Italy and is something I miss) and I got up early to be at the gates of The Chelsea Flower Show as they opened, full of hope for inspiration.  It is also where I usually choose my tulips as nothing compares with actually seeing the colour of the blooms.

I had managed to see a bit of the tv coverage of the show so I had an idea of what to expect.  I read several blogs criticising the coverage and while I agree about the presenters of the show I have to defend the BBC and tell British gardeners that they should be thankful they don’t have to watch Italian television, where gardening is considered some kind of weird interest programme to be treated as a joke.  (Moan over).

Overall I enjoyed much of what I saw, was disappointed by the overall standard of the planting; happy that the standard of the catering facilities seems to improve every time I visit (not every year) and that someone has organised the toilet facilities so that queues were rare, I never had to queue.

Every year at Chelsea there is one plant that somehow makes its way into every show garden, 2 years ago it was a brown iris, possibly Kent Pride and I was feeling a bit smug as I already had this in my garden (I’m kidding really, I had it by chance and I don’t choose my plants for fashion, this year this is the plant of the moment.

Flower seen in most gardens

Other trends, planted roofs and walls were featured heavily; I don’t really have strong feelings about these; the university here in Viterbo has also set up an experimental planting on a wall at a nursery; I can see advantages for small gardens and certainly a planted roof has environmental advantages, this year they were planted with grasses and perennials rather than the usual sempervirens – I think sempervirens are more likely to be successful in the long term as they will survive periods of drought and exposure to wind.

Planted roof on a studio room itself designed for a roof top terrace

This was also a roof although it is difficult to see that from this image

walls and roofs planted were the main trend of the show

The Fresh gardens I thought were anything but this; it seemed like young designers thinking they were being controversial or modern but actually most were just boring.

Fresh or just juvenile

Many of the planted walls looked as if they would need a great deal of irrigation.

walls again – Fresh

The garden below ‘The Satoyama Life’ garden by the Ishihara Kazuyuki Design Laboratory was much more accomplished and drew lots of admiration.

Lovely moss lovely the external walls of a botthy

Undeserved gold

I very much admired the Pleached copper beech walk in Arne Maynard’s garden, although the effects of the difficult spring made the copper beech less beautiful than it might have been.  The garden was very popular with the crowds, maybe for its pretty, pretty pink combinations; although I liked some of the planting I felt it was an impossible garden to really create as there was no way that the gardener could get in amongst the plants to pick flowers as Arne suggested.

Arthritic Research Garden

There were two show gardens I enjoyed enormously; they are in any order I loved them both equally but for different reasons.  The first was the Arthritic Research Garden designed by Thomas Hoblyn.  I liked the sunken garden effect and I enjoyed his taking his inspiration from Villa d’Este, Tivoli and Villa Lante, Viterbo that he had visited during his honeymoon.  I visit both these gardens on  very regular basis and his interpretation is modern and usable in a garden today (albeit for a very wealthy garden owner)

by Thomas Hoblyn

excellent restrained planting

The planting was possibly the most realistic of all the gardens, by this I mean that he had used plants that had similar requirements, basically Mediterranean climate, so that they looked superb together.  This aspect of the other gardens was one of my disappointments with the show; many of the planting schemes seemed to have been done by people with no knowledge of plants needs at all.  With all the talk of drought and planting for climate change there should have been more attention shown to planting sensibly.

Fountain inspired by the hundred fountains path at Villa d’Este

Here are a couple of images of Villa d’Este so you can understand his inspiration.

100 fountains path, Villa d’Este

Villa d’Este, Tivoli or Oval fountian

In the first image of Thomas’ garden you can see a fountain on the left, the image above of Tivoli or Oval fountain was its inspiration. Much less impressive but more likely to be acceptable to a contemporary client.

Stripa tenuissima as waves

On one of the numerous trade stands selling garden furniture (do you think there are too many?) the fun planting of Stipa tenuissima with swimming fish also attracted admiring glances and showed the versatility of this, one of my favourite and signature plants in my garden.

I liked this interesting water feature again on a trade stand I think, although I’m not sure.

Now for the garden I think deserved to be ‘Best in Show’, designed by popular TV presenter Joe Swift.

Joe Swift’s garden

The well designed use of space made the garden feel much larger than it actually was.  The cedar arches were beautiful although I imagine any gardener would have preferred traditional pergolas so that they could have been planted with climbers.

great design

inspired planting

The planting was inspirational, he used all plants that needed no irrigation but were all suitable to the temperature range of at least the southern part of the UK.  The limited colour palate gave a restfulness to the garden that none of the other gardens achieved.  Certainly the crowds at Chelsea spent longer looking at and admiring this garden than any other I think.

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Is This a Phlomis? Help please

While at the Botanic Garden in Phoenix I photographed this plant (there was no plant label).  I assumed it was a Phlomis and that I would be able to find its name and hopefully be able to buy some seeds easily when I returned home.  It isn’t in any of my books and a quick search on line hasn’t thrown up anything similar.  Any ideas would be gratefully received. Thank you

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GBFD Phoenix Botanic Garden

This sight welcomed us to the garden!

Something a bit different for GBFD this month.  The foliage in my garden hasn’t really changed significantly since December; maybe the foliage of some of the roses is a little redder, but that is all, so I thought I would write something about my trip to the US that I promised to do in an earlier post.

I was very fortunate to spend 3 weeks travelling from San Francisco to the North California Coast and then via the Sonoma Valley to Reno; then a flight to Phoenix and a New Year’s Day visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer house and the Botanic Garden in Phoenix before continuing to the Grand Canyon, Zion National Park and Chico.  A lot of travelling but it was all wonderful, I’ve never visited the States before and after this first experience I really hope to be able to visit again.

I will write about some of my impressions of Native plants in a future post but I think Cactus is a good subject for foliage day.  Firstly I should admit that cactus and succulents are not my favourite plants, I’m not someone who has a cactus sitting on their kitchen windowsill and to be honest I don’t really understand how anyone can love them!

However, the plantings in the Botanic Garden were fantastic.  For more than 70 years, the Desert Botanical Garden has been teaching and inspiring visitors from the local community and around the world, providing research, exhibits designed to help us understand, protect and preserve the desert’s natural beauty.

The Garden consists of the following areas Ottosen Entry Garden, Desert Discovery Loop Trail, Plants & People of the Sonoran Desert Loop Trail, Sonoran Desert Nature Loop Trail, Center for Desert Living Trail, Steele Herb Garden, Harriet K. Maxwell Desert Wildflower Loop Trail, Sybil B. Harrington Cactus & Succulent Galleries and Berlin Agave Yucca Forest.

We visited all of the areas except for the Desert Wildflower loop as it was the wrong time of year for there to be any flowers.  Each loop showed with naturalistic plantings the different types of desert landscapes.  The day was very warm, I hadn’t realised it would be so hot and had to borrow a cotton top.

The textures, forms and colours above are every bit as satisfying as any garden I know.

The whole garden was brilliantly designed; there were glass cactus at the entrance giving an interesting welcome to the garden.

Glass Cactus

I found it fascinating that for almost every plant group that I am familiar with in my Mediterranean climate there was a desert plant or cactus that was similar.  The plant world is truly a miracle, plants to fill every niche and environment.

Tall, like trees, Organ Pipe Cactus

I was surprised by some of the colours, I had thought cactus were all more or less the same green, but not at all!

I really liked the purple colour of these

This cactus looks as good back lit as any grass!

The garden was open into the evening and because it was the Christmas season some of the plants were decorated with lights.  All the other lighting was well designed to throw light down where it was needed but not cause light pollution.

Some fun Artwork was placed around the garden.  These took the form of giant insects which amused the many children and adult visitors alike.

For me this garden proved “Right plant – right place” really works.  All the plants were healthy growing in the conditions they needed and because of this they were beautiful!  Also plants needing the same conditions usually look good together.  I believe that sometimes when I’m dissatisfied with a planting combination it is because the plants are from different climates or environments; even Mediterranean climate plants from different continents don’t actually always work well together.

Agave macroacantha

 

I have an area of my garden (separated from the rest of the garden) on very thin soil exposed to the South; I have been wondering what I could do with space.  Not too tender cactus might work and I do appreciate Agaves but maybe I am learning some new things and what I should do is plant Things from the dryer parts of the Mediterranean.

I do hope you will join Garden Bloggers Foliage Day and share what foliage is looking at its best in your garden or foliage you’ve seen and enjoyed elsewhere.  Please just leave a comment with the link to your post.  I know that Alberto at Altroverde has some lovely photos of hoar frost which I’m almost envious of, but I am actually quite happy that it isn’t quite that cold here.

 

 

 

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Peonies at Easter

On Sunday I went to visit the local specialist in peonies.  There are fields and fields of peonies that they not only sell as plants but in a range of cosmetics.  As it looks as if something has eaten the buds on mine I’ll share these with you instead.

Click on the photo below to see a vast array.

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