Chatsworth by Alan Titchmarsh & Jonathan Buckley

Author:Alan Titchmarsh & Jonathan Buckley [Titchmarsh, Alan & Buckley, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473596344
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2021-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Sunset in September when late summer perennial asters carpet the view that leads the eye down towards the Maze.

In September, Japanese anemones and persicaria help the Hundred Steps Glade to fray seamlessly into the surrounding woodland.

It is also hugely spectacular – among those pinks that Tom mentions is Geranium PATRICIA (‘Brempat’) whose 75-cm-high domes of finely cut leaves are studded with almost luminous magenta-pink flowers right the way through the summer. The display moved me to order some for my own garden. You may well do the same. I love the way Tom has restricted his palette of plants – using large numbers of relatively few species and varieties, in deference to the expansiveness of the terrain. The overall feeling is of lushness and generosity, with large drifts of plants all of one variety, rather than lots of smaller groups that would lead to a more bitty, less restful and less spectacular effect.

Tom is pleased with the way things are progressing, though the fact that planting had to be accomplished through a mulch of 15cm of composted green waste (since the soil below was intractable shale and clay, and to offer some kind of weed control) has had a varied effect on the plants:

This has given absurd growth with some species, for example Lamium orvala and Campanula lactiflora, but it’s not so suitable for more touchy woodlanders, so things like trillium, uvularia, sanguinaria and erythronium have struggled.

This new planting will be monitored – successes and failures taken note of, and the mixture adjusted over the years as some plants thrive and others dwindle. However much we espouse the dictum ‘right plant, right place’, sometimes it is only by experimenting that we discover what will grow and what will not in a particular spot. We can check the soil conditions, monitor the light levels and the degree of exposure of a particular site, and base our plant choice on what we think will thrive. Even then we cannot always predict the outcome, but that is the nature of gardening, whether in a pocket-handkerchief plot, or the 15 acres that comprise Arcadia.

The woodland walk between the Bog Garden and the Rabbit Glade in autumn, with ferns and grasses forming a soft counterpoint to Laura Ellen Bacon’s ‘Natural Course’ dry stone walling sculpture.

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