Select Your StyleDetermine which type of garden you prefer
If there is one garden style that is emphatically relate with Britain , it is that of plantsmanship and particularly the tradition of herbaceous border design , which was break in the early 20th C by Gertrude Jekyll and others . The British clime is notoriously fickle , but it is also perfect for growing plants from all over the world , and many British nurseryman have been bite by the plant - collecting bug . In late years , the plant palette has expanded still more with the attack of climate change , and now Australian tree ferns and semitropical plants are a common sight inBritish gardens . British designers excel at creating realistic planting schemes with their diverse flora pallet , even though it often call for keen artifice to blend such disparate flora groups . Whatever the theory , constitute design is always nearly linked with the personality of the designer , which makes it an idiosyncratic graphics pattern .
Traditional formalities still has its position , with the front path lined with clipped lavender , but the clipped yew are being encourage to grow into slightly crooked forms . photograph by : Nicola Browne .
During the belated eighties and 1990s , while most British garden designer were still entranced by the Arts and Crafts tradition of herbaceous planting that go steady back almost a one C , Dan Pearson was almost alone in advocating a more New solution for innovative garden situations . In a drawstring of secret garden , and through a chronological succession of television series in the 1990s , he kick upstairs the mind of a garden that united a love of plants and the natural world with a variety of fashionable functionalism that really invoke to garden owners under the age of 40 .
One of Pearson ’s signature plant , blaze orangish foxtail lily ( Eremurus‘Cleopatra ’ ) makes a sales booth in the border in June at a Warwickshire manor house house . Photo by : Nicola Browne .
By the late nineties this approach and mental attitude had conk mainstream , and Pearson was justifiedly hailed as an trailblazer onward of his clip , just as John Brookes had been in the sixties . If anything , however , Pearson ’s study has become more naturalistic over the age , a testament to his serious credentials as a plantsman , with a Kew grooming and yr of experience with plant residential area in the state of nature all over the human race . One of Pearson ’s shaping influences as a gardener was Beth Chatto , whose garden in Essex , to the east of London , demonstrates the way a garden ’s style can reflect the substance abuse of self - supporting communities of works as they thrive in nature . To this Pearson adds a abstruse appreciation of the website ’s existing signified of piazza , which he aims to raise and reflect with his designs .
A stone - edged pond is the focus of a romantic rosaceous garden that plays with formal / cozy contrasts — lax shrub roses versus orderly Turkish boxwood ball . picture by : Nicola Browne .
Pearson ’s gardens are usually free-base on impregnable , clear structural bones , both in terms of sinuous , refined curve in the hard landscape and ground plan , and in a liking for horticultural features such as lines of pleached trees , or clipped yew hedges in bulgy soma . A graven spacial quality resounds through the work . In recent direction Pearson has explore an ever more naturalistic feel , with an emphasis on wildflower plantings with mown path meandering through them , planting of aboriginal trees , elusive turf landforms and the decorative theory of walling based on traditional styles . ornamental plantings near buildings often give path to native - mintage plantings at the bound of the garden .
Planting in the smooth-spoken garden is aeriform and light , with a tapis of silvery leafage plant and decorative grass ( Stipa tenuissima ) , highlighted with blue spike ofSalvia verticillata‘Purple Rain ’ . Photo by : Nicola Browne .
One of Pearson ’s most significant current project is a bold contemporary garden of dividing line for a Jacobean manor house in Warwickshire . In a series of hedged and walled inclosure in the English 20th - century custom , Pearson has played with idea of formality and ease by clip topiary into vegetable shapes ( Daucus carota sativa , mad apple and Allium porrum ! ) , and creating a vibrant “ hot ” delimitation of oranges and reds correctly next door to an elegant garden of silver medal and T. H. White , bordered by yew hedges and a stilted hornbeam manner of walking . There is a conventional canal , a nuttery , an arboretum of native British Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , and a “ wind garden ” of perennials that move and rustle in the zephyr .
Traditional double margin get a relaxed treatment with perennials pushing through empurpled Allium and bloodless California poppies . Photo by : Nicola Browne .
Recently Pearson ’s practice has expanded internationally , with projects in Italy , the United States and Japan , where he is working on a 500 Accho landscape commons ( the Millennium Forest ) on Hokkaido , northerly Japan , and five courtyard gardens for a new living accommodations ontogeny in Tokyo .
For more selective information on the work of Dan Pearson , seewww.danpearsonstudio.com .
Other examples of the British naturalistic planting style :
Photo by : Marianne Majerus .
Pam Lewis ’ garden in Dorset , Sticky Wicket , has become something of a cult destination for herbaceous - industrial plant partizan in recent years , and Pam has secure a wider audience through her book Sticky Wicket - Gardening in Tune with Nature ( Frances Lincoln ) . The Round Garden , set around a camomile lawn and incorporating rings of native grasses , is one of the main attracter , as it chimes with the current absorption with ecologic gardening . At Sticky Wicket the butterflies , batrachian , skirt and bee are as important as the plants.Seewww.stickywicketgarden.co.uk .
exposure by : John Glover .
Julie Toll is a widely respected designer who was banging the drum for an bionomical and realistic style long before it was fashionable . She also has an understanding of the Modernist architectural custom , and this inspires the insidious linear structure that underpins all her oeuvre . Julie is a specialiser in hayfield , water and woodland - fringe design - here primulas and hostas make a natural - looking water margin.Seewww.julietoll.co.uk .
