Whilst attempting conscientiously to work in an environmentally-friendly way, and indeed sometimes leading the way in this quest, I make no apologies for my desire to train and manipulate the plants I was using to create an effect that I had decided for them. Nature has its own habit of growth, I had different requirements. The two had to be made to coincide. When it came to growing things on walls, this required a particular vision and discipline, based on practicality and art working in balance.
So, as you now know, this involved keeping everything as flat against the surface of the wall as I could, keeping all branches separate, not allowing anything to twine, sucker or attach itself by adventitious roots to any place I didn't want it to go. Nothing was allowed to grow behind its support, no branches were allowed to cross, and all forward- and rearward-facing growths were removed. What remained was then trained to fill the allotted wall space, the allotting being decided by me on aesthetic grounds. Simple as that. Let's have a look at some examples, shall we?
Firstly, on a low wall, one of the most successful features of the original design of the garden was the Forsythias grown between Box pillars on the outside of the walled garden. Like everything else, the concept was excellent, very understated, using common plants of only one type. But like everything else, the maintenance had let it down. I have no 'before' to show you, but take my word for it that the plants had been left to grow forwards to the point where it was no longer possible to get the mower in to cut the strip of grass beneath. The whole ensemble was a tangle of branches crossing each other, and thinning the growth was a heavy labour of love when I got started on it. Eventually we had a feature which made it into the guidebook, and again, once I had enabled the concept to work through considered maintenance, it proved to be one of the most effective features, partly by virtue of its essential simplicity. The plants are Forsythia suspensa, which, just to make life awkward for the pruner, has a tendency to throw up long vigorous stems vertically, before gracing them with side-shoots of a pendulous nature, There is an essential conflict between the two types of growth which must be carefully managed. Photograph courtesy of Stephen Robson.
What a lovely easy on the eye spring scene.
How often do you see ivy on a wall, and it looks like it got there by accident? Unkempt, waving its unconnected tendrils about, partly arborescent, yet simultaneously clinging ferociously to the mortar like it was built in? We had ivy. We had it low down on the East Wall of the house, near the lily-pond. Its primary purpose was one of concealment. The Old Man had been given a couple of stone Sphinxes which he disliked, and the ivy had been planted to grow over them and obscure them, as he didn't want to ditch them altogether for fear of offending the donor. The Sphinxes offended me less, and the organisation thought they needed to be preserved too, so I removed much of the ivy from them, and began training it up the wall. At some point I had attended a Head Gardeners' Conference in Northumberland, where we visited a private nursery where the walls of the house were covered with immaculately clipped ivy, and I took my inspiration from that. Sadly, I don't remember the name of the nursery, but I do have a picture of the ivy, which had made an instant impression. Look to the left side of the wall -
In the next photograph you can see what I achieved with ours in the space of four years. The ivy is just left of centre, trained to parapet height, clipped tightly, and shaped round the sculptural stone plaque in the centre. To the right of it is an old Actinidia kolomikta, which also had needed severe pruning to allow it to grow to this height. When I started the job, it was top-heavy, congested and the ties were unable to support the weight hanging from them. At that time it reached just above the ground-floor windows. By keeping it flat to the wall, I was able to make a much more significant feature of it, and better show-off its pink- and white-splashed foliage -
In front of the bay window to the left of this picture, you can also see how close I was able to keep the Magnolia grandiflora to the wall. By nature it makes a sizeable tree, so it was never going to be possible to make it completely compact, but by keeping it narrow like this, I was again able to start training it up to parapet height. This had previously been impossible, because on that exposed south-eastern corner of the building it constantly wrenched itself from its fixings as the wind tugged at its unbalanced form.
I shall show more specific close-ups tomorrow to conclude this excursion into the craft of growing climbing plants. But first, let me bless you with one more picture, taken four years earlier by our volunteer photographer, Ray Woodham. It shows the Sphinxes, the ivy part -grown and in need of pruning. The plant on the left corner is a Wisteria 'Black Dragon' early in its training, which I found I didn't like much after seeing it grow for a while. And there is nothing at all filling the wall-space in the bottom right-hand corner of the building. That is a delight for next time.
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