Natural Inclinations

This seems to me the important catalyst. Using plants in these larger expanses inevitably means getting away from composing a merely linear flower arrangement, where plants seem like lines of suspects subjected to the scrutiny of an ID parade. The viewer is forced to ask, how do these plants relate to one another? It’s then a short step to looking into how they grow in their natural habitat. I saw the Bury Court meadow, which is actually quite a modest area, in its prime, before the Deschampsia died out and the clover went rather leggy. It had such simple grace, as if it were just getting on with its own business of being grass and clover. Growing, flowering, and of course dying. Piet is the evangelist of decay.

At this time I was filling my own garden with short-lived verbascums, giant thistles, and other unruly things that suckered, seeded, and generally misbehaved. It was up to me to keep them in check. This is all very well on your own watch or if you are lucky enough to work with a gardener with lots of patience and understanding, but I gradually learnt that the spontaneous and slightly disorderly look I was drawn to had to be reined in a little if it (and me, I suppose) wasn’t to come off the rails. I remember once coming quite spectacularly unstuck when I enthusiastically recommended a clump of Sambucus ebulus, the handsome herbaceous dwarf elder, for a planting on heavy clay in the middle of France. The elder duly helped itself and in nine months covered an area about half the size of a tennis court, engulfing all before it in an inexorable flow of green. Sometimes a plant can be just a bit too happy.