The Natural Look

The desire to have a little piece of nature gets stronger among garden owners and makers.  I have written before that I think the deep need we seem to have at present for gardens and landscapes that evoke natural plant communities and wild places is in part a guilty response to the horrors that we, as humans, visit on the environment in other arenas.  Such landscapes may be our way of making some small recompense for the over-use of the planet.

An unmanaged meadow

The irony is that to create the multi-flowered pictorial appearance of the modern meadow requires a lot of work and intervention.

The weedy ground in an olive grove

Unimproved agricultural settings can offer a template for these landscapes - the weedy ground in orchards, vineyards and olive groves is almost a matrix through which the trees emerge, but is not necessarily an attractive backdrop in its own right.  However, where plant communities have had time to develop over long periods of time it is possible to see a large variety of plant species in a stable community.

The flowering meadow in a vineyard - late spring

To create a flowering meadow from scratch, with a good percentage of forbs (the flowering plants rather than grasses) requires the soil to be, generally, impoverished.  This can be done over a long period by repeated cutting and removal of grass - the quick solution is to scalp the area, removing topsoil.  In doing so, the grasses are deprived of their required nutrients and the tougher flowering plants have space to grow.  Eventually the initial seeding will settle down to a stable community of flowers within the grass matrix.

Natural plant communities may not be very mixed or attractive

A short-term meadow can be created by ploughing then seeding with a chosen wildflower mix, including grasses.  The meadow will flower impressively in the first year, but after this the number of flowering plants will rapidly decrease as the grasses out-compete them.

A seeded meadow can make a spectacular show in the early years

The team at the University of Sheffield (Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough) experimenting with pictorial meadow mixes will have their work tested to destruction this year, with millions of people seeing and experiencing their work at the Olympic Park in the summer.  Their seed combinations are in no way reflective of any particular meadow community - they put together combinations of attractive plants that suit the setting and aspect, and which give a plausibly natural feel when established.  Over several seasons natural selection takes over and some varieties decline in favour of others, but such is the nature of these dynamic plant communities.

Plant communities in a matrix of grass can use ornamental plants when carefully managed

Paul Ridley Design

2012: New horizons...

This year is shaping up to be a highly productive, challenging and inspiring one.  With many initiatives currently under way - in both professional and personal spheres - it's getting a bit difficult to keep track of everything.  However, it's these periods of change and development that keep life interesting, and open up new opportunities.

With a number of projects at the build stage I will be profiling a few different gardens in the coming months, but am starting 2012 with a project for a cottage in south Oxfordshire.  The clients are having the ground floor remodelled to include a new, two-storey oak-and-glass extension.  The challenge of the site, which slopes back towards the house, is to provide a series of interconnected terrace areas, each of sufficient size to be useful on its own, but together providing a fluid and flexible arena for entertaining larger groups. 

Here, three terrace areas on two different levels wrap around the new extension, with a gravelled area, capable of being used for playing boules or acting as 'overflow' terrace, form the areas of hard landscaping near to the house.  The upper garden retains a large area of lawn for childrens' play, with a line of fruit trees installed to act as a screen but also to form a backdrop to a possible future vegetable garden acessed by the pathway, which will then run through the middle of the productive area.  The terraces and lower garden are screened from the lawn by staggered blocks of evergreen hedging and perennial planting to keep footballs out of the sitting areas, while areas of mixed perennial planting are brought down to the very bottom of the garden, providing scent and visual interest close to the house and arrival zone.

The project is at tender stage, and with committed clients I anticipate a quick decision and some serious earth-shifting in the spring!

Paul Ridley Design

Winter Garden



The winter garden is a great resource for photographers.  The decaying flowerheads of shrubs such as Hydrangea and Viburnum, the skeletons of umbellifers (now the Apiaceae) and the occasional flowers of witch hazel and wintersweet offer a surprising range of plant material, often in striking juxtapositions.

Without the clothing of leaves, the plant structure is more apparent, and it is easier to get close to your subject for macro images.  Light is often at low level, particularly on overcast days, but if you can get out on a bright day then you have the option of silhouetting twigs and flowerheads against a bright background. 

 Even better, in snow or heavy frost, the light will be reflected from beneath, giving a pearly glow to your subject.  As a backdrop, snow can show up the tracery of plant skeletons to great effect. 



These images were all taken in the depths of winter - some have been edited using the monochrome editing suite Silver Efex Pro, from Nix.

Paul Ridley Design

Late-season Colour

By the middle of November it would not be unreasonable to expect gardens to be looking well past their best.  There are some gardens created expressly for winter interest, but most gardeners take a pragmatic approach: the winter months are a time for planning and plotting the coming season, the weather is usually inimical to long periods of garden maintenance or to much time spent admiring the garden.

However, the autumn in Oxford this year has been extremely mild so far, with warm sunshine in abundance and relatively little in the way of wet or windy weather.  Bonfire Night on November 5th is often a cold, wet trial - not so this year.  One or two gusty days in the last month or two have been all that central England has had in the way of seasonal gales, and there are still a number of well-coloured leaves on deciduous trees waiting to fall.

The warm weather has allowed birds to continue feeding, so the winter berries have not yet been decimated and the plentiful sunshine permits the colours to shine out.  There are some remarkable colour combinations out there, as some plants survive a bit longer to appear with others that have begun to turn.  Tree leaves will be heading towards uniform brown by now, but the foliage of many perennials has only just begun to adopt the yellow-green cast that precedes the plants' dormancy.

Combine these with the very last flowers - some last-gasp Rudbeckias, miniature red pom-poms of the Ricinus and a few dahlias in deep red or pastel orange and there is the possibility of something really eye-catching in the garden at this least likely season.

I think the trick to getting the most out of this season is to treat every chance combination as a bonus - relish the different shades of brown and enjoy the quietness of the fading year whilst welcoming any other colour that happens by.  In the absence of large areas of bright colour it is the small, intense incidents of berry or solitary surviving flower that draw the eye.  We also become more relaxed and less demanding - given the opportunity to experience any colour at all we ignore clashes of colour that would earn a disapproving 'tut' in high summer whilst also welcoming subtleties that might seem insufficiently dramatic at other times.

Even so, it can be seen from these photographs taken this week that there are still some great combinations to be enjoyed out there while the weather holds, with some cast-iron perennials such as Verbena bonariensis coping well with current conditions.  The weather will inevitably worsen, of course, but it will be worth getting into gardens while the weather holds over the next few days - enjoy the show while it lasts!





Images and text copyright Paul Ridley Design

Paul Ridley Design

Miscanthus malepartus

Miscanthus, a varied genus from Asia, especially Japan and Korea, is an immensely valuable grass for garden designers.  Offering late-season interest, the grass flower stalks arise from clumps of narrowly strappy foliage in the summer, flowering in mid- to late-summer, but then continuing the show into autumn and winter.

Varieties have different capacity for withstanding the rigours of winter, but typically the grasses colour up in autumn before turning sere and straw-coloured in the winter months.  The familiar fluffy flower tassels emerge in a range of different muted shades from cream to dusky red, but fade to soft white during the course of the season.

The grass pictured is Miscanthus malepartus - a lovely species growing to 1.8m.  The flower colour is dark plummy red when first open, and the leaves have a silvery central rib.  A graceful plant, M malepartus turns a wonderful golden yellow in late autumn - the leaves retain minor variation in the yellowing, but this is most apparent when the plant is backlit by low autumn sunshine.

In fact, the best use of this grass is in a position where the fading leaves and flowers are lit up in this way - if you can arrange it so that the backdrop is a dark hedge the effect is even more dramatic.  Miscanthus are robust and hardy plants - their varied height, flower and foliage offer a great opportunity to introduce structural long-season presence in mixed plantings or wilder schemes.

Paul Ridley Design

Serpentine Pavilion 2011

The creation of an outdoor pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens has become an annual ritual of the London summer season, and this year's offering holds special interest for garden and landscape architects.

Taking as his inspiration the idea of the medieval 'hortus conclusus', or enclosed garden, the renowned Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has created a temporary building of strange power.

The medieval hortus conclusus was, it its original conception, as much an embodiment of the Virgin Mary as an actual garden.  Rich in allusion, the notion of the garden as a protected zone - as uncorruptible as the body of the Virgin, with each element of the garden (water, plants, trees) having symbolic resonance with the mythology of Mary is now largely lost to us.  We can comprehend it on an intellectual level, but few people in the post-Christian West would today have the spiritual response to such a garden that our medieval forebears, immersed in the cult of Mary the Virgin, would have enjoyed.

Zumthor, however, is noted for his buildings which have a spiritual as well as intellectual dimension, and the Pavilion is no exception.

The approach, while not exactly sinister, is far from encouraging.  Isolated on the turf of the park, anchored with concrete paths which lead to the openings, the building is a slightly forbidding black cuboid, the deep darkness of the entrances adding to the sense of separateness that the exterior conveys.  This is clearly a 'space apart', but it has rather unpleasant echoes, suggestive of places that it would be a transgression to enter, or in which nasty things might happen which we would rather not know about (for some reason I thought of an abbatoir when I approached it).

Once through one of the entrances, however, you are in a dark cloister, brightly lit at intervals by the other entrances.  The subtle rhythm established on the exterior by virtue of the panels of black suddenly becomes much more dramatically expressed, with vivid blocks of light crossing the otherwise dark passageway.

From here one passes through an opening in the inner wall of the structure into the garden itself.  Occupying the majority of the open space in the centre of the Pavilion is a garden planted up by Dutch master, Piet Oudolf.  Here, within the dark frame of the building is a tumble of plants, mostly restrained in colour, but with occasional splashes of (in September) bright blue Aconitum and magenta Geranium.  Grasses feature heavily, as do the robust perennials Oudolf favours for their capacity to 'die well'.  It is interesting to ponder the possibility that the structure, temporary, could be removed this month, with the plants left to outlive it, standing to decay over the winter.

The building proves to be something other than a cuboid - from the inside it becomes almost a tent, with an inward sloping roof sheltering the tables and benches set around the perimeter.  This roof is suggestive of the sloping tiled roofs of the courtyards of the Alhambra and other Moorish gardens, in which the patio gains its sense of enclosure from just such an arrangement.  The garden does, at this point, feel truly separated from its exterior and setting.  Only sky and the tips of nearby trees are visible over the roofline, and despite a smallish crowd of visitors it is possible to lose yourself for a moment or two, and feel alone in the space.

Despite nailing its colours to the mast with the title 'Hortus Conclusus', the Serpentine Pavilion this year seems to have as much in common with its Islamic, Roman and Moorish antecedents as the specifically Christian garden it refers to - but as a place to experience seclusion from the outside world, where, free of distraction, it might be possible to lose yourself in contemplation, it is as successful as any of them.

Paul Ridley Design

Chaumont International Garden Festival 2011

Paul Ridley Design

The Chaumont Garden Festival is a very different kind of garden show.  Forget impeccably manicured show gardens produced at vast expense for a few surreal days as at Chelsea Flower Show.  At Chaumont on the Loire the focus is on ideas - the show gardens are selected for their novelty and elucidation of the annual theme, produced to a small fixed budget and allowed to stand for a long season between April and October.  The show is located in the grounds of the Chateau, in a permanent setting which retains one or two of the most successful experimental gardens from past festivals.

Paul Ridley Design

The theme this year is 'Gardens of the Future', and the gardens all attempt to illustrate the importance of encouraging biodiversity as a means of improving the health of the environment.  In a way the theme is restrictive - clearly no one is going to seriously suggest that we should be reducing biodiversity at a garden show.  However, a garden that represented the logical outcome of continued over-exploitation of the environment would have made an interesting counterpoint to the plethora of pseudo-compost heaps and recycled mini-beast hotels that were widely displayed this year.

Paul Ridley Design

The most literal comment on environmental health was in the installation which had trees bandaged up, supporting 'blood transfusion' drips which ostensibly fed the ground and the red-dominated planting.  A hospital bed planted up with varieties of Sedum reinforced this clunky message.  More impressive was the garden of extinct plants - the labels showing the names of plants lost to us ranged in serried ranks as in a war cemetery.  Set in blocks with paths between, this was a true Garden of Remembrance and a very sobering illustration of the havoc being visited on natural habitats.

Paul Ridley Design

There were a number of gardens with structures of recycled materials - orange boxes, timber laths and bamboo were in evidence, chosen for economy (these structures only have to last a few months) but also, it seemed to me, for the fact that they weather so rapidly.  Within a few weeks the timber starts to sag and colour with mould, the shapes settling into squashier versions of their original selves, the intervention beginning to decay and return to the earth.  Demonstrating the inevitability of death and decay these gardens were relatively subtle entries in the field.  In the cases where plants had started to scramble through the structures it was easy to see how the latter would rapidly descend into compost.

Paul Ridley Design

A few gardens used the idea of miniature environments - supported in plastic bubbles or planted up in floating oil drums, for instance - to highlight the fragility of a variety of natural habitats as well as the duty incumbent on us all to protect these.  Another garden acted as a sort of herbarium, with seeds trapped in resin blocks waving on tall wire supports - the point being, I suppose, to draw attention to the need to preserve plants lest they become merely a label and join those in the memorial garden.

Paul Ridley Design

Paul Ridley Design

There were other gardens that just revelled in the opportunity to have some fun - I think the message was still there, but what one really noticed was the colour or daftness of the installation.  I particularly liked the hanging ribbons with bells - in patriotic red, white and blue (tricolor or Union Flag - take your pick) this garden was a surprisingly reflective space in still weather, although the wind might make it a bit hazardous to negotiate, especially when crossing the stepping stones...

Paul Ridley Design

Paul Ridley Design

The celebrated Vallee des Brumes - an installation that has been a fixture at Chaumont for some years - was still a foggy delight, though less impressive in dull weather than in sunshine, when the mists are penetrated by shafts of light, and was joined in the wooded valley behind the show site by a sinister/comic group of figures clothed all over in jazzy knitted body-stockings.  

Paul Ridley Design

The festival continues until 16th October - if you are in the Loire Valley before then it is worth a detour to see how the theme of environmentalism and biodiversity has been interpreted by these thirty-odd garden designers and artists.

See more images of the Festival here.

Paul Ridley Design