And I absolutely can't believe that I don't have more photographs to show of this area, because by the time I left the job it was spectacularly colourful but still developing. Not to say that I would have stuck with this style of planting. Looking back from the person I have become now, I might have changed tack altogether in years to come.
What did we have? It was good, but it was conventional in the context of its time. Other people were doing this, I had taken ideas from other gardeners. This was more about plants than overall visual effect. I was collecting varieties, and the whole-border philosophy was being lost amongst that. By pure chance, the overall effect was harmonious, but I was choosing on the wrong criteria. As an entity the area was becoming inconclusive, still afraid of itself. It was being governed by its content, and not the other way round. By going down the plant route, I had given it colour and vibrancy, but in a way I had sold out my principles and was not really creating art. I had a collection of tender specimens which were in need of protection and were high-maintenance. My ideas had not yet fledged.
Where would I have gone from here, had I stayed? I don't know. My thoughts have changed. In that environment, with the kind of thinking I was surrounded by in the organisation, the influence of my illustrious colleagues, I might have continued down the plant route, extending the range of rarities year on year. But looking back now, I don't think that would have been the way to go. Now, I would be tempted to simplify, to use more of the plants the punters might see in the garden centre, but use them to spectacular effect. I'd have silvers, golds and purples, big spiky Phormiums, some bamboos pruned to enhance stem colour, small trees with winter bark. I would still dot in the bright splashes of seasonal colour, but I'd make more of an permanent architectural statement. I'd take out the remaining dull bread-and-butter plants and put back cake. But I wouldn't run from cake people are familiar with. Give them some of what they want. People are fussy eaters. They like comfort food. They don't want exotic every day. Sometimes nothing but steak and chips will do. And that's OK. It's not capitulation. Even if what the chef wants to give them is a delicately-spiced Middle-Eastern delight, sometimes he just has to serve up what the diner ordered. But there's nothing to stop him making the steak and chips look fancy.
This approach would be truer to the original concept of this garden with its framework of common hardy plants. It would also help to give the chalk-pit better winter bones, so it would look good in the snow. It seems, looking back, that I had been seduced by the kind of horticulture that was going on around me, rather than ploughing a sympathetic furrow appropriate to the garden or to myself.
We used to have a Regional Director who was insistent that all gardeners should spend their spare time visiting other gardens and learning from their peers. I argued against this and made myself unpopular with him. My contention was that there was a time to study, a time to learn, and there was a time to practice. I had done my studying, it was now time to put into operation what I had learnt. I believed that it was no longer right to be absorbing more influences. I apply the same approach to my writing and drawing still. And I was right, because, viewing it all from the present day, I can see that I was still absorbing influences, and expressing the fashions of my time, not creating fashions of my own. I have to say that it looked bloody good though!
Oh, go on, then, a couple more pictures -
Leonotis leonurus. Now that's a fine thing to have eight feet high in your border, even if the leaves do look like a nettle. Look at those whorls of brick-red flowers.
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