Hal Moggridge and the Future of Landscape Design

The Garden Museum, on the South Bank in London, next to Lambeth Palace, has an ongoing series of evening lecture-discussions called VISTA.  Co-chaired by Tim Richardson and Noel Kingsbury, the format is simple - an invited guest gives a presentation of their work after which the chairs jointly interrogate that guest on issues raised by the talk.  The end of the session sees questions from the floor.

Last night it was the turn of Hal Moggridge, doyen of landscape architects, to offer his opinions on the state of landscape architecture in the UK, explored through brief exposition of a small portfolio of key works in which he has been engaged over the past four decades.

The discussion was interesting when exploring the failure of the authorities to secure and protect iconic views (especially in the capital).  It is apparent that Moggridge's early architectural career in the socially-responsible 1950s - when the profession of architecture was striving to build a post-war democratic environment fit for the new, Modern, utopia - deeply influenced his outlook, and although his stance is not necessarily a 'political' one, he is clearly on the side of a public whose environment is at risk of degradation, not the side of the wealthy developer or company wanting to erect huge buildings for mere financial gain.  The value of detailed and comprehensive planning to preserve the best of the built and natural environment - something which is implicit in the work of landscape and garden designers - becomes even more apparent when viewing the 'before and after' images of Moggridge's work in comparison with other, less successful interventions.

The trend towards landscape architects working on huge private estates came under scrutiny, along with the increasing trend for these tracts of land to be removed from public view - another strand in the theme of the undemocratisation of the landscape.

 

Discussion of Moggridge's early career with such luminaries as Geoffrey Jellicoe and Brenda Colvin raised questions of the links between garden design and landscape architecture.  Tim Richardson's recent suggestion (Garden Design Journal, June 2012) that the Landscape Institute and Society of Garden Designers should combine forces, with fully accredited members being designated 'landscape designer' came up for discussion.  This is an interesting possibility, and has much merit.  The field of garden design is, frankly, bedevilled by the lack of an overarching body to manage the profession.  Changes are under way, and the SGD has to be congratulated on its moves to increase the professionalism of garden designers.  Hal Moggridge identified the crux of the matter, and I have discussed it elsewhere: until suitable garden design qualifications are accredited by the SGD or another relevant body at the source, there are only the 'post training' hoops to jump through to ensure the professionalism of garden designers.  Much more sensible would be for design courses and providers to be rigorously assessed and accredited at the outset: successful completion of such a course would give an automatic, professionally recognised qualification.  The tradition of gifted amateurs designing gardens for themselves and friends could be accommodated by a licentiateship or associate membership.  This would have the benefit of allowing appropriately rigorous courses to advertise themselves as such, thus encouraging an improvement in training standards across the sector. 

Part of the problem, from my point of view, is that so much garden design (and the vast majority of that at the amateur level) is still so driven by plants and horticulture: in a nation obsessed with the culture and cultivation of plants there is no shortage of people who are able to create pretty gardens for themselves or others - whether this makes them garden designers is a moot question, and one which I would probably answer with a 'no'.  This is not to say that there aren't sufficiently talented amateurs out there, with the vision and patience to create magnificent, meaningful gardens - I'm currently reading Roy Strong's account of his garden at The Laskett, clearly a garden so rich in allusion and meaning for the makers that it could never be achieved by a designer parachuted in to draw up a ground plan.  On the other hand there are (mercifully, for garden designers!) plenty of others who would love to have a beautiful garden but lack the time, knowledge, patience or creativity to make their own.  Perhaps this is the real dichotomy - not 'landscape architects and garden designers', but rather 'garden designers and garden makers' - the former providing a service, the latter engaged in the very personal act of creation.  Possibly the greatest skill of a designer is to become so good at the design that the end result has the same effect as a more personally created garden.  Fortunately there are enough gardens in Britain to keep everyone happy and busily employed, at whatever level they are engaged with the process of making gardens!

Here's a pretty photo after all that text...

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

Nursery Stories

A key relationship for any garden designer is that with a trusted and reliable nursery.  Plant supply is a dark art, subject to its own seasonal oscillations that are sometimes at odds with what is going on in the garden year, and the advice and support of talented and knowledgeable plantspeople who are also able to supply healthy stock can make the difference between a successful scheme and one which is merely acceptable.

Orchard Dene Nursery near Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire, run by Chris and Toby Marchant is one such.  This is not a retail nursery - stock is grown for wholesale supply to designers and landscapers, including those at the top of the field in the UK.  Calling in on any particular day you are likely to see plant orders assembled for the likes of Andy Sturgeon, Tom Stuart-Smith and Anthony Paul - a roll call of the notable names in our profession. 

It's no surprise that these people come here for their plants - the quality and range is terrific, with every plant on the list 'road-tested' for its garden-worthiness and contribution to a planting.  Chris and Toby have built an enviable reputation for quality and regularly supply plants for the most demanding arena of all, the show gardens, putting their wares under the scrutiny of the harshest judges in the horticultural world.  The plants I used in my own garden, supplied mainly in 9cm pots, have grown away brilliantly this season - it is hard to believe that the planting was only a few weeks old when I photographed it for my website.

The list is particularly strong on plants and groups popular in the 'New Perennial' school of plant design - large, robust perennials with good form and habit that could easily have come from the wild.  Improved forms rarely stray too far from this ideal - overbred plants with their attendant problems don't seem to feature here.  There is a good selection of grasses, particularly varieties of Miscanthus, to go with Persicaria, Salvia, Eupatorium, Helenium and Rudbeckia, amongst many others.  The catalogue also offers great advice on plant combinations, more than one of which has found its way into my garden.

If you live too far distant to make use of Orchard Dene then hopefully you will have an equivalent nearby - the world of horticulture is full of talented, committed and helpful people, ready and willing to assist.

Paul Ridley Design

Planting with Style

 

In a garden designed by Christopher Bradley-Hole in south Oxfordshire, sweeps of naturalistic planting merge together to form a plausible community of wild plants - plausible, but not genuine, and certainly not wild.

The planting is beautiful, however. Here, Bradley-Hole has employed his grid system, with square beds of perhaps four metre dimension separated by gravel paths. The planting is so dense that the pathways become visible only when you are looking directly along them, and each square of the grid echoes its neighbours in the choice of plants. Dynamism and variety are introduced almost mathematically - the proportions of each type of plant change with each bed, and select additions subtly bring new colours or forms to the overall pattern.

Elsewhere in the garden, a fringe of massed grasses and huge Persicarias along the boundary picks up the theme of these plants which runs through the planting as a whole, and a mown circle of grass allows for rough-grass planting of spring bulbs around its perimeter. The terrace, raised above the level of the garden, is fringed by a tall bank bearing swathes of different Persicarias and more grasses - looking at this head on gives the impression of a huge pointillist screen, ranged in colours of rust, plum and tawny yellow.

Some find this pattern of planting somewhat 'spotty' - too many small groupings of plants (often in fact single plants) creating, for them, a hectic mess of plant material.  This is highly skilled design, however - although the plantings cannot be read easily at distance, closer inspection reveals the rhythm built through repeated forms, closely-related varieties of the same plant and the same colours, appearing in the foliage and flowers of completely different species.  I find the style deeply satisfying - a creative response to the environment that suggests wild places and natural communities of plants through highly knowledgeable design.

Paul Ridley Design

One year on

There is always a bit of anxiety over seeing a garden design after it has spent a year establishing.  Will it have the intended effect?  Does the design work as hoped?

In the past few days I have I revisited a garden that was redesigned and built last year in Ely.  This is a garden for a weekend cottage that is prone to being left for up to a month at a time - the design and plants needed to be structured and low-maintenance, giving maximum impact throughout the year.  The focus of the garden is the new gravel terrace catching evening light at the end of the garden, surrounded by a simple planting palette of grasses and alliums with agapanthus, daisies and salvias.  The theme of grasses is continued in a block of the frothy Deschampsia flexuosa on the left which will offer a contrast with two blocks of yew clipped into severe rectangles within the grasses.  The yews need another year to bush out and establish before we attempt the initial shaping, so this sculptural element of the design is not yet apparent.  The Deschampsia is backed by a ribbon of the vertically-accented Calamagrostis x acutiflora 'Karl Foerster' against the wall.  A familiar component of grass plantings, this variety makes a curtain of vertical stems to offset the billowing Deschampsia - the foxy red flower spikes make a lively wind-tossed screen behind the new line of birches which march along this side of the garden.  The trees have had a rough ride this summer, and a couple of them are looking very autumnal already - the twiggy growth still has green beneath the bark, however, and my instinct tells me that these individuals have responded to the stresses of their first summer by shutting down early.

Overall I'm pleased with the result - there are some minor adjustments to the planting I would like to put in place this autumn, but within a couple of years the woody elements of yew, laurel and birch will be established and contributing to the structure and lines of the design as intended.  The best outcome is the satisfaction of the client, who is able to use the garden as a recreational and entertaining space for the first time in 15 years.

There are more images of this garden transformation, from conifer-riddled jungle to the present in my website portfolio here.

Paul Ridley Design

Summer Planting

As summer progresses into August in the Northern hemisphere, light quality changes - by the end of the month the sun is lower in the sky, and afternoon light is tipped towards the red end of the spectrum.  This is the most evocative time of year for me - grasses, seedheads of earlier-flowering perennials and the drumsticks of spent alliums are all ripening, and the tone of the colours softens.  The plants that are still doing their thing may have gloriously coloured and vibrant flowers, but with a gently fading background and less strident lighting these accents are not the eye-popping additions that they might have been a month or two earlier.  We are at the cusp of autumn, and as large numbers of plants fade away, the performers that are really hitting their stride become increasingly valuable.

Many umbellifers (now grouped in the Apiaceae) shine at this time of year - fennels, dill, angelica  and the rest invariably stand well through autumn, and even into winter, their skeletons gradually leached of colour and the seeds eventually released and dispersed.  The heleniums, or sneezeweeds, contribute their mixed warm palette for months - the buttery yellows through to velvety mahogany shades in the petals, via burnt orange mean that there is something in the family for almost any situation.  To extend their season I am experimenting next year with the 'Chelsea chop' - by taking a third off the tops of these plants in May I hope to push the flowering back to August, and reckon that if I do this for a third of the plants I will also get some valuable shorter, sturdier specimens to support those plants that escape the shears.

Eryngiums and thistly plants are all in full swing at present (see my earlier post) and Dahlias are beginning to have an impact in mixed borders.  Plant dahlias with dark foliage and you won't go far wrong .  Crocosmias, with a similar colour range to the heleniums, offer a valuable option for partially-shaded sites, or an interesting contrast of foliage and habit if mixed in with the sneezeweeds.  My all-time favourite is Crocosmia 'Emily McKenzie' - petals in two shades of rich orange, with a purply-tobacco shaded throat.

Many herbs continue well into August - ornamental marjorams (Origanum) are good value, especially O. laevigatum 'Herrenhausen' with its glaucous foliage and clusters of purply-pink flowers.

The best thing about all these plants?  They are crowded with masses of insects at this time of year, so the garden is alive with sound, movement and interest.

Paul Ridley Design

Spiky Plants

I love the drama of big spiky plants.  As the summer moves to its later stages, the many garden plants that have a thistly habit reach their peak, and their jagged outlines and often grey-silvery colouring are a good antidote to the mounds and cushions of more vibrantly coloured perennials.

Some varieties are perennial - the globe thistles (Echinops), artichokes (Cynara) and bear's breeches (Acanthus) are among these, but some of the most eye-catching are biennials which, having spent a year looking decidedly underwhelming suddenly sprout into amazing Gothic candelabra.  The Scotch Thistle (Onopordum acanthium) is one such - eight feet tall, with felted white leaves in huge sheaves around its winged stem, it branches wildly to bear tomato-sized thistle heads of blue-purple.  It is invaluable as an accent in larger schemes, but give it room - the leaves make uncomfortable close-quarters partners in small spaces.  Once you plant it you have it forever - it self-seeds like crazy.

One family of garden-worthy plants has a wide range of forms that run from something the size of the Onopordum down to much less threatening two-footers.  The eryngiums, or sea hollies do have some perennials among their number, such as the stately E.pandanifolium (widely branched flower stalks to about seven feet, with, in the dark Chelsea Physic Garden form, rusty claret buttons at the ends) - the most elaborately formed flowers belong, however, to the biennial Eryngium giganteum, commonly known as Miss Wilmott's Ghost. 

Green in bud, the whole plant reaches its peak in a blaze of silver, the extravagantly jagged ruff to each flower veined with pale buff as it dries.  The blue flowers are loved by insects, including wasps, and once they are over the plant decays beautifully, holding its structure throughout the winter, the deeply cut and thorny flower heads never better than when frosted on a sunny morning.  The story goes that the Edwardian plantswoman and gardener Ellen Wilmott surreptitiously introduced this, her favourite plant, to other gardens by sprinkling the seed as she visited.  Like the Onopordum it is a vigorous self-seeder, favouring hot situations and gravelly soil.  Besides the species, there is a selected form with even more flamboyant costume, E.g. 'Silver Ghost', but either plant will reward you with a glamorous late-summer display to set against daylilies and grasses, with which they associate particularly well.

Paul Ridley Design