Visually, a foliage garden was a different dimension in this garden, and the temptations not to stray from that were too great. Whatever the decision, first you have to know what had allowed it to deteriorate so badly.
In some ways that was obvious, and I was convinced I could avoid a repetition of most of these causes. Firstly, no one had been able to control the invasion of Japanese Knotweed. Well, I was already succeeding in that. It just required an understanding of how the plants work and how the chemicals work. It is surprising how many people just splash weedkillers about, hoping for the best, without timing their application appropriately, or understanding the kind of coverage required. I can honestly justify the use of chemicals in extreme cases like this, as long as you are not wasting them through ignorance. Weigh up the pros and cons.- you are not going to get rid of the problem by digging it out. And if you don't get rid of it, you are leaving an environmental concern in situ. The Japanese Knotweed has the potential to destroy our landscape, just as Rhododendron ponticum has ravaged parts of Wales and Western Scotland. It needs sorting. But not by people who don't know what they are doing. Targeted application was the answer, using less harmful product for maximum kill.
The other matter was Giant Hogweed. This dangerous plant causes painful weeping rashes, particularly if contacted in bright sunlight, and by letting it seed freely as a kind of informal background feature, it had escaped into the foreground and no one could get in amongst it to do any basic maintenance. The answer here was to remove all but a few carefully-placed specimens near the top of the banks, and to remove the seed heads before they dropped and started to spread. In truth, I did this for a couple of years, before deciding that the plant, although spectacular with it huge umbels of white flowers held twelve feet in the air, in fact aged in a rather tatty way, and all things considered, we would be better off without it, regardless of historic precedent. Both the above are notifiable weeds anyway, and it no longer seemed responsible to persist in something which in the future could get out of hand once more.
Add into those difficulties, the fact that the garden had been understaffed for quite a while, and it was obvious that this peripheral place was going to be one of the first to suffer from the lack of available labour. So. The answer, it seemed to me, was to make it attractive enough that looking after it became a pleasure.
We started by continuing the earlier style of planting, incorporating things that had been there before, such as Pulmonarias in the foreground, with their spotty leaves. We put in ornamental rhubarbs, Rheums, with their large purplish tinged green leaves, Crambe cordifolia, a large cabbage with huge sprays of frothy white flowers, but which, sadly, still stank of cabbage and split apart in the wind. At the top of the banks we inserted weeping trees, such as the small Birch, Betula pendula 'Youngii', and a weeping Hornbeam, which was so determined to remain dwarf that we had to artificially create a new leader by training a stem up to ten feet, before allowing it to cascade. We put in a pendulous Caryopteris, which grew strongly, and we infilled the drier areas in the foreground with Euphorbias and various other suitable contrasting foliar forms. Shadier areas had Solomons' Seals, Hostas and other plants more suited to a woodland setting. Also included was a Paulownia tomentosa, which we pruned to the ground every spring, encouraging a single stem to a height of ten feet every summer, with huge heart-shaped leaves half a metre across. Further down the line, I developed a thing for Paulownias (foxglove trees) and eventually the chalk pit was home to five different varieties, most of which were left to grow to produce their flowers.
An early photograph shows the borders in a very young condition, beginning to bulk up, but, frankly, unspectacular. Nevertheless, this tentative and not particularly courageous incarnation was a distinct improvement on the recent past and pointed part of the way into the future -
The trouble was, by developing the theme on the basis of an unadventurous past, we were not really using the area to the full. This was potentially quite a dramatic site, and here we were with fairly conventional plantings, failing to make the most of it. As my confidence grew over time that would change. For the moment, it was OK, but a bit ordinary. And it was all rather green.
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